Gunning for God (25 page)

It is a common human experience that guilt chains us to the past. Suppose I park my car illegally. I am deemed guilty of an infringement of traffic laws and incur a penalty in the form of a fine. The law demands that I should be punished. The fine has to be paid; and the law will insist that it is paid. I cannot just forget about it. The courts will certainly not “just let it go”. More crucially, the courts will not just “let go” serious crimes. If there were no punishment for such crimes, the world would descend into anarchy as the message got out that
crime did not matter
.
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Robert McAfee Brown says: “One cannot allow, as a human axiom, a position such as that of the philosopher-poet Heinrich Heine, ‘God will forgive, that’s what He’s here for.’”
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There is another reason why God cannot “just let it go”. Think of a woman whose marital happiness has just been ruined by the discovery of her husband’s unfaithfulness. She is deeply hurt, her domestic world shattered. Forgiveness in this situation will involve
two
distinct processes. First there is the woman being able
inwardly
to “let it go” so as to limit the damage to herself as far as possible. Making progress here may be very difficult and take a long time and the good counsel of friends. But then there is the matter of her husband, and her active
outward
forgiveness of him. Suppose that she gets to the point where she is willing to forgive her husband. What then? True forgiveness here is conditional on her husband’s repentance. If she “just lets it go” it amounts to saying “it doesn’t matter” — which could be interpreted as effectively condoning the sin. Failure to separate these two aspects of forgiveness has often led to a great deal of unnecessary pain, when well-meaning friends have urged the victim of wrongdoing to “forgive, because it is your duty”, even though there is no sign of repentance on the part of the perpetrator.

At this point there is a common objection: “But didn’t Jesus pray for forgiveness for the soldiers that crucified him?” Indeed he did. But we should notice the grounds on which he prayed: “Father, forgive them
for they know not what they do
[italics mine].”
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Greek scholar Professor David Gooding explains:

This prayer, uttered in a moment of fearful pain, on behalf of those who were causing the pain, has rightly moved the hearts of millions and become the ideal which has taught countless sufferers not to yield to blind retaliation, but to seek the good of even their enemies… It detracts nothing, however, from the glory of Christ’s prayer to point out that it was prayed on behalf of the soldiers who in all truthfulness did not know what they were doing. False sentiment must not lead us to extend the scope of his prayer beyond his intention. To pray forgiveness for a man who knows quite well what he is doing and has no intention of either stopping or repenting would be immoral: it would amount to condoning, if not conniving at, his sin. Christ certainly did not do that.
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Sin matters. If my sin doesn’t matter, then I don’t matter in the end. If your child is murdered and the law does not bother to arrest, try, and sentence the perpetrator, the law is saying, in effect, that your child does not matter. The courts cannot “just let it go”. Such an attitude would spell the end of all morality and all hope of justice. It would inevitably lead to anarchy. So, if the legal system were to adopt the view that Dawkins seems to think God should take, it would be an offence to our moral conscience. But God will never accept that our lies, greed, theft, adultery, violence, murder, etc. do not matter. He takes our sin seriously, not because he hates us but because he loves us. His universe is a moral universe; and as its supreme moral governor he, a holy and perfect God, must deal justly with human sin. It is sin that ruins life and happiness. It is sin that brought human death into the world. The more we are aware of the holiness of God and our own shortcomings, weaknesses, failures, transgressions, and sinfulness, the more we can appreciate the gulf that separates us from God, and the connection there is between sin and death.

In our hearts we know that this makes sense — it fits in with our innate sense of justice and fairness. Yet it creates an obvious problem for each one of us. If God were to deal justly with me, where would I stand? I cannot break the guilt that chains me to my past. God cannot simply let it go, if he is to be just and I am to retain any significance as a moral being. There is a penalty to be paid, there is cost involved, and I cannot pay it. The heart of the Christian good news is that
God, in Christ, has paid that penalty on the cross
. As a result, God can justly forgive and accept all who repent and trust in Christ for salvation.

Hitchens, who appears to have more insight on the matter than Dawkins, still has a major difficulty here. He writes:

I can pay your debt, my love, if you have been imprudent, and if I were a hero like Sydney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities
I could even serve your term in prison or take your place on the scaffold. Greater love hath no man.
But I cannot absolve you of your responsibilities, It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept
[italics mine]. And if the same offer is made from another time and another world, through the mediation of middlemen and accompanied by inducements, it loses all its grandeur and becomes debased into wish-thinking or, worse, a combination of blackmailing with bribery.
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As he subsequently makes clear, Hitchens’ last point here is a reference to the reprehensible commercialization of religion that has developed from (and serves to propagate) the false notion that acceptance with God can be gained by merit, ceremonies, or monetary contributions of various kinds. It is important to note that, long before Christopher Hitchens, Christ himself protested vigorously at such exploitation, with all of its attendant misrepresentations of God.
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For such exploitation, whatever it calls itself, is not true Christianity. True Christianity knows no self-aggrandizing middlemen and no inducements of the sort Hitchens mentions — there is no blackmail or bribery. What Christianity teaches is: “there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all.”
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What does this mean? We can start with what Hitchens seems to accept, even though he expresses it somewhat tongue in cheek. If a person gets into difficult financial circumstances then all of us understand what it means for someone else to step in and pay off that debt — indeed, many of us will at some time have been that someone else! We all know how sin (for instance, theft, greed, etc.) can get us into this kind of debt. We also understand the payment of a penalty, a fine, or a ransom to free a hostage. This kind of debt envisages a payment to someone. There are other kinds of “payment”, of course, that do not involve debt. We might say that Sydney Carton paid the (ultimate) price for taking the place of Darnay in
The Tale of Two Cities
.
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That price was very real, but there was no one to whom he paid it. Hitchens (like the rest of us) can understand and respect noble sacrifice of this ultimate kind. The principle of vicariousness — one taking the place of another — is something with which we are all familiar at some level.

Hitchens now reaches his moral impasse: “I cannot absolve you of your responsibilities. It would be immoral of me to offer and immoral of you to accept.” His point is that one human being cannot absolve the sins of another human being. Hitchens is not the first to raise this issue. It was put to Jesus himself by the religious experts of the time. The scribes were shocked and angered when Jesus said to a paralysed man, “your sins are forgiven.”
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The point has real substance. If I have seriously wronged and damaged you, when you get me to court what would you think if the judge said to me “I forgive you”? You would have every right to protest: “Wait a minute, this is absurd. Even though you are the judge, you cannot forgive this man. It is me he has wronged, not you. It is my prerogative to forgive and mine alone.”

One of the most famous books to deal with this matter in depth is
The Sunflower
by Simon Wiesenthal.
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It tells a deeply moving story of how Wiesenthal, while incarcerated in a concentration camp in Ukraine, was taken by a hospital orderly into a room where a young Nazi soldier was dying. The soldier, who was unknown to Wiesenthal, told him that he had taken part in a horrific SS atrocity in the city of Dnepropetrovsk — blowing up a house full of Jewish families and shooting them as they tried in vain to leap to safety. The Nazi begged Wiesenthal, as a representative Jew, to forgive him.

Wiesenthal listened and then departed without a word. When he subsequently related the incident to some friends in the camp, one of them, Josek, stayed behind to talk privately. ‘“Do you know,” he began, “when you were telling us about your meeting with the SS man, I feared at first that you had really forgiven him. You would have had no right to do this in the name of people who had not authorized you to do so. What people have done to you yourself, you can, if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience with other people’s sufferings… What he has done to other people you are in no position to forgive.”

Wiesenthal, who subsequently went through great uncertainty as to the rightness of his decision, ends his book by saying: “The crux of the matter is, of course, the question of forgiveness. Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.”

In common with Hitchens and the ancient scribes who challenged Jesus’ right to forgive the sins of the paralysed man, Wiesenthal naturally assumes a situation in which the participants, let’s call them X, Y, and Z, were merely human; in which case it is clear that X could not forgive the sins that Y had committed against Z.

What makes all the difference in the case of Jesus is that
he wasn’t just another human being
. He could bear other people’s sins, as a true mediator, because he was both God and man. He was human but never merely human: he was none other than God incarnate. And sin is ultimately against God. Now the New Atheists choke at this and reject it out of hand. But they should notice that it is their rejection of the incarnation that is responsible for their failure to see any significance in the cross. The cross and the incarnation are inseparable.

At the beginning of the story of the incarnation, Joseph, the husband of Mary, Jesus’ mother, was told: “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
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From the beginning, therefore, Jesus’ very name bore witness to the fact that he was to be the sin-bearer. The prophet John the Baptist announced Jesus to the nation with the dramatic words: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
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For centuries the nation of Israel had been taught the seriousness of sin by having to kill a lamb to atone for their sin. This procedure vividly taught them at a basic level what experience constantly underlines — that sin enslaves, it is ultimately a killer, and therefore needs to be atoned for. The death of animals never really dealt with the problem, of course, as the Bible itself recognizes.
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The prophet John announced that Jesus was the reality that the sacrificial lambs foreshadowed: Jesus was the real Lamb who could actually atone for sin. The imagery was unmistakeable. Jesus would one day die for his people’s sin.

Jesus confirmed this by saying of himself: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
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At the Last Supper in Jerusalem, when he instituted the ceremony by which his first disciples and all subsequent believers should remember him, he chose bread and wine as eloquent symbols of his death: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me… This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”
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Incidentally, this completely refutes the widespread but erroneous idea that it was St Paul who “spoiled Christianity” by introducing the Jewish notion of vicarious suffering that was foreign to Christ’s intentions. For, the communion service was deliberately designed, not by Paul but by Christ himself, to give people an unmistakeable reminder of why he died: his body given and his blood shed, for our sins. Paul understood its significance in exactly the same way as the Gospel writers. In what most scholars accept as one of the earliest and most important statements of the Christian message, Paul wrote, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”.
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The death of Christ for sin was not an innovation by Paul, or indeed of the Gospel writers. It was predicted in the Old Testament, for instance in the famous words of the prophet Isaiah regarding the suffering servant messiah: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.”
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