A Thinking Reed

Thought for the Day

Written by

Lee M.

in

Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ’s Cross at the center of that history? Obviously, one response could be that God does not need to justify Himself to man. It is enough that He is omnipotent. From this perspective everything He does or allows must be accepted. This is the position of the biblical Job. But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and-to repeat once again-Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man’s lot and participates in his destiny. This brings to light another inadequacy, the completely false image of God which the Enlightenment accepted uncritically. With regard to the Gospel, this image certainly represented a step backward, not in the direction of a better knowledge of God and the world, but in the direction of misunderstanding them.

No, absolutely not! God is not someone who remains only outside of the world, content to be in Himself all-knowing and omnipotent. His wisdom and omnipotence are placed, by free choice, at the service of creation. If suffering is present in the history of humanity, one understands why His omnipotence was manifested in the omnipotence of humiliation on the Cross. The scandal of the Cross remains the key to the interpretation of the great mystery of suffering, which is so much a part of the history of mankind.

Even contemporary critics of Christianity are in agreement on this point. Even they see that the crucified Christ is proof of God’s solidarity with man in his suffering. God places Himself on the side of man.

He does so in a radical way:

He emptied himself

taking the form of a slave

coming in human likeness

and found human in appearance

he humbled himself

becoming obedient to death

even death on a cross (Phil 2:7-8)

Everything is contained in this statement. All individual and collective suffering caused by the forces of nature and unleashed by man’s free will-the wars, the gulags, and the holocausts: the Holocaust of the Jews but also, for example, the holocaust of the black slaves from Africa.

– Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope

Comments

5 responses to “Thought for the Day”

  1. Marcus

    I am not familiar with this piece by the Holy Father.

    Is this account intended to supplement the traditional view according to which only God’s own death on the cross could expiate man’s original sinfulness and thus “open the gates of Heaven”?

    A debt of justice paid to God by God, on man’s behalf, because man could not pay it? Because, though man’s death was a just punishment for his sin, it could not fully expiate it and earn forgivenss, and so entry to Heaven?

    I would not guess it was intended by the Pope to replace the traditional view.

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  2. Camassia

    I didn’t think Satisfaction Atonement was THE traditional view for Catholics. I mean it’s only 800 years old, and it’s been taken over by Calvinists…

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  3. Lee

    I would guess that JPII is not offering here a new theory of the atonement so much as emphasizing an aspect of it that speaks to the problem at hand (the problem of suffering).

    The Catechism of the Catholic Church still appears to affirm a satisfaction model as an important part of the story, to wit:

    615. ‘For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.’ By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who ‘makes himself an offering for sin’, when ‘he bore the sin of many’, and who ‘shall make many to be accounted righteous’, for ‘he shall bear their iniquities’. Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.

    616. It is love ‘to the end’ that confers on Christ’s sacrifice its value as redemption and reparation, as atonement and satisfaction. He knew and loved us all when he offered his life. Now ‘the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.’ No man, not even the holiest, was ever able to take on himself the sins of all men and offer himself as a sacrifice for all. The existence in Christ of the divine person of the Son, who at once surpasses and embraces all human persons, and constitutes himself as the Head of all mankind, makes possible his redemptive sacrifice for all.

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  4. Marcus

    Not every descriptive use of “the” is properly taken as quite so definite as Lord Russell thought.

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  5. Marcus

    Sorry, terrible night. Not enough sleep at all.

    Of course, I referred to the traditional view that only God’s own death on the cross could expiate man’s original sinfulness and thus “open the gates of Heaven.” And of these there is just one.

    Score one for Lord Russell, after all, I suppose.

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