In the 2012 movie, Batman Returns, one of Cat Woman’s driving motivations was her desire for a clean slate.
As you might imagine, she has a pretty sordid history as an international cat-burglar, and, like all of us in the age of social media, every detail of her past is on record somewhere on the world-wide-web, making it impossible for her to escape the past.
But word on the streets of Gotham is that someone has developed a powerful computer program called “The Clean Slate” which will erase your entire internet record from every database on the planet, all with the simple click of a single button. And for reasons that are perhaps obvious, Cat Woman would do anything to get her hands on it.
In this respect, Cat Woman is more than just a comic-book super-villain, she is also a metaphor for us all. At least, the way data about us accumulates on the internet until it starts to define and control us, is one of the growing social issues of our day.
Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain uses the term “reputational bankruptcy” to talk about all this. The web never forgets, he reminds us, and as more and more of our lives are lived online, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape the impact of our digital footprints.
“What we need,” Zittrian argues, “is some way to declare ‘reputation bankruptcy and start over. Like: If the internet allowed you a one-time pulling of a lever that would delete your digital identity and you could just start fresh.”
The concept of “reputational bankruptcy” is a helpful image for something the Bible calls “Justification by Faith.”
The idea is that we are justified—saved from the sins of the past and saved for a relationship with God—not by works—keeping the Old Testament Law or adhering to some human-defined moral code or what have you—but through Faith in Jesus Christ.
Strictly speaking, the term “justification” is a legal term that describes a judge rendering a not-guilty verdict in a court of law. To be justified, in this sense, is to be declared not-guilty.
But what, exactly, does this mean? How does God declare us “not guilty” on the basis of our faith in Christ, and what does this justification actually look like for us in real life?
This is where the Clean Slate comes in handy. Because in the same way that all the digital data that’s accumulated about us on the internet has all sorts of implications for our present—impacting our ability to get a job, to secure a bank-loan, to get a date, and so on—so much so that our digital identity can come to define us in all sorts of unhealthy ways—so too with sin.
Biblically, sin is not just about the moral failings of the past that need forgiveness, it is about how these moral failings define us and have all sorts of implications for our present: our ability to serve God, our ability to commune with him, our ability to take our place as one of his people. We don’t just need them forgiven, we need a brand new spiritual identity.
Justification by Faith is for our spiritual identities, what the Clean Slate is to our digital identities.
On the cross, Christ stands in our place as our fully-human representative—the Second Adam is what the Bible calls him—and through his own death on the cross, he puts to death the entire sin-record of our lives—he cancelled the accusation that stood against us, is how the Bible puts it, nailing it to the cross.
Through his death on the cross, he wipes the slate clean, and then, through his resurrection on the other side, he offers us a brand new identity to live, untied with his resurrected life.
In a very real way, putting our faith in Christ is like declaring “reputational bankruptcy” and so allowing God to “justify us”—to wipe the record clean so that Christ’s identity can now define us.
And, like it says in one place: “Having been justified like this through faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
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