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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tony Jones
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April 20 - July 18, 2022
If the way that a person gets into heaven has to do with a spontaneous, fear-driven, adolescent decision, then the Christian faith is no more than a desperate sales pitch.
what really troubled me about that night was the guilt. Jesus’ blood was on our hands.
what kind of sense does it make to believe that God would create you and me, only to be disgusted by us and wrathful at our inevitable shortcomings?
the Bible is rife with stories of God going out of his way to set people on the right path—despite
religious violence has been perpetrated as a result of that crucifixion, in the name of the crucifixion, most notably the extraordinarily heinous history of Christian anti-Semitism. The crucifixion, an event that we claim brings peace between God and humans, has also been used to justify pogroms and holocausts.
assholes have bad theology.
we don’t experience God as uber-wrathful toward us. For another, it simply doesn’t make sense that God would game the whole system so that he has to kill his own son just to vitiate this wrath.
Liberals, put off by the Bible’s seemingly primitive taboos and violence, too often minimize the Bible’s role to the point of unusefulness.
Primitive religions—we might call them protoreligions—sought to deal with ever-increasing violence by setting up a pressure-release valve in society: violence would be perpetrated on an innocent victim in the form of a bloody sacrifice,
God looks at sin as separate from humanity and acts himself to end the tyranny of sin by sweeping it away in one loving and self-sacrificial
Jesus’ entire life is the atoning sacrifice, not just his death.
Jesus’ crucifixion defeats the powers of evil and death in the world. In Revelation, the big problem in the world is not sin, it’s evil. And Jesus conquered evil in his death,
in none do we find an angry, vengeful God, standing with arms crossed, awaiting a sacrifice equal to the weight of all human sin.
If we could get in a time machine and motor back through history, we could pop out at various points and ask, Just what did Jesus’ death accomplish?, the theologians and preachers of each era would confidently give us an answer, but each of those answers would be different.
got to find a perspective on the cross that doesn’t make Jesus or God helpless or beholden to a system of justice that’s bigger than they are. Jesus’ sacrifice was made out of love, not out of obligation,
Anselm argued that Jesus died as a substitute for human beings and as a satisfaction for the sin-debt that humans owe God.
In an earlier age, when people feared God as they feared the weather or the lord on the hill, it made sense to preach a wrathful, vengeful, bloodthirsty God.
If something bad were going to happen to my children I’d rush to substitute myself. That’s what love does. So it’s not surprising that God does the same thing.
if God both initiates the suffering and supplies the only means of escape from it, that’s self-serving.
the God of the Payment model. He may be a God to be feared, but he’s not a God to be loved.
Christians continued to find the death of Jesus to be the cure to what ailed them. The thing is, different ailments afflicted different generations of Christians.
Victory sees Jesus as the ultimate pacifist. He’s a nonviolent warrior, throwing himself into the midst of battle and even suffering a violent death to show the bankruptcy of violence
The language of warfare was available to Jesus, yet he rarely used it. He did not primarily paint his ministry as that of a battle, nor did he talk of God as a warrior.
Satan, if such a being exists, may be as alive as ever, but he is surely not God’s equal.
Abelard makes his third point, offering his solution to the conundrum: God took on human nature and even bore death in order to more fully bind himself to us. The result should be that, upon grasping what God has done for us, we will be likewise set afire with love for God and desire nothing more than union with him.
If catalyzing love were the only reason for Jesus’ life, surely he didn’t have to die.
While the Orthodox don’t necessarily reject that notion, they also firmly believe that God lives inside of us. We reach God by going within.
In the resurrection on Easter morning, God defeats death and gives us the ability to once again claim our divinity.
because Christ assumed human flesh that humanity is redeemed. And the same goes for the violence of the crucifixion. Because Christ entered fully into humanity, including a cruel and violent death, the terror of violence is defeated along with death.
Humanity developed a pattern of violent sacrifice meant to assuage guilt and appease the “gods.” It worked, but only temporarily. It took Jesus on the cross to provide the remedy that was really needed.
the brink of mob violence, a victim is chosen and sacrificed. Somehow, almost magically, when the victim is lynched, the mob’s desire for violence dissipates. Then, in an ironic twist, the scapegoat is often made a saint, or even a god. The scapegoat mechanism is the foundation of all religion, says Girard.
The genesis narrative of nearly every human society has a “founding murder”:
the victim is actually innocent, and the only reason that a sacrificial system works is because people have convinced themselves that it does.
Jesus’ death is a renunciation of violence, and upon the foundation of his death is based a religion of peace.
Jesus’ death shows that the entire system of sacrifice is bankrupt, that it never pleased God, and it never really solved human problems.
Jesus was the “first lynchee,” who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil.
God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own.
crucifixion was surely meant by Rome and the Temple leaders to discourage others from preaching along the same lines. And yet, the cross became a sign of victory.
The disgust mechanism dictates many human affairs: how we treat the disabled, the disfigured,
perfectly “clean” God enters into the “unclean” body of Jesus of Nazareth. Even in this act, a disgust boundary is crossed.
Jesus repeatedly violated those boundaries, touching lepers and blind men and menstruating women.
God made the disgusting sacred;
They argue that violence does not save and that Jesus’ death did nothing to further his life and ministry. It was, they think, a morally repugnant act.
Jesus unites with victims on the cross, and the Holy Spirit overcomes the hopelessness of han in the resurrection by offering ongoing companionship and new life.
the unreality of God died on the cross. And born in its place was the spirit of Christ,
The desire to sacrifice is rooted deep in the human evolutionary psyche.
Jesus did not explicitly condemn the sacrificial system, but neither did he endorse
He hears me; he does nothing about it. He should be here, not us. He’s an evil bastard. We should put him on trial.”
God is not good. He was never good. He was only on our side.”
being forced to watch the hanging of an angel-faced child at Auschwitz, Wiesel heard someone ask, “ ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer, ‘Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’ ”4
