Word: godly
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...this last model that first caught on. For roughly a thousand years, the church fathers seem to have viewed Christ's suffering and dying less as salvation's all-important tragic fulcrum than as one more necessary step in God's triumphant campaign into the human world and, eventually, the devil's precincts. They saw the incarnation and the Resurrection as far more important to reconciliation and a new start for humanity. In fact, a position close to this is still maintained by the world's 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christian believers, rendering them less susceptible than most to extended...
Behind those questions is A sense of tragic estrangement that predates Jesus' life and death by thousands of years. Since religion has existed, God has (or the gods have) always been defined by otherness. But for just as long, humans have feared that the alienation was increasing. "Why, O Lord, do You stand aloof?" cried the Psalmist, eventually concluding that the reason was human disobedience and sin. By Jesus' time, Jewish temple ritual included regular sin sacrifices freighted with hopes for reconciliation, or atonement, with God. (The word's original English meaning of unity is evident in its three syllables...
When the early church fathers did pick up on the scriptural language of Christ's death as a ransom, the payee was not God but the devil, who some felt had legitimate claim on humanity because of Adam's fall. But others preferred another scenario: to see the Crucifixion and Jesus' subsequent descent into what they called Hades as a kind of divine bait-and-switch scheme, whereby the devil thought he had claimed a particularly virtuous human victim only to discover he had allowed into his sanctum the power that would eventually wrest humanity back from his grasp...
...emphatic in their understanding of a decidedly nonvictimized Christ as a great champion against an evil that is a real and formidable supernatural force--of invisible kingdoms battling above our heads and below our feet. That conception survives in Martin Luther's great hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, in the Revelation-based Left Behind books and in the eerie getting-to-know-you scene between Christ and the devil that opens Gibson's film. But it did not come to define Western Christianity's majority understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. That honor went...
Anselm too read the New Testament lines calling Christ's death a ransom, but he could not believe that the devil was owed anything. So he restructured the cosmic debt. It was, he posed, humanity that owed God the Father a ransom of "satisfaction" (to use Anselm's feudal terminology) for the insult of sin. The problem was that the debt was unpayable: not only did we lack the means, since everything we had of value was God's to begin with, but also we lacked the standing, like a lowly serf helpless to erase an injury to a great...