Jesus as Exemplar

Over at “A Tippling Philosopher”, Jonathan MS Pearce has been talking a lot about the Resurrection, and more specifically what’s wrong or inconsistent with it, as he has a book out on that very topic.  Recently, he wrote a post talking about the idea that the Crucifixion is about atonement and made it clear that he thinks the idea is completely and irretrievably incoherent.  I do think that we can make sense of what the Crucifixion was about, and noted that I might make a post here on that since I needed a Friday post anyway and it was probably short enough to work, so this is that post.

Before I start, note that my idea here is philosophical, not theological.  While I think it can be reconciled with theology, that’s not the point here and it certainly isn’t the standard theological views that we all know and love.  In fact, anyone who knows me will have no problem believing that it’s pretty eccentric,  So comments that say “That’s not what religion X says!” will not be comments that I take at all seriously.  Also, the idea is going to take the Bible “at its word” and so be derived from the Biblical accounts, as that’s what’s expressing the idea.  So comments of “That never really happened!” won’t really be entertained either.

After all of that, on with the show!

First, let me highlight a pet peeve.  Pearce’s focus is on why Jesus would say on the Cross that God has abandoned him but that that in general doesn’t make sense, and in doing so says this:

It makes absolutely no sense of the Holy Trinity – why would God be talking to himself and claiming he had forsaken himself?

Sigh.  This always comes across as a cheap attempt at a “Gotcha!”, but anyone philosophically minded — as Pearce is — will be able to come up with all sorts of ideas of how that could work, with things like aspects and avatars and incarnations and all sorts of things that would make this make sense.  Yes, some of them don’t work theologically and I believe that Edward Feser comments that we can only ever attempt to understand it by analogy, but in general there are ways for that to make sense, so that sort of “talking to himself” line doesn’t really address the overall issue in any way.  And this is especially bad because it turns out that there is a key difference that would explain why Jesus would have to address God, even in the Trinity.

Fortunately, Pearce does add some more philosophical complaints against the line, but I’m not going to address them directly.  Instead, I’m going to outline my own view, which I think will either address or dodge most of his complaints.

To start with, to understand Atonement here we have to go way back to the beginning to the thing that needs to be Atoned for, which is Original Sin, and the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.  It will surprise no one that I have an eccentric view of that story, but one that I think works whether or not the Garden of Eden story is meant to be allegorical or literal (I lean towards it being an allegory myself).  The basic idea is that the key takeaway is that after Adam and Eve ate the apple, they gained knowledge of right and wrong, and that is the key to the rest of the story and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.  It is, for me, less a punishment for their having dared to do what they were told not to do, but instead a sad realization that moral agents who know are capable of knowing right from wrong cannot live in a paradise anymore, at least not immediately.  They need to be able to act on that capacity and so through that develop a moral character, and only if they develop a moral character that will always choose the right can they be readmitted to paradise.  Such a life must be difficult because it’s only through adversity that our moral character gets tested, and so again it’s less a punishment and more a necessity.  And the story shows that you cannot have people who do not have that capacity simply inhabit paradise either because if there are any rules whatsoever they cannot be trusted to follow them because they don’t know that it’s wrong to break them.

So the Original Sin, to me, is not a taint that we need to overcome, but instead a recognition that to develop as moral agents we must be capable of being tempted to do wrong and yet also capable of resisting those temptations to develop our moral character.

This then leads into what is important about Jesus, which is made clear in the Bible:  Jesus was made human.  In doing that, Jesus gained a unique ability to understand what making those sorts of decisions are for us, and importantly the ability to be tempted.  And the New Testament makes it clear that Jesus can be tempted and can fall prey to human foibles.  I think it’s early in John that the Devil takes Jesus to the desert to be tempted, and the story makes it clear that while Jesus rather easily resists his temptations, we are supposed to believe that Jesus was tempted by that.  Crucially, the Devil also notes that Jesus could use the powers He gained for His own benefit, and Jesus refuses.  This will be important later at the Crucifixion.

As we proceed through the New Testament, we can indeed see Jesus being tempted and acting human.  He flies into a rage at the moneychangers in the Temple.  He curses the fig tree for not having figs.  We see on a number of occasions that Jesus is indeed human and shares our foibles, but in general He’s able to resist them and do the right thing anyway.  He feels our temptations, but for the most part, except in a few cases, is able to resist them.

Importantly for the specific topic of feeling abandoned by God, long before the actual Crucifixion we can see that Jesus does not want to go through the Crucifixion and does not want to face that suffering.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, He asks repeated for the cup to be taken away from Him, but submits to God’s will anyway.  On the Cross itself, He is taunted by at least one of the criminals who says that if He really is the Son of God He would have the power to free himself and should do it, but refuses to do so and praises the one criminal who rebukes the other for it.  Thus, like us He is frightened of the sacrifice and suffering He is called upon to make and doesn’t want to go through with it, but unlike a lot of us He goes through with it anyway.

This carries over to the abandonment line that Pearce references.  Briefly, Jesus calls out to God asking why He has abandoned Jesus and left Him to his suffering.  This is a moment of human weakness that many religious people have experienced when enough bad things happen to us.  But nevertheless, at the end Jesus accepts his fate and commends His spirit into the hands of God, something He would not have done if He still felt abandoned by God.  So through all of this, while even His faith is shaken, it is not destroyed.  So Jesus faces the same temptations and fears and feelings of abandonment that we do, and yet He goes through with what He, at least, knows is the morally right thing to do anyway and accepts its necessity.

Now you can argue that that’s all fine and good, but that only works if that’s the morally right thing to do, and we need something for Jesus to be Atoning for for that to work.  But I don’t see it that way.  Following on from my view of Original Sin, Jesus isn’t really Atoning for our sin, but is instead providing an Exemplar for us as an ideal of morality to follow.  If we look at the Old Testament, morality is very much following rules and being punished if we don’t, but in the New Testament while Jesus does talk about Hell morality is far more a matter of doing the right thing even if we have to suffer for it, and not letting potential suffering stop us from doing that.  Jesus is the example to demonstrate that transition as He shows us that we, as humans, can act morally no matter how much we suffer or have to sacrifice for it, and even when there is no terrible punishment waiting for us if we don’t act morally.  Jesus comes when we are at the stage where we can accept that new sort of morality and don’t need the simple rules-and-punishment-based morality anymore.

This also ties into the idea of sacrifice.  In the Old Testament, animal sacrifices were required and there was a lot of ritual involved in worshiping God, which I submit was necessary in the time to build a community around it and to get people at that level of civilization to follow the rules and not stray, and to be moral.  But Jesus minimizes ritual and focuses more on doing the right thing and having a more direct and personal and not public relationship with God.  So, then, He can also be seen as the last sacrifice that, again, marks the transition from the more primitive religion to the new more modern religion, where the sacrifice is not literal in terms of sacrificing an animal that was raised and designed as a sacrifice but instead sacrifice is seen as every day being willing to sacrifice everything, even your life, for the right thing and to do what God wants you to do.

Thus, Jesus “atones” for our sinful nature by being both the example that we can be better and putting Himself in a position to help us overcome that nature and refuse to sin.  He can do this because He was human and so has experienced the pull of our sinful nature and our temptations, and so knows both how tempting it can be and from experience that we can, in fact, overcome it.  Because of that, He needed to feel that sense of abandonment by God so that He can overcome it and not use His powers to save Himself and so that, in the end, He can commend his spirit to God secure in the knowledge that ultimately, at the end, He did what was necessary and what was God’s necessary will.