Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...neck. Iraq 's continuing turmoil has been boosting antiwar feeling in Italy, but last week, public solidarity with Agliana and the other captives was intense. The government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tried to extricate the hostages through secret talks, and denied reports it was paying a ransom. But when Berlusconi crowed that, with the imminent departure of Spanish troops from Iraq, Italy was now Washington 's closest ally on the Continent, an Iraqi mediator declared his remarks "inopportune" but said he understood the men were still alive. About 50 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq in the past month...
...this time, Jesus is both priest and sacrifice, spilling, "not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption." The Gospel of Mark favors Roman legal language for the freeing of slaves: "the Son of Man came ... to give his life as a ransom for many." The First Epistle of Peter, meanwhile, takes a radically different tack, posing Jesus' trials as occasion for imitation: "because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." And Paul's letter to the Colossians pauses only briefly at the Cross...
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...
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...
...expounded with vigor a few weeks ago by the Rev. Shafer at Rutgers Presbyterian. Shafer, having just seen The Passion of the Christ, felt moved to respond to what he regarded as its assumption that "the central purpose of Jesus' existence [was] to offer himself as a sacrificial ransom to a God made angry by our sin." The pastor disagreed. "The mission and purpose of Jesus' life and ministry," he preached, "was, first, to model for humankind the fullness of mercy and forgiveness that God offers to us sinners and, second, to model for us the perfection of love that...