Yes, this is the fourth video in what was supposed to be a single session. This should let me take up less time on future lessons because of the foundation laid here. This will also continue for one more session, so next week will be #5. – Henry
And remember the resources page, where I have interviews now with Bruce Epperly and Herold Weiss on the question “Who Was Paul?”. Future interviews will include Allan Bevere, David Alan Black, and others.
by Dr. Herold Weiss, author of Meditations on the Letters of Paul
Martin Luther’s argument against the selling of indulgences to shorten one’s stay in purgatory before reaching heaven was a courageous and necessary attack on a grievous abuse of ecclesiastical authority. The ninety five theses he nailed to the door of the church at the university where he was a professor of Scripture presented his argument with meticulous precision. At its core, the point was that “works” were not what saved those doing them. In other words, paying for sins did not open the gates of heaven. Said positively, Luther’s argument has survived and become encapsulated and promoted as “righteousness by faith.” These days the phrase is understood somewhat differently by different Christians. Generally, it is understood to mean that to be saved one must believe that the death of Jesus on the cross pays for one’s sins and thereafter believers receive strength to live in conformity with the Ten Commandments. In other words, salvation is attained by faith in a substitutionary atonement, and the keeping of the commandments, made possible by Christ’s grace, keeps believers from sinning again.
I find the above understanding of righteousness by faith only tangentially related to the theology of the apostle Paul. It is true that there are two texts in Paul’s writings which could be understood in terms of substitution, but such an interpretation is not demanded by them. One says that “God shows his love for [eis] us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for [hyper] us” (Romans 5: 8), and the other says that “the life I now live in the flesh I live by [the Greek says “in”] faith in [the Greek says “of”] the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for [hyper] me” (Galatians 2: 20). The English of the first text uses the preposition “for” twice, but the Greek has two different ones. The Greek preposition eis usually is translated “toward.” In this case it indicates that God’s love is directed towards us, it is aimed at us. The basic meaning of hyper is “on behalf of,” “having to do with.” In other words, Christ’s death had to do with us, had us in mind. It was concerned with us. The idea also appears in the earliest Christian confession known to us. Paul quotes it as the foundation on which to build his argument against those who teach that there is no future resurrection. It said, “Christ died for [hyper] our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and he appeared . . . “ (1 Corinthians 15: 3). The confession is formulaic. The formula “for our sins” is balanced with the formula “on the third day,” and both are declared to be fulfilments of the Scriptures. In summary, that Christ’ death had to do with “ us,” “me” or “our sins” was the customary way of affirming that Christ’s death had not been just a Roman execution, which in fact it had also been, but an event of cosmic significance in which God was involved. It was “concerned with” the life humans live under the power of sin. These texts do not show that Paul saw the death of Christ as a substitute for the death of sinners.
Paul is quite clear, however, on the necessity for all men and women to die with Christ. In other words, the predominant Pauline teaching is not that Christians need not die because Christ died for them, but that all must participate in the death of Christ in order to also live “in Christ.” He does not teach a substitutionary atonement but the need to die to life in the flesh and live free from the condemnation of the Law (Romans 6: 4-8; 8:1).
The first thing one should know about Paul’s understanding of faith is that for him it is not a noun but a verb. It is a serious handicap that English does not have a verbal form of the root “faith” as it has one of the root “belief.” Faith is not a belief. Faith is a way of being. As Paul says in the verse quoted above, I live “in the flesh” and “in faith.” To live in faith is to live in Christ by the power of the Spirit. For him salvation is not by faith as the adoption of a belief. Salvation is something God accomplishes for those who “live in faith,” that is, those who live faithfully in Christ. Righteousness is not a stamp placed on those who affirm a particular proposition as true, but something “attained to” (Romans 9: 30) by those who live in ‘a manner worthy of the Gospel” (Philippians 1:27).
Paul defines the Gospel as “the power of God for [eis] salvation to every one who has faith” (Romans 1:16, RSV). The translation “to every one who has faith” provokes misunderstanding. Paul wrote, “to all the faithful.” Faith is not something to be had, something to be grasped intellectually. The Gospel is not information to be believed, but power to live faithfully (Romans 1:16). Paul says that righteousness can never be attained from [ek] works of law. It can only be attained through [dia] faith in Jesus Christ, or from [ek] Christ’s faith (Galatians 2:16; both expressions are found in this text). This is so because those who have been baptized and thereby have been crucified and raised now have Christ living in them and are guided by the Spirit that made them a new creation. They are “alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6: 11), rather than dead under the Law. Paul, quoting Habakkuk, says that the righteous live from [ek, out of] faith (Galatians 3: 11). In other words, for Paul faith is not a way of knowing but a way of living.
The mantra of righteousness by faith may be used to live unlovingly; it may serve as an excuse for living denying the Gospel’s power to give life. True Christianity is not a theological system, but a way of being. Paul emphasizes that Christians are those who crucify themselves with Christ and participate in the faith that brought about Christ’s resurrection and gives new life to the believers. That Christ died “for [hyper] all” (2 Corinthians 5:14), does not mean that therefore no one else needs to die. It means that his death was concerned with all, and all are welcome to die with him having the faith that Christ himself had in God when he died. Faith has to do with a manner of living and of dying.
Paul makes very clear that at the Parousia all will have to appear before God’s judgment and give an account of what they have done (2 Corinthians 5:10). God’s judgment is definitive; therefore, Paul insists, no believer has the authority to judge another. God’s judgment, however, is not an evaluation of what people believe, but an assessment of whether or not they live “in the faith of Jesus Christ.” Since all believers are servants of their Lord Jesus Christ, only their Master has the authority to judge them (Romans 14:4, 10).
Paul also warns his converts of the necessity to live as members of the body of Christ who are guided by the Spirit. As such, they are empowered by the Spirit to discern the will of God (Romans 12:3). Living in the Spirit, guided by the Spirit is living “in faith.” It is living empowered to “approve what is excellent,” and thus be “pure and blameless for the day of Christ” (Philipians 1:10). The conduct of those who have Christ living in them is no longer determined by the conditions of life “in the flesh,” in which the Law of Moses rules. Those who live faithfully are beyond the power of the Law to condemn (Romans 8:1), but not beyond the judgment of God. The sins of the believers are the things they do which are “not of faith” (Romans 14:23). As Paul says, God’s righteousness has been revealed “apart from the Law” (Romans 3:21). According to Paul, those who live actualizing their faith and hope, that is, those who demonstrate the power of God’s promise to give life to the faithful attain to righteousness. That is Paul’s understanding of righteousness by faith. It has to do with the actions performed by those who live in the faith of Jesus when he faced death. It has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments and judicial declarations.
by: Herold Weiss
Those who see themselves as the rescuers of the primitive gospel most likely proclaim a gospel that is only a century and a half old, and as such is quite irrelevant to those who do not sing in the choir of their churches. Claiming to have rescued the “eternal verities” of the Gospel they are actually proclaiming “truths” that are no different from the ephemeral truths of science. As is well known, all the truths of science are subject to change when new evidence comes to light. It is sobering to recognize that not too long ago eugenics, lobotomies and lie detectors were considered to be based on scientific truths, but fortunately they have been discarded as demonstrations of premature abuses of trust.
The history of theology is also full of debris left by the banks of the river of time. That the incarnate Son of God was considered by some to be the amalgamation of a human body and spirit with a divine mind (Logos) has been forgotten. That the Christian life is to be promoted by fear of Purgatory, in fact that there is such a place as Purgatory, is no longer held by most Catholic theologians. No one these days gets exited discussing the truth of consubstantiation versus transubstantiation. Most Christians don’t even know what the words mean. The same is true of the classic definition of the Trinity, even though Western and Eastern Christianity broke company charging each other of having a wrong doctrine of the Trinity. Sectarian movements have introduced new doctrines like the Rapture, the Investigative Judgment, Baptism on Behalf of the Dead, etc., but these have remained anomalous sectarian truths.
In his struggles with those who insisted that the Jesus Movement should remain a sect within Judaism, Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, three times says that he is defending the “truth of the Gospel.” The key word in the debate is “circumcision.” Is Paul saying that the truth of the Gospel is that Christians need not be circumcised? Of course not. For him, the truth of the Gospel is that the cross and the resurrection of Christ did not give Judaism a new definition, or a new lease on life. These acts of God constituted a new creation. The power of the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead, now gives new life in the Spirit to all those who participate in Christ’s death and resurrection. In other words, the truth of the Gospel is not a piece of information to be defended, but an experience to be lived.
[ene_ptp]These considerations make evident that the Gospel cannot be locked in some of its past formulations. Even the mantra of “righteousness by faith” is now seen as a truth that needed very much to be proclaimed when it was, but which today is misused for modern agendas. The Gospel is not tied to any time, place or culture. It is capable of being expressed in any and all cultures, and needs to be expressed anew by each new generation of believers in their own culture. As the power that makes it possible to live in Christ guided by the Spirit, the Gospel needs to be proclaimed in terms that fit the conditions of human life at any given time and place. If believers are to live, as Paul says, “in a manner that is worthy of the Gospel,” the Gospel must be relevant to the conditions in which Christians live. This means that the will of God that is to be done on earth must be discerned by each generation. If the Gospel is the power that makes it possible to do the will of God, and each new generation finds itself living in a world that is different from the one in which their parents lived, then the actual performance of the will of God must be informed by a clear vision of what it demands from those living “now.” No generation lives at the time of the previous one. It is, therefore, impossible for the proclamation of the Gospel to be effective if it is bound to the past. Even if the death and the resurrection of Christ is a past event, it is also a present event in the lives of those who have died and been risen with him. The reality of this event is “the truth of the gospel.” The most pernicious temptation is to tie the Gospel to a formula and live as one pleases because what the formula says is not relevant to life today.
The Gospel is not information written on stone. The Gospel is power to live transposing faith and hope into acts of love that make the Risen Christ present in the world of quotidian living. This means that the task of Christian theology is never done. As the discourse that explains the will of God for today, theology is always in need of being done. One of the best known traditional definitions, given by Anselm in the XI century, says that theology is “faith seeking understanding.” Faith in God is the positive answer of the whole person to an encounter with God. As such it is a person’s immediate response to the call of God. This experience takes form at the level of the being who is now living in Christ, the whole person responds to God’s call and finds satisfaction and security in the new creation. Once the act of faith has taken place, the person then feels the need to examine what the experience involved by processing the memory of it through the mind. Going over the experience trying to make sense and determining its implications is the work of theology. It establishes the consequences and explores the meaning of living as a response to the call of God. In other words, theology is second level discourse about God. As such, theology is always in need of being done anew because, while God is always the same, each new generation faces God from a different situation, and each member of every generation has a peculiar faith response to God. Thus, every believer does theology in order to understand what life in God’s presence is all about “now.”
Theology is the act of reflecting on the significance, the implications and the consequences of having faith in the promise of God in Christ. This reflection has immediate consequences on the manner in which the one who has faith in God lives. Each believer, however, also talks with other believers and reads what previous believers say about life with God to evaluate his own understanding of God. Besides, theology needs to be done to coordinate the mind of the community of faith with the mind of the fellow human beings who need to know that God loves them. In our own time, when we are experiencing dramatic changes in the way in which we live on account of the rapidity with which scientific and technological advances are changing the way in which all humans around the world live, the need for imaginative and creative theological reflection is paramount. The significance of life in Christ needs to be explained to those who find themselves loaded with the burdens of post-modern life so that they too may experience the dynamic force of the Gospel to bring freedom and joy. Christians must be most seriously engaged in the task of making the life of faith understandable to unbelievers and believers alike. This cannot be accomplished by reliance on the theological formulations of the past centuries. It demands a presentation of the Gospel that is current and relevant to the situations in which women and men find themselves today. It is, therefore, quite evident that the doing of theology is never finished.
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by Herold Weiss
Having discussed with some seriousness critical topics of interest to Christians who value what the Bible has to say about them, I think it is time for me to take an ironic pen in hand and draw a caricature of the history of the Gospel. Caricatures distinguish themselves by taking a feature and exaggerating it out of proportion. As such, caricatures can be mean, and may give offense to those who see themselves as the victims of someone’s lack of respect for authority, or malicious distortion of the past. On the other hand, caricatures may also be valid ways to call attention to aspects of the truth that are often overlooked, or are distorted in order to promote a particular version of reality. While the appreciation of caricatures requires a sense of humor, once their picaresque dress is recognized they may be the best way to bring to the forefront an issue worthy of serious consideration. In this case caricatures are used as the basis for a thesis about the Gospel.
Thus, with tongue in cheek, I offer my condensed history of the Gospel in twenty five words . . . or more:
The Gospel of Christ was power to do the will of the God who gives life to the dead.
The Greeks made it a mystical philosophy.
The Romans made it a legal state.
The Russians made it an icon paraded for veneration.
The Germans made it a proletarian revolution.
The Spaniards made it a colonial instrument for the subjugation of native peoples.
The Portuguese made it what consecrated their imaginary multicontinental nation.
The Dutch made it the protector of a profitable laisse faire.
The English made it an agent for mercantile empire building.
The Americans made it a financial enterprise for the benefit of shareholders.
The Mainline Churches made it a bourgeois living standard.
The Conservatives made it an idol with traditional authority.
The Liberals made it a cultural monument to be evaluated.
The Fundamentalists made it a divine message that can be manipulated.
The Evangelicals made it the means for a romantic forever-friendship with Jesus.
The Charismatics made it the escape hatch to another world.
The Apocalypticists made it a mystery locked in a safe to which only they have the key.
Throughout history the Gospel of Christ has been in need of being rescued from its purveyors.
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by Herold Weiss
The most striking scientific advances of the last few years have been in the field of genetics. Biology has made great[ene_ptp] strides since Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom in 1909 and Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helix in 1953. Among them is the realization that the nucleus of the atom is essentially a void. This basic modification of our understanding of material reality, however, does not demonstrate that science is not to be trusted. It only demonstrates one of the basic characteristics of science. Every scientific declaration is subject to modifications by new discoveries. No scientific demonstration is the last word. All scientific theses only serve to formulate predictions concerning areas in which knowledge is less secure. A scientific thesis serves to design experiments with which to test the validity of a particular prediction. In other words, the validity of a scientific thesis is demonstrated by its capacity to incite the imagination of scientists who design experiments that further reveal the way in which the universe in which we live actually works. Both Newton’s law of gravity and Einstein’s law of relativity are in a constant process of refinement as new evidence comes in from more recent research. These refinements in no way prove these laws invalid or wrong. The recent discovery of gravitational waves has proved Einstein’s prediction of their existence on account of his refinement of Newton’s explanation of gravity. Einstein viewed gravity as a curvature in spacetime. The scientific confirmation of gravitational waves proves Einstein right and now sparks the desire to understand the astronomical events that produced them. In this way new scientific discoveries serve to validate Newton’s and Einstein’s scientific work. On the other hand, if someone proposes an explanation of material reality which cannot be affirmed or refuted by scientific experiments, she/he is not a scientist. Science can only offer explanations of reality which can be confirmed or denied by scientifically controlled experiments or critically reviewed evidence.
The science of genetics has identified the language of the genomes. In 2006 a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the leadership of David Haussler, published the results of a detailed comparison of the genomes of different species. These researchers found two conglomerates of DNA that have remained stable throughout many transmutations in genomes of vertebrates. They designated one HAR1 (Human Accelerated Region 1). This genome is found in chickens, mice, rats, chimpanzees and, highly modified, in humans. During 300 million years, this genome did not suffer modification since the common predecessor of chickens and mice until the common predecessor of chimpanzees and humans. Then, during the following 6 million years, it underwent significant modifications in the common predecessor of chimpanzees and humans. During these 6 million years HAR1 in humans went through 18 modifications. Also discovered was that HAR1 is very active in the cerebral cortex of the fetus during the second trimester of gestation. This is the time when the essential structure of the brain is established.
The second genome of DNA was designated by the Santa Cruz researchers as HAR2. It is active in the development of the wrist in the human fetus. These discoveries, which some consider to be as important as those of Rutherford, Crick and Watson, are very important not only because they open a new area of study, human biology at the molecular level, but also because they deal with the brain and the wrist, the two organs that more discretely differentiate humans from all vertebrates.
No doubt, science will continue to advance as it discloses the way in which nature works. The new technology of computers has revolutionized methods of research, as the Santa Cruz team has amply demonstrated. There are Christians who see these advances as follies of human hubris or as attacks on Christian faith. These reactions, however, are based on basic misunderstandings.
Those who dismiss such scientific discoveries as pronouncements of science “so called” claim that true science concerning the formation of nature is to be found in the text of the first three chapters of the Bible. To assign scientific legitimacy to the Bible is at best anachronistic, and at worst illusionary and ignorant. Science as knowledge attained by the application of specific methods of research that are subject to peer review became part of our culture rather recently. The reconstruction of the past by the critical evaluation of the extant ancient sources and an explicit demonstration why some may be taken seriously and others may not is also a recent development in the writing of history. To claim that biblical authors wrote science or history is to do violence to the Bible. To pretend that the Bible contains science and history of a quality superior to that written by “mere” human beings is doubly wrong. It is wrong because in the Bible there is neither science nor history in the academic sense in which these words are used today. Besides, it is an error because the Bible gives ample evidence that it was written by “mere” human beings who were the children of their times.
Those who see science as a threat to Christian faith misunderstand both science and faith. I agree with those who understand that science and faith operate in different realms, deal with different objects and do not affirm the same kind of truths. As noted above, scientific truths are characterized by their ability to be modified by new research. No scientist can defend as irrevocable what he was taught in school. Anyone who rejects the critical results of well-designed experiments or historical research ceases to be a scientist or a historian. The believer who has faith in God also constantly searches for better ways to understand the God in whom he/she has faith. Believers who get attached to what they believed as children become immature believers. The faith of a child and the faith of an adult is the same faith. The faith of Abraham and my faith, I am convinced, is the same confidence of living by the grace and the mercy of God. But my way of understanding God and God’s will are not the same as those of Abraham because his culture and mine are quite different. It is also true that my way of understanding God and God’s will now that I am an eighty one year old man living in Michigan is not the same as my understanding of those things when I was a child in Montevideo, Uruguay. In reference to the difference between Abraham’s and my understandings of God and of God’s will, I have the advantage of the revelation of God made available to all human beings by Jesus Christ. On the other hand, I repeat, the faith of Abraham and my faith as a child or as an eighty one year old is absolutely the same, unchanged, undisturbed by different understandings of God and God’s will. Faith is not connected to changes in cultures and historical and scientific constructions of reality in the way in which conceptions of God and of God’s will are. Historical or scientific “truths,” which are temporal and contingent, cannot threaten faith in God, even while they may require that adjustments be made to the way in which God and God’s will are understood.
The reason I have no problem in taking into account what scientists tell me concerning how life has evolved on the universe is not because I have put my faith in science rather than in God. It is because my study of the Bible has convinced me that it is not concerned with providing academic science or history. When the Bible refers to historical or natural events the information is marginal, tangential and inconsequential. If academic scientists and historians today find some of this information to be correct, according to our present understanding of things, it does nothing to prove that the Bible has supernatural information. It only proves that the ancients had excellent powers of observation. To the contrary, when scientists today find that the way things are described in the Bible are proven wrong by our more refined means of observation, it does not prove that God has nothing to do with the Bible. The Bible’s agenda is to testify to God’s involvement in human affairs, to give testimony to God’s power, justice, fidelity and love. Many of the things that it tells about are not correct and many are not edifying. All its content, however, reflects the way in which a people saw themselves to be guided, protected and punished by God. It is a witness to the faith of these people, and as such it is worthy of emulation. A believer who vetoes the advances of science and history to defend the accuracy of a biblical text is taking leave of his reasoning powers. People of faith express their faith with the concepts available and reasonable to them. Faith does not turn a believer unreasonable. Faith surely goes beyond what can be established on historical or scientific grounds, but faith never vetoes what is reasonable. Faith is a power that integrates the personality harmonizing all the facets of what it means to be human, and being human is not limited to what can be investigated by scientific methods. When faith stands against reason it becomes a distorter rather than a harmonizer of the person. Religion can be either an agent of well-being or an agent of physical and psychological malfunctions. A faith that makes a person unreasonable reflects a religion that destroys the personality.
Consideration of different ways of understanding anything is an activity of the mind under the power of reason as well as the influence of experience and accumulated intuition. This means that understandings change. I have traced the changes in my understanding of God’s will in Finding My Way in Christianity: Recollections of a Journey. Similar exercises are sometimes described as “how my mind has changed, or has remained the same,” or “Why I changed my mind,” as is the case of the series in this blog. Faith, on the other hand is lodged, as the apostle Paul points out (Rom 8: 8 – 10, 27; 1 Cor. 4:5), in the heart, the core of being. As the activity of the heart, faith is the anchor of life in God. As such, it transcends reason and intuition. Faith grasps the very being of God as Faithful. The truth of God is not to be found in the realm of knowledge, but in the realm of being. I shall never place my faith in either science or history. Their truths are temporary and contingent on limited sources. The same is true, it must be said, of doctrines formulated to account for God and God’s will. My faith is set on the truth of God. God is who accounts for the reason of my being at all. Of my faith I cannot give explanations; I can only confess it. In the meantime I am happy to have science and history give me timely information about the past and the way in which life and what exists in time and space function in the universe that God is constantly creating. With science I have a great debt of gratitude. On account of its many recent discoveries I am enjoying my old age with good health and comfort.
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For more information on Herold Weiss’s books, click on a book cover.
by Herold Weiss
It would seem that in the gospel accounts of the crucifixion a scene is missing. None of them tells us that when the disciples saw Jesus being crucified, one of them (we would think that it should have been Peter) said, “Everything is going ahead according to plan. Let’s go home and wait for Sunday.” On the contrary, all the gospels tell us that at the crucifixion the disciples were all disoriented, and that on Sunday, confronted with the fact that Jesus was alive, they were greatly surprised. We have been left to choose from among unsavory explanations. Either the disciples were really dumb and did not get what Jesus was plainly telling them all along, or the presentation of the life of Jesus as a pre-established march to the cross is the product of theological reflection. Mark’s Gospel is obviously aware of the problem and goes out of its way to paint the disciples as really dumb. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which were written using Mark as a source, take pains to make the disciples look a bit more attractive.
Undoubtedly, for the early disciples who went out to proclaim the salvation brought about by the cross and the resurrection, the crucifixion was very problematic from a public relations standpoint. Paul admits it was a curse to the Jews and nonsensical to the Greeks.
In Christian theological reflection, however, it was essential to the salvation of humankind. It had been determined before the foundation of the world. When Jesus was born, he was destined to die on a cross. We have all seen marvelous paintings from the Renaissance onward of the Madonna and Child with baby John the Baptist beside them holding a miniature cross for Jesus’ benefit. In other words, it had been preordained that Jesus would die on a cross. In the gospels Jesus says, “It is necessary that the Son of Man” or “The Son of Man must suffer many things . . . and be killed, and after three days rise again.”
Philosophically, things may be classified as either contingent or necessary. What made the death of Christ on the cross necessary? Was there no other way for the Almighty to save humanity? I would think that if God is Almighty God could have saved the world in thousands of other ways. Some would argue that all things in this world are contingent on other things.
What made the cross of Christ necessary, it would seem, was theological reflection on the fact that the Risen One had died on a cross. For the first disciples to understand this unforeseeable, disqualifying, horrendous, dishonorable death as part of the life of the Risen Lord was to conceive it as willed by an Almighty God who knows and controls everything in the universe. For Jesus’ contemporaries it would have been impossible to worship a God in whose universe the agent of salvation suffers crucifixion against God’s will. For the disciples the Roman execution needed to be imagined theologically. In this process conflicting metaphors became useful. His cross was a sacrifice, the ransom payment, the down payment, the lifting up of the serpent in the desert, the glorification (talk about an oxymoron!), the harrowing of hell, etc. All this made perfect sense to ancients who lived in a traditional culture where security was dependent on things being set firmly on what God wills.
For us moderns, or post-moderns, however, this is not very comforting. We find it difficult to worship a God who is not just, and in our vision of justice the freedom of individuals is essential to our humanity. This means that a Jesus who lacks freedom is not quite a human being. If he was born with everything predetermined –born to die on a cross– we find him rather less than a full human confronted with the pressure of making choices facing an open future. To face a closed future in which the only way out is a cross is not just. It dehumanizes the person required to live under such conditions. While for Jesus’ contemporaries the human ideal was to live life as it had been fated, the Stoics would say “according to nature,” for us it is to exercise freedom. For them freedom was limited to specific relationships. For us freedom is an inalienable right. We find it hard to think of Jesus without it. Did Jesus go through life having to make only one choice which, once he made it correctly, left him in a state of static perfection? Did he not have to go through the normal human stages of development facing the choices appropriate to them? Did he end up on a cross because it had been determined from before the foundation of the world that he must? Or because, on account of the choices he made as a full human, he developed a character and determined for himself the highest standard of integrity? How these questions are answered depends on whether one thinks of them historically or theologically. Thinking theologically, like the evangelists do in their gospels, the answers to these questions are not necessarily historically precise. But here we are not in search of an explanation. What we wish for is understanding of the ways of God, and that can be obtained only imaginatively, creatively, metaphorically. That is what is really marvelous about the cross. The cross is the ultimate symbol because no one is tempted to think that it accomplished our salvation on account of its actuality (unless, of course, you are Mel Gibson). As a Roman execution it was just one more historical event. As the death that was determined before the foundation of the world, it destroyed the power of death over humanity for the believers of the first century. For those of us who think that Jesus used his freedom to discover his vocation and to chose his future, because otherwise he would not have been a human like us, his crucifixion confronts us with the need to reformulate creatively, imaginatively and metaphorically the meaning of this most central of symbols.
(Herold Weiss is author of Energion title Finding My Way in Christianity: Recollections of a Journey.)