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Christianity from an Existential Perspective..
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God's Forgiveness
Lately Steve over @ Freethinking Faith
has been discussing the nature and basis of God's forgiveness towards
sin. From what I can gather (and correct me if I am wrong here Steve)
but he is advocating something like this - Humanity sins constantly,
and is thus in need of forgiveness from God. God is loving, forgiving,
and merciful, and in this love he will readily forgive our trespasses.
Steve also says that the idea that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a
kind of metaphysical transaction for our just punishment for being
human (an eternity in hell) negates the whole idea of God's mercy.
Since God's wrath was taken out on Jesus, Christ took the punishment
away from us, which does not make God very 'forgiving' or 'merciful' in
any sense of the word.
Finding all of this very convincing, I
decided to search the gospels myself in an attempt to find what Jesus
really taught in this regard. The number of texts I could use here is
enormous, so I'll pick out my most favourite and use that. First of
all, I think it is very important to understand that Jesus gave and
taught forgiveness of sins BEFORE his death. He offered remission of
sins to many people well before his crucifixion, and his disciples
found life eternal in Jesus Christ before Pentecost. This is important
because when examining Gods relation to sin, it does not start with
Jesus death but Jesus life. His death was not an event that opened the
floodgates of heavenly forgiveness for sins. But also, in another way,
if Christ resisted the criminals death that he suffered through, His
claims on divinity would be dubious because he failed to live up to his
own ideals.
Keeping this principle in mind, I want to now
examine a few of the many meaningful encounters Jesus had with people
concerning forgiveness of sins:
Luke 7:36-50
Matthew 6:14-15
Matthew 18:21-35
All
amazing passages; and all offer an illumination of God's attitude
towards sin. Forgiveness of sins is characterized here as being
extremely lenient. Jesus forgave very openly prostitutes and other
terrible sinners. They did not have to pay back their debt in any way,
they didn’t have to beg or commit their life to him. These sinners were
forgiven because they 'loved much', because they forgave other men
also, and because they had great faith. (NOTE: Faith here does not mean
an "intellectual belief in some maxim" (for example Christ's divinity),
faith was always characterized by a great act of commitment the man had
for Jesus. And after that 'leap of faith into Jesus' a man lived by
faith by essentially living a Christ-like life. Faith was and is
existential, and should never be associated with intellectual belief.)
With
these amazing and encouraging examples of God's extreme love and mercy,
Christ also gave a very grave warning concerning forgiveness of sins
that must not be overlooked. In
Luke 7:47 Jesus said that the man who is forgiven little, loves little. In
Matthew 6:15
Christ said that if we forgive not other men also, God will accordingly
not forgive us. In the amazing parable Christ gave of the kingdom of
heaven in
Matthew 18:21-35
, the way God relates to sin is told with extreme directness. In the
story the servant here asks the master, just like the sinner asks God,
to forgive his big debt (in our case sin). The master forgives freely,
showing a great amount of mercy, love, and forgiveness. But later on,
when another servant talked to the forgiven servant and asked to
relieve a much smaller debt, he was incredibly harsh on the other
servant, forcing him to repay the debt. Now, when the master heard
about this, he sent for the servant and told him how wicked he was, and
sent him to jail, forcing him to repay his debt.
This makes it
seem like there is a sin that can not be forgiven by God, maybe being
what Jesus talked about when he spoke of the "sin against the holy
spirit". The hypocrisy in the servant is blindingly obvious, the master
forgave the servant for a very large debt, and the servant did not show
even an iota of that forgiveness when talking with the other servant.
This shows not only that he was hypocritical, but that he was never
grateful to the master for what he did, and therefore did not love the
master.
The biggest lesson we can learn from these passages is
that if our Christianity is not expressed existentially, then it is not
really Christianity at all. As James mentioned in his epistle, faith
without works is dead. A non-existential Christianity is essentially
dead, or as I like to say it is not Christianity at all. When Luther
corrected the errors of the Catholic Church, it seems church history
since then has not only learned from these errors, but has
over-exaggerated everything Luther seemed to teach, and the result of
this process is "modern Protestantism".
-- By Timothy Neal |
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