Why Jesus’s Death Wasn’t a Triumph
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Jesus, Christianity, Religion, Philosophy, Theology

Christianity is essentially a theodicy, an attempt to explain away the particular evil that founded the religion, namely the brutal execution of Jesus.

Imagine putting your faith in a wise, charismatic, peaceful guru, in someone who seems to embody a spiritual power, giving you hope that all isn’t as cruel and absurd as it seems.

Now imagine having your faith dashed by the world’s turning on that hero in spectacular fashion. You thought heroes were supposed to win in the end, as though life were a comedy, not a tragedy, since a benevolent God is supposed to be in control. But according to the gospel accounts, many of Jesus’s fellow Jews turned on him, including Judas, one of his disciples, and the Romans tortured and crucified this precious individual, snuffing the light in the darkness.

Christianity is a religion that seeks to answer how that evil could have been perpetrated. Whether Jesus actually existed in history is irrelevant, since he stood for Rome’s many innocent victims and for the countless victims of marauding empires throughout history. In particular, Jesus stood for the Jews who found their way to unnatural monotheism in spite of their record of being repeatedly conquered by polytheists. The evil of a good man’s apparent defeat by forces of ignorance and depravity extends far beyond Jesus, the protagonist of the gospels who may or may not have lived as depicted in the New Testament.

The earliest Christians responded to the story of Jesus’s and God’s apparent defeat and to the evident victory of amoral empires around the world, by positing that there was no such defeat, because Jesus rose from the dead. Moreover, the godless regimes that seem victorious will eventually fall as Jesus predicted; the first will be last and the last will be first in God’s kingdom, because after Jesus was resurrected, he ascended to Heaven as befits such a spiritual hero, but one day he’ll return to earth and finish what he started.

All of which was an unfalsifiable fantasy that looks foremost like an expression of grief and exasperation. Rather than plunging into depression, those who identified with the story of Jesus renewed their faith and refused to accept the harsh facts that many steadfast Jewish rebels were crucified or otherwise crushed by pagans and that Rome was still in control.

Indeed, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, providing the impetus behind the Christian change in direction. This, too, was an evil that cried out for explanation. Why had God apparently abandoned his chosen people, leaving them once more to wander in the wilderness after their failed attempt to liberate themselves from Roman oppression? Perhaps Jews had to be punished for betraying and rejecting the more profound, universal kind of messiah symbolized by Jesus?

The Injustice of Human Sacrifice

However that may be, Christians would add much to their theodicy, taking not just Jesus’s triumph over death but his mode of execution to be theologically significant. Jesus died not as a hapless victim of a brutal regime, but as a divine agent who was secretly in command. Jesus chose to die to serve as a sacrifice to free us all from the consequences of our sins. Jesus died to save the world, so what looked like a sign of God’s absence was instead proof of God’s majesty.

The most obnoxious interpretation of Jesus’s death is proclaimed by Protestants and recently by Evangelical Christians, those whose religion has been most thoroughly Americanized (rendered spiritually void). This interpretation is the penal substitution theory, which says that the point of Jesus’s death is specifically that he suffered the penalty we all deserve for our disobedience to God.

The purpose of Jesus’s egregious suffering on the cross was to show us (1) how awful is God’s vengeance and sense of justice, since Jesus’s crucifixion replaces everlasting torment in Hell for the Christian believers, and (2) how infinite is God’s mercy and righteousness, since God was willing to undergo the penalty himself, giving us a way out of death and Hell, if only we accept Jesus’s sacrificial death.

There are many problems with this interpretation, and those problems exist because this theory has little to do with any supernatural power. The Christian penal substitution theory of atonement belongs with all the other cringe-worthy, harebrained excuses offered by bewildered people on behalf of their rosy image of God.

Just for starters, this theory is supposed to take its inspiration from the human practice of punishing criminals. But of course there’s never been a penal system that finds justice in executing an innocent person instead of the guilty party. True, there are scapegoating rituals in which human sins are supposedly transferred into an animal that’s ritually sacrificed to cleanse the tribe. More generally, innocent animals and even human children and virgins have been sacrificed to demonstrate people’s fear of God. The point was to demonstrate that the people loved their deity even more than the child or valuable animal they were slaughtering.

But those were religious, not political or legislative acts. Justice had nothing to do with such sacrifices. William Lane Craig, a proponent of the penal substitution theory, of this rationalization of the evil that founded Christianity, says he’s discovered a secular equivalent, namely the law of vicarious liability (see the 25:00 mark in the video). According to this civil or criminal law, he says, “blameless third parties can be found vicariously liable for the wrongs and even the crimes of someone else, even though that blameless party did not commit those wrongs or those crimes.”

But if you just Google “vicarious liability,” you find that Craig’s engaging in flimflammery. In secular law, vicarious liability is about a manager’s or a corporation’s indirect liability for the employee’s misdeeds. True, the manager or the corporation doesn’t commit the particular wrongs in question for which they’re being held liable; instead, those parties are found guilty of a prior or more general misdeed, such as the inadequate training of the employee or the reckless fostering of an environment that contributed to the employee’s misconduct.

The principle is that of respondeat superior, ‘the responsibility of the superior for the acts of her subordinate or, in a broader sense, the responsibility of any third party that had the “right, ability or duty to control” the activities of a violator.’ Ironically for Christians, in the Supreme Court of Canada case, Doe vs Bennett, the court found that a church was vicariously (that is, indirectly) liable for the sexual abuse scandals caused by its priests, because the Church gives the priest authority and power over the parishioners.

(In an “Unbelievable?” debate with theologian and pastor Greg Boyd on the penal substitution theory, Craig explicitly and hilariously denies that vicarious liability in secular law is about indirect wrongdoing on the overseer’s part, saying at the 50:10 mark, “In these cases the employer is utterly blameless in the matter; he’s not guilty of negligence or complicity or failure to supervise. That’s very clear.”)

For the law of vicarious liability to be relevant to Jesus’s death, the Christian would have to concede that Jesus and thus God were indirectly responsible for human sin. Indeed, this is how Jack Miles interprets Christianity in his insightful book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, in which he understands Jesus’s death as an implicit admission and apology on God’s part for having spoiled Creation with his miscalculations and apparent inexperience. In effect, Jesus’s death was God’s suicide or self-chastisement, because as our Creator he must have been indirectly responsible for our waywardness. The buck stops with God.

Of course, “conservative” American “Christians” have no interest in that kind of humility. Theirs is the god of America, the unapologetic superpower that bestows on Americans their manifest destiny to enslave Africans, exterminate Native Americans, practice patriarchy and plutocracy, and to support oppressive regimes around the world since the end of WWII, all in wanton violation of everything the Jesus of the gospels stood for. God is perfectly innocent, for these American “Christians”; God gets all the credit and we deserve all the blame.

In that case, though, there’s no secular counterpart to the barbarism of the penal substitution theory. If God isn’t even indirectly responsible for human sin — which he obviously would be for having created us as we are — then Jesus the Son of God must not have been vicariously liable for the sins for which he was being punished.

Resolving God’s Inner Conflict

Instead of visiting the myriad problems with this theodicy or theory of atonement, I’d like to focus on what’s supposed to be its main advantage, which is that this theory’s meant to reconcile God’s justice and love. God’s holiness and perfection compel him to reign over Creation and to bring wrongdoers to justice. God can’t let any misdeed go unpunished, because nothing can escape his knowledge and power.

The Judeo-Christian deity is the Supreme Being, so someone has to suffer God’s wrath, given our violations of his commandments, not to mention our wholesale abandonment of religion and our steps towards secular, humanitarian progress. God poured out his wrath on Jesus, thus slaking his thirst for blood, paying us in kind what we’re due because of what we’ve shown God with all our misdeeds, including our many violent ones. We rob, beat, and kill each other, so divine justice demands an equivalent punishment. Jesus’s life was infinitely valuable, so his torture and death suffice.

But God is also benevolent and Jesus’s death equally demonstrates this other divine attribute. God loves us as his children and wants to show us mercy, not to send us to Hell forever. Instead of giving us what we deserve, God wants to offer us a gift, a golden ticket off of our doomed course. Jesus accomplishes this, too, by receiving the punishment in our place. God demonstrates his love for us, not just his justice, by sacrificing himself for us in his incarnation as the man Jesus.

What’s interesting about this rationale for the penal substitution theory is that it only sweeps the problem of Jesus’s death under the rug. The question raised by the manifest unfairness in the story of Jesus’s execution is only pushed back to one about how God could be both just and loving. This conflict between divine attributes, this incoherence of many Christian conceptions of God reveals, in turn, the gulf between Judaism and Christianity. Christianity was supposed to fulfill Jewish expectations, but if the historical emergence of Christianity were ordained by God, we’d have expected Jews to convert to this new faith. Instead, the two religions grew apart and both exist as separate to this day.

Jewish Purity and Humanism

Why the divergence? Read the two Testaments and see for yourself. After all the priestly editing, the Jewish scriptures come across as being obsessed with moral purity. That’s what distinguished Jews from the pragmatic, cosmopolitan, and eclectic polytheists. Jews adhered to their tribal practices, to the point of seeming to be antisocial, because Jews adapted Zoroastrianism’s apocalyptic process theology and ecstatic vision of the moral perfection that would arise at the end of time. (A Jewish faction encountered that Persian religion towards the end of its Babylonian captivity.)

Jews weren’t interested in converting humanity to their religion, however. Instead, Jews and their deity served as symbols of righteousness. The Jewish religion was about realizing ideals of justice and moral purity through human action, not through faith in a deus ex machina. Most Jews didn’t emphasize any elaborate eschatology or theology of divine rewards and punishments. In fact, Jewish theology ends, in effect, with the skepticism of Job and Ecclesiastes, which has made Judaism a force for secularization.

Implicitly, at least, the point for Jews wasn’t that their scriptures should be taken literally, but that those scriptures point the way to humanistic ideals that ought to guide our conduct. Jewish rituals and codes of purity and morality are meant to be extreme so that no one could miss the underlying point: the difference between right and wrong is paramount.

But Jews lost their social standing after their clash with Rome, which prompted the Christian rethinking of Judaism, based on the early Christians’ synthesis of Judaism and Greco-Roman philosophies. Judaism would become universal and a Jewish tale of a martyr would be taken literally as dogmatic revelation. Traditional Jewish practices became obsolete, because God was understood now as being unimpressed with conceits of human purity, conceits which Jesus castigated as so many signs of hypocrisy. Instead, God loves everyone, even the downtrodden, the poor, the sick, and the hungry, as well as the untouchables and the pagans.

The Incoherence of a Just and Loving God

For Christianity, God’s primary characteristics are his love and mercy, because God means to show mercy to those who most need it, who have been shown none in corrupt human societies. As a historical accident, however, Christianity had to embrace its Jewish heritage, despite the chasm between the Jewish and Christian conceptions of God, since the Christian movement that became orthodox defined itself in opposition to the Marcionites who naturally took the Pauline, proto-Gnostic literature to be incommensurable with the Jewish scriptures.

Thus, the conflict between God’s justice and love, which supposedly had to be somehow reconciled, was only an historical accident arising from Christianity’s conflict with Judaism.

Beyond that, however, there’s the incoherence that’s offensive to commonsense. Suppose, for example, there’s a father who loves his child, but the child grows up to commit a murder, and the father has to decide whether to turn in his child or protect him from punishment. Suppose the father knows that if he alerts the police, his son will face the death penalty with no possibility of rehabilitation.

Parental love for a child would lead the father to protect his child at all costs, perhaps even to obstruct justice to conceal his son’s wrongdoing. But as a responsible citizen, the father would have a duty to follow society’s laws, to betray his biological drive and surrender his son out of respect for the murdered victim and for the social contract.

So we have conflicting motives, leading to a Sophie’s choice. Your intuition may pull you in one direction or the other, but the real point is that the conflict between justice and love is due to the anomalousness of human society in the biological domain. Parental love is genetic and hormonal; justice is social, civilizational, and political. The latter emerges from the former, not by way of any divine plan but by haphazard evolution and historical breakthroughs. The conflict between justice and love, holiness and altruism is due precisely to the absence of God in the emergence of these ideals.

In so far as the irresolvable conflict shows up in the Christian conception of God, this conception testifies to the arbitrariness of theism. The Evangelical Christian wants to say these sides of God are reconciled beautifully on the Cross of Calvary, but of course that’s not so. This is why I’ve called this Christian theodicy “obnoxious,” because this theology isn’t even decent, let alone sublime.

In fact, this theodicy is so counterintuitive and appalling that it’s true rationale may be to serve as a test of Christian faith, as dictated by the Handicap principle. Just as the male peacock’s bizarre, burdensome tail feathers are supposed to signify the peacock’s fitness, because the peacock can overcome that burden, some literalistic Christians prove their faithfulness by publicly committing themselves to this religion even when their doctrines are preposterous. As Tertullian said, “I believe because it’s absurd.”

I’d compare this theodicy to the belligerent American crowd’s penchant for drowning out opposition at this or that political rally, by chanting “USA, USA, USA!” The chant is obnoxious because it’s dehumanizing. The chanters lose their intellectual integrity and declare their unconditional faith in their political party despite its glaring dysfunctions. Instead of engaging with the criticisms, they shout down and ignore them, belittling the critics.

Similarly, this theodicy pretends to explain why a good man could have been brutally murdered by an oppressive regime, and why God is apparently absent from the world, by positing a theological narrative that only exacerbates the problem.

Theologians don’t even trade in genuine explanations, since their aim is to undermine rationality by pointing to an underlying mystery that mocks human vanities. We explain a mystery by reducing it to something more familiar and understandable, as in science. There’s no such explanatory value in saying that Jesus had to die because God wants such and such or because God is like this, not like that. Once you hold out God as the answer to some set of real-world circumstances, you’ve made your theodicy an empty gesture, a pseudo-explanation.

But the penal substitution theory is especially counterproductive because it wears its emptiness on its sleeve. So Jesus had to die because God used him as a means of accomplishing the aims of justice and of love. Okay, so why does God have both of those aims? Why would God in reality care about justice, morality, or love in the first place? Why would God be so parochial and human? Isn’t the point of worshiping God to trust that we can transcend our limitations? And why should we be so overweening as to project our biological and historical preoccupations onto the ultimate source of the universe?

A Humanistic Theodicy

How, then, should we face up to Christianity’s founding narrative? What is the viable lesson of Jesus’s execution? Nietzsche said the lesson is that we should be unafraid to embrace our barbaric preoccupation with self-empowerment. Slave morality, he suggested, is for victims who can’t face the truth that even they long to dominate, which is why they fantasize that Jesus will wipe the earth clean when he returns to rule the faithful who’ve renounced their natural roles or “ranks.”

But that social-Darwinian construal of Nietzsche is dubious. The mere fact that millions of people could revere this Christian symbol of “slave morality” for two thousand years demonstrates they’re not just “sickly animals,” as Nietzsche might have put it. When the abnormal becomes normal, standards change. People are not animals in the pejorative sense. Animals may seek power over their environment, to the extent that their bodies are instruments controlled by their genes, but that’s not our primary drive.

To be sure, we use our intelligence and technology to control circumstances. But to attribute the Anthropocene to a “will to power” is to understate the significance of civilization. Behaviourally-modern people don’t seek merely to dominate or to overcome obstacles, but to humanize the world, to replace the wilderness altogether with an artificial extension of our mentality. We aren’t just tool-users, like octopuses that hide in coconut shells or like chimpanzees that use twigs to fish out termites. We’re meaning-creators, gods of new worlds.

We’re terrified of our creative potential, which is why we often protect the status quo against subversive outsiders like Jesus, Socrates, or Confucius. We’re pulled in both conservative and progressive directions, as it were, towards embracing what’s safe and familiar, and what’s radical and transformative. Jesus’s egalitarian spirituality was as revolutionary as Alexander the Great’s cosmopolitanism, but Jesus wasn’t born to inherit a position of political supremacy; he was a spiritual rather than a political “messiah.”

The message to reform ourselves and our corrupt institutions, to free us from self-deception and unworthy delusions survived the destruction of Second Temple Judaism just as it’s survived the temporary failure of many prophets, artists, and would-be revolutionaries. This is how martyrdom works: the failed visionary nonetheless stirs up feelings of guilt in others as we consult our conscience and our imagination to wonder whether we’re honouring our existential calling.