For the past few weeks, I’ve been deconstructing American Christian ideology. Today, I’d like to think with you about another aspect of the Upside-Down Gospel, transactional theology.
We’re all familiar with transactional theology, the idea that if we give God a token of some sort or believe a certain way, or our faith is strong enough, that God will shower us with endless blessings in return. Most commonly referred to as “The Prosperity Gospel,” the concept is ancient. Transactional theology is perhaps humankind’s original form of worship.
We see evidence of animal and human sacrifices in temples dating back tens of thousands of years. Ancient texts from around the planet, representing every culture, share stories about ritually sacrificing bulls, chickens, doves, pigeons, and people, to appease the gods or ask for their favor. This system was still in practice when Jesus was gathering his flock.
Paganism and Judaism were also transactional religions (and I argue that Christianity still is). In both, a worshipper was expected to purchase a sacrifice in the Temple courtyard before proceeding to the Temple. There, a priest would make the offering to God (for Jews) or a god (for Romans).
Jesus utterly despises this system and seeks to destroy it, as recounted in Mark 11.15-17 (CEB):
“Jesus and the disciples came into Jerusalem. After entering the Temple, he threw out those who were selling and buying there. He pushed over the tables used for currency exchange and the chairs of those who sold doves. He didn’t allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. He taught them, ‘Hasn’t it been written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you’ve turned it into a hideout for crooks.’”
Jesus introduced the world to a loving God—a completely accepting, forgiving, unconditionally loving entity of allness who doesn’t require a transaction of any sort. Jesus wants to replace the people’s primitive vision of a punitive, petty, jealous god who requires blood sacrifices, with a beautiful image of the God who forgives freely. Not because we’ve paid our debt, but because God is love—pure, unadulterated, and non-transactional. As true love always should be.
Unfortunately, the idea of grace freely given never really catches on. It becomes lip service, something people say they believe, but in practice, Jesus has become the new sacrifice.
Perhaps that’s because it’s been too many thousands of years of thinking of the gods as beings who need to be paid for their services. Perhaps it’s because religious institutions inherently mimic commerce instead of Christ. Maybe people simply find it too difficult to believe that God’s love is free, that grace is free, that God doesn’t charge a transaction for love.
Whatever the cause, Jesus isn’t immune to the effect, because almost immediately after his resurrection, his followers began turning his death into a transaction. Three-hundred years later, Jesus’ death on the cross as payment for the original human sin of disobeying God in the Garden of Eden would become “orthodox” Christianity. Jesus’ overturning of the tables in the Temple in protest of transactional religion became lost to the pages of scripture, much of which was (and continues to be) reinterpreted by the new, Gentile, Roman Orthodoxy in the most anti-Semitic of ways.
Jesus’ idea that God’s love is free—his radical understanding that God’s forgiveness is free—even confuses people like Paul, who in many ways codifies the upside-down gospel of God’s transaction to save the universe through the payment of Jesus’ death. This idea was quite appealing to the Romans because it mimics the Pax Romana perfectly.
The Romanized view of Jesus—today’s general Christian view—is that Jesus died on the cross for our salvation. His death was a transaction for the debt we owed God (and could never, ever repay of our own volition). We incurred this debt when we disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. It is the theology of a transactional economy.
That same Roman, transactional theology is prevalent in Christianity in America today. It is predominantly defined by a particular, narrowly focused, biblically literal, too-often closed-minded belief system with little to no knowledge of the Jewishness of scripture or the radical, society-changing economic and social ideas of Jesus.
In America, Christianity is most often, and most unfortunately, associated with exclusion and fear rather than love and compassion.
Of course, Christianity isn’t the only religion suffering under the weight of fundamentalism. The truth is that all religions, for most of their histories, have had issues living into the words of their prophets. For example, not long ago, my wife Trudy bought me a book of poetry by Kabir, a 15th Century poet-prophet and critic of religions (from Benares, Uttar Pradesh, India). He was a Hindu reformer who believed, like St. Francis and many others, that God was the material makeup of everything (something we often talk about today as a result of discoveries in quantum physics).
He also often wrote about how all the organized religions and “holy books” had messed up the teachings of the various enlightened masters. Kabir was Hindu, but his parents were probably converts to Islam. He was intimately familiar with both religions and recognized how easily institutions strayed from the teachings of their prophets. Notice in the following poem, too, that both Hinduism and Islam were mired in the same transactional theology as Judaism and Christianity.
Transactional theology is a universal problem. In response, Kabir wrote this magnificent poem that’s as powerful today as it was 500 years ago, a reminder that our relationship with God is intrinsically intimate, and that transactional theology has no place in any religion.
This poem is not intended to insult Hinduism and Islam. Both of those religions have been instrumental in my own faith and spiritual formation. Instead, Kabir’s poetry is a critique written by a Hindu/Muslim, and his words are just as applicable to Christianity.
Seekers, I’ve seen both paths.
Hindus and Muslims
Don’t want rigor
They love rich food.
The Hindu keeps his fast
Eating chestnuts and milk.
No grain, but no brain either
And he breaks his fast with meat.
As for the Muslim, he prays daily,
Fasts once a year, and goes on
Crying, “God, God!” like a cock.
What heaven could await people
Who slaughter chickens in the dark?
They’ve abandoned all longing
For kindness or compassion.
Hindus kill with one chop
Muslims let the blood drip
Both houses blaze in the same fire.
Truth has revealed to me
There’s no difference between them.
Kabir says: Go beyond religion
Say the Name and rejoin origin.
Jesus teaches us about a love that doesn’t require any transaction, perhaps even about a love that doesn’t require any religion. Jesus proclaims a God who gives love freely. How can love be given freely, yet still cost Jesus his life?
Jesus demands we disregard this transactional thinking about God. We do not have to make blood sacrifices to return to God’s good graces because it’s not grace if we have to do something to earn it. It’s not grace if it demands the death of Jesus—or any human being (or animal). Jesus’ death was not necessary for the salvation of the universe. He was an insurgent. Had his followers remained insurgents, instead of joining forces with the same ruling powers that killed Jesus, the world might look very different today.
Jesus never asks anyone to believe in him. He never asks anyone to find his death on the cross a cosmic necessity, and he never condemns anyone to hell for not believing in either of those things. Jesus never condemns anyone to hell for any reason! Condemnation only happens after the invention of Christianity, hundreds of years later.
Jesus reveals that God is with us, right now, in our midst and within us, he says. God gives us this love energy because that’s what God does. There is no repayment expected. We are God’s creations in the most physical of ways, formed from God’s quantum being. We can never be separated from the love of God because we are the love of God in the flesh. That’s the story of Jesus. That’s the metaphor of the cross.
Amen.
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