"suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;"
Interpreting the suffering and death of Christ is something I've thought about a lot at both an academic and personal devotional level because it seems so central to the Christian faith. It certainly is for me. So it was good for me to be able to think about how to frame a worship service reflecting on it. This is the call to worship I came up with:
We believe that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, died, and was buried,
- That this God who made heaven and earth sent his Son
- not in wrath, to conquer us,
- not to enforce his power over us,
- but to share in the suffering and evil which we have brought upon ourselves,
-
- Under Pontius Pilate,
- not in some abstract metaphysical plane,
- but as a human being in human history,
- at the hands of human beings who hold onto power,
- at our hands,
-
- That Jesus suffered,
- not punished by his Father,
- but rejected by humanity along with the Father,
- alienated, humiliated, misunderstood, betrayed, tortured and killed,
- and buried.
- Today we remember and affirm together that God in Christ entered into humanity, sharing in death with us so that we may share in life with Him.
2 comments:
So you guys all went along with rejecting penal substitution? (I'm asking mostly to gauge how popular it is among academics at the moment.)
Well, I think of my chapel planning group I'm the only one you could really call an academic on this issue, and only one of two you'd call academics at all (two more ministry oriented folks). Because this is an issue I've thought a lot about and have strong opinions on, I went ahead and wrote this to try and frame it. I tried to be up front about it being my take on it, but they all seemed to like it.
As far as academics, it is a very controversial issue. There are certainly plenty who reject it, but there are also those who have tried really hard to defend it. You might see The Atonement Debate or Four Views of the Atonement both of which explore the issue from a generally conservative evangelical perspective.
Anyway, in some ways this phrasing was inspired by Karl Barth, whose little chapter on this part of the Creed (he has a beautiful little book on the whole thing) emphasizes the human rejection of Christ as the sort of climax of humanity's continual rejection of the triune God. In this way it is the ultimate expression of every individual sin.
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