Religion & Spirituality

Death, Sin and Atonement

By Austin Cline, About.com GuideJuly 14, 2010

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The idea that someone can and should suffer to pay for a person's sins is common enough because of Christianity that many people may not think to stop and ask just where it came from and why anyone would believe it. It's not an idea that is entirely original to Christianity, but Judaism didn't start developing it very long before Christianity came on the scene so it's not unreasonable to look at it as a primarily Christian dogma.

In A Brief History of Death, Douglas J. Davies writes:

It was only some two hundred years before the time of Jesus of Nazareth - interpreted as the new Adam who is obedient to God - that some Jews began developing the idea of the resurrection of the dead, in an act of divine vindication of the righteous. It was an idea that ran alongside the notion of atonement, the belief that suffering could counteract the effect of sin and restore ruptured relations with God. Suffering in this life could serve an atoning function, while death itself, which was more of a process of dying than an instantaneous moment, also served to atone for sins.

These ideas came together in the interpretation of the life of Jesus as a saving passion: suffering and death were interpreted as making atonement for the sins of all and of bringing into sharp profile a fulfilment of the divine covenant. The immensely popular film The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson in 2004, brought to the screen perhaps the most extensive pictorial displays of Jesus' suffering and death ever witnessed in cinema.

The idea of suffering having a transactional value plays an important role in Christianity. According to traditional, orthodox Christian soteriology (study of salvation), humanity is mired in sin and, because of this sin, deserves eternal punishment in Hell. Fortunately, God loves humanity and doesn't want to see us suffer. To keep us out of Hell, God sent his son to suffer and die in our place, thus paying our cosmic debt and freeing us from sin -- but only if we actually believe this story first.

This assumes, however, that the suffering and death of one individual can suffice to replace the suffering (eternal torment in Hell) of any other person or any group of people. Suffering must have transactional value -- it must be something that can be traded in exchange for other things that have transactional value, whether other suffering or something different entirely. Work has transactional value. I can do work for you (like chopping wood) for a couple of hours and thereby relieve some debt I owe you because, in the end, you possess something (chopped wood) that you value as much as what I owed you.

Can the same be said for suffering? I don't think so. If I suffer over the space of a couple of hours, what are you left with that has value such that a debt I owe you can be relieved? At most, one might argue that you gain the value of seeing me suffer and that has value because you hate me and wish my ill -- but that would suggest that you are a sadist, not that suffering has transactional value.

Could someone else suffer in my place to pay my debt? Someone else could chop wood in my place, and then I would owe them rather than you. That same does not seem to be true of suffering, though. Even if we take the more extreme case and imagine that you would derive pleasure from my suffering, such that you would accept that in exchange for a debt I owe you, we couldn't conclude that you would accept the suffering of someone else in my place unless you are a general sadist and would take pleasure in the suffering of any random person.

Let's take a look at what Nietzsche had to say on the idea that there can be any connection between suffering and the repayment of debts -- or, to use the Christian term, "atonement":

Let me pose the question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for "debts"? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury and for the distress caused by the injury, got an offsetting pleasure - making someone suffer - a real feast, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater the difference between him and the rank and social position of the creditor. [Genealogy of Morality, Section 6]

Thus, if suffering is to have any sort of transactional value, it would only be for sadists who take pleasure in seeing the suffering of others. For everyone else, suffering isn't something that can serve as "a debit entry in some ledger." What, then, would that say about a god which required that someone suffer in order to pay off any sort of debt? What does it say about Christianity that it takes such sadism, places it as the very heart of religion, and calls it all good?

Death, Sin and Atonement

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