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Interesting lunchtime discussion at Selwyn (they always are, although the timetabling means they often end up feeling unreasonably short. The topic was salvation, and how Christ's death and resurrection achieved this.
We dashed through a few models, starting with the patristic idea of Christ's defeat of devils, and covering Anselm's rather feudal idea of us owing God a great debt that Christ pays for us, as well as Calvin's idea that we have broken the law, and that Christ somehow is able to take our punishment for us.
In each case, we discussed the model a little, and found that although there is scriptural backing for each idea, they all have some flaws (the last, Calvinist one perhaps the most serious flaws). Some other theories will have to wait until next week now.
Afterwards, Annie, Joe and I didn't quite manage to leave. Joe was saying that each of these ideas about salvation gives us an image of how salvation works, and that you shouldn't get too hung up on the fact they all have flaws; they're approximations of a mystery and as long as you don't get too caught up in one and try to insist you have the only answer it's OK.
My counter-concern was that if all the available images of salvation have serious flaws, then where are we left? My analogy is the apple falling from the tree - in a scientific world, this is quite an important thing to explain, and if you imagine a situation where gravity was proven to have serious holes in it, you'd be a bit stuck. Annie's idea "what's wrong with saying God made it fall?" was an interesting one. We talked a bit about how science assumes there's a simple "right" answer to things, that can be reasoned from evidence with logic, and how this approach doesn't necessarily apply to theological questions: the eucharistic prayer has within it "Great is the mystery of faith".
As a scientist, this sort of argument is quite difficult to accept; the idea that one should have faith that because God has said (through Scripture) that salvation is effected through Christs death and resurrection, it is, and that it may be too difficult to be expressed in a clearly reasoned simple idea. I'll wave away the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument with "experience of God" at this point, because having that debate right now isn't what I'm interested in. I gather arts types are rather happier with there not being one "right" answer to things...
Clearly it's a problem for apologetics, which is why CICCU's hard-line Calvinist stance makes a certain amount of sense - if you can try and claim that this is the simple answer, it makes it much easier to sell to people than a "trust in God" approach to how salvation might or might not work.
I'm still not sure I'm happy with the idea, but I wanted to write down my meanderings on the subject, and doubtless we'll talk about it more next week.
We dashed through a few models, starting with the patristic idea of Christ's defeat of devils, and covering Anselm's rather feudal idea of us owing God a great debt that Christ pays for us, as well as Calvin's idea that we have broken the law, and that Christ somehow is able to take our punishment for us.
In each case, we discussed the model a little, and found that although there is scriptural backing for each idea, they all have some flaws (the last, Calvinist one perhaps the most serious flaws). Some other theories will have to wait until next week now.
Afterwards, Annie, Joe and I didn't quite manage to leave. Joe was saying that each of these ideas about salvation gives us an image of how salvation works, and that you shouldn't get too hung up on the fact they all have flaws; they're approximations of a mystery and as long as you don't get too caught up in one and try to insist you have the only answer it's OK.
My counter-concern was that if all the available images of salvation have serious flaws, then where are we left? My analogy is the apple falling from the tree - in a scientific world, this is quite an important thing to explain, and if you imagine a situation where gravity was proven to have serious holes in it, you'd be a bit stuck. Annie's idea "what's wrong with saying God made it fall?" was an interesting one. We talked a bit about how science assumes there's a simple "right" answer to things, that can be reasoned from evidence with logic, and how this approach doesn't necessarily apply to theological questions: the eucharistic prayer has within it "Great is the mystery of faith".
As a scientist, this sort of argument is quite difficult to accept; the idea that one should have faith that because God has said (through Scripture) that salvation is effected through Christs death and resurrection, it is, and that it may be too difficult to be expressed in a clearly reasoned simple idea. I'll wave away the Invisible Pink Unicorn argument with "experience of God" at this point, because having that debate right now isn't what I'm interested in. I gather arts types are rather happier with there not being one "right" answer to things...
Clearly it's a problem for apologetics, which is why CICCU's hard-line Calvinist stance makes a certain amount of sense - if you can try and claim that this is the simple answer, it makes it much easier to sell to people than a "trust in God" approach to how salvation might or might not work.
I'm still not sure I'm happy with the idea, but I wanted to write down my meanderings on the subject, and doubtless we'll talk about it more next week.
thoughtful
an attempt to argue the converse, probably somewhat flawed
The problem isn't that there's something incorrect with saying that. The problem is that to a large extent, having said it, you know exactly as much as you did before.
Arguably, the usefulness of a theory such as that of gravity comes from being able to apply it to predict things. "The apple fell because masses are attracted to other masses" lets you make guesses about what other apples might do in a similar situation. "The apple fell because, on a whim, God made it fall" does not. We say a theory has holes in it when we come across things that it makes incorrect predictions for.
This approach fails in cases such as Christ's sacrifice and biblical miracles because as soon as one accepts that they happened, one must also accept that they are, by their nature, unique; the concept of making predictions about them is meaningless, and so "God made it so" has exactly the same explanatory power as any other theory and is therefore no worse from that POV; and one must rely solely on consistency to choose between alternative explanations.
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Scientists continue to use theories they know to have holes in them until such a time as they come up with a better theory. The simple "right" answer that can be reasoned from evidence with logic sounds much more like the logical posivitism of a bygone age rather than modern science.
I find trying apply this model of science (stick with a theory until you have a better one) works quite well for theological questions and with apologetics.
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Personally I can see the attraction of saying that something as important as this `ought' to have a simple explanation. God's obviously under no obligation to arrange things so that we can understand them, but the 17th-century idea that God isn't going to create intelligent beings only to mislead, deceive or confuse them still carries some weight.
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*grin* I don't think I am, but then Mycenologists aren't proper artsy types :) I mean, I think there can be more than one answer, but the answers have to be completely compatible. E.g. 'gravity made the apple fall' and 'God made the apple fall' aren't paradoxical statements if you believe God made gravity so that stuff could fall. IYSWIM.
As for salvation, well... sometimes I think there are things we're not meant to know the answer to. When you die there's a big library in heaven where you can find this stuff out anyway (my very dear friend Stan told me!), so maybe we have to wait. After all, faith wouldn't mean anything if we felt we had to rationalise everything before we believed in it. Er, would it?
Personally, I tend to see Christ's crucifixion as symbolic, in a way - so, if Jesus had come down to earth and then just disappeared magically, He wouldn't be so relevant to us, but by becoming wholly human (including taking on sin and being sacrificed for it) He becomes something closer to mankind (closer than icons they have in many religions, anyway - the God = Man thing is one of the most important things about Christianity for me).
Um, sorry, gotta go now... just my twopenneth :)
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I'll get in before
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I personally suspect the analogy falls down almost immediately, because a grand unification of quantum and relativistic theories is achievable, and a grand unification of salvation theories not.
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Also, we haven't stopped using Newton just because the theory has flaws - it's a simpler way to look at some aspects of the problem while disregarding others. Lots of science works like that - like the whole assume your pipe of diameter 5 cm has an infinite radius - it's a decent approximation, so it will do. When they get a round tuit or an inspiration scientists refine these models, but we all still learn them first...
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Even when the result of disregarding that aspect results in a bizarre anomaly (π=infinity)!*
*Is there a way of getting an infinity symbol in html? I tried &infinity; but got &infinity;
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∞ gives you ∞.
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Step 1: Crucify Christ.
Step 2: ...
Step 3: Profit!
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Step 2: Kill him.
Step 3: ???
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The problem with applying that to the atonement is that if you say "Christ dying on the cross worked because God made it work", then why couldn't God have made something else work that didn't involve Jesus getting crucified? You could say "because God showed how much he loved us by dying for us", but that only works if the dying actually accomplishes something that not dying couldn't have done. Otherwise it's akin to "I love you so much I'm going to jump off this bridge."
C.S. Lewis's favourite idea was something along the lines that Christ, through dying and rising, beat a path through death to life for the rest of us to follow. Not simply that he gave an example, but that he opened that path for the rest of us, made it possible.
I think my favourite approach is to say not that Christ by dying on the cross made it possible for God to forgive our sins, but that the cross is where and when God forgave our sins, that is where God's eternal forgiveness became incarnate in space and time in Jesus's supreme act of forgiveness from the cross. This removes the need for any sort of spiritual 'mechanism' going from the Passion to God's forgiveness.
I do think though (despite my first paragraph) that there's room for saying that different theories may validly capture different aspects of what was going on on the cross, even if they have flaws. So, for example, viewing light as a wave or as particles can each capture some aspects of how light works, but each theory on its own has holes in it. They are imperfect models for describing something that is very difficult to describe.
I do think, for example, that the substitutionary atonement theory captures certain truths - that sin is damaging, it is a problem, that it creates a separation between us and God, and that it has consequences, both temporal and eternal, the latter of which God somehow took upon Himself on the cross. If you try to make the model more precise and talk about it in terms of some sort of judicial process, you run into trouble. But you run into trouble with even very good metaphors. Like, Christ the Good Shepherd and us as the sheep. So does that mean that at some point Christ will, albeit very sorrowfully, take us off to market to be sold and slaughtered and served as dinner? (For whom?) Does this objection invalidate the metaphor?
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