Flann 5 wrote:
Had he actually been sinful he could not make atonement since he would have been guilty and due the penalty for sin anyway.
Today, Christmas Eve, is a good time for scientific, religious and philosophical contemplation of the meaning of atonement. Christmas is timed in relation to the winter solstice, as the first day when the position of the sun at dawn is to the north of the day before. Therefore Christmas places the birth of Christ at the same day as the birth of the sun each year.
http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/chic ... &year=2014 show that the days shortened until 21 December, and then lengthened each day, but only by seconds, with Christmas day just 13 seconds longer than Christmas Eve.
One way to understand this timing for Christmas is through the archetypal mythical link between Christmas and Easter, with the resurrection on the third day after death. At Christmas, the resurrection of the sun in its path back to the warmth and light and life of summer follows three days after its winter death, the date when the position of the sun at the horizon appears to stand still as far as naked eye observation can tell. This period of standstill by the sun can be compared to the myth of the descent of Christ into hell between the crucifixion and resurrection. So today, Christmas Eve, equates to the time of the harrowing of hell on Easter Saturday, when Christ like Odysseus and Orpheus wandered among the shades of Hades to save the souls of Moses and Abraham.
Atonement means becoming at one. The need for atonement arises from the problem of alienation, that we fail to see and understand our deep real unity with the cosmos. The role of Christ in delivering atonement is a central part of the Christian myth. Flann said “Had he actually been sinful he could not make atonement since he would have been guilty and due the penalty for sin anyway.” For me, the phenomenological challenge is to analyse how such language can contain scientific meaning.
We see a range of medieval fantasies swirling about such talk, including Augustine’s idea of original sin. Similarly, the ransom theology of the expiating power of Christ is at play, with its idea that the devil was holding humanity hostage and threatening our extinction, so God decided to pay a ransom to the devil for our salvation, by giving up his own Son to torture and gruesome death as a political criminal.
This is all naturally rather confusing for anyone trying to understand it sensibly, without the metaphysical prop of a supernatural personal intervening magical God. If we start from the material scientific premise that the universe is physically consistent and ordered, then all this talk of atonement is purely symbolic, since there is no real way that nailing someone to a tree in ancient Palestine could affect the prospects of human extinction or enable believers to go to heaven after they die.
Just as we can see Christmas and Easter allegorically linked within the framework of ancient geocentric astronomy, so too I suggest the myth of Christ as the atoning sacrifice by God can be best explained as an astronomical parable.
The day and the year have a regular ordered structure of light and dark, warmth and cold, activity and rest, birth and death. This cosmic order provides the framework for the agrarian myth of the dying and rising saviour, a story going back into a number of different mythological traditions, brought to sublime depiction in the Christian stories of Christmas and Easter, with the birth, death and rebirth of Jesus Christ as saviour of the world.
Trying to understand this myth within a scientific framework, I have found it makes sense to examine the structure of time to look at how these motifs of the day and year fit within bigger orderly patterns. So the concept of atonement, being at one with the cosmos, can be studied against these temporal cycles. At midsummer we feel totally connected, but at midwinter we feel totally separated. This is the natural run of life and death. And yet, the problem of sin, understood as ignorance, delusion and alienation from truth, means that humanity is fallen from grace, and that the sense of oneness at midsummer is disrupted and incomplete.
To make things whole, the religious sensibility sees a need for an atoning sacrifice, a scapegoat whose death enables the community to reflect upon its collective conscience to think about how we can restore a gracious connection to truth and reality, overcoming the alienation of delusion.
This is the meaning of the crucifixion story of Jesus Christ, that when a perfect man walked on earth, the response was to reject and despise him, displaying how humanity was hell-bent towards death and destruction. But the resurrection myth shows that the cosmos is anthropic, that love is embedded in the natural order of reality, and that humanity has good cause for hope in spite of our failings.
None of that requires that the Jesus story was historically true in order to be meaningful. In fact, as Voltaire said of God, if Jesus did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him. This idea of a ‘man without sin’ closely equates anyway to a man without matter, an ideal vision of perfection, descending from the cosmos in the semblance of flesh, as a comforting imaginary fantasy.
The archetypal power of this fantasy rests in its position within the evolutionary structure of planetary order, namely the real long cycles of time that surround our ordinary cycles of the day and the year. We see these deep enfolding cycles in the glacial record, with the advance and retreat of ice over the aeons.
The last warm point in this cosmic cycle, when the northern summer solstice was at the orbital position closest to the sun, known as perihelion, was at the dawn of the Holocene about ten thousand years ago. This is the imagined Golden Age. The last cold point of the cycle, masked by anthropogenic emissions, was in 1246 AD when the summer solstice was at aphelion, furthest from the sun. This is the Iron Age.
Indian mythology, at the root of Western mythology, imagines this great 24,000 year cycle of light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, life and death, as a perpetual seasonal cycle between gold and iron ages representing cosmic summer and winter, with silver and bronze as the intervening periods of spring and fall. Putting this myth into the real astronomical framework of planetary evolution, we find that Jesus Christ may be understood as the presence of the Golden Age within the Iron Age, glorious summer in the discontent of winter, providing redeeming atonement for humanity through a message of eternal truth that not even the grave can destroy or hold.
The atonement of Christ may therefore be understood in purely scientific terms as a symbolic imagination of how the despair of the fall from grace embodied in the climate shift over the aeons may be reversed through a connection to eternal truth, a rekindling of the cosmic wonder of wholeness seen at midday and midsummer, from the perspective of midnight and midwinter.
The themes of advent, the season of preparation for Christmas, are hope in the midst of despair, love in the midst of rejection, peace in the midst of conflict, and joy in the midst of sadness. The message of divine incarnation was understood by the great Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to be the beyond in the midst of the world. This atoning sense of the presence of the eternal within time is well encapsulated as the vision of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age.
The story of planetary restoration is one of large forces and slow processes. The perihelion now happens on 5 January each year, and will slowly march back through winter and spring to reach the summer solstice in ten thousand years time. Against this encompassing framework for history, the period of the last six thousand years described in the Bible as the fall from grace appears as a cosmic fall or autumn, as the perihelion advanced from September to December.
The challenge is that the mentality of fall is deeply ingrained in psychology and culture, and is resistant to the paradigm shift needed to see a steady path up towards a next cosmic spring and summer. But just as Christmas offers hope of the return of summer at midwinter, so too we are justified in having hope for a slow atoning restoration of planetary integrity, through a sense of connection to place and time. Putting Christian faith into a scientific evolutionary framework is a first step on that connecting path to a transforming liberation of humanity, at one with our natural cosmos.