On the Meaning of Crucifixion
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Crucifixion, 1675 -1682
Our sins are forgiven through the death of Jesus on the cross. What does this mean? What are the sins that are forgiven? How did Jesus accomplish forgiveness through the Crucifixion? It is important to answer these questions because part of believing in Christ involves believing in His power of resurrection, and one cannot be a believer without having some ideas about what he believes. (Can one be said to be believing that Nixon was the 37th president of the United States without knowing to some extent what ‘Nixon,’ ‘president,’ and ‘the United States’ mean?) To be a Christian, one must be disposed to declare (or state) that Jesus is Lord (Rom. 10:9-10). But the noise that one is making is not to be counted as a declaration, i.e., as a locutionary act, unless the speaker knows the syntactic and semantic significance of his utterance.
The remark that Jesus died for our sins is rather
misleading because it is not immune to abusing the wage model of the
explanation. It is said, “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). However, this
should not mean that one’s sins are forgiven as long as they are paid by an arbitrary
person, not necessarily the sinner himself. That is, what is being done (sin)
is inseparable from who has done it (sinner). The price-tag of the sin follows
the sinner, not the sinful behavior, and who gets to pay for it does matter. Otherwise,
we get the paradox that we are free to sin without any consequence since the
blood of Jesus is costless (Gal. 5:13; Rom. 6:1-2, 15). The wage model as an
analogy has a limitation in explaining in what sense our sins are forgiven. The
predicament of sin is as the following. We are the sinners, and we must pay for
our sins (by death). We have no ability to nullify this transaction, i.e., to
forgive ourselves. Jesus paid for our sins so that we did not have to, but He
paid it in the way that His payment counts as ours as well (Gal. 2:19-21; Rom.
6:5-11). In the rest of the reflection, I will develop a metaphysical model of the explanation: our original sin is the exercise of our own rational agency apart
from the divine perspectives, and the Crucifixion freed us from our sins by
invalidating our moral outlook of the world.
To motivate this model, let us conduct a thought-experiment.
What would it have been like for the disciples when they saw the death of Jesus
on the cross? The Gospel of Luke records in detail a story of two (ex-)disciples
moving out of Jerusalem after the Crucifixion as Jesus in disguise approached
them (Luke 24:13-35). When Jesus asked the disciples what they were talking
about, the two expressed disappointments about the then-recent death of Jesus,
saying that they were hoping “He was the One who would redeem Israel.” The
followers of Jesus regarded Jesus as a messiah in the sense that they thought
Jesus was going to save them from the Roman rules and lead them to
independence. Their concept of messiah and salvation was such that what God
is supposed to do, i.e., what righteousness is, is founding a political
state of the Jewish nation. But Jesus did not accomplish this, at least not in
the way that they expected.
Throughout the gospels, there are multiple incidents of the mismatch between our concept of what ought to be done (righteousness) and what Jesus actually had in mind. When Peter expressed concerns for the upcoming sufferings of Jesus, he did it out of care for the person. Yet, Jesus rebuked him by calling him ‘Satan’ (Matt. 16:21-23; Mark 8:31-33; Luke 9:21-22). This is because what Peter considered to be good was not in accordance with the will of God. Similarly, when Jesus asked Martha whether she believes that He is the resurrection and the life, Martha responded by affirming her belief that Jesus is the Son of God (John 11:24-27). The kind of being that Martha believed Jesus to be (and needed Him to be) out of the desperation for her dead brother Lazarus was not what Jesus insisted her to believe Him to be. What these incidents show is that we constantly project our own concept of justice, righteousness, and salvation onto the work of God. Elsewhere I argue that receiving the Gospel is accepting the rules of God (how one ought to conduct in the world according to God) rather than one’s own.
In fact, that we hold onto our own moral (and, I will argue,
cognitive) outlook is exactly what the original sin comes down to. The moral
outlook in the broadest sense includes the way one perceives himself in
relation to others and the world. It dictates how one ought to behave and attribute
values to his surroundings. In respect to Kant, if we expand valuation to
include cognition, the moral outlook coincides with our worldview, or the
conceptual framework we employ in coping and engaging with the surroundings.
In Genesis 1, God makes moral judgments about His
creation, and whether the creation is complete is determined in respect to
these moral judgments. When men ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, God (Elohim) remarked that men have now become like God, which
motivated God to expel men out of Eden in order to prevent them from attaining
eternity as well (Gen. 3:22). This incident implies that part of what it is to
be God is to have the ability to make moral judgments, to determine what is the
right and the wrong thing to do. That is, rational (and moral) agency is
originally the property of God.
Different agents have different moral outlooks simply
because morality is essentially subjective in the sense that what is good is
that which is beneficial and what is evil is that which is harmful; morality
can be inter-subjective, but not objective in the sense of being dictated from
the view from nowhere as it is always from someone’s perspective that
things are beneficial or harmful. Given scarcity, multiple agents mean
competitions and constant adversity, therefore a state of nature. Thus, it was
natural for God to prevent men from attaining immortality lest it creates at
least two equal (competing) agents, making the state of nature the default
state of the universe. (Perhaps this is unacceptable in the sense that Spinoza
thought there is only one substance in the universe.) Our rational agency is
fallible in the sense that it is subject to empirical uncertainties (since our
perspectives are not equally eternal as to compensate for the defeasibility of
human viewpoint). Thus, our moral outlook (i.e., our way of thinking) is
imperfect and is incapable of saving ourselves from the constant strives and
struggles, leading to death. This is because, as shown through the history of
philosophy and mathematics, it is impossible to provide a ground for the foundation
of our knowledge that is insusceptible to skepticism and paradoxes (the Myth of
the Given, the two dogmas of empiricism, Putnam’s paradox, the incompleteness
theorem, etc.). The original sin is not merely a result of an action that our
ancestors or we have done. It is the very fallible nature of our rational capacity
that is cut off from the divine perspectives.
When the disciples witnessed the death of Jesus on the
cross, their own moral outlooks have collapsed as their expectations of what God
would do for them are invalidated. We must remind ourselves of the golden calf story
in Exodus. When the Israelites worshipped the golden calf as an idol, they
worshipped it as “YHWH” (Exo. 32:5). That is how much indistinguishable
to us our own idolatry is from the orthodox. We cannot tell whether we are
doing things right as, Davidson remarks, “we can’t get outside our skins to
find out” whether our beliefs are in correspondence with facts.[1] Thus, the work of salvation
that Jesus undertook was saving us from this fallible state of our rational capacity.
This is done by imbuing us with God’s own divine nature, or perspectives
(John 3:6; 20:22; Acts 1:5-8, Gal. 2:20; Rom. 8:1-15). To accomplish this, God
must first have demolished the temple, our own concept of what is good
and evil, of what is the right thing to do, i.e., what God is like (Luke 21:6).
Only if these veils are lifted can we start having unadulterated access to how
things actually are and ought to be (Matt. 24:51). (Here, I would suggest that
we should interpret the significance of the Nietzschean death of God along this
line as what Nietzsche meant by the death is really the limit of the logo-centrist
view of the Enlightenment, i.e., the philosophical tradition from Pythagoras-Plato
to Kant and perhaps onward to Russell-Frege and logical positivists.) After so,
Jesus Christ could provide us with the infallible (i.e., self-justifying)
foundation of our knowledge, which is the divine life or essence (Acts 4:11). Accordingly,
the Given is always Mythical. Likewise, we are free from and have paid the dues
for the sins in the sense that our old selves (moral outlooks) have died and we
are to be filled with a new way of understanding ourselves and the surroundings,
metaphorically speaking, “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). The end
result of this transformation is the citizenship in the new Jerusalem, a
perfect political system that is to replace any human institution (Rev. 21:2).
(In my view, this political system is what could realize Plato’s Republic.)
I shall qualify the conclusion of this reflection by commenting that it should discourage the dogmatic thought that we can ever fully grasp the will of God. Anyone who claims to know with certainty the will of God (for a particular instance) must be dismissed as heretic, whether he be a theologian or a minister. For our default condition qua human is academic skepticism, and philosophers are right about this. As Wittgenstein writes, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”[2] The only thing we must be sincerely uttering as Christians is the repentance of our own transcendental weakness, beyond which we must keep quiet (Matt. 4:17). Only this repentance is the confession of faith, and humility is the highest virtue of Christianity.
[1] Donald
Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (1989).
[2] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921, 1922).
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