Another Passion of the Christ

Not the movie....but an essay of the same name, on the God Quest site. Not too far into the article the author declares

And he (Jesus) did not undertake his sacrifice to shield us from a “wrathful” Father.[ This is the intimidating, threatening, and centuries-old claim of conventional Christianity. A fraud so well conceived that it has prevented millions of honest people from entering into a loving relationship with the Creator.

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But then he takes an unexpected twist in the section titled, "Is God Entirely Guiltless?" in which he ponders the question of God's guilt in allowing evil into the world. He quotes Jack Miles in Christ, A Crisis in the Life of God expresses it this way:

The pathos of those artistic enactments—those masses and oratorios, passion plays and memorial liturgies, and above all those paintings and sculptures in which the unspeakable is left unspoken—is inseparable from the premise that God is inflicting this pain upon himself for a reason. ‘The real reason’, as Albert Camus wrote in his haunting novel The Fall, ‘is that he himself knew he was not altogether innocent.’”

Now there's a pretty heretical thought...God is not altogether innocent? John G says says something similar in one of his writings called a Legal Mentality....

When Christ died for us He was not paying dues to the law but, with love beyond measure, meeting us where we were in our mentality that said, "We demand justice. You let the serpent in the garden. You penned us all up in disobedience. The buck stops at your desk. You should pay" (Rom. 11:32). And pay He did.

The Passion Essay goes on to say:

The cross is the expression of God entering into his own story, meeting the terms of justice for the divine responsibility of letting evil loose within the universe.

and later:

The passion of the Christ is, ultimately, self-inflicted. That is, for a greater purpose and good, God has chosen to do it this way. The one true and wonderful God has ordained that all should suffer and die, including himself.

or as my friend Roy says:

Then, Christ came. God in the flesh. Man had always blamed the Father for the fall. Inwardly the blood rage is there.

God has never shirked his responsibility regardless of what religion teaches. Search the scriptures and see. Man tries to take responsibility for this fallen creation. But, ultimately, God has never shirked responsibility for anything He has done. He balanced the scales in Christ.

He came as Man. He said, "You rage against me? You want justice? You think I should be punished for all you have suffered? Here, take out your rage on me. Here is the blood you have been searching for, longing for. It is laid down freely. Rage on me. I won't lift a finger to stop you."

And, He took responsibility for all the evils that have befallen man that day. He gave His life. This has never been adequately appreciated by religion. It needs to be appreciated.

As I post these very diverse thoughts on the atonement here on my blog, perhaps it will become apparent that the PSA view is certainly not the only view that makes sense...and is not the only view that is supported in the scriptures.....