Episode 140 - The Cross Shows Love Only If It Rescues Us

Someone bleeding and dying does not automatically communicate love. That single objection forces a deeper question many Christians assume is settled: how does the cross actually show the love of God, and what must be true for “Jesus died for us” to mean more than a disturbing image?

We walk through Schleiermacher as one of the clearest modern voices for a human-facing atonement, where the cross primarily changes human attitudes rather than defeating cosmic enemies or satisfying divine justice. In his Enlightenment shaped theology, the universe is a closed chain of cause and effect, sin carries its own consequences, and there is no need for an external Judge issuing verdicts. That move reshapes everything: death becomes a natural feature of finite life, demons and the devil become poetic remnants of ancient culture, and God’s wrath is dismissed as non-literal language because God is treated as beyond emotion.

From there we test a popular alternative: the cross as divine empathy, God climbing down into human suffering to sit with us in pain. We grant what is compelling in that vision, while asking why the Bible keeps reaching for sacrifice, covenant, cleansing, forgiveness and victory over sin and death. A death shows love when it is a rescue, when it achieves a real good for the beloved, like a rescuer entering danger so others can live.

If you’ve ever wondered whether the cross is mainly inspiration, mainly comfort, or something far stronger, you’ll find plenty to wrestle with here. Subscribe for what comes next, share this with a friend who loves theology, and leave a review. What do you think “dying for” must mean for the cross to be convincing?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Welcome And The Atonement Question

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Well, welcome to the next episode of the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as we continue to think through atonement. Now, in the last episode, we got right into Schleiermacher's account of the death of Jesus. And that is part of we were doing that because we wanted to examine an example, and really one of the most powerful examples for the modern world of those who see the cross as primarily facing towards humanity. And that is that the reason Jesus died, all the way through this, we're asking the question: why did Jesus die? And we Shalimacher doesn't really have Jesus as God, not really, not in a classical sense, but we're really like if we understand that Jesus is God, He's all the fullness of God in bodily form. This is this enormously powerful question is why would the immortal God die? And we've seen that there are these three orientations, like that he's the cross is facing towards humanity, or the cross is facing towards cosmic enemies, sin, death, and the devil. Or the cross is facing towards God, and it's accomplishing something within God. Now, we're gonna argue in this whole series that you need all three elements of that to have a proper biblical account of what's happening in the death of Jesus, the death of God. But the what people really take one of these to be the primary thing, and that becomes their main anchor point from which other other things are said. Now for Schleimacher, it is really entirely facing towards humanity and the effect of the cross. He really doesn't have it as something that is purposed by God or intended by Jesus, even, but rather once this situation was forced upon him, the way he behaved in that situation has a massive consequence on humanity as a whole. Because it changes the way humans think or feel about God, about themselves, about sin and punishment. And so that's that's what we're continuing to explore. Now, the Schleimacher is one of the very best examples of this approach in one sense, because his whole system is internally consistent. So he has a very clear reason why the death of Jesus has this effect, why the death of Jesus breaks this connection between sin and punishment and so on. But other people who say that the cross of Jesus faces towards humanity in order to change how humanity thinks about God, the love of God, or so on, it I find others are very rarely as clear and internally consistent as Schleimacher. Let's just review Schleimacher's way of doing this briefly. Remember, for Schleimacher, the whole world system has been set up by God with its own natural laws. So remember, Schleimacher is an extremely enlightenment kind of guy coming after the 17th century, 18th century. This clock, the the universe is essentially a machine, and the god who made it made it with its own internal mechanism, laws, and it doesn't need any outside interference. If they have any view of God and the universe at all, it's that God, if he if God is such a good creator, he must have created the universe with this perfect set of natural laws so it governs itself, it doesn't require tinkering with because miracles are perceived as only necessary if the universe hasn't been set up correctly. The very it's hard for us today to get into that, but for into the mentality of the European intelligentsia of 1800, but for them, the the idea of the scientific laws of the universe and there being a perfect chain of cause and effect in a closed system of the universe, to them that's a kind of absolute dogma of reality. And so Schliedmacher accepts that and says, yes, those laws, natural laws of the universe, they are the law of God. That's good, that's how God has set the universe up, and we are to have this sense of absolute dependence upon this in this closed system of cause and effect, and that is a dependence upon God. So the the laws that govern all human behavior and all behavior, all activity in the universe, they have been set up by God that are internal to the universe, and crucially, therefore, sin, morally bad behavior, has got its own negative consequences. We saw that at the end of our last study. The living God has set the universe up in such a way that sinful behavior carries with it bad effects. That is how sin is kind of judged. So there is no need for an external judge to give judicial verdicts upon human behavior, because sinful human behavior already has bad consequences built into them, into the nature of the universe. And then Shalimach know, you know, so he says that that sin, sin and evil, and evil they're defined as suffering caused by sin. Sin and evil are equal to each other and completely contained within the universe. So he does acknowledge that the sinner many times doesn't feel the consequences for themselves. Others carry the punishment of the sinner's sin, bear the burden of their sin. But yet, so sin and evil are equal to one another and they do not reach beyond this world. The real the right remember for Schleimacher, you we can say nothing about metaphysical realities at all. He accepts the kind of Kantian framework that all our language and points of reference are physical, and therefore we cannot say anything metaphysical at all. And Schleimacher does sort of say, well, whatever we there is nothing to be said about that. So it's all enclosed within the world. So the cross changes everything because this human, Jesus Christ, is the human with the perfect consciousness of God, and he is able to be in perfect harmony with God whilst enduring the punishments of the sins of the religious leaders and Roman military political leaders of his day. And therefore, Jesus breaks our association of sin with punishment, and therefore we can kind of accept God's love, his blessing towards us, regardless of this equation between sin and punishment. And anyway, to accept the love of God, the blessing, the benediction, as he says, of God, that's the cure for our sinful behavior, anyway. Like once we have this consciousness of God, we won't do sins, and therefore all the suffering caused by sin will dwindle away. So he sees history really as an upward trend, and sinful behavior is getting less and less the more the impact of Christ's life, teaching, and death are felt, and less and less sin, therefore less and less bad consequences and suffering caused by sin, and that's all good. That's him. Now, we obviously are. I imagine anyone listening to this podcast would feel, whoa, that that it is internally consistent, but it's not very, it's impossible to reconcile with the Bible. It's and got and raises enormous questions about justice and all kinds of things. Now, others have different versions of a human focus, a human-facing account of the death of Jesus, the death of God. And many who try to make a human-facing account of the cross and have that as the primary meaning of the death of Jesus. Most of the others I've read that do this do not tie themselves so completely to a kind of deist account of the universe. But the key to this approach is kind of to the main things that need to be addressed is not death, the devil or sin or even God, but human human attitudes or something like that. Now, of course, to do that, to make the cross primarily human-facing, what is necessary is then to say that death as such, or the devil, or sin, or God, but let's leave the God component for a moment. But death, the devil, or sin, those are not the primary things that need to be addressed in the cross. Now, how does Schleimacher achieve that? Well, Schleimacher does this because so is death something that needs to be defeated by the death of Jesus. Well, Schleimacher really says no, because death is just a natural part of life. It's an intrinsic aspect of life in this universe. It existed before human sin and after human sin, and there's no link, no natural link between sin and death. What we what in a way look uh if we meditate on the death of Jesus, perhaps we can see how to face death with a calm dependence upon God, but it doesn't actually change death. Death is just an entirely natural feature of the universe, death is a feature of biological life for finite creatures. So Schleimacher is like a classic mortalist in saying that death is not caused by sin, death is just part of the world in an inevitable feature of finite biological life. But and then when it comes to the devil and demons, well Schleimacher, his chapter on it, I think it's 40 sections 44 and 45 of his Christian faith. It is it is extraordinary, really, because uh the devil and demons are definitely a part of the Jesus story in the Gospels and so on. And even and in the Old Testament, also the devil's present. So it how he had he kind of needs to get rid of that because that's too that's metaphysical kind of claims. So he they're not they're not real for Schleimacher. He explains that the the the belief in demons and the devil and that sort of thing, when you analyze it, it has no place in the Christian system of thought at all, and he he points out what he feels are logical problems with it. Like, for example, it's uh it's a stupid, it like the devil is presented as hyper-intelligent, and yet for him to attempt to overthrow God by doing whatever he does is a stupid thing to do, and no hyper-intelligent being would behave in the way the devil does as portrayed in the Bible. So he says it obviously cannot be taken literally, even at face value. But he says, what the devil and demons are really just part of the folk folk tales and superstitious beliefs at the time of Jesus, and so Jesus and the apostles kind of will use these concepts of the devil and demons and things, not because they're real, these things are real, but because they are a way of using ideas that were around at the time to enable people to grasp the battle of you know, the spiritual battle of turning away from sin and escaping sin to being to living with a proper God consciousness and so on. And he's so he says we can refer to the devil and demons in a poetic way, but they have no substance in Christian faith or doctrine. So for Schleiermacher, then the idea of cosmic enemies that need to be defeated, he he he gets rid of all that. And then Schleimacher also can get rid of the idea of God being angry. He rejects that. Why does it if you remember, he doesn't like the idea of God being angry because he doesn't think God has any emotions at all. Schleiermacher is very sort of philosophically comfortable with classical theism, that kind of account of God, which we've examined in earlier episodes that it begins with, it begins in Greek paganism, but that there's a sort of syncretized version of it that has a long history in certain kinds of Christian thought. And Schleiermacher's comfortable with classical theism because that's a kind of abstract conception of God that isn't really connected with history or physicality or anything like that, and and that concept of classical theism has a much greater power over Schleiermacher than the Bible itself, and so he's able to say, although the Bible uses a language about God's wrath and anger and so on, that that is not literally true at all. So God, the cross doesn't need to face towards God at all because God has just benevolence and doesn't have these kind of emotional reactions against sin or anything like that. There are no cosmic enemies for Schleimacher, so the only thing that needs to be addressed is human attitudes about God and sin and things like that. Now, does the cross show us the love of God? In a way, Schleimacher doesn't really directly say that, but others do. Others do. It's a common thing to say that if the cross is facing towards humanity as the primary focus, that what it is doing is the cross is showing us that God loves us. How does it do that? That's what I want us to try to unravel in this episode. How can the cross show the love of God? It's not straightforward. One account simply says it is God, like the world is a mess, it's unfair. Schleimacher's happy with the idea that the world is kind of unfair because sin, the consequence, the but the suffering caused by sin is often, even mostly, felt by the victims of sin, not the sinner. So it's an unfair world, and then there's also what he calls accidental suffering that's caused by disease and disasters and things like that. So all it's an unfair world with all kinds of pain and suffering and injustice and so on. And one account simply says God we think of all that as God being angry with us, and this is punishment for our sin and so on. And Schleiermacher recognized that we that he felt we have to break that, that any connection between sin and punishment. And so that's what Jesus does on the cross. But other people have other versions of that and have it more like a kind of empathy thing. That what God sees us suffering in this unjust universe that's full of death and pain and disease, and what God essentially does is say, I'll become one of you and sit with you right in the midst of all this pain and suffering and empathize with you. And instead of standing over at a distance looking at you from a transcendent height of comfort, what God does is kind of climbs down into the pain and suffering and kind of puts his arm around us and says, Yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? I'm I'm gonna suffer it with you and feel it with you and try to comfort you in it. And that's what the cross is doing. That that God doesn't stand at a distance from the suffering, but comes and gets into it, feels empathy with us, intends to comfort it in us, and kind of feel it with us. Now, of course, there is there is a sense in which the cross, that is what is happening, it's it's impossible to look at the cross and believe that God is disengaged from injustice and suffering. This is other the the gods of other religions stand at a distance, transcendent, far removed, and and and boast that they are incapable of suffering and death. Whereas our God boasts that he is capable of dying with us and for us and so on. And so the cross does demonstrate that the living God is not disengaged and standing in a cold transcendence, unmoved by human suffering. We the the real and living God has suffered with us, for us, as one of us. So there is lots to be said about that, but is that the primary meaning? Is that the primary meaning? It's hard to see that it is. The Bible doesn't really seem to say so. It doesn't really talk about it as as primarily all that language of of sacrifice in in Exodus and Leviticus and so on. Very, very little of that that I can perceive would fit within that kind of a model of God's of God coming in and simply saying, Isn't it awful? I will feel its awfulness with you and comfort you in it. And then I haven't got an answer to it. I I don't know how to get rid of it, but. I I I'm in I'm I'm with you in it now even there's that, but also this idea that the cross is a display of God's love. The Bible says that it is, that God shows his love to us in on the cross. That is clearly taught in the Bible. But how does the cross show the love of God according to the Bible? Merely coming to die, merely bleeding and dying doesn't in and of itself show love. Like we may have seen someone bleeding and then dying. Seen an accident or violence committed and seen someone stabbed and bleeding and then dying. But that in another seeing that does not make us think, look how much that person loves us because they are bleeding and dying. That bleeding and dying is a tragic is tragic suffering. In and of itself, it doesn't show love at all. It just shows how awful the world is or how terri the consequences of sin and it it it shows that, but it doesn't show love in and of itself. A person dying is not an act of love or a demonstration of love. But Jesus says the greatest love is to lay down your life for somebody else. So if the bleeding and dying is for somebody, then that could be a demonstration of love. But even then, we need to know what do we mean by dying for somebody, to lay down your life for somebody. Like when a person loses their life to rescue others, or if a person risks their life to get people out of a dangerous situation, rescue workers, fire workers, lifeguards, things like that. We see in that great love and courage, we see that a person will put the lives of others ahead of their own. They may even step in front of somebody and take a fatal blow so that they can save the life of somebody. All of these things, we there's many stories where these sort of things happen. And so if a person does that and bleeds and dies in order that other people do not die to rescue them, that shows love, that shows courage. But but if a person say simply goes into a dangerous situation and ends up being wounded and bleeds and dies, for no apparent reason, they just went into a dangerous situation, foolishly, that doesn't show love. That shows no love at all. In fact, it it might show a disregard for the safety of others who may have to deal with this situation that they've caused. Now, I remember about 25 years ago going to the cinema in Leicester Square in London, and I can't remember which film we'd gone to see. But but what I do remember is before the main film there was a short film that was kind of I think intended to be a critique of the Christian gospel, but it didn't say that at any point. But when I explain what the short film had, you'll understand it. And I was then for the rest of my time in the sun where I couldn't stop thinking about this little film. That's probably why I can't remember what the main film was. See, in this short film, in it, a boy is in love with a girl, and the girl doesn't seem very interested in him. So as I recall, he kind I think he gets into her flat and he either breaks in or he or he's able to go in. And he fills contain he gets a variety of containers, and then in the bath he cuts himself such that he's bleeding out, and he fills containers with his own blood, and he's sort of bleeding himself to death, and then she turns up and she's absolutely horrified. What are you doing? And he just keeps saying, I'm showing you that I love you, I'm showing you I love you. See, look at my blood that I've bled out. I'm sure this shows that I love you. I'm showing you how much I love you. Look, here's my blood, and then you know, it's an it's a terrible scene, a gory, horrible scene. She's horrified, screaming. I think she ends she has to phone them the police and things, and it ends like that. The point of the film seemed to be that how is Jesus dying and bleeding? How does that show love? It's just weird. The film was kind of saying it's just weird. That doesn't show love. Why do Christians think that shows love? It doesn't show that God loves us. In and of itself, somebody bleeding and dying is just a tragic event. But and and if they if they do it deliberately to say this shows that I love you, it's just weird. It's not loving. That is not how you show love by by ble bleeding out and dying. Okay, fair point. I get the point of that little film, what they were trying to say. So the mere fact of Jesus bleeding and dying does not show love, it is only a demonstration of love if, if, if there is a great benefit gained for humanity from his bleeding and dying, if he is going into danger to uh to either defeat an enemy too powerful for us, if he's going to defeat death itself, for example, or if he is in some way defeating the devil, or if sin is some kind of tyrant that captures humanity and it is defeated by whatever he's doing on the cross, or or and or if he is bringing about some kind of change within God so that God can relate to us differently because of what happens on the cross, that God can forgive us for sin, cleanse away our corruption, whatever. If any of these things are true, that Jesus is doing so, he's putting himself into this dangerous situation to rescue us. He he he he risks his life and loses his life, he loses his life in order to rescue us, in order that we do not die in some sense. He's doing what the rescue workers do when they go into a or a champion who goes to fight on behalf of others and wins a victory, but at the cost of his own life, and all of those concepts we understand that a death shows love in those ways. So if he's doing that, then the cross can be a powerful demonstration of love. So, how is the cross a demonstration of God's love? Such that what is it that is occurring so that it really is a demonstration of God's love? And then we can acknowledge that one aspect of what the cross is doing towards humanity is changing humanity, showing humanity that God loves us. What must be true about the cross if the cross is genuinely a demonstration of love rather than just something a bit weird? Well, that's what we'll get into next.