What is the appeal of Jesus? Part 5

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 5: Jesus’ crucifixion as a sacrifice for sin is still effective in our new understanding of God

So, believers in this version of Christianity argue like this:-

God is the voice we create in our heads which calls us to adopt a particular spiritual life and supports us in this life, a voice which makes real and personal the idea of God, which is a repository for all good values

Jesus was an actual person, who lived and preached as recorded in the gospels, who expressed the spiritual values we approve of to an ultimate degree, and who was killed on a cross.

When his followers realised that the spiritual values embodied by Jesus had not been taken away from them by his death, they either experienced this as Jesus being resurrected from the dead, or they have used resurrection as the symbol to express the truth that these values cannot be destroyed and, in this sense, they “conquer death”.

By preaching Jesus as God incarnate, his followers are expressing their faith in the ultimate worth of the spiritual values that Jesus embodied and shared with them.

When Christians today proclaim that, “Jesus is Lord” they affirm their faith in, and commitment to, these spiritual values. Although Jesus is not Son of God in the literal meaning intended by traditional Christianity, he is “Son of God” in terms of being the complete representation of the values that Christians believe are the very essence of God.

By trusting in “what God has done” in Jesus, Christians are declaring their allegiance to his spiritual values, which they have made their own. Although, literally speaking, God has not raised Jesus from the dead (because we are not allowing God to exist, nor are we allowing any miracle to occur, which a resurrection is), we declare that, in our spiritual value system, God (our ultimate value) would indeed become incarnate in the person of Jesus, and he does indeed, love us enough to die for us, and it is, indeed, the case that his and our spiritual values can never be extinguished, and so by saying, “Jesus lives” we declare, “His values are still the mainspring of our lives”. Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us, and this is what we mean when we say that we are Christians because we follow the way of Jesus. We affirm our belief that this is the pinnacle of what love means, and we want to live in tune with this love. And, at the risk of being pedantic, but in order to fully clarify what we mean, we take the sentence, “Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us” and turn around the sentence structure to say that it means the same as, “Our core value is that the willingness to die for love of the other is the pinnacle of truth and meaning in life”. We experience this in ourselves that we are loved in this way, and we want to share this quality of love with others.

Once we have adopted these beliefs, we are able to make use of, and benefit from, the liberating effect from guilt and sin that comes from believing that the sacrifice that Jesus has made is, indeed, sufficient to cleanse us from all sin, completely, no matter what we have done, forever.