The very core if Christianity, what sets it apart from the other Abrahamic religions, and makes it a death cult is substitutionary atonement: the idea Jesus died on the cross so your sins are forgiven. A Get Out of Hell Free card that justifies the cruelty and mass murder done by the church through the centuries. I believe this hypocrisy is the reason so many people have left the faith. You won’t be effective in restoring faith until this is gone. People want to believe personal responsibility, and honest good deeds are what will get one into heaven, and giving select individuals a free pass is a copout.
Chris
One view that connected my time as an atheist, and the vast majority of my time as a Christian was that the Apostle Paul sucked. At best, I saw him as a person who contaminated the message of Jesus. At worse, I saw him as someone who purposely manipulated religion to gain power over others. Simply, I saw him as one of the worst offenders of Christianity.
I was far from alone in my disdain for Paul. Even today, I know a good many Christians who completely ignore Paul, or even actively diminish him and his works. But now, I think Paul gets a lot of undue hatred.
Part of the reason I think Paul gets so much flak is that he’s simply misunderstood. So often he is taken not only out of context in what he is writing, but he’s taken out of context when it comes to his background.
Paul was a Jew. His background, his studies, were within first-century Judaism. His rhetoric, the manner in which is portrayed his message was all based on what was common at that time. And without understanding this, we so often take just portions of what he said, while missing the point he was trying to make. Because of that, it is really easy to simply dismiss him as a whole.
This really is too bad, as Paul has a lot of enlightenment that he could share. He’s someone working within the same framework that Jesus did, and he’s able to draw from this tradition in a way that allows him to build upon it.
Paul isn’t doing this in a bubble though. He’s not creating a new theology. Instead, he is able to speak and learn from those who were closest to Jesus; the disciples of Jesus, as well as the brothers of Jesus.
And while what Paul is putting forth isn’t new, it is something that is evolving. Paul’s works are often reactionary, in that he addresses questions that are being posed. And at times, he has the chance to go back to those ideas and really expand on them, as we see in Romans.
But it’s also more than just that; it’s more than just Paul. Paul went to Jerusalem, he met with the pillars of this budding faith, with the people to whom the leadership of this movement Jesus started passed on to; Peter and John who were disciples of Jesus, and James the brother of Jesus. He got his message approved from these people who knew Jesus so personally. We have to realize that what Paul was saying wasn’t strictly his own, and those who knew Jesus the best saw it as being in line with the movement Jesus started.
So when Paul speaks of what the death of Jesus meant, what the resurrection meant, he is speaking to this larger tradition. And the message he presents isn’t that one gets a free pass. He doesn’t present a justification for evil. Time and time again he teaches how followers of Christ must do better. Paul reminds his readers over and over that they are also sinners. That they have sinned and come up short. And while there is new life in Christ, one can’t simply live as if this life no longer matters. You must live a Christ-like existence, and be willing to sacrifice.
Paul preaches personal responsibility. He throws that in the face of his readers. That is exactly how he begins his most ambitious letter, the Epistle to the Romans. Paul builds up this vice list, where it appears he’s condemning all of these people for a host of different sins. You have to imagine that as this is being read, it’s whipping people up into a frenzy. It’s getting people worked up as they are agreeing with this condemnation.
And then he flips it all. He holds a mirror up to all of those individuals and tells them, this is you. You’re all sinners. When you judge another, you judge yourself, as you’re guilty of the same things. He doesn’t stop there though. Paul speaks of how God will repay all of us according to what we have done. This is a point Paul hammers home.
It’s a point so important to Paul that he leads with it. Paul doesn’t even know this church in Rome to which he is writing. It’s not a church he established, or even has visited. He’s writing to them in order to gain their favor, to introduce himself, so that they will accept him and allow him to use their church as a launching point for a larger mission. And he begins this all by hammering home the idea of how we are sinners, how we need to take a deeper look inward, and how we must do better.
This is something the Church at times definitely should have focused on. But just because they didn’t focus on that message, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. And when it comes to the Church, it’s much more complicated than seeing it as simply the head of a religion. That’s for another post though.