The End of Christianity (25 page)

Even though humans are creative communicators, some of our religious behaviors may have specific biological roots. Consider for example the act of bowing one's head in prayer. It probably is traceable to ancient postures that allowed commoners to approach royalty. The word
grovel
today means to show exaggerated deference or contrition in order to appease someone. But its medieval root appears related to the word
prone
and may have to do with the physical posture required to approach the king. A parallel word,
kowtow
means to behave with extreme submissiveness to please an authority figure. But it derives from the traditional Chinese practice of bowing so low that your head touches the ground. But these behaviors in turn may derive from something far more ancient. In other primates, a bow communicates submission to an animal of higher status. It can be a means of avoiding a fight when tensions are high.
²⁸

In this world, if we understand our place, if we engage in submissive behaviors, then high-status people let us hang around, and we ourselves gain status from the proximity. I recently was invited to an investment club meeting at the home of a powerful woman. Because I was working on this article, I couldn't help but notice the actions of the guests (who were mostly less wealthy and less social). They expressed gratitude for the (exclusive) invitation. Praise for the catering was effusive, and for the garden. The words of the hostess got extra nodding. We all felt lucky to be a part of her circle.

Christians gain status, at least in each others’ eyes and in their own minds, because of proximity to God. I am not suggesting that Christians are particularly arrogant, because I don't believe that to be true. I think simply that all of us are wired to orient ourselves according to hierarchical assumptions-they are inescapable—and to seek advantage within the hierarchy. I think also that these hierarchical relationships are mediated by emotions, and that we instinctively expect them in any being with a humanoid psyche. Since the Christian Bible describes a personal god who relates to humans, it is inevitable that believers respond to these contingencies.

If the world were different, biblical Christianity might center on release from desire or ethical study or acts of compassion as in some forms of Buddhism.
²⁹
It might focus on ahimsa or nonviolence like Jainism.
³⁰
But that, I think, would take a different Bible. Like the God of Islam, the God of the Bible is interested primarily in worship. That is what the sacred texts tell us, and believers respond. As a consequence, intellectual assent accompanied by submission behaviors and displays of devotion are core to both religions. The way that believers interact with God, both in the Bible and in modern life, tells us who they think they are talking to. Unfortunately our god concepts fall victim to what we know about big-cheese humans. This not only means that God has emotions but that a lot of them aren't very nice.

IF GOD WERE A DOG-OR A
HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS

Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.

—John Burroughs

Almost two hundred years ago, a young European Christian, trained in theology, set off on a voyage around the world. When he left England, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible, and in fact during the trip he quoted the word of God as a moral authority. But he returned with questions and spent the next twenty years assembling the vast array of detailed observations that he had made as the ship's naturalist into a scientific theory that rocked the world—and his own Anglican orthodoxy. In the end, Charles Darwin had many things to say, some with no small regret; among them:

I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice.
³¹

Lately Richard Dawkins put the point more forcefully: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
³²

Dawkins's statement feels harsh, even to me, and yet the claim he makes is modest. The universe we observe has the properties we would expect based simply on the natural processes we are able to identify. He makes no claims about what, if anything, lies beyond the realm of our observations. Careful, repeated observation of the natural world, however meticulous, will never allow us to say whether there is another realm beyond the reach of our senses and our ability to process information. But they do allow us to understand the intricacies of the natural order, ourselves included. And they allow us to examine our god-concepts in light of what we know about ourselves.

What would we expect god concepts to be like if they were simply a product of evolved human minds? Rather like the ones we have. Pascal Boyer's book
Religion Explained
outlines many ways in which our minds are not blank slates. All kinds of efficiencies are built in—in the form of default assumptions and ontological categories that function, in some ways, like prelabeled filing systems. We force our life experiences into the categories available to us, and one way we do this is to interpret the world in humanoid terms.

Humans are social information specialists. Most of the knowledge we need to survive and thrive in this world comes from other humans. It is collective cultural evolution rather than biological evolution that has let us live long and prosper, outsmart nature's balance, and populate a whole planet. Our minds reflect this niche—specialized systems in the brain are fine-tuned for processing information about other humans. We see the world through a social lens.

Children assign names, identities, and—yes—emotions, to objects that are clearly objectively inanimate.
³³
It helps if the object is stuffed with spun polyester and covered in synthetic fur, but really almost anything will do. When my daughters were young, we traveled to visit a friend in eastern Europe. The girls were utterly disinterested in long adult conversations over beer and well-boiled cabbage with beef. At any restaurant, they simply would sit down and pick up their forks and spoons (which had been assigned names and identities) and continue a game in which these stainless steel characters inhabited a world peopled by empty bottles, cups, and pepper shakers. The game lasted only as long as the trip, but a shabby stuffed whale comforted one of the girls for almost ten years.

Adults don't assign roles to silverware, though we certainly can, and we don't usually have transitional objects. But we do give names to ships and hurricanes and then talk as if they had preferences and intent. We become more protective of whales and gorillas if we give them human nicknames. We unwittingly breed canines to look more like baby humans (e.g., big-eyed) by preferentially nurturing the ones that look more like us. We spend time trying to cajole favors out of tree spirits and ancestors and gods. Adults who shed traditional religion may simply move to the next level of (still anthropomorphic, self-focused) abstraction, talking as if the universe itself heard our wishes and could be manipulated into fulfilling them (e.g.,
The Secret
).

It is only with conscious effort that we are able to set aside the instinctive projection of ourselves onto the world around us, let alone anything that may lie beyond. And yet, if we care about honoring reality, we must. Author Dexter VanDango put it this way:

If humanity is to get beyond God as the ultimate human male, for good or bad, it is vital to always keep in mind our psychology, our biology, and our family relations. And it is equally essential to realize that God, if God exists, does not possess our hopes, our fears, our desires, or emotions. If God does possess anything akin to desires and emotions, these “feelings” are unlikely to bear any resemblance to ours.…For if God just is, it may be a fact that God has no consciousness, as Nature has no conscious overview, designs, or goals.
³⁴

A friend put it this way: “I've always wondered how God can be considered omniscient and omnipotent and yet have anything resembling temporal intelligence and all that it implies (emotions, reasoning, etc.). Without time, everything is definite and, possibly, indeterminate even at the same time, and the mind of God would be able to conceive of this.” As these two comments illustrate, if we let ourselves contemplate the little that smart humans know about reality, then orthodox Christian conceptions of divinity become transparently self-centered and self-serving. It is a testament to our narcissism as a species that so few humans are embarrassed to assign to divinity the attributes of a male alpha primate.

To say that the descriptions of God in the Bible are metaphors does not make the situation any better. A metaphor about something as deep as the human relationship to ultimate reality needs to be deeply accurate. The center of gravity needs to be spot-on even if the surface meaning is grossly simplistic. But biblical descriptions of God have this backwards. Rather than heightening the sense of an
ineffable
power that is actually compatible with philosophical concepts like omniscience or omnipresence or with the laws of physics and biology that govern this natural world, they force divinity into a human template. Rather than evoking the humility, wonder, and delight of the unknown, they offer the comfort of false knowledge. Rather than being true to timeless, placeless completeness, they are true to the place-time-culture-ecosystem nexus in which they arose.

When the writers of the Bible said God was angry or regretful or pleased, they had only a superficial idea of what these words actually mean. How could they know that these affective labels describe intricate, functional body systems, just like our visible appendages? Their peers didn't yet understand how two eyes create binocularity or how our muscles contract the hand, let alone the chemistry and function of emotions. They are not responsible for their ignorance; they did the best they could with the information at their disposal. They looked at patterns in the natural world and human society and made their best guesses about what lies beyond. We should do the same.

by Dr. Ken Pulliam

W
hat is the central element of the Christian faith? It is the cross. What is the sign of Christianity? No, it's not the fish; it is the cross.

What do you see perched on top of church steeples? What do you see around the necks of Christians? It is the cross. The cross, and what Christians believe was accomplished there, is the most basic and fundamental of all Christian doctrines. Many Christian apologists focus on the resurrection. However, without the cross, the resurrection is meaningless.

Christianity is basically the idea that Jesus died for sinners. What does that mean? How does that work? Christians have for millennia debated and disputed this central point. They agree that in some way the death of Jesus makes it possible for sinners to be forgiven, but they cannot agree on why that is true. Unlike the doctrine of the Trinity or the Person of Christ, there has never been a consensus among Christians as to what the cross means and how it saves.

Throughout the history of the church there have been a number of different theories of the atonement, but the dominant view today in evangelical Christianity is the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST).
¹
This view states that God's holiness demands that sin be punished. God cannot remain just and forgive man without punishing his sin. That would ignore the seriousness of sin, according to this theory. Therefore, God sent his son to bear the punishment for man's sin. Jesus vicariously bears the punishment for man's sin. Once sin has been punished, then God can forgive man without compromising his holiness or justice.

The PST is not a negotiable doctrine for most evangelical Christians. It lies at the very heart of the Gospel. It is arguably their most important doctrine. A veritable “Who's Who” of evangelical theologians agrees:?

Roger Nicole
, professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, says, “Atonement is the central doctrine of the Christian faith, and penal substitution is the heart of this doctrine.”
²

Timothy George
, dean of Beeson Divinity School and executive editor of
Christianity Today
, says, “The doctrine of the penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ can be abandoned only by eviscerating the soteriological heart of historic Christianity.”
³

Carl Trueman
, professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, says, “The perennial attempts throughout church history to relativize and even deny the propitiatory and substitutionary nature of Christ's sacrifice should not simply be understood as peripheral discussions; they indicate a constant tendency to revise the very essence of the Christian faith to conform to wider cultural mores and shibboleths.”
⁴

John MacArthur
, president of the
Master's Seminary Journal
, says, “Deny the vicarious nature of the atonement—deny that our guilt was transferred to Christ and he bore its penalty—and you in effect have denied the ground of our justification. If our guilt was not transferred to Christ and paid for on the cross, how can his righteousness be imputed to us for our justification? Every deficient view of the atonement must deal with this same dilemma. And unfortunately, those who misconstrue the meaning of the atonement invariably end up proclaiming a different Gospel, devoid of the principle of justification by faith.”
⁵

Greg Bahnsen
, one-time professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, says, “The doctrine of penal substitution could be expunged from the biblical witness only by a perverse and criminal mistreatment of the sacred text or a tendentious distortion of its meaning.”
⁶

J. I. Packer
, professor of theology at Regent University in Vancouver, BC, says, “The task which I have set myself in this lecture is to focus and explicate a belief which, by and large, is a distinguishing mark of the worldwide evangelical fraternity: namely, the belief that the cross had the character of penal substitution.…I am one of those who believe that this notion takes us to the very heart of the Christian Gospel.…”
⁷

The purpose of this chapter is to show that the dominant view of the atonement in Evangelicalism, the view that many claim is the very heart of the Christian Gospel, is illogical, immoral, incoherent, and therefore, absurd.

IT IS ILLOGICAL

Punishment, according to the retributive theory of justice, is an appropriate response for one who is guilty of breaking the law. As such, Anthony Quinton tells us, “The essential contention of retributivism is that punishment is only justified by guilt.”
⁸

The first and most important element of retributive justice then is that the guilty party and only the guilty party should be punished. As a matter of fact, Quinton goes on to argue that it is impossible logically to punish an innocent person. He writes:

For the necessity of not punishing the innocent is not moral but logical. It is not, as some retributivists think, that we may not punish the innocent and ought only to punish the guilty, but that we cannot punish the innocent and must only punish the guilty.…The infliction of suffering on a person is only properly described as punishment if that person is guilty. The retributivist thesis, therefore, is not a moral doctrine, but an account of the meaning of the word “punishment.”
⁹

Many Christian apologists seem to ignore this problem, but Mark Murphy, in a recent article, recognizes it clearly. He writes:

[T]he problem with penal substitution is not, first and foremost, a moral problem; it is, rather, a conceptual problem. The problem is not that penal substitution is immoral, but that it is conceptually defective.…

[P]unishment expresses condemnation of the person punished. And if that is right, then punishment will be nontransferrable: one cannot express condemnation via hard treatment of someone who one does not take to be worthy of condemnation.…If (nondefective) punishment is essentially condemning of the agent who failed to live up to the standard, the violation of which justifies the punishment, then penal substitution is unintelligible.
¹⁰

As both Quinton and Murphy show, it is illogical to punish an innocent person. It contradicts the very definition of the word
punish
as it is used in a judicial sense. Thus, I maintain that the phrase
Penal Substitution
is actually an oxymoron.

IT IS IMMORAL

Let's leave aside for a moment that it is logically impossible to punish an innocent person. Obviously, innocent people have suffered for things that they have not done. While this cannot technically be called punishment, it is suffering nonetheless. Is it ever moral to inflict suffering on someone as punishment for something they did not do? Our moral intuitions tell us that it is not.

People seem to know intuitively that it is wrong for an innocent person to suffer the penalty that a guilty person deserves. Paul Bloom, a psychologist at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, has shown that even infants seem to have a built-in sense of justice. They recoil at the idea of the wrong person (i.e., the innocent person) being punished.
¹¹
The practices of human courts around the world demonstrate that this principle, that only the guilty are deserving of punishment, is a universal belief among humankind. How does man innately know that substitutionary punishment is wrong?

According to the Evangelical Christian, our sense of right and wrong comes as a result of being made in the image of God
(Imago Dei).
What it means to be made in the image of God has been widely discussed by Christian theologians. The evangelical theologian Charles Feinberg says:

The image of God constitutes all that differentiates man from the lower creation. It does not refer to corporeality or immortality. It has in mind the will, freedom of choice, self-consciousness, self-transcendence, self-determination, rationality, morality, and spirituality of man.
¹²

Two of the results of being made in the image of God, according to Feinberg, are rationality and morality. Humans reflect God in their ability to reason and in their ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Paul confirms this “implanted morality” in the Epistle to the Romans when he writes:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them (Rom. 2:14–15).

So, if one were to believe that man was made in the image of God, as evangelical Christians do, then one would have to believe that his innate sense of right and wrong was implanted in him by God. If man knows right from wrong as a result of being made in the image of God, and if one of the things man knows from his being so created is that it is wrong to punish the innocent, then how can the central doctrine of Evangelical Christianity, namely penal substitution, be maintained?

In addition, if one were a Christian, one would believe the Bible when it says that an innocent person should not suffer the penalty that a guilty person deserves. The whole chapter of Ezekiel 18 discusses this matter. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:4). The son will not and should not be punished for the sins of his father and vice versa. The position is summarized in verse 20:

The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.

So, as a Christian, it seems one ought to believe it is wrong for the innocent to suffer in the place of the guilty on the basis of 1) his implanted sense of right and wrong and 2) the clear teaching of the Bible. The problem that evangelical Christians face, however, is that the Bible teaches that Jesus did suffer in the place of sinners. So the Evangelical has to either admit the Bible has some contradictory teachings or else try to explain how it's okay for God to do what he tells man not to do. It seems that the Evangelical is on the horns of a dilemma.

One of the ways that some Evangelical theologians have sought to explain the justice of penal substitution is through the concept of
imputation
. The Greek word for imputation in the New Testament is
(
logizomai
). It occurs forty-nine times. The King James Version translates it as “to reckon, to count, to impute.” It is a term that was used in accounting to refer to placing something on one's account. While that word is not used, the idea is found in Philemon 1:18, where Paul tells Philemon in regard to Onesimus (a runaway slave), “If he hath wronged thee, or oweth [thee] ought, put that on mine account.” The Evangelical defender of penal substitution will argue that man's sins were imputed to Jesus. In some grand accounting scheme, God transferred the debt of man's sin to Jesus’ ledger, and then Jesus paid the debt that was owed upon the cross. There are numerous problems with the theory of imputation.

First, in order for imputation of guilt to take place, there has to be some complicity or culpability by the one to whom the guilt is imputed. Some theologians have argued that Jesus somehow shares in our guilt (though innocent himself) as a result of being a man. In other words, his connection to the race of human sinners allows him to be punished for what they have done. This fails to note, however, how imputation works legally. Norman McIlwain offers an illustration:

The owners of a company are responsible for actions that happen within the company rules and consent of management. Corporate manslaughter is a good example. However, the company would need to be involved in the action. One employee murdering another in a fit of temper, for example, would not make the owners of the company guilty for the crime. It would have happened without their consent and certainly against company rules. However, drugs manufactured that later are found to cause death would make the company and its owners liable. Guilt would rightly be imputed—because of the company's consent to the manufacture. Consent makes all the difference.
¹³