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A while back, I had a conversation with a conservative Christian on theology.
Below is the transcript of a portion thereof:
"And I suspect that you hold the moral influence theory of atonement - correct?"
Not at all. [For more on the Moral
Influence Theory, click here.] What I believe is that there indeed exists
a circumstance through which man is separated from God. This separation,
however, does not exist through the sinful nature of man. Rather, it exists
because of the efforts of an entity to counterfeit God's creation in man and
prohibit that man from enjoying the benefits of true, full fellowship with
God.
So it is that although God created man, both male and female, in the image of
God [Genesis 1:27] and prescribed for them the fruit of every tree [Genesis
1:29], this [other] entity took man and made from him a woman [Genesis 2:18-23] and
jealously proscribed the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge [Genesis 2:17]. The
Tree of Knowledge was proscribed because the entity could not abide the
possibility that man might live as equals among the Elohim [Genesis 3:22].
Therefore, the entity cast man away from God's presence and into a world of
imperfection, where man, woman, and their descendants would be forever reminded
of their subservience and enslavement to the entity. [Genesis 3:14-19,23-24]
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From here, the entity sought at first to destroy man [Genesis 6:7]. Something
apparently either changed his mind or otherwise prevented him from doing so;
some Gnostic writings hold that Sophia intervened. [See Irenaeus's Against
Heresies, 1.30, for more info on this.] Having been so thwarted, the entity
next sought to condemn man of his own imperfection. After all, how can an
imperfect man abide in the presence of a perfect God? To that end, the entity
gave man the Law to demonstrate how man cannot, of his own efforts, be brought
back into fellowship with God. Rather than act as our salvation, the Law was
supposed to have allayed the entity's fears as expressed in Genesis 3:22.
Enter Jesus Christ. Christ lived as man for several reasons, not the least of
which is substitutionary atonement to reconcile man's imperfection. However,
to say that Christ is merely a substitutionary atonement is to ignore the
metaphysics [remember from my last post?] of the circumstances behind man's
fall from Eden.
Christ also lived to show man that the force separating man from God is
external to God's grace. When Evangelicals state that Christ releases us from
Mosaic Law, they are quite correct: Christ frees us from the Law's chains by
showing that God has already freed us from this entity's enslavement. "Come
now, and let us reason together," says the Lord through the prophet Isaiah
[1:18], "though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Note also the word
"reason" in this statement: This calls us to apply the Gnosis man gained from
the Tree of Knowledge to see Christ clearly.
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