Welcome to our first ever podcast for Occupy Today. Please be gentle!
Today’s topic? Well . . . let’s just say we try to butcher a very sacred theological cow… Penal Substitution*. It’s a great launching point for discussing justice, wrath, judgment, punishment and all sorts of related things. Jumping into the Deep End? You bet! [31:52]
Transcript:
Simon (00:00):
Welcome to the first episode of Occupy Today. The podcast that's the marriage of activism and spirituality. I'm Simon.
Michelle (00:10):
Michelle.
Sophie (00:10):
Sophie.
Scott (00:13):
Scott.
Lia (00:13):
Lia.
Jermaine (00:14):
Jermaine.
Jennifer (00:15):
Jennifer.
Justin (00:15):
Justin.
Simon (00:15):
And we have topics that we are going to pick randomly. We've got a big list in front of us. Who wants to pick a topic?
Justin (00:31):
Randomly?
Simon (00:40):
I think the Penal Substitution.
Michelle (00:43):
Oh boy. We're going to start deep there. Alright. So where this comes from the, uh, our understanding that Christ died for our sins. Okay. And that he was the substitute, um, and took on God's wrath. Okay. That's what most, everybody in America understands. However, that is actually one of different theories of understanding the cross. And apparently that's actually not part of the original original church that only came about apparently around Calvin, that understanding. Now having said that this is something that I am exploring, hence several of the books that I have, because one of the concepts that's coming around is, and it ties in kind of with the wrath of God, is this idea of you have God who is inflicting judgment. Okay. But at the same time with Christ coming, the idea is did God inflict judgment and have him be tortured and brutally murdered and all of that? Or was it more of God, the father in with the son submitting to our anger and killing. And the fact that the, let me try to explain this because, um, in Jesus coming, Jesus was walking in obedience. Everything about him was in obedience, right? So one of the questions that somebody has posed was in him coming as human and submitting to being human doesn't that automatically dictate that as human you will die. Right? Okay. So the death didn't necessarily need to be brutally murdered. The submission and the sacrifice was coming in human form and fulfilling death through that. But the obedience unto death and allowing mankind to make Jesus, the scapegoat to say, we all have our rage. If we just get rid of you, just like Cain killed Abel. If I just get rid of you, then my sacrifice is getting all of these things. And so that's one of those questions that I have that because we so embrace the penal substitution idea. And it's so marked with judgment that literally I heard somebody the other day say, well, that's why if ISIS was coming through and they were going to kill a village of Christians and the people in ISIS are praying to God, but basically they're just praying that they want whatever their agenda is to happen. And God opens up a cavern and they all fall in there and die. Well, that's, God's judgment right there because they never accepted Christ. And therefore that's it. And the Christians are saved and everything's fine. That was where this logic went. And I just was like, that doesn't seem right.
Lia (04:08):
That's the most ignorant thing I ever heard in my life.
Michelle (04:08):
And that's the thing I, I clearly I will, what I will do is I will send you the debate that I was listening to. Okay. And we will do this. Okay. Um, that's great because that would be great if everybody watched it. And then we talked further about it because it was, I, this is a relatively new thing because I realize that so much of everything that was foundational for me, and I don't want to minimize that. I want God's judgment because that's justice. Right. But I also know we don't fight against flesh and blood. So is when we're seeing calamities. When we see all the destruction, when we see kids getting shot in a high school and people can sit back and go, well, that's, God's judgment because there's sin in the world. It's like, no, those are consequences because of sin in the world. If we have environmental disaster and you're saying, well, that's, God's judgment on the world. And I'm saying, no, that's because you're putting pollution into the ground and it's causing this. I think that that's where that idea app, it basically allows people to go, as long as I'm saved the individual, whatever systemic never needs to be addressed. I'm going to heaven.
Lia (05:23):
So that's what the, that's what the penal substitution is. Well, the theory is it's.
Michelle (05:28):
Right. Penal substitution is the idea that Jesus took our place and that otherwise God was just going to smoke everybody.
Lia (05:35):
Yeah.
Michelle (05:36):
And, and I've gone back like right now I'm reading Ezekiel, which is an intense, intense book. And I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay. And I went away from that and I'm like, going God, I just don't know. And I felt like the holy spirit say, Michelle, you need to look at Jesus. What did Jesus communicate? What did he do? And then put that over the old Testament because constantly Jesus is going well, you've heard it said, you've heard it. You've seen it written, but I tell you, or I'm showing you this. And it's, and it's not that he's changing it. It's almost like you're looking at something. You're looking at a set of facts. And then all of a sudden with one little bit more of information, everything turns. And so the question is, is everything all about the judgment or is justice really everything actually becoming healed becoming, you know, so if somebody commits a crime, my flesh says, I want them punched. I want corporal punishment. They're going to die. But we've seen where when Christ intervenes and that person is saved and there's a complete change of heart and a complete sense of repentance chances are that person's change then affects a whole string of things much deeper. And that seems to me contrary then to this idea of penal substitution. But
Scott (07:06):
I want to say something, I don't know exactly how much it ties, but it's around like this new thinking I've been having about Jesus dying for our sins. And it goes back to Jeremiah. And you know what, before Jeremiah, you had the old covenant, right? God chose his people and created a covenant with them. And a covenant is an agreement between two parties that they'll hold up their end of the bargain. And God made a covenant with his people, knowing that they couldn't keep it right. And that the law that, that, um, dictated how they should live would only serve to hold up a mirror and say, look, how, how, how bad you are, right? Look how you can't keep this law. And so there were these hundreds of years where, where the Jewish people and us, you know, today we couldn't keep the law, but the law is there to prepare us for one who could, right? And that then Jesus, in living and fulfilling the law. And then there's a new covenant. So Jeremiah talks about there will be a new covenant and the new covenant was Jesus being able to, um, do all those things that we weren't able to do. So God chose us knowing we were going to fail. So then he gave us one who wouldn't fail at it. Right. And the idea of like bloodshed and covenant, that goes way, way back. I remember struggling with, I honestly, just, even in the last 10 years, trying to figure out like really Jesus's death. Why does that cover everyone? And not just like one person, right? Like it was one life. So why does that not just cover just your life or just my life, like when we need each need our own scapegoat, um, for, for it to like work, right? Like with quotation marks. So that's something I've been thinking about, but really thinking about that covenant, that, that covenant was with all people and that Jesus was able to hold up our end of the bargain. So that, so that at judgment, God looks at the covenant, says what you kept up your, your end of it. But it wasn't because of us. It was because of him.
Michelle (09:30):
In Ezekiel, there's a, there's a passage that talks about, you know, even if we had Noah or Daniel or, or David, no Moses. So it was Noah, Moses, and Daniel, those three were, were named out. And that, um, even if they were there, it didn't matter. Like they would be saved, but not even their families would, it was the one for one. Right. And I, and I was pondering that and going, oh my gosh, because these are like, this is, you know, Moses is called the most humble. Noah is the most obedient, really, if you think about it at that time, and Daniel is like one of the wisest and just like pure in the sense of, of his worship. And, uh, so I was thinking, dang, if they don't have it. And that was part of the why I walked away. I said, I need to make a cup of tea. I'm struggling with this. And again, it came back to, they couldn't, but Jesus did, Jesus was able to, because of his obedience and, and obviously who he was, but he was able then to make it be not only, you know, for everybody, for everybody. And, and I kept hearing that, you know, obedience is better than sacrifice. Obedience is better than sacrifice. And yet everything in us feels like we want to do sacrifice. And so then I thought about it. I'm like, well, I think we, we ask for that because in a way it keeps our hands clean. It's like, okay. Yeah, we go. And we do that. We walk away from it. And I feel like through Jesus, God came into the yuckiness and the messiness of our life. He got his hands dirty and in our culture where we have wars and we just push a button and the drone goes over there and kills people and we watch it on the evening news and it doesn't affect us the willingness to go there into poverty, into suffering constantly. And then to the point where taking just this heap of, of abuse, um, I think that, I don't know. I just feel like there's something that we've, we've lost over the years. And I think it's, it's terribly influenced the, particularly the American war machine, the American foreign policy, how we deal with the poor. I mean, everything, it's, it's all because of, I mean, even LGBTQ, well, it's God's judgment, you know, the aids epidemic. Oh my gosh. I heard somebody feel well, that's, God's judgment. It's like, no.
Lia (12:00):
It's not because it's not affecting them as heavily as it's affecting orphans and women eating them alive. But I mean, yes, some LGBTQ people get it, but most of the people that have it are children and yeah. So, yeah,
Sophie (12:17):
I think like when, like we, and I don't know if it's cultural or just how we are, but we think of the victims. So like in a scenario we think of the, of the victim who was raped, but not the rapist. And like Jesus was equally on the cross for both of them. Um, and I think about that, like, we love this judgment part of it and thinking, oh yeah, he did that for us. But like, let's think of all the bad guys in quotes or like these things that we don't want to acknowledge that.
Lia (12:52):
But that comes along with obedience as well, because he told us to love everyone. So that's where I think we have an issue with, we want the sacrifice, but we don't want to deal with the obedience because obedience is difficult. It's, it's hard to love somebody who you want to punch in the throat. It's hard to love somebody when you see the ugly that they've done and, you know, the ugly that they've done, it's, it's difficult to do that. So if we could just be like, well, Jesus sacrificed themselves. So I don't have to love that person, but that's not what exists. Right.
Simon (13:24):
So how does that reflect in situations like, cause we've brought up the rape issue. Like there was the guy that got six months. So not even that.
Justin (13:38):
The Stanford swimmer.
Simon (13:39):
Yeah. I mean things like, things like that. How, how does that cause? Cause they, the justice thrown out that didn't seem appropriate, It seemed really light.
Lia (13:52):
There's a lot of issues with that simply because it's not necessary. I will say that it definitely goes along with, we have to look at him with love. Yes, of course. You know, he was, uh, he was a young kid, a young boy, man, young man who made a bad decision. Um, everybody makes bad choices. Our Bad choices don't get us put on the news. Our bad choices. Well, they sometimes do. Our bad choices don't, you know, don't ruin other people's lives again. Sometimes they do, but we have to, I think it seemed right because of if it was someone else with a different background, someone else with a different, you know, instead of of the Harvard swimmer, the Stanford swimmer, if it was, you know, some dude who grew up in yeah, right, right from the hood, right, right from the hood would be in jail for the rest of his life. He would be for 20 years, at least get 20 years for rape. But because he was a quote unquote young boy who had his whole life ahead of him, he gets six months probation. It's, I mean, think that's where people get angry as opposed to the fact that he was a rapist. That, that part, yes, that's sick. But the part that's even more sick is the fact that his punishment was not equal to the other people around him that would, they would have gotten.
Jermaine (15:09):
And I think that if we are going to depend on a system to deliver justice for us, and it doesn't matter the society, it can be here in the states or it can be, you know, halfway around the world. We're not going to find justice in a system. Um, and I think that that's one of the big things that, you know, Jesus speaks to us about, you know, God will repay and he does. And, uh,
Simon (15:46):
But do we have the ability to put justice in the system? I mean, we're not going to be able to create a theocracy because that has its own bad elements as we already know. What's our contributions to society?
Michelle (16:04):
Accountability. I think it's accountability. I think, I think in that situation where you have a young man who gets six months and, you know, for a fact, cause there's plenty of facts in prison, you can put 10 people and say their crime was identical or less or less. Well, there's tons that are less. But you know, if you did try to do apples to apples of crime and then say the law is here, but you didn't apply the law the same way. So then we hold them accountable because, you know, I think we have power in our society to to affect change in law, through elections, we have power in society to affect and create laws through, um, campaigns, through, through conversation, through whatever. Um, but I think our biggest power oftentimes is like what you were saying of holding a mirror up and saying, look at what you're doing. And I think, um, Reverend Barber is doing tons of that in the people's poor camp or the Poor people's Campaign. And, and I'm just constantly kind of in your face and, and Shane Claiborne's doing that right now too with the Red Letter Christians and going, uh, in your face, this is what's going on and it's not lining up to what you say.
Scott (17:20):
One of the other topics on here is around. Um, I think it was maybe not, oh yeah. Capital punishment. But that's coming to mind for me, the idea, like the way we're choosing to raise our daughter is not necessarily always just about doling out punishment, but it is about recognizing that there are consequences to actions. Right. And it's hard to say that as Christians, we should be applying that same thing to like our society where, well, there's really no law. There's just consequences. Like that feels soft. Yeah. But you know, I was convicted, you know, I've for years and years, I've I would've said I supported the death penalty. And then honestly, just the scripture, God says vengeance is mine. Right? Like it, it isn't for me to Dole out. Um, you know, and I'd heard that for how many years, probably 25 years I was fighting with your mom about it.
Michelle (18:17):
I think , with capital punishment. One of the things that, that helped me to kind of step back away from it was actually looking at the people who I was expecting to administer it because somebody has to do it. And again, it's that, well, my hands are going to be clean because they're going to push the button or push the plunger or do whatever. And I had read something, um, this was regarding actually Antifa and in the Charlotte thing going on. And they had said how they were pacifist, but when Antifa stood kind of next to them and had force against force, they were like, thank God that they're there. But then they realized, I am asking someone else to wear violence for me because I'm a pacifist. And that convicted me too, because there's certain places where I'm like, you know, I want a strong police force or I want strong laws and, and consequences and justice like that. But at the same time, it's that having someone else shoulder it and then going, you know what, I don't want to create laws, like for instance, immigration stuff, where I'm then telling, I used to go in and separate families, I'm forcing through the laws. I have them create, I am forcing a behavior on somebody and they're the ones that are having to do it.
Justin (19:40):
I was just going to say, I think, and I gotta be open and honest, right. So I think my walk through faith, I'll say hasn't necessarily landed me to say strongly that I'm a Christian. I have faith in God have faith in the idea that there's Jesus. But I do think that the thing that I struggled most with, because I am also a researcher and I'm one of my projects that I'm working on heavily right now in research for a lot of years, is the idea, is there some type of where's the basis of all this kind of like where you started off, like where did the narrative change? Who created the Bible? How did we come to know these stories? So well, so deeply and how are they told and how are they also then expressed to groups of people that then expressed it to more groups of people then? And the idea that I think at the core of it all, um, even at the core of most religions is the idea that Jesus was never teaching judgment, right? He's the biggest shining example of somebody that did not judge did not judge so much that you saw past illness and healed that did not judge so much that you saw past lack in, gave up plenty. Um, and I think that's kind of a big story that I take from the idea of what Jesus is. And I also struggle. Maybe somebody can talk to me to help me idea that we have the idea that God is judgmental. And so us as Christians have to be judgmental in some way, or God has vengeful. And I don't think that you can hold the idea that you have an all loving God and a vengeful God in the same bottle. I think these concepts deeply contradict each other. And I think that for that reason, um, I balanced the walk of spirituality, knowing that I think because why pastors, like Joel Osteen are so popular, he's teaching the idea of love and care and not justice, but hope and faith. And then when you start to get those other cutting messages, whether it goes against, you know, somebody's judging on homosexuality or if you're a murderer, I think those are where these things ripple heavily because what's a murderer if it's a, let's say, uh, a warrior or somebody in war versus somebody that was raped and killed, or somebody that chose to defend themselves out of self defense and murdered somebody. Are they seen differently? Our society sees it differently. Does God see it differently? And I think that's a topics I don't know.
Lia (22:18):
Yeah. I think, uh, um, I definitely had when I was growing up and coming into my own understanding of my faith to seeing God as a vengeful, angry God, I kind of think back of being a parent because he is our father. So I think of how I deal with my kids when they act out of control, you patiently say, don't do that. Don't do that. You lay out rules, you lay out borders, you lay out, you know, the lines of what behavior is acceptable, what behavior is not acceptable with your kids. But when they step outside of that behavior, there has to be consequences for the behavior saying that God is a vengeful, angry God. Yes. Looking at it. It's sometimes it looks angry. But so do we, as parents when we're dealing with our kids, I know that sometimes my anger towards the girls can get definitely not biblical, there has to be a punishment for the behavior. So that's how I kind of dealt with my relationship with God. Um, and with the quote, unquote, vengeful, angry God situation. And I know that, go ahead.
Justin (23:41):
I was just going to say, I think that's how we rationalize the story we've told, been told. That's how we rationalized the understanding that we have, um, what's in the book, right? But in the understanding of God, knowing God, when you come to actually have a deeper relationship, let's say with God, um, are those things, those trials that we go through, uh, you might say punishments or whatever the case is, but are they just in consequences? And we're attributing these human characteristics, that's something that's supernatural, right. But so is that the way that he would see it or are we really taking ourselves to those places? Are we not taking ownership of our own guidance towards these deeper, darker places that are away from the light, that are away from God, or away from source in some way, shape or form, but then saying, well, I'm getting this because I'm getting punished or this must be a test to test me for something maybe not. But also if you look always towards the love, the guidance, the, uh, the part of voice, that noise, I think you always find like a deeper, softer loving message. You know.
Lia (25:00):
I see people who do the thing where they're struggling with something, or like they have family members that are sick or dying, and they're really struggling with life in general, they lose jobs. They, when our car was literally blowing up on us every two weeks, I could see people saying, God is punishing me. He hates me. And I actually said that numerous times, Jesus. But I say that, but at the same time, I know that that is not his punishment when things are going great. When things are, when you're skipping through life, literally sometimes you miss the rock that's in the road and you trip over it and you fall. Or sometimes, you know, that's not, God's saying, oh, you're too happy. Let me trip you and see what happens. It's, it's more of a, or I will definitely say that when I'm not in line with God, when I'm not, my prayer life is not in line with God, when my worship is not in line with God. And I've just kind of let it go. That's when my life tends to get out of control hectic, mostly because I'm not walking a path that has been forged for me. I'm not walking where he tells me, tells me to walk. So that's not him punishing me for getting off path. That's me getting distracted and going, running through the woods at full speed, where there is no path hitting trees and stuff, and getting knocked over as opposed to staying on the path that is nice and paved out, or that at least has the trees cleared away. So I'm not going to keep knocking my head on stuff.
Justin (26:36):
And I think that's, you know, the idea that a path that has less resistance, lets you know, strongly that you're walking in your faith, you're walking next to God. You know, those, those things, that. I think that's right. That's, that's kinda, I think what, uh, there's an author, Esther Hicks, the idea that, you know, I think what God gave us is like our own GPS system, right? It's a guidance system. Um, it's like the hot cold gang. The idea is like, if you're facing, if you're seeing yourself in like me too, like we go through some things that I, you know, I turned towards everyone upset, pissed, whatever the case is. And I'm, um, I'm headed that way. And I, I really, as much as I've honed in on it now have understanding that that's telling me I'm off that path more and more, the more angry I get more frustrated to get the more stressed I get, I need to veer back. But I think this self-built guidance system that we all have, we almost take for granted, right? What are emotions? Emotions are more like, um, you know, your emotional pain is more like your physical pain. If you had your hand on a hot stove, you would say, oh, get away. You know, but if you're going through some, we've also taught in our culture, in our society and our culture scape. The idea that if you're going through something struggle-filled endure pushed through now, sometimes you do. And I say sometimes through, will you come out off the other end better and more determined, more, you know, durable, but at the same time, was it unnecessary struggle that you needed to go through at that time.
Lia (28:13):
Should you have taken your hand off the stove?
Justin (28:14):
Should you take in your,
Michelle (28:18):
There's also this thing of, you know, our God is a consuming fire, right. But I was thinking about how, you know, when you look at the old Testament and some of the imagery and especially anything dealing with the wrath of God, and it's pretty violent, pretty, you know, intense. But then I thought, okay, the writers at that time, we, we tend not to look at at the society that something's written in and, you know, and we take it out of context and all of that, we're really in the cultural thing. So I was thinking about how in the book of Revelations, it talks about the flying scorpions, right. And pretty much it's from the time I was little, that was always one, that's a helicopter. And I think a lot of people were like, yeah, that, that looks, that totally reads like a helicopter. Right? So then I thought, well, if you applied that to half of these things that are in the old Testament, what they're seeing, or the visions that one of the prophets can be getting, it's kind of, again, you know, when Jesus does it and the kingdom of heaven is like, and this is like, and things are like this, and this is happening, you know? Um, I think how, you know, if in those societies, there was no spiritual secular divide. Like we have, everything was under God and everything was through God. I mean, that was just how they knew it. So anything cataclysmic, God did it, anything that caused pain and suffering, God did it. And I think the difference is, is the maybe what the intent of what something is. So for instance, I know that there's been times where I've had really severe pain of just emotional pain. And I remember even sometimes sitting there crying, going daddy God, I need help. I just need help. And all I could say was daddy God it hurts. And that was probably one of my most vulnerable prayers. And yet at the same time, I look at that, and I think if I hadn't gone through those valleys, I wouldn't have felt that like to come that close. And so I think going back to what you're talking about with our children is like, when they fall and hurt themselves, when they have the consequences of their actions, meet them with pain. Okay. And they come to us crying because they were trying to climb on something, and you told them not to, and they fell or they touched the stove and burned themselves. And they come to us. We didn't punish them with burning their hand on a stove. We comforted them when they came, but we told them, this is your consequences when that happens. Now, maybe they would look and go, well, that's, you know, my parents were bad because they, they let me burn myself. You have free will. And I think that we've fused so many of these together that I think we have to look at Jesus to be able to understand it because we're outside of that cultural context, we're definitely outside of God in and around and through everything in our society. Um, we've lost that sensitivity.
Jennifer (31:13):
And it's like, what Justin was saying there, like when you come to him, you do find the love. You can go find the judgment in that, but you find the love.
Simon (31:25):
Well, that flew by. So, thanks for tuning in everybody and we will see you in the next episode.
*“Penal substitution derives from the idea that divine forgiveness must satisfy divine justice, that is, that God is not willing or able to simply forgive sin without first requiring a satisfaction for it. It states that God gave himself in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for our sin…While penal substitution shares themes present in many other theories of the atonement, penal substitution is a distinctively Protestant understanding of the atonement that differs from both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understandings of the atonement.” [Wikipedia]
“Among the many problems of Calvin’s theory of the cross, one is that it turns God into a petty tyrant and a moral monster. Punishing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is monstrous logic, atrocious theology, and a gross distortion of the idea of justice. This debate — billed as “The Monster God Debate” — was recorded and eventually viewed thousands of times online. Over the next year I received hundreds of correspondences from people around the world relieved to learn that Good Friday was not the day when God killed his Son. What Jesus did on the cross is far more mysterious and beautiful than simply offering himself as a primitive ritual sacrifice. Ritual sacrifice may appease the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, but it has nothing to do with the Father of Jesus. The cross is a cataclysmic collision of violence and forgiveness. The violence part of the cross is entirely human. The forgiveness part of the cross is entirely divine. God’s nature is revealed in love, not in violence. The Roman cross was an instrument of imperial violence that Jesus transformed into a symbol of divine love.” ~ Brian Zahnd, Who Killed Jesus?