The Infinite Cross of Christ

This is a big, deep post, and I’m not sure how I will put it into words.

I suppose it starts in one of my previous posts, where I discuss my new vision on abortion. Please read the full post, but in summary I was saying that abortion is always an intolerable evil, but which still needs to be there. It’s always wrong, but is often the best way forwards. If you find you are walking on the forbidden lawn, you still have to walk on it to get back to the path. I referred also to the Israelite soldiers who went into Canaan and committed genocide under God’s command, and then offered sacrifices because they had incurred bloodguilt by breaking God’s law – even though he told them to do it..

So now I am developing those themes. Imagine an American abortion clinic. Outside are two massed demonstrations: one shouts and screams about the rights of the child, one screams and shouts about the rights of the mother. In the past I have always been very partisan: vocally anti abortion. I have even presented motions in meetings of my branch of ‘Unison’ (many years ago) to denounce the union’s extreme pro-choice policy. But now I see that we are created in god’s image, and both of those demonstrations is expressing the heart of God. God cares passionately for the baby he has created in the womb. He also cares passionately about the life of the mother. Both opposing demonstrations are expressing the heart of God.

So how do we proceed?

The difficulty is that we are mortal, limited, physical human beings. We don’t share God’s infinity. We cannot reconcile is trinity with his indivisible one-ness. We want one answer to each question. Our God is infinite. In him, parallel lines meet. Opposite truths are in balance. Free will and predestination co-exist. Three is one. Abortion is both the ultimate sin, and the ultimate right.

And yet, even within the infinity that is God, these opposites somehow jar. His love and his justice are not easy bedfellows.

Because of that, infinite problems require infinite solutions. In infinity, the normal rules of maths and physics cease to apply. And yet, infinity can still fit within the finite. If you go on a journey, you keep halving the distance remaining. You do it an infinite number of times. It should take forever, but in fact you reach your destination in a finite time, despite the infinite number of distance-halvings. And so: The infinite God shoe-horned himself into a finite man. The immortal one died.

So in the cross, parallel lines meet. It is the place where every irreconcilable opposite is reconciled. Love and justice embrace. Free will and predestination turn out to be Siamese twins. Abortion is the ultimate sin - permitted. The innocent is a convicted criminal, the convicted criminal is innocent.

The Cross of Christ is the narrow neck of the hour glass through which the whole universe falls. The Cross of Christ is the black hole through which we pass into the next universe. It is the singularity from which the universe emerges, and collapses into. It is the union of the infinite and finite. It is the union of God and man. Immortal and mortal…………………….


In fact, it’s really quite good!

Looking at it; is it two lines crossing on a flat plane, or is it four parallel lines meeting at the vanishing point on a far horizon?

Hot Springs to Heresy

As I child I went to Rotorua in New Zealand. This is an area of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The mud made an impression on me because you could see where a bubble was about to appear – the surface would slowly heave up, then it would seem to stretch and get thinner before finally the bubble would burst, splattering hot mud randomly in all directions.

The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.

Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.

This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.

So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?

If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.

Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.

If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.

So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.

The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)

Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.

[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]

This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.

The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.

So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.

And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.

When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.

Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”

This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.

And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.

And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.

He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.

And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.

But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.

If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!

And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.

Christ takes responsibility

This is an idea that has been cooking in my brain for a while, and I'd appreciate your thoughts as to whether it is a well known idea, a slightly different take on a well known idea, or something more novel.

We talk about what Jesus was actually doing on the cross, and we can get into Christus Victor and substitutionary redemption and all those different theological ideas - which I should be able to list by now but I'm not that clever.

The image that I want to look at is more of a politician. In the UK and no doubt similar hings happen elsewhere, we are used to the press, media, and opposition MPs calling for Government ministers to resign becasue something has gone wrong in their department. And of course usually the minister in question denies it all vigorously, and the afair drags on for weeks while he hopes it will all die down, and of course it doesn't and in the end he is forced to resign after all. And it would have been better if he had resigned right a the very beginning.

This initial resignation would not mean that he himself has done wrong, only that the error has happened within the department for which he is repsonsible. It is on his patch. His watch. Therefore it is his responsibility, even if he didn't actually do it. And that is why he should resign anyway, as a matter of course.

And so we come back to the crucifixion.

In my illustration, God is the government, and Jesus is the minister.

The world says:
What about suffering?
What about natural disasters?
What about wars?
What about disease?
What about children taht die?

Jesus says:
I didn't do it
It's not my 'fault'
But it is my responsibility - it happened on my patch, my watch, so i am responsible.

His response is to 'resign', willingly, not waiting to be forced out of office. But the extent of the problem is such that a simple resignation, or abdication, is insufficient. In accepting responsibility, he takes on board the full consequences, and that means that he, the innocent and infinite God, takes on limited mortal flesh and dies, taking on himself - accepting responibility for - the sins of the world.

What about suffering? --- Jesus accepts responsibility and dies
What about natural disasters? --- Jesus accepts responsibility and dies
What about wars? -- Jesus accepts responsibility and dies
What about disease? --- Jesus accepts responsibility and dies
What about children that die? --- Jesus accepts responsibility and dies

So, am I a genius, a heretic, or just regurgitating stuff others have already thought of?