Friends, In this third installment, let’s find where the Bible says “Jesus paid a price for our sins.”  Blessings! Bob

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Spirituality Column #854

March 28, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Delightful Gift, Part 3

By Bob Walters

“Delight is what distinguishes a gift from a payment.” – Ephraim Radner, First Things

After two weeks of laying the groundwork for my distaste of the reflexive and widely unexamined modern Bible hermeneutic that endlessly declares “Jesus paid a price” for our salvation, let’s try to find this popular doctrinal misdirection in the Bible.

It’s what I did 15-20 years ago.

Modern Bible Christendom is fat with metaphors, allegory, and assorted other comparisons and story devices to tell us about the grand, divine transaction of Jesus’s life for ours.  Dying on the cross was a quid pro quo; Jesus “traded” something – His life – for our salvation, and thus paid a price for our forgiveness. His body on the cross and his blood on the ground were the payment Jesus made to save us.  It was a high cost to Him, and He bore this punishment that was otherwise ours to bear.

That should sound very familiar, because nearly everybody endlessly hears some version of that divine economic arrangement and bargain for salvation in church, hymns, worship, Bible study, Christian media, devotionals, corporate prayer, and virtually everywhere else “two or three” are gathered in the name of the Lord.  Jesus paid a price.

But there is one notable place it doesn’t appear – except only by the most glancing of blows, inattention to detail, and the observational inertia of expecting to see it there – and that is in the Bible; the Bible that is the Holy Truth of God and our treasure map to discerning, finding, trusting, and entering the Kingdom of God.

Early in my Christian life – and I was in my late 40s / early 50s at the time – Bible scholar George Bebawi, recently retired from the divinity faculty at Cambridge University, England and teaching a weekly Bible class at our church, noted this odd quirk of Western Christianity. We in the Western church tend to reduce the uncountable riches and gifts of God, Christ, and Holy Spirit to the consumerism of our culture.  To wit: any value demands a cost, and any sin demands punishment. Someone must pay the price! But wait. “Grace?”

George’s observation flew in the face of what I heard everywhere else in the church and studies of my nascent Christian walk; “Jesus paid a price.”  So, I took all the words I could think of on this transactional palate – bought, cost, paid, price, purchase, punishment – and, having just discovered how to use the concordance in the back of my Bible, I looked them all up.  And I threw in “ransom” and “redeemed” as well.

Um … with a couple of exceptions, the words basically did not / do not appear in any context with Jesus on the cross, our salvation, our forgiveness, or our being heirs in Christ of God Almighty adopted into the Kingdom of God.  I’d invite you to look for yourself.

I’m glad I added “ransom” and “redeem” because we misunderstand – or rather, we force a misunderstanding – that these always have to do with some payment of currency.  No, “ransom” is the condition under which freedom is attained: it may or may not include money.  In Jesus, it didn’t.  We are “redeemed” as a gift, in Jesus’ blood, as something unearned, like the sure forgiveness of sin we have through Christ.  Nobody buys it.

Two notable scriptural exceptions seem to be Paul’s parallel words in 1 Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23, where in each place we see the phrase, “you were bought at a price.” 

I’d only note two rules, as with any scripture: 1. examine the context, and 2. don’t build an entire doctrine off any single snippet of scripture.  Context in 6:20 is the brothel at the Corinthian temple of Aphrodite, so guard your body, and 7:23 is about not becoming a slave; guard your body and your freedom.  And consider, as Ken Bailey suggests, that “bought at a price” reminds us not of a consumer purchase, but who, in love, owns us.

That owner is Jesus, whose love secured our salvation.  What a delight!

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) ends next week with shocking Old Testament news.

Friends, If life’s purpose is to glorify God, then our proper gauge is our delight, or rather, the deeply personal appreciation of God’s gift: not a payment made on our behalf. See the column below.  Blessings! Bob

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Spirituality Column #853

March 21, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Delightful Gift, Part 2

By Bob Walters

“Delight is what distinguishes a gift from a payment.” – Ephraim Radner, First Things

 Please forgive my continuing presence on this soap box mounted last week regarding the ubiquitous presence – in modern Christian worship and doctrine – of transaction theology that says it is payment, not grace, that frees our souls.

Disagree?  Count the times in a church service – in prayer, singing, homilies, or sermons – that our salvation is somehow tied to Jesus paying a mysterious price.  Our souls were purchased at a price. Jesus paid our debt.  Jesus was punished for our sins.

No one can point to the recipient of the “payment” – Jesus is already God so He’s not paying God, and I’ll lay great trust on God not paying Satan to “free” us – but that’s our modern, earthly, mercantile, unwavering metaphor for the saving wonder of God’s love, grace, and obedience.  God simply picked up the tab by killing himself. We’re on the payroll.

That rankles me every time I hear it and I hear it a lot.  More details on that are available in last week’s opening salvo (852 – Delightful Gift, Part 1). Today I wanted to fill in some blanks, still holding the belief that my delight is the gift of Jesus, not the lingering guilt of forlorn sin and an unrepayable debt I can barely comprehend. 

Love … I understand that.  Grace frees me … in humility.  Obedience? I try.

First blank to fill … who the heck is Ephraim Radner, author of the wonderful aphorism on the top line above? He was born to a Jewish father and lapsed Catholic mother who himself joined the Episcopal Church at age 14 and is now a priest, theologian, professor, writer … and current occupant of The Back Page column – an institution in itself – of my beloved First Things, a conservative Catholic journal of theology and culture.  I read it because 17 years ago, Russ Blowers recommended it.

The Back Page column is usually the toughest thing in the magazine, if you don’t count the theology arguments in the Letters section.  Radner here (March 2023) is analyzing another philosopher, but notes this: “In a created world, delight fuels the energy of our lives and, rightly understood, marks the governing purpose. Every moment or thing of delight is the incarnate articulation of God’s glory.” 

If life’s purpose is to glorify God, then our proper gauge is our delight, or rather, the deeply personal appreciation of God’s gift: not a payment made on our behalf.

Early in my tutelage under Dr. George Bebawi – my friend, mentor, and weekly Bible study teacher at E91 from 2004 through 2017 – he emphasized the laziness of reducing the love of Jesus to a simple idea of “payment,” “purchase,” or “cost.”

Though perhaps useful as analogy and metaphor, they diminish our potential for deep love and relationship with Jesus.  I don’t remember how he said it, but I’d express it as being similar to being friends with someone to whom you owe money.  That debt is always the first thing you think of, not the love or relationship. I’ve had that experience.

Is it a “salvation issue” thinking Jesus paid a price?  Not sure … not my call.  I would say it is a quality-of-this-life and joy-in-the-here-and-now issue.  Did you ever try to pay someone who didn’t want to be paid?  Or, they try to give you your “grace” back and both parties are embarrassed?  Maybe its unintentional and well meaning, or even noble, as in, “I should pay for this.”  I think Jesus tells us, “We should love for this.”

This is why God loves a joyful giver and, I’d add, a delighted receiver. Joy and love don’t keep score, and delight sweetens life.  In Jesus, we needn’t sweat the payroll.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) years ago tried to find the “paid the price” doctrine in scripture and was convinced only that it really and truly is not there.  That’s next week.

 Friends, If the death and resurrection of Jesus – and our salvation – was all such a great “free gift” from God, why are we always talking about it as a payment? Some thoughts.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #852

March 14, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Delightful Gift, Part 1

By Bob Walters

“Delight is what distinguishes a gift from a payment.” – Ephraim Radner, First Things

It is a Christian no-brainer that our eternal salvation is a gift from God.

We cannot buy salvation.  We cannot earn it or work for it.  We cannot trade for it, debate for it, bargain for it, beg for it, or pay for it.  Heck, before Jesus, humanity didn’t even know to ask for it.  

In the Bible we find the only road to it; we have to “believe” for it: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of your own doing; it is a gift from God, not a result of works...” (Ephesians 2:8). God’s grace and love save us, through Jesus.

And then, we have to love for it. Jesus commanded, on multiple occasions, to love God and love others.  Paul writes, “… If I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2).  Faith, and love … Godly salvation.

The gift of salvation is Christianity 101.  Without faith in Jesus, we are sinners far from God.  With faith in Jesus, we are sinners close to God.  It is a closeness granted to us by the grace of God; we are restored and covered by the righteousness of Jesus. 

We know salvation because there exist in this life – a life of faith in Jesus – the prayerful “heavenly realms” of faith and love that tease and peak and promise relief from our sins, witness the truth of God’s righteousness, and reveal the purpose of Jesus’s life on earth: His mission to restore fallen humanity to our Creator’s Kingdom.

That is the gift: truth in relationship with Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit now, and grace and salvation in the assurance of God’s love eternally.  It is a gift; we know it.  The Bible never says “pay for it.”  The Bible never punishes us for it.

But that brings up the points – P Points – that are today’s bullseye: purchase, price, payment, and punishment as they regard our faith, salvation, and Jesus’s mission. Salvation is an expression of God’s love; yet we regularly make it a profaned expression of earthly, consumerist transaction in monetary or punitive terms.

How? Well, even though we would all agree it is a free gift and by grace, listen to how salvation is constantly characterized and marketed in churches, sermons, hymns, and virtually all modern and therapeutic Christian theology: “Jesus purchased us.” “Jesus paid a price for us.”  “Jesus paid our debt.”  “Jesus was punished for our sins.”

Really?  Find any of those specific things in the Bible. As general metaphors they work because our modern culture – commercial, moral, judicial – is based on all value requiring payment, and all wrongs requiring restitution.  But that’s not grace; it’s a picture of guilt-ridden, “get-even” transaction that interrupts God’s work of love and faith.

Grace isn’t Jesus “paying a price”; grace is Jesus loving us and obeying God.

Punished?  Crucifixion was a punishment, yes, but Jesus was murdered by those who hated what He said about God’s grace.  Jesus’ death opened our door to heaven. 

If humans understand the loving work of Jesus as only a “paid” transaction, you can be sure humans will try to keep score … on their own judgmental human terms.  No way will that equate to the divine justice of God’s Book of Life or mercy seat of heaven.

My advice?  Delight in the Lord’s grace and live with joy, neither measuring a mythical payment plan nor fearing punishment.  The difference is eternal.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will fill in some blanks next week.  For now: prove him wrong.

 Friends,

Here is Common Christianity column #851 (3-7-23), Antioch ‘Devastated’. Antioch, the Christian landmark noted in the Book of Acts, was destroyed by the recent earthquake in Turkey.  Hurts my heart. - Bob

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Spirituality Column #851

March 7, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Antioch ‘Devastated’   

By Bob Walters

“And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.” – Acts 11:26

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal headline, lower right on the front page, hurt my heart in unexpected ways: “Ancient Antioch Faces its Devastation.”

The bustling, multicultural, religiously calm city known for hundreds of years as “Antakya” – the “Antioch” we know from the Bible – is today, WSJ reports, “a moonscape of broken concrete, stray dogs,” and soon-to-be refugees surviving in tents. The horrific Feb. 6 earthquake in southeastern Turkey near Syria has evidently stopped Antioch’s civilizational clock at 2,400 years: throughout the region are ruins everywhere, 51,000 known dead, with countless more missing and assumed dead under rubble.

Antioch, third largest city in the Roman empire, crown jewel of the ancient “Silk Road” trade route, and the first place the disciples of Jesus were called “Christians,” rose from the ruins and ashes of a similarly devasting sixth century earthquake to grow into the modern city of Antakya. It was a thriving, peaceful, multi-cultural city of 400,000.

All I had previously known, specifically, about Antioch, is encapsulated in that Acts 11:26 quote above; it was the first place anyone was called a Christian.  Details of the surrounding scriptural text in Acts 10 and “The Church at Antioch” section of Acts 11:19-30, were not on my radar.  The WSJ story sent me back to my Bible.

In Acts chapter 7 we see the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr, killed under the supervision of Saul of Tarsus, who in chapter 9 is converted by Jesus to a life of faith and discipleship as the Apostle Paul.  After Stephen’s stoning in Jerusalem and in fear of Saul’s then-murderous ways, Christians scattered to places like Antioch, and there spoke not only to Jews but to Greeks as well.  The Spirit was obviously with their efforts.

“And the hand of the Lord was on them, and a great number turned to the Lord,” (Acts 11:21).  The apostle Barnabus, the disciple who replaced Judas the Traitor, was sent by the church in Jerusalem to Antioch, “saw the grace of God” (v23), fetched Paul from Tarsus, brought him to Antioch, and for a year they “taught a great many people” (v26).  Antioch was perhaps the first great multi-cultural mission field outside Jerusalem.

And now … it’s gone.  Or may as well be.  Politicians, according to the WSJ, say they “will rebuild it in a year,” but of course politicians always say those kinds of things.

“Founded along the Orontes River in 300 B.C. by one of Alexander the Great’s generals,” WSJ recounts, “what’s now known as Antakya was once the capital of the Roman province of Syria.  The empire built Antioch into a grand metropolis of theaters, aqueducts, and baths.  It was also an entrepot (shipment center) for caravans linking Asia with the Mediterranean world in what would become known as the Silk Road.”

WSJ adds, “The apostles Peter and Paul made Antioch a center of their new religion with Cathedrals and churches springing up.” And noted, “It was there their followers first became known as Christians.”

Modern Antakya was a calm, religious melting pot of cooperating neighbors of Muslims, Alewite (branch of Shiite Islam), Sunnis, and Jews, along with Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians.  The city had indeed carried forward the grace Barnabus, in perhaps 46-48 A.D., had noted in the first decades of Christianity.

Considering all the religious turmoil in the region, not to mention the Syrian civil war raging only miles away, Antakya was a beacon of hope … sadly extinguished,

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was initially encouraged that WSJ used B.C. instead of B.C.E., but notes its failure saying these followers were of Peter and Paul, not Christ.