Bring Back the Buffalo (VI): The Cross and the Buffalo Skull

In Jesus and the Victory of God, N. T. Wright argues that somewhat controversial point that for First Century Jews, like those to whom Jesus of Nazareth first proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, “sin” and “forgiveness” were tightly bound together with the Old Testament narrative of exile and return. His position—and in broad strokes, I tend to agree with it—is that in a Second Temple Jewish context like Jesus’, “forgiveness of sins” meant, in particular, forgiveness of the national sins of apostasy and corruption that were the cause of and explanation for the Roman oppression and national subjugation they suffered as a people. He makes the case that they would have interpreted their present situation in terms of the Babylonian exile described in their sacred scriptures, and they would have seen the Roman occupation as evidence that in some real sense the exile had not yet ended. Inasmuch as the Babylonian exile was a direct result of ancient Israel’s corporate, national sin, the “sin” that needed to be confessed and forgiven in Jesus’s Judea, in the mind of a first century Jew, was also corporate, and national in nature.

In N. T. Wright’s succinct assessment: “Forgiveness of sins is another way of saying ‘return from exile.’”

This position was controversial when N. T. Wright first articulated it, mostly because it seemed to undermine the widely-accepted, individualized gospel popular in modern day evangelicalism, that understands “sin” as our personal, individual moral failures and shortcomings that need we need to be “saved from” by making Jesus our “personal” Lord and savior. This popular-level understanding of the Gospel has little room for the idea of corporate sin, that needs to be confessed by a people, in order that corporate forgiveness, in some sense, might be proffered. And yet, in N. T. Wright’s reading of the New Testament, this was at the heart of the historical Jesus’s ministry and message.

He suggests, for instance, that when the gospels relate that the whole region of Judea was going out to the Jordan river, “confessing their sins” and being baptized by John, they were not confessing their individual sins, or even their personal sinfulness. They were “confessing” the fact that Israel was still, in a very real sense, suffering the realities of the exile, and that they were, in another very real sense, implicated in the national, historic sins that had resulted in this situation, and that they wanted the Lord to end the exile and heal their national life.

It's a poignant reframing of the story, though it doesn’t fit neatly on a 4-point Gospel Tract.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea lately, that for the historical Jesus, “forgiveness of sins” might be more about the healing of national, corporate sin than it is about individual absolution from personally-committed sins. It’s been especially helpful to me as I’ve processed my recent trip to Pelican Lake First Nations Reserve, where a delegation from our church participated in a Bring Back the Buffalo initiative with Loko Koa and Tearfund. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the goal of this initiative was to gift a First Nation community with a herd of buffalo, as a small step towards restitution and reconciliation.

Ever since I heard about this project, I found it deeply inspiring and profoundly moving; it becomes more so after you’ve done a bit of research into the horrific story of Canada’s systematic decimation of the buffalo herds that once roamed freely across the prairies, sustaining Indigenous communities and playing a central role in their culture. Throughout the 19th Century, the Canadian government actively encouraged the slaughter of millions of buffalo, both to clear space for settlers and agriculture, and to force the Indigenous people who relied on the buffalo to accept treaties and move to reserves. There were an estimated 30 million buffalo roaming freely on the Great Plains of North America when settlers arrived in the 1600s; by the end of the 19th Century these had been hunted to the brink of extinction.

I have never hunted a buffalo; I’ve never posed for a grotesque photo next to an obscene mountain of bleached buffalo skulls; I was born long after the last buffalo hunt ended on the great plains of Canada. In that sense, I am not “responsible” for the decimation of those herds.

I have, however, benefitted from the prosperity and the security that the nation of Canada enjoys, a prosperity owing, at least in part, to the fact we’ve had so much resource-rich land to make ourselves at home in, land we acquired, historically speaking, through Government policies that exploited and oppressed the First Nations who called this land home before us.

I grew up visiting Elk Island National Park as a child, home to one of the few remaining “free roaming” herds of buffalo on the continent (I put “free roaming” in scare quotes because, even though the buffalo at Elk Island are left to roam at will, the area of the park they’re allowed to “freely roam” amounts to little more than 75 square miles). We used to oooh and ahhh over the buffalo herds we saw grazing peacefully in its meadows and among its trees, but no one ever told me the reason why the entire population of wild buffalo in Alberta could now fit in a 75 square mile enclosure, when they once teemed across the prairies.

In this sense, I am implicated—personally implicated—in the sad story of greed, violence and racism that is the history of Canada’s dealings with its Indigenous neighbors, even though I myself have never personally slaughtered a buffalo.

This is one of the reasons I find N. T. Wright's read on the gospel so compelling, because it reminds us that sin runs far deeper than just our individual shortcomings, that it is woven into the entire web of social relations, both present and historical, that make us who we are and form the context in which we live. The individual first century Jew who went out to hear John and be baptized may not personally have done anything to cause the Roman occupation, but they were implicated in Israel’s national sins nonetheless, and knew it, and received John’s baptism as a profound sign, both of their acceptance of their part in the problem, and of their longing for corporate absolution and restoration.

When we realize that Jesus offers us forgiveness at that broad, corporate level, that through the Gospel we can be forgiven—even of our part in the decimation of Canada’s buffalo herds—it sets us free, I think, from the paralyzing, unspecified sense of shame that often inhibits robust action towards reconciliation, while allowing us still to face these issues squarely, with an honest acknowledgement of our own responsibility in them.

I realize this might be misunderstood. It may sound like I’m saying that, even if Canada’s historic treatment of Frist Nations people was sinful, and even if I have benefitted personally from that sin, well, Jesus forgives me, so it just doesn’t matter.

That’s not what I’m saying at all.

What I am saying is this: that when we come to terms with the implications of the cross in its broadest sense, we discover that even the systemic sins that we may have unwittingly participated in have been judged—condemned and atoned for—in the crucifixion of Christ; and if we accept the Son of God’s death on our behalf for even those sins, he forgives us of that culpability and, in so doing, graces us to pursue right relationship with our Indigenous neighbors, not out of a place of shame or a need for self-justification, but out of a profound longing to live as agents of the very shalom we ourselves have experienced in the cross.

Realizing that Jesus died for our corporate sins, too, sets us free, I mean, to redress those sins honestly and authentically, with no fear of condemnation or need for excuses. I have tried in previous posts to give some ideas of what it might look like to “redress those sins honestly,” but my sense is that, unless such efforts are tied intimately and inextricably to the cross, they can very easily slip into self-righteous virtue signaling that do more harm than good.

When they are done in response to the cross, though, and as the outflowing of the grace we’ve experienced in the cross, they can be done with all the humility and grace, the longing for community and neighborliness, the open selflessness and shared understandings that are so crucial, if our interactions with our Indigenous neighbors are going to result in genuine truth and real reconciliation.

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Three Minute Theology 3.8: Clean Slate

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.”

Three Minute Theology 3.7: Justice for All

In 2007, after years of irresponsible lending practices and unethical mortgage trading had inflated it to unsustainable levels, the U.S. housing market finally collapsed. Global stock markets fell and millions of people lost their jobs, in an economic disaster that cost the world trillions of dollars.

The causes of the 2007 economic crisis are complex, but many attribute it, at least in part, to fraud and corruption among the financial institutions that rated and sold mortgage bonds. Because of the unethical practices of a few large, rich banks, in other words, a lot of ordinary people lost their homes and their livelihoods.

Something that has enraged many people since, however, is the fact that none of the CEOs of the financial institutions seemingly responsible for this situation were ever brought to justice for their part in the mess. Instead, when the crisis threatened to bankrupt many of these banks, the US Government provided a financial bailout, essentially giving them billions of tax-payer dollars to keep them afloat.

To the extent that it is the exact opposite of what happened on the cross, the way these banks were “forgiven their debt to society” without any recourse to justice, it provides us a helpful way for thinking about an aspect of the atonement that is sometimes difficult for us to wrap our heads around.

It’s something called “Penal Substitution.” Penal Substitution refers to the idea that Christ satisfied the demands of God’s justice, by taking onto himself the punishment for our sins, in our place, on the cross.

If it’s misunderstood, Penal Substitution can leave the impression that the Christian God is some petty, vengeful deity who can’t be satisfied until someone suffers to appease his wrath, which is in flat contradiction of the Bible’s own description of God, that he is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Penal Substitution starts to make perfect sense, however, if we think about it in relation to the 2007 financial crisis.

The US government’s decision to bailout the banks—to forgive them their debt—was based on the assumption that the banks themselves were too big to fail, and, if they went under, the whole economy would collapse. In their view, forgiveness was necessary.

But what leaves us with a justifiably sour taste in our mouths is the travesty of justice here—that no one was held to account, and justice was not served.

To grasp how this relates to the cross, we must first consider that, when he created the world, God was after a world where things like fairness, and right relationships, and harmony, and holiness, where all the things we think of when we think about justice, obtain.

Human beings, of course, have not lived up to the Creator’s intention for us; the global economic crisis of 2007 is only one of a million examples of this. We sin.

And herein lies the dilemma.

For us to be included in his plan for the creation (and because he loves us passionately, he passionately wants this for us), God must forgive us our sins. But if he were to forgive us without somehow satisfying the demands of justice, it would sort of be like a government that forgives the debt of a bunch of corrupt banks without just regard to the plight of the ordinary people hurt by them.

From God’s perspective, both undeserved forgiveness and genuine justice are necessary if his plan for the creation is to be accomplished.

And this is the dilemma that he resolves for us through the cross.

Penal Substitution is not about Jesus pacifying the rage of an angry Heavenly Father. It is about a loving God who, in the person of Jesus Christ, suffers the full consequences of our sin, for us, and in our place, so that God can forgive us with just regard for the severity of sin, and so that he can deal with sin in all its severity, without excluding us from his plan for the creation.

Like it says in one place: he made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that we could become the righteousness of God.

Three Minute Theology 3.4: Won by Love

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis Tennessee.

King was one of the key leaders of the American Civil Rights movement, and was working tirelessly to bring about racial equality in America.

While this was a tragic moment in American History, some historians of the Civil Rights Movement have noted that, rather than silencing Martin Luther King, his murder had the opposite effect.

At the time of his death—the very week he was shot, in fact—the American House of Representatives was debating the Civil Rights Act. The waves of protest that swept the country immediately after King’s assassination forced lawmakers finally to act.

Charles Mathais, a politician at the time, put it like this: “Members of Congress knew they had to act to redress these imbalances in American life to fulfill the dream that King had so eloquently preached.”

President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into Law on April 11, exactly one week after King’s death.

The way in which Martin Luther King’s apparent defeat actually led to a profound and deeper kind of victory over the evil of racism, is a helpful image for us as we think about theories atonement—our theological answers to the question: “How does Jesus’ death on the cross save us?”

One of the answers the New Testament gives for this question is that in some mysterious way, God actually won a profound, and very real victory over evil, through the Cross.

In one place, it says it like this: “by his death he [has] destroyed him who holds the power of death, and has freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” In another place it says, “God disarmed the powers of evil and triumphed over them in the cross.”

This atonement theory is sometimes called the “Christus Victor” theme—Christus Victor being Latin for “Christ the Victor.” And the idea is that human beings are in some kind of spiritual bondange to evil—sin, death and the devil, is how the Bible talks about it. We are slaves to our evil nature and held captive by death.

And because we are unable to free ourselves, God won a decisive victory for us, to break evil’s power over us and set us free from our bondage to death.

Just exactly how the death of a 1st Century Jewish Holy Man could actually be God’s Victory over evil is difficult to explain.

The earliest theologians talked about it in terms of God fighting a spiritual battle with Satan, on the Cross. They sometimes used the metaphor of a fish going for bait on a fish hook. Satan, in this analogy, is the fish, and Christ on the cross was God’s “bait.” Satan believed he had devoured Christ, only to discover the “hook,” that is to say, three days later Christ rose again from the grave.

Modern theologians have developed other ways of talking about Christ’s Victory on the Cross. Some suggest, for instance, that by dying as a perfectly innocent victim at the hands of the World Powers, God in Christ exposed how cruel and idolatrous human power-structures really are. In this way, they say, he broke their power over us.

Other theologians trace human sin back to our fear of death—we exploit others, hoard things, and so on, all because we are afraid to die and we believe that these things will give our lives meaning in the face of death. Through his death and resurrection, Christ replaced our fear of death with the hope of resurrection glory, and so broke sin’s power over us.

Probably none of these explanations gets to the very heart of the mystery, how Christ’s death on the cross could actually mean, for his followers, victory over sin and death, but the writers of the New Testament were pretty convinced that this is one of the things that was happening when Jesus died for us on the cross.

Like the apostle Paul put it: Thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Three Minute Theology 3.3: From Head to Toe

There’s this Arts and Culture program on Canadian public radio  called Q, that I used to be a big fan of.  It was all about music and film and other cultural trends, and it usually featured fascinating interviews with fascinating celebrities.

In the fall of 2015, this program went through a dramatic upheaval, however. The host, a pretty well-known name in Canadian media and much loved by fans, was involved in a salacious scandal involving some pretty unsavory allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.

Even though these were simply allegations, the host was seen as the public face of Q, and the damage had been done.  Fans were disillusioned.  Fans felt betrayed.  Fans dropped off.  Many even felt a sort of guilt-by-association: I think I did, at the time.

The producers of the show tried to recover from the scandal; they made public apologies; they brought in guest hosts on a rotating basis.  But everything they did seemed touched with the taint of the whole sordid affair.

The only way to escape it, it seemed, was to completely rebrand.  They relaunched the program with a new logo, new theme music and especially a brand new host.  The program kept its name—Q—but everything else was rebranded under the head of a new host.

Q is a successful program again—though I’m no longer a fan—but the story of Q helps us get at one of the major ideas in the story of the Cross, and the reason why the death and resurrection of Jesus brings salvation to human beings.

The idea here is a theological concept called recapitulation.  It’s a Latin word that means something like “summed up under a new head,” and the idea is that in Jesus Christ, and especially through his death and resurrection, God “recapitulated” our humanity, summing it up under a new head.

The idea goes something like this: originally, God created human beings to live in holy relationship with him, and in loving relationship with the rest of creation.  But because of human sin, people did not, and have not, lived up to that original intention.

Adam and Eve, in other words, sinned.  Scandalously.  And no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape the taint of that scandal.  We are guilty by association.

So God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Second Adam, or the New Adam, is how the New Testament writers put it, to sum up our humanity under a brand new head.

Through the Cross, God puts-to-death our old human nature, and its guilt-by-association with Adam; he crucifies it in himself, and then through the resurrection he offers us a brand new way of being human.  The resurrected Jesus puts his Spirit in us so that we can fulfill God’s original intention for humanity: a right relationship with him and a loving relationship with the rest of creation.

In this theory of the atonement, the cross is the place where our old “tainted” human nature dies and our new human nature is “summed up” or “recapitulated” in Jesus.

The ancient theologians felt that this was one of the most crucial things that happened on the cross.  One compared it to a painted portrait.  “If a portrait becomes distorted and stained,” he said, “the artist doesn’t throw the canvas away, but the subject of the portrait has to sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material.”

We don’t sit for hand-painted portraits that much anymore, so perhaps a more contemporary analogy is the radio program Q.  When it became tainted by scandal, the only way to save it was to completely rebrand it.

The producers didn’t cancel the show, but they “summed it up” so to speak, under a brand new host.

Metaphors are limited, but in a way, this is what God has done for human nature in the person of Jesus Christ.  He recapitulated it with a brand new host.  Like it says in one place, “His purpose was to sum all things up in Christ.”