I’m half way into “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott and I have to say I have a much tougher assignment in the book swap challenge with Jeremy (ReverendRockstar). He has given me a weighty book about the classical theory of atonement. I held this view at one point in my life so for me it is less about gaining new information and more about reflection and reconciliation. My first impression is that I’m not sure I realized how bizarre the fundamentalist faith of my childhood appears when viewing it from the outside looking in. I have found some positive areas for agreement and I’ll expand on those in later posts, but first I need to make a couple of observations.

As with most religious viewpoints, there are a few assumptions and biases that must be accepted before anything downstream can make sense. The first assumption of John Stott is a very strict theistic view of the divine that reminds me of the gods in Greek mythology. In order for the classical theory of atonement to work, God needs to be something like Zeus who is a transcendent intellectual being consciously controlling, manipulating, and sentencing mankind from some other remote planet or maybe a parallel universe. Stott doesn’t go into these ontological assumptions in this book. Maybe that is something my conversation partner Jeremy can clarify. I know that in my past, the reason I held tightly to ancient anthropomorphic images of God is because I had just never thought about any other options. For fundamentalists, the whole point of being Christian is to train people to adopt an ancient view of the universe complete with ghosts, demons, miracles, and supernatural after-life. Depending on what century you live in, it may also include a flat Earth and an orbiting Sun.

The questions I have at this point are: How much of this ancient worldview does a Christian need to hold and would it be a problem if that changes again in another 500 years? In this version of reality, where is this kind of God? Do I need to have an opinion about “his” location or for that matter “his” gender?

I realize that what I’m doing in this post is beyond the scope of Stott’s book. He begins with all this as assumption and it isn’t fair to critique his book for not explaining how he got there. That isn’t his intended purpose but his argument makes no sense without this lens imposed onto the narrative. The more I read, the more I feel like Stott makes the Bible sound like a science fiction movie or one of my childhood favorites "Clash of the Titans".

I thank God that I have more choices than strict theism and atheism! For me, God is not a Jewish version of Zeus but instead God is the ground of all being. God is not an intellectual being but the essence of all intelligence. I do think Jesus is divine, but "divine" doesn’t have to mean that his molecular structure was different or that his DNA was not a derivative of his earthly mother and father. I see Christianity as people embracing Jesus’ model for the ideal way to be human and participating in a society based on peace through justice (the promised-land and/or the kingdom of God). The issue for us is how we can each be transformed into our full potential as humans (born-again, resurrected, reborn) and then how we can make this unique vision of life a reality right here inside the space and time that we can control.