How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.

Faith and Practice: Words Mean Things

There seems to be a disconnection between Christian faith and practice, but in a way in which those words as defined culturally have lost their meaning in Christian theology. Is “faith” only faith, and is “practice” only practice, to be used thus in the same flattened way that other religions use them? I don’t believe Christian faith should not be “faith” in the world’s estimation, and “practice” should not either.

If Christianity is the religion of miracle and demonstration, and not merely of wish-casting, “faith” needs to be faith in and because of a divine phenomenon that occurs in the spirit and the epistemic equal to any divine phenomena that trigger it that occurs in the mundane. It needs to be a miraculous knowledge and radical. To the natural noetic senses crazy radical, and demonstrably so, to show all those not accepting it are crazy. Following as an effect, “practice” can then essentially only be a personal spiritual demonstration of that faith in reaction to the divine phenomena in which it shares space, which is equal to an outward movement of the body in which are the content of speech and the motivations for actions. If not, it is easy why you can think you can believe Christ atoned for your sins but need not think you must know, understand, or become inspired by a provable miraculous act in the Crucifixion, death, and resurrection. You believe in miraculous Christian conclusions, like talismans, not miraculous Christian predicates.

The one verse that always came back to haunt me, beside and above all these other concerns was

John 8:24: “I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.”

Here is contained the essential religious faith and practice, but to natural sight, it sure does not look that way.

Again, How does Faith Work in Redemption?

Well, it’s a little too early for that. But I will tell you this.

This question was becoming a key, because the identity of Jesus, required for us to confess, is the identification of him as Messiah Savior through his apparent, miraculous acts that stand alone as products of the exclusive power of a God of transcendence.  But also those which he performed that are not so plain to see casually, but plain only through honestly, mentally, connecting the act to a prediction that only God could make. If the case, the Atonement must have a far deeper meaning regarding the operation of our salvation than it presents on the surface.

Whether we are speaking of how the atonement works with faith or how faith works with the Gospel, we have the same question: How does Christian faith work in redemption? We will get around to the Gospel. But since, in my view, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is such an integral and powerful symbol of what God did to secure our release from the penalty of sin, I could not get it out of my mind when thinking about this.

Now, when I was busy being bewildered over so many questions and with no answers forthcoming, my first thought was that there must be something wrong with me. Maybe I have a spiritual block about spiritual things. Perhaps the whole proposition was a sham, this atonement of a Man-God by sacrifice for the world’s sin. Maybe this Jesus and his followers just invented a novel way of explaining how God’s plan of redemption fulfilled the Law and ended by their chosen religious leader, through which all need to join through them. When the possibility that the Church might not be teaching this correctly came up, I interpreted the word “correctly” here according to one of the choices given by the church and not by the Bible. “Correct” or in “error” according to Protestantism, catholicism, secularism, philosophy. Perhaps its only my Church that is not correct, joining something like, by Catholic perspective, the Protestant heresy of “justification in a moment,” where the real answer lay in adding works to faith in a progressive redemption. Maybe I need to shut my mind up and accept the “Christian” version of the truth, placing my “heart” needs over my “head,” and the church defines them.

In retrospect, although all these alternatives were confronting me in my lack of understanding of the theological formula, and should have weakened my resolve to push through it, I became more determined. Unlike any other religion I knew, Christianity seemed in some strange way to invite this examination, this struggle, deep introspection, just because it did not appear in a hurry to proclaim any more truth than it asked the hearer to admit of himself. It seemed to ask a lot of questions instead of only telling the answer to spiritual matters. This seemed strangely honest. Maybe this Christianity was perhaps more than it appeared above both the pedestrian and scholarly elucidations, and perhaps we are fundamentally ignorant about it.

Sacrifice for the Sins of the World. Christ on the Cross.

Again, asked am I to believe the imputation of Christ’s righteousness defeats that sin that keeps me from God. This result is by the belief of Christ’s sacrifice in my place. How does this operation work?

Knowing Christ’s heavy symbolic strategy of communicating what seemed for the pedestrian senses hard things but also axiomatic truths to those looking for them, was not this symbol of the crucifixion intended to mean something more than “sacrifice” or “death?” Should not the symbol of the crucifixion, knowing Christ’s methods, designed by him as a mirror image of the theology of salvation that he taught? And should not each one, the image and the theology, be as something as unique and surprising as we would expect to have come from transcendence? But here’s the kicker.  Should not the kind of faith that he asks us to have then rendered as foreign and unwanted to the Street as his intended meaning of the Cross is known and becomes paramount in his religion?

That suggested that maybe, just maybe, the Street is not them, but it might be us, the professing Church. I had all these images running through my head of the Pope and his priests. A Billy Graham Crusade. My childhood Methodist church, and the vast ocean out there, the over one billion, taken for granted as “Christian” yet are almost to the man saying that God’s makes exceptions for them because of their handling of a faith symbol which need have nothing remarkable and unexpected as a transcendent signification, and which feeds, counterintuitively, what must only be called feelings of false humility and self-importance.

If you don’t like that statement, I think we can agree that if what is being communicated and received by man and not designed to be touchy-feely, especially that which is inherently foreign and only designed to illuminate the spirit’s desire for truth at any cost, is not going to be touchy-feely. If it is touchy-feely, but also miraculous for the benefit of Truth alone, there is something wrong with the way it is explained.

I wanted to give the Bible every opportunity to speak for itself. I knew that it was a very symbolic, parabolic kind of revelation that Christ presented.  Was the atonement idea represented there in any other sense than someone dying in our place who must be God? It just did not sit well with me that Christianity, on the one hand, claimed an exclusive and complete revelation of God of things kept secret from the foundation of the world and now known, while this revelation as explained to me seemed to be nothing more than what could come from the mind of a creative and ambitious spiritual man on his own.

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