“Punishing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is monstrous logic, atrocious theology, and a gross distortion of the idea of justice… Ritual sacrifice may appease the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, but it has nothing to do with the Father of Jesus.”

Brian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a Christian congregation located in the heartland of America in St. Joseph, Missouri. Read his devastating refutation of John Calvin’s theology here

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As I have written elsewhere:

The Christian idea that guilt can be removed from a wrongdoer by someone else being punished instead is morally grotesque. Or if we say that God in the person of God the Son punished himself in order to be able to justly forgive sinners, we still have the absurdity of a moral law which God must satisfy by punishing the innocent in place of the guilty. It is a strange thing if God so delights in, or requires, the blood of the innocent, that he neither chooses, nor is able, to spare the guilty without the sacrifice of the innocent.

I believe the basic fault of the Christian understanding of salvation is that it has no room for divine forgiveness. For a forgiveness that has to be bought by the bearing of a just punishment, or the offering of a sacrifice, is not forgiveness, but merely an acknowledgement that a debt has been paid in full.  The Cross is not a symbol of forgiveness at all: on the orthodox Christian view, it denotes the repayment of a debt, as the infinity of Original Sin is atoned for by the infinite sacrifice of God’s own temporary death. But what humanity really needs, as we look back over our long record of disobedience, is a model of true forgiveness by a God who does not calculate, who imposes no mean-spirited ‘economy of salvation’ worthy only of accountants and bookkeepers.  As the Bible teaches: The letter killeth – the spirit giveth life.

But in the authentic teaching of Jesus to be found in the synoptic gospels (that is the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke) there is, in contrast, genuine divine forgiveness for those who truly repent. In the Lord’s Prayer we are taught to address God directly and to ask for forgiveness for our sins, expecting to receive this, the only condition being that we in turn forgive one another.  There is no suggestion of the need for a mediator between ourselves and God or for an atoning death to enable God to forgive.

Categories: Christianity, Wisdom