Winning by Losing

I’ve been generally hesitant to talk at length about the new administration’s activities since the inauguration. Please don’t mistake my silence for consent, however.

For one thing, while I have been freely critiquing the politics of the evangelical church and other supporters of the new president, I have generally been fairly quiet about the specific politics, because I don’t really feel like it’s my purpose in life.

But for another, I’ve been so utterly distressed by the total collapse of morals of the party that I grew up supporting, and their wholesale chasing after power and control, now with a champion who promises them the entire world if they’ll but bow down and worship him, in the name of worshiping Jesus. If that sentence sounds uncomfortably close to the statue of Nebuchadnezzar or to the Beast of Revelation, well, it wasn’t an accident. It’s been so absolutely hard to see that I’ve kind of avoided talking about it here.

At any rate, I’m watching an absolute flood of activity coming out of Washington in the supposed name of giving Christians control over all the various aspects of American systems, so that unrighteousness can be stamped out. And the evangelicals are practically orgasmic over what’s happening. I’ve never seen them so utterly full of lust – in this case, the lust for power as they are while watching Trump’s systematic destruction of every aspect of American democracy in the name of reigning over fellow Americans. It’s lust, pure and simple, not sexual lust but lust for power and control. And mark my words, it’s going to bite them just as hard as the woman of Revelation 17:16.

I think God’s view of this situation is pretty clear. Read Ezekiel 23, and its graphic lewd descriptions of God’s people whoring herself after empire: the Assyrians and Egyptians are often used in prophecy as symbols of empires, of power. Look, if American evangelicals want to identify as spiritual Israel, they better read the warnings in that chapter about historical Israel.

I don’t need to believe that those prophecies in Revelation 17 or Ezekiel 23 are about us, to see that they talk about a very real, very common, and often-repeated tendency of the human heart, and of religious systems. They describe things that we ought not to repeat, that we ought to use to inspect ourselves today, and see if we can avoid making such mistakes like they did.

In other words, that lust for power is absolutely deadly to the followers of God.

What I failed to see as a younger evangelical, and what many today still do not see, is that the Gospels and the epistles very clearly describe the ethos of the Kingdom as sacrificing oneself for another.

We don’t win by conquering. We win by losing.

Actually, using the word “win” here is not even really correct, nor would “victory” be a good choice of word. It is more that we draw closer to the Kingdom by losing. In the words of Jesus, let it be “on earth as it is in heaven.” We bring the spiritual Kingdom into the physical realm by losing. Jesus said “take up your cross and follow Me.” He didn’t say “have victory over people with the cross.” We evangelicals – I used to be evangelical, and to some extent I still cannot escape saying “we” sometimes – have been so obsessed with victory that we miss the deep story of Jesus.

You may want to quibble with the word “losing.” I get it; we’re used to songs like “Victory in Jesus,” or verses like “He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor 15:57),” or “we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Rom 8:37),” or “everyone born of God overcomes the world (1 John 5:4),” and of course the famous passage about putting on the full armor of God in Eph 6:10-18. But what are these verses saying? Who or what are we victorious against?

It’s never other people.

It’s always against the kosmos – the systems that oppose the Kingdom of God (1 John 5:4), which is NOT people, but against a spiritual system. Or it’s against sin and death (1 Cor 15:56). Or it’s against the schemes of the devil (Eph 6:11), the cosmic powers of darkness (Eph 6:12), again not people but against spiritual forces that oppose the Kingdom. Or it’s against the flaming arrows of the evil one (Eph 6:16).

Never people.

None of those things even slightly refute the underlying message of Jesus, that of self-sacrifice on behalf of those humans around us. None of them talk about taking over the empire for the Kingdom. In fact, the only verses that talk about our relationship to any oppressive earthly empire urge us to pray for and submit to them, for the sake of our peace while we live here on earth.

So the entire idea that we ought to go on the offensive against the “seven mountains of influence in our society” – the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate” theology, that we are supposed to be victorious over our culture, is simply not supported in the Bible.

That’s why I use the word “losing” in this context.

Let’s take a detour for a moment.

Part of the problem, I have begun to realize, is the theory of atonement that I inherited, that most evangelicals inherited.

Here are the various theories of atonement:

• Moral influence: the idea that Jesus’ life and sacrifice inspire moral transformation and love for God.
• Ransom: the idea that Jesus’ death was a payment made to Satan to liberate humanity from bondage to sin.
• Christus Victor: the idea that Jesus defeated sin, death, and Satan through His death and resurrection.
• Satisfaction: the idea that Jesus’ death satisfies the debt owed to God’s honor due to sin.
• Governmental: the idea that Jesus’ death demonstrates God’s just and moral governance, but without requiring substitutionary punishment.
• Recapitulation: the idea that Jesus’ perfect life redeems every stage of human life, reversing Adam’s failure.
• Scapegoat: the idea that Jesus died as the scapegoat of humanity, an innocent victim instead of a sacrifice.
• Penal Substitution: the idea that Jesus took the legally-required punishment for humanity’s sins in the place of each human.

All of these have some support in scripture. It’s hard to point at any one of them as the only acceptable theory, but somehow most evangelicals lock in pretty hard to penal substitutionary atonement (also called simply PSA) as the only valid understanding.

When you see the world through the lens of PSA, it causes a few things to happen.

• sin is a legal problem
• punishment is the only solution to sin
• the punishment must fit the crime for God to be just
• God is infinitely good, so any sin against God is infinitely bad
• punishment must therefore be infinite
• But because Jesus was perfect, His unjust death was infinitely powerful against the infinite punishment

Naturally, growing up evangelical, I inherited this idea and never thought to question it. Every Bible verse about salvation was ultimately fit into that frame, and every verse that saw things differently was explained away or creatively renegotiated.

But looking at it from the outside now, it seems loaded with some unsupported assumptions. Specifically:

• Why is sin a legal problem? The Bible never says that. If anything, it seems to discuss sin in the context of a relational problem.
• Why does addressing sin require a payment? The Bible certainly discusses how humans need to bring suitable restoration when someone is harmed, but there’s nothing that we humans can possibly do to repay God, and honestly nothing we do against God can possibly harm God in any way. So a pure punishment cannot level the in any meaningful way.
• The idea that God’s justice requires punishment isn’t directly stated in the Bible. In fact, the words we translate as “justice” are almost always paired with “righteousness” and when you actually dig into what the average Jewish person alive at the time of the writings would have understood, it would not have meant legal justice at all. Rather, it was all about equitable treatment of every human, especially the oppressed and poor.
• Why is sin against God infinitely bad? That’s not specified in scripture.
• Even if sin was infinitely bad, why would the solution to sin require infinite punishment? That’s a made-up idea.
• Even if sin was infinitely bad and infinite punishment could pay for it, why does God killing Jesus (or any human) cause that payment to happen on behalf of us? Okay, you can appeal to the mystery of God, but it’s an interpretation.
• And even if all those things are true, and Jesus’ death was truly a perfect and infinite justification for sin, why does it require ANY human to mentally choose to accept it, for it to be fully effective for every human without fail?

I know that I was taught to think that sacrifice pays a debt, in the same way as sacrificing a lamb or other animals paid for a debt in the Temple sacrifice days. But my mind was changed about that interpretation, when I learned more about the Jewish sacrificial system and I found very clear proof that we modern folks completely misinterpret most of the uses of the word “sacrifice” and tend to ignore an awful lot of Bible verses that run counter to this interpretation. If you’d like to learn more about it, I’d encourage you to read “Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death” by Andrew Rillera. It completely changed my mind about thinking of Jesus’ death as a substitutionary sacrifice: it’s just not what the Bible says.

I also imagine pushback from those quoting Romans 5:6-11, which pretty clearly discusses Christ dying “for us” and being “justified by His blood.” But somehow, I never used to notice that Rom 5:10 says “we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” – not payment for sin, but reconciliation – and “we will be saved by his life” – not His death. The salvation isn’t by the blood, it’s by Jesus’ life BEFORE He died.

So of all the ideas about atonement, I actually now find that penal substitution is really the worst possible interpretation of the Bible, and the least supported of all of them.

So with that detour and a better understanding of PSA, let’s get back to the topic at hand.

When one sees the world through the lens of PSA, there’s a fundamental idea that we cannot lose. Unlike the atonement theories of scapegoat – where Jesus allows Himself to be unjustly killed without reason, or moral influence – where His death was not relevant to whatever salvation means, or recapitulation – where Jesus’ perfect life matters more than His unjust death, PSA simply doesn’t consider the idea that Jesus just died completely unjustly, because He was unwilling to kill His tormentors. It cannot abide the idea that when He said to turn the other cheek, that a truly good man may be willing to die for another, He actually meant that we actually might need to lose in order to show the ultimate love of God: not to win over them, but simply to serve them. Because from Romans 6, it was Jesus’ death that reconciled us to God, not His victory over the grave or over His enemies.

We can even look at the imagery most often used by evangelicals in their drive to be warlike in their faith: Jesus in Revelation 19:11-16, riding on the white horse, with a sword coming from His mouth.

“Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! Its rider is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and wages war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a scepter of iron; he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, ‘King of kin gs and Lord of lords.'”

Okay, let’s think about that for a moment:

First observation: His robe is dipped in blood before He begins to ride out. He’s bloody at the very moment John first sees him, when heaven is first opened. It’s HIS OWN BLOOD, not the blood of the nations, of any unbelievers.

Second observation: that sword is the Word of God. If we refer back to Eph 6:10-18, “Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” That sword, although coming from His mouth, is very clearly reminiscent of Hebrews 4:12, where “the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Jesus doesn’t need to wield a sword in His hand; He simply speaks the true and living Word. The sword is the Word.

Third observation: the ones who execute this judgement on those who ride out to wage war against the rider on the horse and His army are “the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure.” It’s those who have already died in righteousness, and been caught up into His presence, and been completely purified. It’s not us, living on this sin-soaked earth with our own sin and misconceptions and misinterpretations and arrogance and hatred. We’re simply not qualified to mete out that judgement on our fellow humans. We don’t get that terrible responsibility until we’ve each died and been purified by the fires of God’s presence. Only THEN do we get those white robes. Only THEN are we qualified to execute judgement.

Fourth observation: this is an event on the final days of judgement. The very first words in Revelation 19 are “After this” – after the events of Revelation 15 and 16, the plagues and bowls of judgement, and after the events of Revelation 17 and 18, where the apostate church, the great whore of Babylon, is utterly devoured and burned up by the Beast and its followers. Those events are not here and now.

So if you want to believe that the Revelation of John is literal prophecy, you’d better be really careful to consider all of it, not just the handful of verses that support a certain dogmatic position.

And if you instead see that book as mostly metaphor, there’s still no justification for taking literally the verses about Jesus slaughtering all His enemies and somehow using that as justification for doing that job ourselves.

Now, what about our culture?

The whole idea of winning our world for Jesus is deeply rooted in my upbringing. It’s really hard to shake the idea that we cannot possibly allow the culture around us to decay. Don’t we fight to bring righteousness into our culture?

Of course we do.

The question is, HOW we do that.

We don’t do it by winning over and against our fellow humans, no matter how deluded or sinful we may believe them to be.

We don’t do it by demonizing them, dehumanizing them. They’re each and every one made in the image of God, no matter how they behave. And if Jesus was any example to us, the more sinful someone was, the better He treated them. He reserved His harshest speech and strongest physical acts for those who were the most religious.

We don’t win with a sword in our hand – certainly not physical, but also not metaphorical. Again, we’re not fighting other humans. The victory that is being discussed is against systems and against principalities and powers. And defeating them doesn’t require defeating any human, or controlling any human. Remember, the sword is bringing the Word of God to illuminate culture, not slaughtering those who are deceived by it.

No, bringing righteousness into our culture requires persuasion and cooperation and education. It requires showing people The Way of the Cross. All down through the ages, since Jesus died on the cross, the single most potent measure anyone can take is self-sacrifice. And the strongest examples of that self-sacrifice are when believers are so devoted to The Way that they will die before abandoning their principles. It’s not that they make others die for those principles; it’s that THEY choose to be killed for their principles. That’s exactly what makes people wonder “how can this person be so convinced of the Truth?”

It’s honestly ironic to me that we’ve forgotten this. I grew up with the idea that the reason we can trust the Bible is that the early believers were willing to die for their beliefs rather than renounce their faith. If they believed that strongly, it must be true, right? But now we have this idea that we must make others die to defend our own faith.

What did those early Christians know, that they didn’t need to live to advance the Kingdom?

I think those early Christians knew that they didn’t need to conquer Rome; God would handle it. They needed to show something different. The way we truly advance the Kingdom is by dying – either literally or metaphorically. By choosing not to “win” in any conventional sense of the word. By laying down our lives, by replicating the example of Jesus.

And when it looks like we’re losing our culture?

What’s a stronger thing to do: resort to violence, or show the way of Jesus?

God doesn’t need our sword to bring about the Kingdom.

Jesus even dealt with this. In Luke 4:16-30, at the beginning of His ministry, He stood up and read from the scroll and said some things about Himself that angered the listeners. They attacked Him physically. What was His response? He simply walked through the mob without harming anyone, and he simply “went His way.” He was willing to let them be wrong, to shout falsehoods and insults at Himself, and leave them to their sinful ideas.

And in the last hours of His life, Jesus told Peter, “put away your sword.” He didn’t need anyone defending His life or honor with violence.

I think I could say a lot more about this topic. But I think I’ve made my point:

Let’s follow the example of Jesus. We win by losing.