Why a Christ?
I was asked to explain why there had to be a Christ. That's a pretty hefty question, and I'm not sure I'm really qualified to tackle. That said, I thought I'd take a swing at explaining how I understand the Christ, and instead of burying it in comments, I would open it up to the whole community. After all, when I started writing it, I discovered that it really turned into a convert_me challenge.

I am very open to being converted. Historically, I have meandered through atheist/LaVeyan Satanist, Pagan (of a pseudo-Native American flavor), and theist-agnostic. It's only within the last five years that I've landed back into the lap of Reformed Christianity, and I don't feel like this is the end of my journey. I do think that I've been making forward progress, and that I understand more than I did before, but I'm certainly not done learning.

To me, my religious exploration is based on a need to understand my soul, my world, and my place in it, and so I have a practical-ministerial kind of approach to religious understanding. The upshot is that the virulent anti-Christian crowd who know it's all stupid before they even see the argument can just pass on: they won't find traction with me, because I simply was that kind of angry too long to give it credibility. Instead, I'd like to know what people think of this way of phrasing/presenting/understanding the spiritual world. I'd particularly like to hear from Christians outside the Reformed tradition (catholic_heart, I'm looking at you), and from those who have left the Christian faith rather amicably (like naturalexponent, who asked for this post originally).

Now, this is going to be pretty poor apologetics, because I'm really going to start where apologetics stop. I am going to take as a given in the argument that there is a God who is the grand architect of all things physical as well as an omniscient entity of unbounded love, and move forward from there.


Now, let's start with this concept called "sin". I've never found the legalistic concept of "sin" -- that is, the idea that "sin" is a list of things that are Naughty simply seemed silly to me. Lists that are specific and provide a whole series of very specificy Naughty Acts (e.g. Leviticus) seem to pretty quickly stumble across something or other that seems much more grey than their rule provides for. The reality of this sinks in quickly, and then you get hemming and hawing in an effort to try to make seperate the black from the white in those grey boundaries. It just doesn't work for me, and I've not been moved by the approach. So, given that the legalistic concept is out, how do you look at "sin"?

To this point, I look to the Great Commandment -- stated positively, not negatively. Now, the interesting thing to note is that there is one commandment asked for, but two given back. That is to say, there is something inseverable between the commandment to "Love your God" and "Love your neighbor" -- to present one is to present the other. And this makes sense: after all, if I am to love God and God loves everyone, then am I not reserving some of my love from God if I choose to not love those He loves? It is not possible to truly and openly love God while resenting or ignoring His love of all human beings.

But what does this talk of love have to do with sin? Well, the way I understand it, "sin" is distance from God -- distance from love. The fundamental nature of loving your neighbor is to treat your neighbor with as much value as you treat yourself, and to respect their humanity and "being-ness" just as much as you respect your own. When you see someone who hurts themself with the same pattern of behavior over and over again, it's easy to see that person as a machine, without any consciousness or value. When someone cuts you off on the freeway, it's easy to treat them as simply an obstacle whose entire existence is defined by the way in which they inconvenienced you. Yet both of these people, like all people, have a history, a context, a family, friends, thoughts, dreams, and consciousness. They have as much weight, personhood, and thought as you do. And it's very easy -- doubly-so for intellectuals like theologians and philosophers -- to artificially devalue that truth in other people. And when they do, they distort their view of the reality in which they live, they contort their conscience to appease their conveinence, and they make room for destructive patterns of behavior.

So, when there is this devaluation of the otherness, it actually hurts the person doing it. Dehumanization of others is ultimately self-destructive, in terms of not only a person's mental health, but in terms of a person's relationship to God. It's that self-destructive dehumanization that I refer to as "sin" for short.

Now God is a being of love and understanding. Yet how can God understand sin? How can God understand distance from Himself? The ultimate act of love is to understand and be with a person in their most desperate times, yet our most desperate times are precisely those times when we are most distant from God. For God to be love, God has to understand distance from Himself, and God has to be with us even when we've created distance. To do all this, God needed to experience sin.

And now the problem arises: how does God, overflowing with love, experience sin? How does God get distance from Himself? The answer is found in the triune nature of God: by becoming human (whatever that means -- I'm still trying to get it), God can understand sin. The Christ came to "complete" God's nature, and it is with this understanding that God comes to judge the living and the dead.

I'm sure the last paragraph made all kinds of hackles rise. It's an awkward paragraph, at least partially because I don't feel like I entirely understand how it all worked. Let me knock one objection out of the way right away, though: when I put quotes around "complete", I did it for a good reason. As I stated in the first link of this article, I don't believe in a God with a concept of "the present" -- God doesn't have a unidirectionality of time. As C.S. Lewis put it, "All moments are an eternity to God." Because of that, the change in God seen in the Christ act had "already happened" at the moment of Creation -- to that, hear John's opening words, which got so carefully scrutinized by this community.

And so where do we go from here? In this understanding, the charge of loving God is the same as the charge of avoiding the dehumanization of others. So, when addressing questions of morality, such as whether gays should be ordained or even allowed to marry, the fundamental question to answer is: "Is there something inherently dehumanizing about the act? Is the very act condoning the degradation of another human being's 'beingness'?" Using that as my guide has served me well, and I believe it's the most reliable yet practical way to summarize the Golden Rule.