How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only One Way. Part 4. The Man.
This is an article in a series. Please see:
How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1.
How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World By His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 2. The Messianic Secret
How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 3. Preparation for Sacrifice.
The Sins of the World, A Man and a Cross. How? Two Things
Now, this Messianic secret starts with the two elements I mentioned, which make up the entire image of the Cross: at its bare minimum, stripped of identity and context, a vertical piece of wood, and a man hanging on it.
As previously mentioned, we can begin by exploring the significance of Jesus’s symbolic method. If this method serves as the fundamental and essential symbol of the Christian message, and considering the debate over whether Christianity has evolved into a sacred or malevolent institution, one might anticipate that this method would provide insights. Indeed, due to its profound importance, a symbolic approach to the Cross could serve as a safeguard, shielding the message from direct attacks and preventing it from being misconstrued by those who constantly seek to challenge a particular interpretation of redemption.
I would like to first discuss the nature of biblical symbolism and its role in providing protection before delving into how the Cross represents a specific understanding of God’s mind. The formal container of the meaning of the Cross is revelational and holds invaluable significance. There is something about the Cross that makes it as powerful when revealed as it is when concealed. If a plan is ordained by God, it is both illogical and blasphemous to assume that the depiction of Christ on the Cross is any different or any less revelatory than its intended meaning. The attachment of meaning to the Cross is not arbitrary but rather an inevitable consequence of the image itself. The primary function of the image is to provide easy access to a precise meaning, which is God’s plan. However, this meaning can only be truly understood by those with a sincere and genuine desire to see it as God intended, free from hypocrisy.
This is why the message of the Cross is primarily one about the nature of morality because the whole display of the Cross is a spiritual movement to expose spiritual reality, not a physical movement for physical reality. If moral movement is spiritual, and the only kind that counts, I ask in what way would we best legally deal with it if not by our equitable, rational, and fair interpretation? Interpretation of a symbol depicting, whether we want to believe it or not, the single most pressing and implicating religious event in human history?
The deep significance of this matter lies in its profound implications for life and death. A true revealed faith must encompass transcendent truths, without which it cannot truly be considered as such. Christians who claim to possess a revealed faith yet fail to approach these matters with the seriousness they deserve are not truly engaging in moral reflection. Merely acknowledging Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross as a mere act of love, obedience, or death is to reduce it to a simplistic symbol, devoid of its true moral weight. I do not argue that only those who possess perfect understanding can belong to God. Rather, it is those who, amidst the distractions and objections of others, maintain a deep concern for these truths and strive to uphold them despite the world’s diminishing values.
The Academy finds it divisive and fundamentalist to bind morality and the handling of religious symbolism in this way. The tendency is to treat such symbols as merely incidental to its age and culture, making their meaning malleable, academic, and disposable. But this is no choice for moral spirituality if the claim is that God designed and delivers a kind of communication as a means of revealing his proprietary knowledge, which would be ageless by definition. No matter who you are, your responsibility is to assume the possibility that spiritual life is infinitely more important than physical life. Your ultimate function in life may be the examination and testing of the world faiths, which claim a special revelation from God. Your spiritual morality may be the only kind upon which qualifies any conception of spiritual existence after death. To proceed in, without bias, hypocrisy, and dissembling, that potential toward a decision.
A true revelatory document is one by definition hidden and revealed, with the former representing the meaning and the latter representing its symbol. If a claimed message from God rests only on your faith in some ancient sage’s confidence, and not on a received truth which he delivers from God and subsequently revealed as true historically, this is not a revelation. This the making of a divine symbol to mean another common symbol, not divine knowledge and meaning. God shows himself in some fashion to the subject, which is scriptural and direct and which manifests itself as a possible product only of the mind of God, not man. In reciprocation, you demonstrate the highest kind of morality by its honest handling, since God’s informational object of handling is the highest transcendent value, and the place of its processing and possession is the most valuable dimension of the individual.
Downgrading Made Simple
I am sure most of you are aware after being exposed to the offered hermeneutical and interpretive choices of the World that there is continuously some attempt to retool biblical types, for example, into non-revelatory things. This retooling is an attempt to circumvent this original, unavoidable definition of morality into a kind of lower value. You lower the symbols means of demonstration in a lower place of expression so that when thinking about goodness, for example, we can think of ourselves there without the threat of very harsh, implacable, interdimensional spiritual laws threatening us.
Moses’ serpent on the pole of Numbers 21, for example. The story is that this is not a display of a more significant and later intention of God, but only perhaps for Moses to give a superstitious people hope that God will protect them from serpent bites. Or, we hear, Christ in John 3 did not refer to this serpent on the pole as a type of him, and has no place in his talk with Nicodemus except Jesus just telling him to believe in God and get baptized truly. Or, Moses’ serpent stops at the meaning of “holiness under the appearance of sin.” Or, the Greeks borrowed the image of the serpent in the Staff of Asclepius, the symbol for medicine and healing, and the image means “true healing by God alone.” Christ is “lifted up,” the serpent was “lifted up,” therefore “lifted up” means Christ raised as the cure for sin.
Do I have a problem with any of these? No, not superficially, except for the first and second. They are all the same interpretation, led by an insularity trying to take a meaning of the serpent on the pole only from a range of possibilities for the purpose of uncoiling and pacifying that serpent, so to speak. The serpent is, however, undomesticated forever, and not defanged unless it is allowed to speak for itself.
That irresistible reflex, an aversion to the idea of any particular thing hidden that may jump out, scare and threaten them, which leads their actions in first making it less threatening, is the problem of a priority of self in the face of truth. Who knows what, if they thought God were speaking certain instead of general things about us, he would say about what is really in our hearts? It’s a lot easier to handle the suggestion that “all those who have no faith can’t be saved” than it is “only those who have [Certain kind of faith here] will be.” Sin defines as a priority of fear of a relatively worthless loss over something of infinite value, so you change the language to avoid the clear threat of identifying against something Holy in which you have no visceral interest. At least “faith” remains open only to an unthreatening species.
We do this for the same reason that Vladimir Bukovsky, in his book Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, said that the West, particularly the liberal West, never really resisted the evil of the Soviet state, they were complicit.
“The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists and end up with yourself.”1
In the church, the theologians of today have little interest in digging for the truth about real sin. Who knows with what might come up? You may start with Satan and end up with yourself.
The thought is that Jesus of the Cross is axiomatically a particular revelation of God’s plan and strategy of implementing it. It’s not optional for Christianity as a revealed faith but would crumble without it by the hands of those who must somehow place themselves in exclusive control of transcendent meaning so that the idea of God that occupies their thoughts does not haunt it as well.
That brings us to the why and how of the necessity of using something ambiguous for this particular revelation of God’s plan of redemption, but not vague for a certain, targeted few.
If you have something of value, particularly of the highest possible value, you don’t throw it into the street for anyone to pick up and exhaust according to their desires, but by some means, you put it away. If anyone thinks it’s as valuable and wants it, they must show their belief that it carries the approximate value that its provider ascribes. The key to this analogy is “desires,” so keep that in mind.
If you want a loan at the bank for a business project, you convince them that you know what you’re doing, that you see the value of money, that you already have some means in cash reserve for a possible slow start, show you have a familiarity with the work. You present a business plan to show that you know where you’re going. You may complain that the bank does not just empty its coffers and let it rain down over the city like a ticker-tape parade, or give it to you just because you want it, but the fact is that if you place a value on a thing you don’t treat it like trash, and you are not honest in expecting others to.
God’s currency is existential truth. “Truth” is the currency of our theology, but not “God’s truth” as we conceive it. “God” is one thing, and “truth” is another, and God’s truth is God’s revelation in a historical phenomenon of promise and fulfillment that forever establishes his exclusive authorship. In our theology, ‘God’s truth” means any kind of truth, biblical or not. “God” is therefore made a disposable and weak concept because there is a desire to think of it as unsupportable except by insular subjective and idiosyncratic motives.
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1.Moscow in. Vladimir Bukovsky 1942-2019. Vladimir Bukovsky 1942-2019. https://www.vladimirbukovsky.com/judgment-in-moscow. Published 2019. Accessed November 18, 2019. ↩
