Mistaking Doctrine for Scripture, and Keeping an Open Mind

My friend Ari remarked: “Maybe the most elementary Christian idea is that Jesus died for the sins of mankind in order to appease his Dad. So the Christian God can be appeased by having his son tortured to death.” 

He suggested I imagine I’m an atheist or agnostic hearing this doctrine for the first time.

Ari, I told him, stop assuming you know what I believe. You assume, wrongly, that I accept that specific interpretation of the Gospel record. 

I don’t. Baha’is certainly don’t, either.

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I told him after I did precisely the exercise you suggested — hearing the doctrine as if for the first time — it made no more sense to me than it does to you. 

To be honest, my thought process went even further. Consider that by this doctrine, God’s anger at all humanity was appeased by having His son tortured to death by the very people he was angered at. Moreover, the continued idiocy of mankind notwithstanding, God’s grudge was against our legendary progenitors.   

I also considered the doctrine (not held by all churches) that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t “just” the Son of God and a prophet like Moses, as the apostles taught, but instead that he was God in substance, essence, and nature. The strange logic of this doctrine, over which rivers of blood have been spilled, creates a situation by which God incarnates Himself in Jesus. This means that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost sacrificed their totality for human disobedience — and that at the end of the day, all three members of the Trinity returned to Heaven. 

So, ultimately, no one actually dies. Mankind just continues on, having not learned to obey even the most essential teaching of Christ — to love others. 

Stripped to the bone, this idea posits that God gave His life on the cross, then took it back again.

When I undertook to scrub my mind of all the doctrine I’d learned in the Christian churches I’d attended as a child and a youth (some of it very contradictory), I realized that it made no sense to me in context with the teachings of Christ. I was puzzled by the fact that Christ’s words about the spirit had given way to such a simplistic and materialistic understanding of his ministry.

I found myself hyper-aware of Christ’s warning from Matthew 15 to the Pharisees: 

Thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying: “These people draw near to Me with their mouth,  and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

I realized that much of the doctrine I’d encountered in churches took Christ’s metaphors as expressing material concerns, his relationship with God as physical son-ship (avoiding the biological details), and imagining that profession of belief and ritual were essential doctrine while obedience to the commandments to love and serve others were secondary. 

The theology I had learned during my childhood seemed to me exactly backward, for in John 6, Christ said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life.” 

The doctrine of blood atonement is closely related to the doctrine of original sin — that we are all guilty by extension of Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience. This is despite the Old Testament stating plainly in Ezekiel 18 that God does not hold the sins of a father against a child.

Yet you say, ‘Why should the son not bear the guilt of the father?’ Because the son has done what is lawful and right, and has kept all My statutes and observed them, he shall surely live. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. But if a wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed, keeps all My statutes, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die.

I found that Christ’s teaching in the Gospel did not support the blood atonement doctrine. Nor does it support the idea that Jesus was God incarnate. Least of all, does blood atonement make any sense in context with the teachings of Moses or the prophecies of Biblical prophets such as Hosea, who was moved to say on God’s behalf, “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

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Hosea was part of a chorus that included the prophet Jeremiah:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat meat. For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices. But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be My people. And walk in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you.

Christ, himself, refers back to Hosea when he is criticized for his unorthodox teachings: “But go and learn what this means,‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’”

The interpretation that literally equates Christ Jesus with God raises questions that I’ve never heard any theologian answer. Christ was the prophet Moses promised in the Book of Deuteronomy (18:15). Most churches I attended vehemently denied that, but he and his disciples believed it, and the Gospels and Epistles confirm that they taught it. In the history of their Faith, Moses was the only prophet to see the “form” of God. Christ claimed that same station, thus infuriating the clergy. 

Here’s the question: Does this mean that Moses was also God incarnate? I don’t know of any Christian denomination that holds this belief. 

The answers to these sorts of questions are in the Bible record itself in part, and I’ve found that Baha’u’llah’s words on these subjects clear up any lingering puzzlement. Jesus did not teach the blood sacrifice doctrine as it is currently taught in some denominations. He taught that his word, which was the word of God, cleansed and purified the believer and that obedience to that word conferred spiritual life. His message is consistent with the Old Testament prophets. 

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Where did the blood sacrifice tradition come from? I have my own thoughts on that; they’re rooted in cultural anthropology and beyond the scope of this essay, but I think the passage from Jeremiah hints at the answer.

Ultimately, I asked Ari to read the Gospels exactly as he suggested I approach the doctrine of blood atonement with a clear mind and not through the lens of sectarian doctrine. Maybe, I suggested, he could take some advice from Baha’u’llah, who revealed in his Book of Certitude that the spiritual seeker: “… must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth.”