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According to temple theology, certain kinds of sins and impurities could be dealt with only through sacrifice in the temple. Temple theology thus claimed an institutional monopoly on the forgiveness of sins; and because the forgiveness of sins was a prerequisite for entry into the presence of God, temple theology also claimed an institutional monopoly on access to God. In this setting, to affirm “Jesus is the sacrifice for sin” was to deny the temple’s claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subverted the
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do have faith in the cross as a trustworthy disclosure of the evil of domination systems, as the exposure of the defeat of the powers, as the revelation of the “way” or “path” of transformation, as the revelation of the depth of God’s love for us, and as the proclamation of radical grace. I have faith in the cross as all of those things.
Jesus as Metaphor and Sacrament of God
we see Jesus as the revelation of God, we see in his life and death the passion of God. He discloses both the character and passion of God.
Jesus is also a sacrament of God, a means through whom the Spirit of God becomes present.
A New Heart
Born Again: Its Centrality in the New Testament
Born Again: Dying and Rising
In the gospels and in the rest of the New Testament, death and resurrection, dying and rising, are again and again a metaphor for personal transformation, for the psychological-spiritual process at the center of the Christian life.
In particular, the early Christian movement saw the cross as a symbol of “the way.” It embodies “the way”: the path of transformation, the way to be born again. The cross, the central symbol of Christianity, points to the process at the heart of the Christian life: dying and rising with Christ, being raised to newness of life, being born again in Christ, in the Spirit.
The way of the cross involves dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and being raised to a new way of being, one centered in God.
Born Again: Why We Need This
The story is both haunting and evocative, for it suggests that we come from God, and that when we are very young, we still remember this, still know this. But the process of growing up, of learning about this world, is a process of increasingly forgetting the one from whom we came and in whom we live. The birth and intensification of self-consciousness, of self-awareness, involves a separation from God.22
The birth of self-consciousness is the birth of the separated self. When this happens, the natural and inevitable result is self-concern. The two go together: the separated self and the self-centered self.
The birth of the separated self—what we call “the fall”—is something we go through early in our own lives. We have all experienced this. Moreover, it cannot be avoided; it is utterly necessary. Imagining that Adam and Eve could have avoided it misses the point. We cannot develop into mature human beings without self-consciousness. And yet it is a “fall”—into a world of self-consciousness and self-centeredness, estrangement and exile.
By the time we are in early adolescence, perhaps earlier, our sense of who we are is increasingly the product of culture. We feel okay or not okay about ourselves to the extent that we measure up to the messages we have internalized.
Our fall into exile is very deep. The biblical picture of the human condition is bleak. Separated and self-concerned, the self becomes blind, self-preoccupied, prideful; worry-filled, grasping, miserable; insensitive, angry, violent; somebody great, or only okay, or “not much.” In the dark, we are blind and don’t see. We live in bondage in Egypt, in exile in Babylon, and sometimes we become Egypt and Babylon. We can even be both victim and oppressor.
The biblical vision of our amazing contradiction is that we are created in the image of God, but we live our lives outside of paradise, “east of Eden,” in a world of estrangement and self-preoccupation. It is the inevitable result of growing up, of becoming selves. None of us, whether success or failure, escapes it. Thus we need to be born again.
To be born again involves dying to the false self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to be born into an identity centered in the Spirit, in Christ, in God. It is the process of internal redefinition of the self whereby a real person is born within us.
Born Again: The Process
for the majority of us, being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.
In the course of a day, I sometimes realize that I have become burdened, and that the cause is that I have forgotten God. In the act of remembering God, of reminding myself of the reality of God, I sometimes feel a lightness of being—a rising out of my self-preoccupation and burdensome confinement. We are called again and again to come forth from our tombs.
This process is at the heart not only of Christianity, but of the other enduring religions of the world.
When the Christian path is seen as utterly unique, it is suspect. But when Jesus is seen as the incarnation of a path universally spoken about elsewhere, the path we see in him has great credibility.
Born Again: Intentionality
spirituality is about the process of being born again (and again and again). It is at the heart of the Christian life. If we as Christians and as the church took this seriously, we would recover the rich spiritual practices of the Christian tradition. We would learn them and encourage their use. One of the central purposes of our life together as church would be to midwife and nourish the process of being born again.
The New Life
For Jesus, the primary quality of a life centered in God is compassion.
growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one.
Our culture is dominated by an ethos of individualism. It is our core cultural value: we are probably the most individualistic culture in human history.1 Of course, there is much that is good about individualism: the value it gives to individual lives, the importance of individual rights, individual choice and opportunity. It emphasizes freedom, and freedom is one of the gifts of God. But individualism as a core value leads to a way of seeing life that obscures the enormous effect of social systems on the lives of people.
Individualism stresses that the primary factor responsible for our well-being is individual effort.
The notion of the “self-made person”—that we are primarily the product of our own initiative and hard work—is widespread in the United States. It is often used to legitimate a social system (both political and economic) that maximizes rewards for individual “success” a...
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individual responsibility matters, but none of us is really self-made. We are also the product of many factors beyond our control.
Social systems are among the factors beyond the individual that deeply affect people’s lives. Seeing this is the key to understanding the Bible’s passion for justice.
The test of the justice of systems is their impact on human lives. To what extent do they lead to human flourishing and to what extent to human suffering? This is what the political passion of the Bible is about. Its major voices protest the systemic injustice of the kingdoms and empires that dominated their world. They do so in the name of God and on behalf of the victims—
God’s Passion for Justice in the Hebrew Bible
What Egypt and the monarchies of Israel and Judah shared in common is that both were forms of the “ancient domination system,” the most widespread form of society in the premodern world. Powerful and wealthy aristocracies centered around the monarchy structured the political and economic systems in their own self-interest.
Three primary features characterized these premodern domination systems:
Sounds familiar
They were politically oppressive.Ordinary people had no voice in the structuring of society. Rather, they were ruled by the monar...
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They were economically exploitative.The powerful and wealthy structured the economic system so that approximately one-half to two-thirds of the annual production of wealth ended up in the hands...
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They were religiously legitimated.In most (all?) premodern societies, it was affirmed that the social order reflected the will of God.
God’s Passion for Justice in the New Testament
The phrase the “Kingdom of God” is perhaps the best shorthand summary of the message and passion of Jesus.
when Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God, his hearers would have heard an immediate contrast. They lived under other kingdoms: the kingdom of Herod and the kingdom of Caesar. They knew what those kingdoms and life in them were like. And here was Jesus speaking of the Kingdom of God.
So what is the political meaning of the Kingdom of God? In a sentence: it is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of this world were not.9 The Kingdom of God is about God’s justice in contrast to the systemic injustice of the kingdoms and domination systems of this world.
To say “Jesus is Lord” is to say “Caesar is not lord.” To affirm the lordship of Christ is to deny the lordship of Caesar.
several of the “titles” of Jesus in the New Testament were also titles of Caesar. On coins and inscriptions, Caesar was referred to not only as “lord,” but also as “son of God,” “savior,” “king of kings,” and “lord of lords.” Caesar was also spoken of as the one who had brought peace on earth. Early Christians used all of this language to refer to Jesus.
the familiar affirmation “Jesus is Lord,” now almost a Christian cliché, originally challenged the lordship of the empire. It still does.
The Political Meaning of the Cross
If we ask why the God of the Bible cares about politics, about systemic justice, the answer is disarmingly simple. God cares about justice because the God of the Bible cares about suffering. And the single biggest cause of unnecessary human suffering throughout history has been and is unjust social systems.
