For the past couple of weeks I've been writing about the nature of sacrifice in the Bible, and how it relates to different ideas of sin and salvation. So far we've seen that the picture is a lot more complicated than the traditional Western Christian ideas of substitutionary atonement would suggest. The Scriptures of both … Continue reading Sacrifice in Romans 3.21-26
As we saw last week, for the past thousand years, the Western Christian imagination has understood Jesus' death primarily as a sin sacrifice, almost to the exclusion of other biblical metaphors for sin and salvation. Specifically, Western theology has been dominated by a specific interpretation of what sacrifice meant and means, substitutionary atonement: In sacrifice, … Continue reading A Survey of How the Bible Talks about Sacrifice
My midweek post this week introduced the complicated issue of sacrifice in Christianity, focusing especially on the substitutionary models of Christ's death that have dominated Western Christian theology for the past millennium. These models assume that Jesus was punished for our sins, in order to assuage God's anger and thereby fulfill the Jewish sacrificial system. … Continue reading Defilement and Purification: A Reflection on Sin and Salvation and Hebrews 10.11-25
This series exploring different biblical metaphors for sin and salvation would be incomplete without looking at the understanding of sin that most readily comes to mind for most of us: sin as infraction, rule-breaking or trespass. This approach understands sin as crossing agreed-upon boundaries. What makes this image interesting theologically is that it doesn't have … Continue reading Law-Breaking and …?
"All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." These words of William Shakespeare from As You Like It capture well the feeling we all have from time to time that our lives are not our own — that we're all too often caught up in the deep behavioural ruts … Continue reading Jesus and the Problem of Performative Religion: A Reflection on Mark 12.38-44
Matthew Root 