Christianity Debate: Forget the Cross

 Just in time for Good Friday, the popular TV and radio preacher Burkhard Müller stirred up controversy in Germany by denying a central tenet of Christian faith:

»Ich glaube nicht, dass Jesus für unsere Sünden gestorben ist«, (I don't believe that Jesus died for our sins.)

And Burkhard Müller is hardly alone at condemning the church's fixation on the Cross.  The Dutch writer Theo Kars put it this way:

Ein Vater, der seinen Sohn für Verbrechen und Untaten anderer hinrichten lässt, damit die wirklich Schuldigen straffrei ausgehen, würde überall auf der Welt strafrechtlich verfolgt, wenn seine Tat ans Licht käme. ... Und dennoch bildet ein derart primitives, brutales, grundloses Verbrechen die Grundlage des christlichen Glaubens. (A father who allows his son to be executed for the crimes and misdeeds of others, so that the truly guilty ones can get away with the their crimes, would be condemned and prosecuted anywhere in the world, if his act came to light.... And even so this kind of brutal, primitive, and baseless crime is the foundation of Christian faith.)

Does the Passion negate the fundamental message of the Gospels of God's love? The conservative evangelical Web site idea.de has been quite active in condemning Müller and others for their rejection of the Cross:

Die Vermutung liege nahe, dass Müller Jesus Christus aber gar nicht als Gottes Sohn, sondern lediglich als einen herausragenden Menschen verstehe und die Sünde und auch das Gericht Gottes über die Sünde nicht ernstnehme. (It would seem tha Müller understands Jesus Christ not as the Son of God at all, but rather as an exceptional person, and doesn't take seriously God's judgment over sin.)

Some of the most interesting thoughts on the meaning of the Cross can be found in the writings of Eugen Drewermann, the pyschologist-priest who was thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church. Drewermann does not in any sense reject the Cross, only how it has been interpreted by the church through the ages.  For Drewermann, the Cross is has the potential for being a therapeutic cipher of redemption for the whole human person.  Instead, it has often been used as a sodomasochistic tool for moral asceticism:

"This is how things are as long as Chirstianity understands the doctrine of the the redemptive death of Christ externally:  it serves not redemption but alienation, not liberation but opporession, not humanization but repression.  Does this have to be this way? ... It is an outrageous and scandalous state of affairs that the religion of Jesus, born from the struggle against the authoritarian suppression of humans in the name of a despotic God has been the subject of the last 150 years to the well-supported suspicion and exposed to the often corroborated reproach that it is basically othing more than the ideology of this kind of morally garnished sadism, a form of institutional external direction and fear, a grotesque new edition of just that scribal mentality which Jesus with the power of his whole person wanted to overcome."  (Eugen Drewermann, Das Markusevangelium (1990))

Comments

[Axel]

David,

what do you think about the following ZEIT article "Was ist dran am Auferstehungsglauben? Eine kleine Quellenkunde für Atheisten" from Robert Leicht?

http://www.zeit.de/2009/16/Leicht-Ostern?page=all