On Holy Saturday I often do a lot of thinking about the meaning of the Cross and Death of Christ. I've written before about how I explain the meaning of Christ's death, and the role it plays in bringing atonement, or "at-one-ment", with God through Christ. But here I would like to ponder the meaning of Christ's death in light of the questions: Did Christ have to die? If so, did that death have to happen by crucifixion? In what sense did God "will" for Christ to die, or even "cause" Christ's death?
Christ's Death as Solidarity and Responsibility and Liberation
Over the last decade and a half, as I have pondered texts such as Isaiah 53 and Romans 3-8 and Philippians 2 and 1Corinthians 15, the necessity of the death of Christ has really centered on three concepts: Solidarity and Responsibility and Liberation.
First, the death of Christ is the Apex of the total suffering and rejection experienced by Christ across his entire life, from being born to despised peasant itinerate workers, to judicial murder as a scapegoat after a show trail. In this life and death, God enters into solidarity with the human condition, not exempting Godself from any of it, nor staying aloof from the full brunt of it. In this sense, God “takes our sins” and “becomes sin” in Christ. It is not a judicial payment for the sentence we have been judged guilty of, nor a commercial payment to God of a commodity of infinite worth, nor a sacrificial act to turn away wrath. These commercial and judicial metaphors deeply distort the act of Love which is Christ's death for us, and turn it into something capricious and mechanical. For God's “wrath” is the total consequence of living in a world immersed in selfishness and hate and apathy. But God takes the consequences of that world into himself to identify with everyone crucified by that world. That is God's solidarity with us.
Which leads to responsibility. God created a world in which massive amounts of suffering and death are not only possible, but ubiquitous. The amount of suffering in the world is monstrous and staggering and beyond justification. And God is the ultimate cause of all of it. Now, in order for Love to exist, it may be necessary to have such a world scarred and traumatized by the effects of the abuse of human freedom, and the viciousness of indeterminate chance. Love cannot exist in an unfree world where everything is “under control” and everyone is a automaton. So, God may be required to create such a world as this if it is to be the kind of world that can generate love, and the values of beauty and goodness and compassion that flow from Love. But, even if there is a “good reason” for creation of this world, God is still at fault, God is still to blame, God is still culpable for creating a world in which massive suffering and death happens to all.
So, the cross is the Apex of the total action of God taking responsibility for what God has created, and owning the monstrous pain God has enabled. God may be said to do this in other relations as well: As immanent Spirit, God fills creation, and suffers and groans and dies within every creature that suffers and groans and dies. As transcendent Father, God empathetically feels pain for every creature God has caused pain to, directly or indirectly. But in the personal Son, God has concretely experienced the worst of human existence as a finite human, just like all of us, with all of the horror and dread that being uniquely human entails. The infinite takes on the finite, the eternal fullness of bliss takes into itself temporal pain and lack and abandonment.
From this, the cross begins to deconstruct and liberate us from the structures of oppression which dominate us. The solidarity and responsibility shown forth on the cross reveal a new way of relating to power and privilege. True power is no longer shown in oppressing others. Real power no longer excludes others from the means of human flourishing. Those who wield power can no longer exist as vampires or parasites or slave holders feeding off of the pain and suffering of the downcast. Instead, the most Powerful has emptied itself out, taking the form of a servant, suffering as a human, pouring itself out in death, to show that the old ways of power are at an end. No longer is power to be used to abuse or scapegoat others. Power is to be used to liberate and heal others. The cross crucifies power itself and inverts power structures, and puts to death the ways we use violence and death to keep others in slavery to our entitlement. The cross inverts. The cross brings at-one-ment between the all powerful Creator and a suffering creation. The cross liberates.
Solidarity, Responsibility, and Liberation do not exhaust the meaning of the Christ's death. But they are the primary ways I experience the meaning of that Death. However, could this all have been accomplished some other way? Was Christ's death necessary? Did it have to be death on a cross?
Death as Necessary, Cross as Variable
There is a provocative essay by historian Carlos M. N. Eire in a book of speculative history entitled "What If?". In it, he imagines what Christianity and the late Roman Empire might have looked like if Jesus had died at a ripe old age as a miracle working guru. Would it have changed how the Incarnation was conceived, the Good News Christians proclaimed, or how the Church would spread? Even if we disagree with some of his premises (as I think I do), it is still helpful to spur deeper thought about the nature and necessity of Christ's atoning death.
Because it seems to me that an atoning death, by which God fully embraces the totality of human nature, is necessary. However, whether that death was on a cross by malice, or in a gutter by apathy, or in a bed by disease, I’m not sure if it changes the essence of the atoning death. But I do believe that what has not been assumed into the Incarnation cannot be healed (cf. St. Gregory of Nazianzus). Because in Christ, God becomes human so that humans may become divine (cf. St. Athanasius). So for death to be healed it must be taken into Christ fully and completely. It is in this sense only that God “willed” the death of Christ: Because only through death could death be healed.
This seems to be entailed by a particular view of the Incarnation: Namely that God wants to unite with creation through Incarnation regardless of what kind of creation it is. No matter if creation had evolved the particular kind of persons we call “humans”, or whether other kinds of persons had evolved or been created, God’s eternal desire is to unite with persons fully in incarnation, from the womb to the tomb and beyond. In the Incarnation God takes all the limitations of personal life into God’s unlimited being: The limitations of not knowing all, not being all powerful, and not living forever. Which means eventual death is part of the package of any Incarnation as a finite person.
And in this view of the incarnation, God did not will this merely to redeem people from sin (although that is one of the many benefits of the Incarnation). Regardless of whether persons were stained with sin, or had remained in sinless innocence, God still wanted to enter into persons completely through incarnation. So, if the Incarnation is such an open-ended intention by God, it must be able to be accomplished in a variety of ways, depending on how history and culture actually unfolded. And this includes a variety of ways of dying.
However, many point out that the New Testament (NT) writers make copious use of Old Testament (OT) Law and Prophecy to illustrate the kind of death the Messiah must die. Out of all the different OT images of sacrifice and atoning death, the NT picks out those which most resemble crucifixion. In particular they draw on Deuteronomy 21.23 “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse”. Which, if definitive, would still open up a number of tree-based deaths (crucifixion, hanging, lynching, impaling, etc.). But I don’t think it’s actually definitive. Because there are a lot of OT images that don’t rely on wood: Slicing open sacrificial victims, or burning sacrifices in a fire, for instance.
So, I think out of all the images of atoning death in the OT, Deuteronomy 21.23 was selected because it most matched the crucifixion, not the other way around. God did not “cause” Christ to die in this specific way to fit some kind of prophetic pattern. While the Incarnation does entail that God will suffer death in some form in order to heal death itself, the mode and cause of death was variable due to social and cultural circumstances.
Thus, I think even Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 could be interpreted to match a number of ways of dying. So, no matter how the Incarnate One died, I think the OT could have been mined for typological and prophetic precedents. The hardest way, I think, would have been death by old age. But even there, I think a compelling atonement theology could have been constructed from the OT, particularly from the Patriarchs who died at an old age so that their descendants could inherit the promised land.
In order for a death to be an atoning death, by which the Incarnate One healed death by dying, I would say at least the following criteria would need to be met: 1. It must be against the desires of the recipient (i.e. not suicide). 2. It must involve a high degree of conscious suffering (i.e. it cannot be anesthetized). 3. It must involve consciousness of enduring death (it cannot be so instantaneous and random that it comes without warning). 4. It probably needs to be public, such that others know beyond a reasonable doubt that death has occurred (this creates the basis for a credible resurrection). It seems that any form of death which meets these criteria, whether murder, execution, sickness, or old age, could be an atoning death for the Incarnate God, and would also generate usage of OT typology to explain and illustrate why such a death is atoning.
But just to clarify my claim: The death of the Incarnate One is necessary for atonement. The cause of that death can be variable. And most causes of atoning death could find prophetic and typological antecedents in the OT. And don’t get me wrong: The cross is a particularly effective symbol in so many ways, from Christ being the Axis Mundi around which the world revolves, to Christ literally displayed as the intersection of God and humanity in the vertical and horizontal bars of the cross, to how the cross visibly incarnates the depths to which the Creator suffers together with his creation and his children. The cross is amazing and life-giving and supremely effective. I just wonder if, had Christ died another way, we would have developed equally effective symbolism surrounding that form of death.
Why it matters to speculate about all of this.
This raises the question of why it matters whether the crucifixion was necessary, and whether the cross was predetermined by God from before all ages. Since this question is speculative, and counter factual, and does nothing to change the manner in which Christ actually died, why does it make any difference? I think it matters for at least three reasons:
The first reason it matters is because it gives us a clue whether God is a sadist or not. It is one thing to bring a person into life knowing they must eventually die. I helped bring three children into this life knowing they will eventually face death. But it is another thing to desire someone to die a maximally painful death after torture, and then determine they have to undergo that death despite their desires. That is sadism. To say it another way: It is one thing for a general to send soldiers into a battle knowing they will probably die. It would be another thing for the general to work with the enemy to make sure all his soldiers were captured, tortured, and executed in an incredibly painful way. In the same way, it is one thing for God to plan to heal death through the death of the Incarnate One. It is another thing to predetermine for that death to be inexorably and maximally painful. The former is compassionate, but the latter is sadistic.
The second related reason is what I will call “sadistic maximalism”. This is the view expressed by some that crucifixion is the most maximally painful possible way to die, and thus is the only fitting way for the atoning death of Christ to happen. This is problematic because, while crucifixion is awful, one could think of worse ways to die. Starving and working to death in Nazi concentration camps while watching your people being abused and executed day after day would arguably be worse. Being chained down in solitary confinement in a basement and beaten and abused and raped day after day for years until you are killed would arguably be worse. Even a slow death from cancer or degenerative disease would arguably be worse. However, we might note that comparing how bad different ways of dying are quickly becomes both gruesome and frivolous. And if "sadistic maximalism" is the only way the atonement is valid, and if crucifixion is not the most maximally painful way to die, then the validity of Christ’s atonement is in question. Which seems petty and absurd.
The final reason this all matters is the issue of inevitability and predetermination. Most Christians would affirm that a central aspect of what it means for humans to be made in the image of God is that we are free to make certain choices, and that those choices have consequences, and we are responsible for those consequences because of our free choice of them. If, however, it was predetermined by God that the Incarnate One had to not only die to heal death, but had to die at an exact time and place, in an exact way which was intentionally savage and awful, then this has ramifications for our freedom and our choices.
This means that God is so all determining that every human decision made up until the time of the crucifixion was precisely directed to effect one outcome. This means that, at least until the time of Christ’s death, humans were not free to determine their choices or consequences, and had no responsibility for their actions, because they were all predetermined by God to accomplish one outcome. If this was true up to the time of the crucifixion, then it is almost certainly still true. We are nothing but automatons acting out God’s predetermined plan. And this makes God the direct cause not only of all good, but also all evil. And if God is the direct and actively willing cause of all evil, that makes God evil.
Compare this with a view of Divine Providence in which God has certain key intentions— such as creation and consummation and at-one-ment with God’s creatures through incarnation— and God can work with a radically free creation to creatively achieve these intentions in a variety of ways. God knows every possible choice we can make, and God knows exactly how God will respond to any particular set of choices to steer the overall course of history to accomplish God’s intentions (so nothing surprises God). But those intentions can be accomplished in a variety of ways, and God does not coerce or determine any specific choice we make.
This means we are both free and responsible, and God works with us to actualize God’s intentions in creative ways that really do take into account both the best and the worst of our choices. This view is a life giving synthesis of human freedom to grow into the fullness of God, and God’s unconditional Love to heal and restore the misuse of our freedom. It is infinitely more life giving than a view of the atoning death of Christ which is unduly sadistic, needlessly maximalist, and unrealistically inevitable.
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