The mechanics of salvation

(The following post has been kicking around in my head for several years, so Good Friday seems like a suitable occasion to bring it out.)

I had already drifted away from orthodox Christianity when I began to think about the following problem, but right now I'd say it's one of the biggest stumbling blocks to ever returning: How, exactly, did Jesus manage to die for our sins? In other words, what made his death necessary and sufficient to forgive us? Why couldn't God simply forgive us before Jesus' execution, and why did he have to forgive us afterward?

Growing up in the church (ELCA, to be specific), the most common framing was that Jesus took our punishment on himself. God demands that we live up to an exceedingly high standard of moral perfection, but since human nature was damaged by the Fall, we inevitably sin and thus wind up deserving eternity in hell. But by dying on the cross, Jesus took our punishment for us and so we're free to go to heaven. The imagery here is typically of a person facing God on Judgment Day and having God pronounce our sentence, at which point Jesus pops up and says "no worries Chief, I took care of it."

But this idea of Jesus taking on other people's punishments is nonsensical from the perspective of justice. Imagine trying to do a similar thing in a human courtroom. Someone has been convicted of a crime, and the judge sentences them to several years in jail. Just then, a member of the audience jumps up and says "Your honor, I will serve this man's sentence for him." By what logic would the judge agree to this deal? It's not enough that if there has been a crime, *someone* gets punished. Every theory of punishment -- retributivist or consequentialist (deterrence) -- requires that the punishment be inflicted on the particular individual who committed the crime. It accomplishes nothing to punish an innocent third party.

It is possible for a judge to be satisfied by punishing the wrong person in one scenario -- the scenario where the judge does not know the wrong person is being punished. But it seems rather odd to premise an entire religion on one part of the godhead playing an eternal trick on the other part. And it's hard to reconcile the idea of Jesus tricking God into accepting the punishment with God's omniscience, and with the Bible's claims that Jesus' life and death were a mission he was ordered by God to carry out.

On top of that, Jesus was not actually crucified for our sins. He was crucified for (allegedly) fomenting rebellion against the temporal and religious authorities in Judea. So perhaps in my example above, we should really have the audience member jump up and say "Your honor, the other day I was beaten up by a mugger. Please count my injuries as the punishment for this man's crimes." That makes even less sense than the original scenario.

Another common frame is that Jesus' death "paid our debt." In this frame, the punishment we deserve for our sins is not some sort of retribution or deterrent -- instead, our sin causes some sort of loss to God, which needs to be repaid. Unlike punishments, debts can clearly be paid off by a third party. A pure creditor doesn't really care where the money comes from as long as they get it back, on time and with appropriate interest. This model fits with the animal sacrifices made by Jews during the temple era -- and indeed, Jesus is often explicitly analogized to a sacrificial animal. Animal sacrifices work because the deity -- be it Yahweh, Zeus, or Baal -- actively enjoys the death and burning of an animal, and that enjoyment offsets their anger at the sacrificer's sin. (Animal sacrifice also often contains a claim that the sacrificer's economic loss is important because it demonstrates the depth of their concern/contrition, but that raises two problems in the Jesus case: first, it brings back the third-party problem noted with respect to taking on a punishment, and second, Jesus' death is not actually a loss, economic or otherwise, for those who get saved by it, since he came back to life three days later.)

A key element of the debt model is that debt only works if the creditor values the thing that's owed to them. If somehow someone ended up owing me a giant pile of manure, I would not ask them to pay it back, since I don't want a giant pile of manure. So God has to intrinsically enjoy the suffering that he's owed -- God likes watching people burn in hell, and he likes watching his son get crucified (likes it, in fact, exactly as much as he likes watching all the people who ever lived burn in hell for eternity). That's a pretty gruesome God we're being asked to worship. Nevertheless, people have worshipped some pretty gruesome deities in various times and places, and "gruesome" is arguably more consistent than "loving" with much of God's conduct in the Bible.

More important, though, is the question of why God doesn't simply declare our debts cancelled without indulging the sadism/masochism of killing his son. After all, no matter what you owe me, I always have the prerogative of declaring it void (and indeed, God specifically ordered the Israelites to cancel all debts every so many years). While there's an argument to be made that strict adherence to justice forbids granting mercy in cases of punishment, there's no similar argument that justice demands not forgiving debts if the creditor is so inclined.

A final bit of imagery I often heard in church was that Jesus' blood washed away our sins. It's quite opaque to me what, if anything, this metaphor tells us about how he accomplished that.

So in addition to the doubts I have about whether Jesus' life, death, and resurrection actually occurred in anything like the form described in the Bible (on which I may post later), I'm stumped as to the mechanics of his death leading to forgiveness. "Jesus died for your sins" seems like a non sequitur.

White privilege and weird names

Working all day has made me late to the pile-on against Texas state representative Betty Brown, who said that if Asian-Americans want to be sure they can exercise their constitutional rights, they should change their names to something Anglo poll workers won't find so weird.

As many people have pointed out, plenty of non-Asians have weird names too. I'm one of them -- most people I meet stumble over my first name (despite the fact that it's pronounced just like it's spelled), and I've learned to respond to anything starting with an "S" (my dissertation advisor sometimes called me "Spencer" as a joking reference to a classmate who misunderstood my name long enough that I decided I didn't want to embarrass him by pointing out his mistake). My name is even misspelled on my birth certificate, so technically my various forms of ID are inconsistent.

Nevertheless, I have never encountered problems voting -- or conducting business at the DMV, a bank, or any other sort of institution -- because of my name. The people I encounter are typically solicitous about getting the pronunciation right, and sometimes make complimentary small talk about it ("that's a neat name. Where is it from?"). This is clearly not the experience of the Asian Texans who were at Rep. Brown's hearing.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to say this is about race/ethnicity. Aside from my first name, everything else about me -- my skin color, the shape of my face, my clothing and hair style, my accent, my last name* -- screams "'normal' (white) American." My name thus becomes an interesting oddity, but one that is reasonable for the person to learn to cope with because I seem like I belong, like I deserve the same quality of service as Jane Smith and Bill Jones. But when an Asian person with an unfamiliar name comes along, at least a few of those features will not match the implicit model of a normal American held by some such workers. Thus their weird name will be taken as one more mark of foreignness, making some people feel put-upon to accommodate an outsider who insists on being treated equally. This idea of Asians as perpetual foreigners is quite obvious in the way Rep. Brown spoke -- e.g. telling the Asian spokesman what "your citizens" should do -- and belies the idea that this is somehow simply about the inherent difficulty of pronouncing certain names. Accommodating "Stentor" is easy, because I'm clearly already a normal Anglo American, but accommodating Asians means not just learning new names but also admitting that the U.S. is a multi-racial, multi-cultural society.

(An aside I couldn't figure out how to work into the post: I have had two teachers in my lifetime who made "learn to correctly spell and pronounce my name" an explicit class assignment. One was my Polish 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Kolodziejski. The other was my Tamil college intro anthropology professor, Dr. Sangarasivam.)

*Interestingly, "Danielson" is much less common in the U.S. than it looks. I've never met a Danielson I wasn't related to, though I know they're out there. But since it uses the "common male first name + son" pattern, it comes off as a very common, normal name (though I do get referred to as "Daniels" from time to time) -- more normal than names like Nguyen or Vasquez which are objectively far more common in this country.