Christianity - A Journey from Facts to Fiction — Page 41
Sin and Atonement 41 hearing about the Christ as their Saviour who was not yet born. In fact, the entire humanity between Adam and Christ as seemed certainly to be doomed forever. Why were they never given even a remote chance to be forgiven? Would they be forgiven retro- spectively, by Jesus Christ as ? If so, why? In other parts of the world, much larger by comparison to the tiny land of Judea, where people had never heard of Christianity even during the lifetime of Jesus Christ as , what happens to them? They never did, nor ever could, believe in the ‘Sonship’ of Jesus Christ as. Will their sins go unpunished or will they be punished? If they go unpunished, for what reason? If they are punished, again by what logic? What chance did they have anyway? They were totally helpless. What a distorted sense of absolute justice! Unwilling Sacrifice Now let us turn to the act of Crucifixion itself. Here we are confronted with another insoluble dilemma. Jesus as , as we are so insistently told, offered himself voluntarily to God the Father and was made the scapegoat for the sins of all humanity, provided, of course, they believed in him. But when the time of the accep- tance of his wish approaches nigh and at last the glimmer of hope for sinful humanity is beginning to appear like the dawn of a new day, as we turn to Jesus as expecting to observe his joy, his happi- ness and his ecstasy at this most eventful moment of human history, how profoundly disappointed and manifestly disillusioned we are. Instead of finding a Jesus as impatiently awaiting the hour of jubilation what we see instead is a Jesus as weeping and crying