If anyone has tried to sell you on the benefits of Christianity -- whether trying to convert you or explaining their own love of it -- one of the strategies they are likely to have used is to tell you that "Jesus died for your sins."
Whether you're a Christian or not, and whatever you think of the sales pitch, it's worth talking about the fact that this is actually a relatively recent Christian teaching. It's not as recent a development as fundamentalism or anything (the full-fledged form of it was articulated by Aquinas in the 13th century and became the main Catholic view of atonement over the next century or two: that may sound like a long time ago, but relative to the scale of Christian history it's as though we're talking about the 1940s vis-a-vis American history), but it doesn't come from the New Testament, from the first Christians or the Church Fathers. It's called a substitutionary theory of atonement, and variants are found in both Catholic and Protestant theologies.
This whole thing is part of the same narrative I'm always laying out for you: the way that in the first millennium of Christian history, the emphasis of the religion shifted from Jesus (teacher, role model, miracle worker) to Christ (deity, supernatural intercessor).
If you believe Jesus died for your sins -- if you're a Christian and this is the version of atonement you subscribe to -- I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I don't believe there's only one valid theology. I do want you to consider several crucial points:
1: This isn't the only or original theory of atonement. You don't have to think this way to be a Christian. It's very likely that you think that you do, since this phrase has become synonymous with Christianity in many peoples' minds.
2: Even if this theory of atonement is true, when you embrace it as the core of Christianity, it casts the actual teachings of Jesus into such shadow as to subvert his message. Jesus's teachings were grounded in love for one's neighbor, open commensality, and an absolute rejection of societal shaming. A sin-centric Christianity is a shame-based religion. Beyond that, it is one that focuses more on Jesus's magical power to get you into Heaven, rather than anything he said about what you should actually, you know, do with your fucking life.
When I say this school of thought is "relatively recent," that isn't to condemn the teaching, as such. It's partly to point out that although religious conservatives condemn liberal "innovation" in Christianity, their own beliefs are dependent on such innovations and many liberal beliefs -- such as a non-substitutionary theory of atonement I will also talk about -- are simply older beliefs that have fallen out of favor. It's also to point out that there are other ways of seeing Jesus, other ways of seeing the appeal of Christianity.
When I talk about the Church Fathers below, I'm referring to a large group of key theologians, bishops, and other church leaders, who guided (and argued about) Christian doctrine in both the West and the East in the 4th through 7th centuries, after the church became organized. When I talk about "early Christians" I am generally talking about the Christians of the generations preceding the Church Fathers. I'm not really going to get into specific enough detail that the distinction is important, but just FYI. And as always, "orthodox" with a "little o" doesn't mean the Orthodox Church but rather an idea, school of thought, or group associated with mainstream Christianity -- meaning the Eastern (that is, Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) Churches in the early days, and Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism later. It's a habit because I'm so often talking about Christian ideas before there really was a Catholic Church.
As I've said before, I think it's ridiculous and harmful that Christianity regularly frames itself in sin-obsessed terms -- and while that sin obsession clearly plays an enormous role in the history of Christianity, its primary sources and core teachings do not make that obsession inevitable. That is, removing the obsession with sin from Christianity is not like removing an obsession with dharma from Buddhism. It's a grit that's been accumulated after leaving the factory.
Really, "Jesus died for your sins" contains several claims:
1: A claim about the meaning and purpose of Jesus's death: that it is the vehicle for atonement.
2: A claim about how atonement is achieved.
3: A claim about sin. The idea that Jesus died for humanity's collective sins is often coupled with ideas about original sin.
Atonement refers to the reconciliation of God and humanity, which requires believing that there is a breach. Believing that humans are not perfect does not necessitate believing that there is such a breach between God and humanity -- like I keep saying, theories of atonement have tended to rise in importance in Christianity as the ideas of original sin and shame have become important.
One thing to keep in mind about early Christian thought is this: after the first generation of Christians, Christianity seems to have rapidly become predominantly gentile (that is, non-Jewish), and certainly this is the case by the second century. Christianity's relationship with Jewish scripture and Jewish thought was a subject of considerable discussion, but: because the Jewish canon itself was not yet assembled, and because rabbinical Judaism developed alongside Christianity and therefore its commentaries on Jewish scripture were written outside of even the earliest Christians' sight, all that Christians took with them from Jewish writing was the "Old Testament" itself.
If this does not seem immediately significant, it's because you were raised in a predominantly Christian culture.
Pound for pound, the Hebrew Bible is easily outweighed by the Talmud -- the central text of rabbinical Judaism, consisting of commentaries on the Bible from antiquity which serving as clarifications, expansions, etc. Think of it as having a similar relationship to the Bible that the body of case law has to the Constitution. The Constitution alone provides a foundation, but once put into play, it immediately raises questions which are resolved in the courts and recorded in judicial decisions.
The Church Fathers not only lacked the Talmud -- which the Jews who preceded them had lacked as well, since as I say, rabbinical Judaism and Christianity developed in tandem -- they lacked the oral tradition of Biblical interpretation to fall back on. Which is not to say that no one brought knowledge of Jewish Biblical interpretation into the mix, but when it came time to interpret the Jewish scriptures in a Christian context, more often than not contemporary perspectives were dominant -- that is, Hellenistic perspectives, the perspectives of philosophers and theologians versed in Greek philosophy and Roman mystery religions -- rather than older Jewish modes of thought.
This is an important frame for understanding Christian thought, really: the reinterpretation of the Old Testament from a new cultural context, one lacking its ancestral Jewish contexts, with Greco-Roman thought and christology rushing in to fill the gaps. That's not so much "another story for another time" as it is something that will keep coming up.
Like I've talked about before, early theological discussion in Christianity -- the first eight or nine centuries, really -- is largely focused on christology, i.e. figuring out the nature of Jesus Christ. That tunnel vision (which, don't get me wrong, was not complete tunnel vision by any means, but still shouldn't be understated) is pretty important to the history of theology for a number of reasons -- not only because it meant that the Medieval theologians generated a flurry of work to address all these previously poorly explored areas of theology, but because the fact that the most mature area of theology (and the area with the most well-developed consensus) dealt with the nature of Christ shaped everyone's thinking in other areas of theology. It sort of guided everyone's arguments.
So that's the main reason that the atonement theories you associate with Christianity have such a late birthday; and that early christological obsession contributes to why later atonement theories are so deeply invested in the supernatural powers of Christ.
But what did early Christians think? What were the early theories of atonement that were displaced by the more supernatural ones?
Honestly, it's pretty fucking simple.
Early Christians, when they talked about atonement at all, from the early generations up through the Church Fathers, subscribed to what historians call the moral influence theory of atonement or the educational view: Jesus didn't die for your sins, and Jesus doesn't reconcile you with God through his death. Jesus brings you back to God through his teachings, which is why he spent all that time in the Gospels being a fucking teacher, before that bit at the very end where he died.
I mean, it's weird that this needs to be pointed out these days.
Really, this is only barely a theory of atonement, because it doesn't necessarily assume a deep breach between God and humanity; the terminology here is ours, the moderns', and we refer to it as the moral influence theory "of atonement" to contrast it with later theories of atonement that displaced it.
For centuries, this was considered obvious: Jesus was the perfect moral teacher. That's why there was a Christianity in the first place; everything else came later. You can certainly bring supernaturalism into this. You don't need to deny him being the Son of God. This is not about reducing Jesus's importance or denying his divinity. But Jesus's divinity should never be more important than his teachings, or you've missed the whole fucking point.
Reconciliation with God is found by following Jesus's teachings, as revealed through both his words and his example. This is far from an easy thing, of course. That's a whole nother matter. Figuring out what exactly Jesus meant half the time is ... well, good luck with those bracelets.
Have you ever fucked up really badly, and gone to someone for forgiveness, and heard, "I don't want to hear another 'I'm sorry,' I just want you to stop doing this?" That's the point of the educational view: not that Jesus's crucifixion wounds open up portals to infinite Golden Tickets of I-forgive-you, but that he taught you to stop fucking up in the first place.
The educational view is found as early as the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas in the early second century. The New Testament itself doesn't really address atonement as such; obviously there are Biblical verses used in support of later theories of atonement, but some of them come from the Old Testament and require the assumption that they were prophetic writings written with the intention of being read in reference to Jesus (and being a Christian does not obligate you to rewrite the Old Testament as a prequel to Jesus), while others are taken out of context or written in the apocalyptic fervor of the first generation of Christians, some of whom expected the Second Coming to occur in their lifetime. The very existence of the Gospels can, in one sense, be read as support for the educational view.
As the idea of the afterlife became more common and more integral, in part as a response to the fact that the world did not end in those early Christians' lifetimes -- and I'll talk another time about the fact that Heaven as the afterlife (rather than God's home) is not an inherent, inevitable belief within Christianity, but one that developed over time, post-Jesus -- Jesus's role was solidified as the one who ensures passage to that afterlife. Specifics vary. The paradigm you're familiar with now -- die and immediately go somewhere, whether Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, depending on your denomination and status of sinfulness -- took a long time to develop and be accepted, which is why some early Christians talk about their own afterlife as a sort of echo of Christ's own resurrection: they envisioned not the transfer of their soul from their dead body to some far off plane of Heaven at the moment of their death, but rather the resurrection and continued inhabitation of their dead bodies at some point in the future, with a period of nonexistence (well, non-consciousness, let's say) in between. The idea that death causes the soul to depart from the body and enter the afterlife trickles into Christianity (and occasionally Hellenistic Jewish thought) via Greek and Roman mythology and especially the popularity of Homer's Odyssey, which provided vivid descriptions of a Greek view of the afterlife that permeated the popular imagination in the same way Dante's descriptions of a late Medieval Christian view of the afterlife have done. (Even those early Christians who write about the soul departing in this way from the body don't write about Heaven in the sense that we depict it now; while it's notable that their Heaven isn't a below-ground underworld, it's basically a waiting room near God where the souls of the dead wait for the time of their bodily resurrection, which is still the endgame.)
I don't really want to get into the way that Heaven was itself increasingly supernaturalized and paradis...ized..?, except insofar as to say that it was part of the same trend in changing thinking which altered Jesus's role. The afterlife became a complicated place, with all those circles of Hell and seven heavens and all of Aquinas's granularities of sin frittering away the hit points of your soul.
The "physical theory" of atonement, of Church Father Athanasius, comes in quite early, in the 4th century, and is certainly more mystical than the educational view that otherwise prevailed both then and for several centuries afterward. "Jesus became human that we might become divine," Athanasius said, which sums it up best -- but while this sounds a little like "Jesus died for your sins," there are some key differences from what became orthodox (little-o) Christian thought. First, Athanasius's emphasis is on the incarnation, not the crucifixion -- that is, not just Jesus's death but the fact that he became human at all and had to suffer any mortal indignities, since Athie is writing early enough that he's still arguing with people who believe that Christ was fully divine and never experienced mortality. Second, he had a very extreme view of humanity's fall from grace, one that doesn't comport either with orthodox Christian thought or most Jewish thought -- for him, Adam himself was a divine being before the fall, an idea with no real Biblical support apart from the notion that, because he was made by God rather than being born, Adam is, like Jesus, the "son of God."
For the physical theory, then, the mechanism is not so much Jesus's death-event wiping out the stain of sin but Jesus's mortality -- which includes the inevitability of death -- restoring a divine birthright to the descendants of Adam as a sort of equilibrium. Different and more involved than the educational view, absolutely! Christ-obsessed, yes. But not as shaming and sin-centric as "Jesus died for your sins."
Substitution theories of atonement develop around the idea that humanity deserves to die for its sins, but Jesus's death on the cross transpires instead. We still die individual deaths, of course, but we have the opportunity to be resurrected in Heaven. See what I mean about how all these strains of thought need to develop alongside each other -- this model of atonement kind of needs a well-developed reward-based Heaven in place. Anyway: there are various forms of the substitution theory. One of the early ones is the ransom theory, which says that Satan has dominion over humankind because they're sinful, but Jesus's death pays the ransom price. This was displaced by the satisfaction theory, which is basically the dominant substitution theory today, and which says that wait no, the price isn't owed to Satan, but to God, and that Christ's death is the sacrifice offered by God to God to pay humanity's debt to Himself. Basically. It's the satisfaction theory (of Anselm) that Aquinas modifies and codifies in his Summa Theologiae, a mammoth work of Catholic theology that comes to dominate Catholic thought, especially in the Thomist revival of the 16th and 17th centuries, when everyone was sort of newly able to appreciate his intellectual rigor.
If you've ever read a web page proving the Hollow Earth theory, you know that impressively detailed arguments don't actually make you right.
There are a lot of reasons the substitution theory succeeded in becoming dominant. Many of them have to do with the scaffolding surrounding it -- that is, it's consistent with all the other developments in theology that were going on. The moral influence model just looks dowdy and ordinary compared to the glittery supernaturalism of Medieval theology, with all its different kinds of angels and all that shit.
But part of it has to do with one of the central facts of earliest Christianity:
Jesus died on the cross.
I mean, that's obvious, you know that. But one reason that even the historians who want to whittle the "definite facts" about Jesus down to the barest minimum keep that one in the mix is because there is no way you would tell people your religious leader had been crucified unless you knew that everybody knew about it already and there was nothing you could do except to get ahead of the story. The earliest form of that is just the Eminem 8 Mile version: yeah he was crucified, tell these people something they don't know about me. You just own the thing and act like it doesn't embarrass you so your enemies can't use it against you. A later version, a much later version? Make it the source of your guy's superpowers. Oh that? That's not kryptonite, that's a fucking ray gun.
The Fall and Original Sin
The Old Testament, the New Testament (mainly Paul), and the Church Fathers all talk about the Fall of Man, that is, Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. Quotes referring to the Fall are often used in later writings talking about the doctrine of original sin.
Here's the problem (or rather, the good news). These two concepts are not the same. In contemporary Christian discourse, "original sin" refers specifically to the idea of ancestral or inherited sin. This too is a sneaky conflation: the term "original sin" in the sense of "the first sin committed" sometimes appears in Jewish literature, but mainstream Jewish teaching does not include the idea of inherited sin.
Which means the Christians who developed the doctrine of original sin were not simply carrying over the Jewish interpretation of the Fall -- although often the way the Bible is taught by Christians today, this is implied -- but were once again introducing innovation to their interpretation of the Jewish scripture, by marrying classical Greco-Roman ideas like ancestral fault, Biblical tropes like collective retribution, and orthodox Christianity's growing emphasis on shame.
The idea of inherited sin is very different from the idea -- common to most religions or, really, most systems of belief, period -- that most people, even well-meaning good-natured people, will fuck up from time to time. Even the idea of "sin" in the sense of a weight on your soul impacting your post-death fate as the result of your adhering to received moral rules, well, that's different too, but you can buy into the idea of individual sin without buying the idea of inherited sin that exists independently of the individual's actions.
In the early Christian writings on the Fall, the consequences of the Fall are not a permanent taint of inherited sin that is borne by every future human, but rather the consequences actually described and detailed in Genesis: mortality and the need to labor for one's daily survival. In ancient Jewish thought, Genesis 3 is not even the enormous trauma that Christians turn it into.
Once you starting leaning on this original sin business, this idea that everybody is born with two strikes, the educational view of atonement doesn't seem to cut it anymore. What good is Jesus if all he does is teach us how to be awesome people? Being awesome people isn't going to wipe this magical sin taint off of us! We need to fight this magic with other magic. Give us some Jesus magic. Thus, Jesus dying for your sins.
Of course, the development of the doctrine of original sin (which begins with the Church Fathers -- Augustine, bless his fucked up little heart -- but wasn't fully developed until quite a bit later) and its use to subsequently justify and develop substitutionary theories of atonement resulted in a framework in which it was difficult for Christians to imagine salvation for non-Christians (or unbaptized dead babies, etc). Fast-forward that a couple centuries and subtract a lot of religious literacy and you wind up with a lot of sort-of Christians or half-atheists figuring every other religion is just so-and-so's map to atonement, which isn't true either.
Next up on Easter talk, probably some stuff about how being obsessed with the end of the world and your entrance into a Heavenly paradise leads to a life of being an irresponsible dick who doesn't care about the future or the planet.
Have a Creme egg.
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