ExFundie

[Note: I should mention that the fundamentalists' beliefs about Jesus fit pretty much into the camp of general historic Christian orthodoxy. So when I talk about their believing this or that about Jesus, I'm not trying to say that these particular beliefs are different from what mainstream Christianity has always believed about Jesus. The reason I go into some detail about these beliefs is that when they are fitted into the rest of the fundamentalists' world view, they produce much different results from what we see in non-fundamentalist Christianity. So it isn't the beliefs about Jesus where the two sets of Christians differ very much; it's how those beliefs fit into the wider philosophy, and what is produced in the Christians' behavior as a result.]

Before we discuss Jesus, we should remind ourselves of the most important beliefs that Christian fundamentalists hold about God, the world, who Man [sic] is, and how humanity got into its current predicament. These beliefs don’t just form the backdrop to their views about Jesus; they actually determine these views, dictating that Jesus must be viewed in certain ways and not in others.

First, beliefs about God. He is the one and only God who exists (Christianity believes itself to be a monotheistic world view, with all other gods being counterfeits of the Real Thing). The pronoun “he” is the proper pronoun to use of God. He is love. He is holy. He cannot sacrifice either of these attributes in favor of the other (though in fundamentalism, he tends to lean more to the “holy,” judgemental side). He is also, despite the monotheistic claim, a Trinity; in the story of Jesus this doctrine really comes into its own.

Next, Man and the world (and fundamentalists take “Man” as the proper word to represent the entire race; women are by definition subordinate to men in this world view). Both Man and the world were created perfect, but when Man disobeyed God’s command and made himself the ruler of his own life, he and the physical world immediately began to run down and die. Man’s reasoning power became prone to error, and his spirit is born in a state of separation from God that, if he dies unredeemed, becomes permanent upon his physical death. He is born sinful, and will do nothing but sin, and therefore is born already condemned. He can do nothing to redeem himself.

So God promised a Redeemer, and spent a few thousand years manipulating history, nations, and people, to engineer the conditions required to produce the one who was promised.

Because God, being infinite, was infinitely wronged by Man’s sin, the payment to wipe the slate clean would have to be awfully big. It would, in fact, involve infinite sacrifice, blood, and death before the demands of infinite holiness and justice could be satisfied. The extensive laws God gave to the Israelites, his chosen people, were meant to illustrate the magnitude and completeness of the payment that would be required to redeem humankind.

With all of that as a backdrop, we come to it at last: the moment at which the whole wretched mess can start to be cleaned up. Jesus is born.

But already, that simple statement is not so simple. For fundamentalists, the Redeemer cannot be just a regular guy born in Bethlehem to a humble Jewish couple.

First off, if he is an ordinary human, he will be born sinful and already under condemnation himself, and therefore disqualified to redeem anyone. So he must be sinless.

Enter the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be a sinless human, it seems that he cannot have a human father. Various reasons for this belief have been advanced throughout theological history. Some believe that Mary had to be a virgin because sex is basically sinful (or at least questionable and icky), and Jesus’ nature would have been tainted if he had been produced sexually. Others believe that the sinful nature (and everything else that’s really significant about human beings) comes down from the father rather than the mother, so Jesus bypassed the sinful nature by not having a human father.

The virgin birth is a doctrinal detail that is absolutely non-negotiable. The fact that such a thing appears virtually impossible in the natural world is no obstacle to belief. Remember that fundamentalists believe they are dealing with the Creator of the entire universe, who is the author of Nature rather than a servant of Nature, and who can certainly intervene at selected moments for his larger purposes. A supernatural intervention is not just unsurprising at such a crucial moment – it is almost imperative, to make sure everything turns out right.

So Jesus was born, literally without the hand (or anything else) of any human man being involved. And he was sinless.

We should add a note here, about Mary his mother. Christian fundamentalists do not venerate her, except as a normal woman who was obedient to God despite the social stigma she might suffer from the circumstances of this birth. They neither believe her to have been sinless, nor do they believe she was a perpetual virgin [references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters seem to prove she was not]. Fundamentalists view the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary as idolatry, and shrink in horror from the very thought that a sinful human woman could be thought of as the Queen of Heaven, or as an intercessor between people and God. Fundamentalists believe Jesus died as much for Mary’s sins as for anyone else’s. The Catholic veneration of Mary is one of several reasons that fundamentalists believe the Roman Catholic church is not a “real” Christian church. They consider it as counterfeit as any other religious belief that sets up a man-made substitute for God’s “true” plan of salvation. To venerate Mary, in their view, is no different from venerating the Hindu Lakshmi, the Babylonian Ishtar, or any other false goddess.

But back to Jesus. If he was merely human, he would still not be sufficient, even as a single sinless Man, to atone for humanity’s offense against the infinite holiness of God. In fact, the only one “big enough” to atone for infinite offense would be God himself.

Well, guess what! Luckily, Jesus isn’t just a man – he is also God. And here we encounter the divine Trinity in earnest.

Fundamentalists believe that God couldn’t just say, “Oh well, boys will be boys” and let the offense go; the demands of justice had to be met, and the atonement had to be made. And it had to be made by Man, since Man was the offender, yet no man was sufficient to the task. So because God loved Man, he himself would make the atonement, in sufficient measure – by becoming a Man and making the atonement in both his divine capacity and his human capacity.

So as well as being fully human (indeed, a complete representative of the entire human race in the same way Adam was at the beginning), Jesus is fully God.

And what a colossal stroke of luck – the structure of the Trinity (Divine Father, Divine Son, Divine Spirit) was exactly what was needed to fulfill the logistical requirements for making the atonement. The Spirit created Mary’s pregnancy, the Son descended to become human and make the atonement, and the Father was the one to whom the sacrifice was made, the one who judged it sufficient.

You could almost think the whole thing was pre-planned. And of course – according to fundamentalists, it was. God created the world, and created Man, knowing full well that Man would fall, and that atonement would be needed. Fundamentalists are careful to say (though the logic is hard to maintain; in fact, I believe it impossible to maintain) that humans had free will despite God’s foreknowledge, and were not inevitably doomed to sin. But God knew it all before it happened, and had already planned the solution. Which is why Jesus can be described in the scriptures as “the lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world.”

So the Trinity plays a big part in Jesus’ birth and ministry, and the fundamentalists will not part with this doctrine. In practical terms, the exact same results could theoretically have been achieved with three separate divine beings instead of one, all united in purpose and love and holiness. But the fundamentalists are determined that there is only one God, and are fiercely in love with the idea of God sacrificing himself to himself to atone for sin. So the Trinity is here to stay.

The first big reason why they want to maintain the Three-in-One idea is that they insist that they are the heirs of the Jews of the Old Testament, for whom there truly was only one God. Fundamentalists regard the ancient Jewish writings as the foundational documents for their own beliefs, so they cannot allow themselves to split the godhead into three separate beings, despite the fact that fundamentalist theology has God functioning essentially that way. (We won’t discuss, here, the evidences for polytheism even in the ancient Jewish writings of the Old Testament.) So the Trinity is the only way they can resolve the contradiction. But also, they feel that if you make the three beings into separate individuals, you can possibly divide the running of the world into separate spheres. So that, theoretically, any one of those beings could be focussed on something that the others were not. But the fundamentalists want God to be in absolute control of, and conscious of, everything there is, all at once, totally and completely and simultaneously. Splitting into three separate gods is seen as somehow making the three into lesser beings, which cannot encompass the fundamentalist idea of how God functions.

The nature of Jesus himself is subject to similar debate, trying to understand how his divine nature and human nature interact and somehow function as one. He is described as both fully human, and fully God, and this can be a dilemma when one tries to understand how he could have been a realistic representative of all human beings during his life.

Fundamentalists say that the reason his thirty-plus years of human life were valuable to us is that he showed us how to live sinlessly and in full obedience to God. He is therefore an example for all other humans to follow as they re-orient themselves from a life of sinful self-centeredness into a God-oriented life. Another reason for his human lifespan is that he is supposed to have faced temptations and trials and weakness the same way the rest of us do, and therefore knows our difficulties, and empathizes with us and our hardships. And his perfectly sinless human life also became a life that qualified to be offered as a sacrifice to God, for the sins of the world.

Fundamentalists stress that it was in Jesus’ human capacity that he lived this perfect, sinless life. But objections have been made to this scenario, from the very beginning of church history. For one thing, Jesus can hardly be viewed as a typical human (and therefore someone we can expect to emulate) when he seems to have been born with a few distinct advantages we don’t have. He was born without the sinful nature the rest of us are saddled with, meaning he had no automatic tendency to sin. So could he, in fact, really empathize with those of us who, as fundamentalists delight to remind us, will always and only choose to sin because of our intrinsic nature? The very reason Jesus qualifies at all to be the Redeemer is that he is sinless. No sinful nature dragging him down inevitably. He starts out with a leg up on the rest of us from the very beginning.

And what about that little matter of his being God? Fundamentalists deny that Jesus’ God-nature helped him make his human choices, and insist that he faced all of them only as a human. Yet his God-nature manifests all over the place, almost every time he acts, in the biblical writings. The most charitable interpretation one can make is that he switches back and forth a lot.

Fundamentalists do have discussions about how Jesus’ basic natures function, but not in the sense of questioning whether the God-man doctrine is correct in the first place. Rather, they make a few assumptions – that Jesus was both God and Man, that he was perfectly human except that he lived sinlessly, that he was as fully God as he was fully human, that his two natures are still one rather than making him two separate beings – and any discussion the fundamentalists have after that are just questions of mechanics and logistics and results, rather than questioning the basic doctrines themselves.

So. We have the Redeemer as they see him: Jesus the Christ. The title “the Christ,” meaning the “anointed one,” refers to the long-standing Jewish practise of anointing someone with oil when they enter a leadership role. The anointing symbolizes the authority of the Spirit of God, descending onto the person to enable him to fulfill his role. In Jesus’ case, his anointing with the Spirit was literal, rather than symbolic, when the Spirit descended to him in person at his baptism and God’s voice announced that this was his Son. And so Jesus received the title: the Christ.

At the end of his sinless life, and a few short years of teaching and ministry to the needy, came at last the sacrifice that fundamentalists believe was prophesied to Adam and Eve thousands of years earlier, just after they had eaten the forbidden fruit and fallen into sin.

And here another question arises. Why could Jesus not simply have just died, rather than first be rejected so violently by the Jewish and Roman authorities, then tortured, then executed? One of the reasons offered by fundamentalists is that mere bloodshed wasn’t sufficient to atone for the offenses of Man – there had to be extreme suffering involved as well. (There were no hints, though, that the millions of sacrificed animals in the Old Testament were tortured before being sacrificed, even though they were supposed to prefigure Jesus’ sacrifice.) The more blood and gore the better, as far as fundamentalists are concerned. The extreme suffering supports one of their favorite doctrines: that the sin of the human race is really, really bad, so evil and bad that it’s almost unforgivable. So to atone for it, there has to be some really, really bad and nasty punishment. (This is undoubtedly one reason why fundamentalists generally adored Mel Gibson’s gory movie about the crucifixion, despite his being one of those “not-real-Christian” Roman Catholics.)

But fundamentalists would offer another reason why the torture and suffering happened. This would be that sinful people simply DO reject the purity of God and his teachings. Humans are so sinful and wicked that even if God himself came down, in love and mercy, to try to reconcile with them, they would always in their pride reject him furiously. The torture and the crucifixion simply prove, to fundamentalists, that humanity really is in a state of evil, and really is in need of redemption.

But there’s no denying that the torture, bloodshed, and violent death were pre-planned by God. For some reason, Jesus couldn’t just have his throat slit in the temple, like all the foreshadowing sacrificial animals, and let his own blood be sufficient for the atonement. There had to be suffering too.

One can see, rather graphically, why fundamentalists major so much on the holiness and judgement of God rather than the love and mercy. When they do speak of love and mercy, it is in the context of saying, “See what he horribly suffered because he loved you, because it was necessary to save you?? If you can reject that magnitude of love, then you deserve all the horrible suffering of hell!” So even love is intricately connected with death and judgement, always. There is no mercy except what is bought and paid for, violently. This goes a long way to explain many fundamentalist attitudes toward non-believers.

But to summarize, before we go on. Why is Jesus not just a “good man”? Because he had to be not just “good” but completely sinless, to qualify to stand in for sinful humanity. And he couldn’t just be a man, because to make the sacrifice sufficient, he had to be as big as God, the one who was offended by sin. In fact, he had to be God. He lived life as a human being, facing all the temptations and trials we face (though with his godhood manifesting at frequent intervals), and then had to suffer rejection, torture, and a violent death, to appease God and make the sacrifice effective.

Next we need to examine just what this sacrifice actually accomplished -- and why, even though it was supposedly sufficient for everybody, not everybody will be "saved" by it.

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