Welcome to the deconstructionist podcast. I'm your host, John Williamson. And today's episode has been a long time coming. you may have noticed that recently sprinkled in amidst the interviews, I've dropped some, I'll call them informative informational, I guess, type episodes where kind of break down some, some heavier topics. And these are things that people have been asking for for years. I just have not been able to do it, not because I wasn't interested because I'm also fascinated by these topics, but because I wanted to make sure I did it right. These ideas aren't abstract ideas. They're very visceral. And for a lot of you, they weren't just doctrines. They were used as weapons against you. And so I don't take that lightly and I wanted to do them correctly. So, finally had the time this year to sit down and really map out how I wanted to cover these topics. And so it's kind of an intermittent series we'll call it.
So hopefully you guys are enjoying them. I'm going to try to make sure, because I have gotten some requests recently for the transcripts - I'm going to try to make those available on the website. For those of you who are interested in sort of having that to share, I appreciate it. That's awesome. But this is one that I, we've kind of covered before. Those of you guys who have been longstanding listeners, probably remember some years back, Adam and I did a live podcast that we did in a restaurant, believe, restaurant, cafe, something like that, where we sort of covered some of the stuff that we'll cover in today's episode. But I wanted to pair it with another topic that is sort of central to modern evangelical theology. And that of course is the devil, excuse me, the devil, hell, and why Jesus really had to die. And so,
With that comes atonement theories, which we've talked about separately on the podcast, but I think the two really go hand in hand and I'll explain why once we get into it. But for those of you listening, I'm sure many of you remember being in youth groups, sitting cross-legged on a carpet that smelled like old church coffee. As some well-meaning adult painted word pictures of flames, demons, and a God so holy that he couldn't even look at you. Then came the music, the lights dimmed, the acoustic guitar came out and the altar call started.
John Williamson (02:21.197)
Maybe you've been there. Maybe you were told that if you died in a car accident on the way home that night and hadn't prayed the prayer, that it was over for you. Eternal fire, no second chances. And the only thing standing between you and that nightmare was Jesus, who we were told had to be tortured to death so that God wouldn't have to torture us forever. That version of the gospel, it's definitely powerful. It's haunting and it works. But here's the question I want to ask today. What if it's not true?
Not just slightly off, not just in need of better explanation, what if the entire framework, the devil as this cosmic arch-villain, hell as place of eternal conscious torment, and penal substitution as the only true atonement theory, was built centuries after Jesus? What if the emotional intensity wasn't a feature of the truth, but a tactic used to keep people in line? So today, we're going to walk through it all.
the history of hell, how the devil got his horns, and why Jesus' death meant something very different to early Christians than what you may have heard in youth group. And if you've ever been told that questioning any of this means you don't take the Bible seriously, I've got some thoughts on that too. So let's get into it. So in the first part, let's talk about where did hell come from? And let's start with this. The modern evangelical concept of hell. You're probably all pretty familiar with it.
This fiery underground torture chamber where unbelievers are consciously tormented for eternity would have sounded completely foreign to most of the biblical writers. In fact, the word hell doesn't even appear in the original Hebrew or Greek texts of the Bible. What does appear are a few very different terms that got smashed together over time. And two of the most important are shayol and gehenna. So let's start with shayol.
Shale shows up all over the Hebrew Bible, in Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes. It was the ancient Jewish concept of the underworld, but it wasn't hell. It wasn't hot, there were no flames, no demons, no pitchforks. Shale was more like a shadowy, silent place. The grave, the pit, where everyone went when they died. The good, the bad, the righteous, the wicked, everyone. Jacob says he'll go there morning.
John Williamson (04:48.675)
when he believes his son is dead. Job begs for the peace of Sheol in the middle of his suffering. The psalmist even says God is present there. It's not a place of punishment. It's just death. The end. Now fast forward to the New Testament era and Jesus' use of the term Gehenna. This one is often misunderstood. A lot of modern Bible translations, especially older ones, just translate Gehenna as hell. And that would include
Our all-time favorite here, as you know, the King James Version. Ugh. But Gehenna wasn't a mystical realm or a metaphysical destination, it was a real place. Specifically, it was the Valley of Hinnom, just outside the city walls of Jerusalem. And it had a gruesome history. Centuries earlier, it was the site of ritual child sacrifices to the god Molech, condemned in books like Jeremiah. Later, it became associated with burning refuse and death.
a cursed place, a smoldering, stinking symbol of destruction. So when Jesus spoke of Gehenna, he was pointing to a literal place his audience knew. And he used it as a symbol, a metaphor for judgment, for what happens when injustice, religious hypocrisy, and empire go unchecked. So in that context, Gehenna isn't about where people go when they die. It's about what happens here and now when society breaks down.
Jesus wasn't handing out fire insurance, he was issuing a prophetic warning. If you keep walking this path, if you keep cozying up to empire and ignoring the poor, this all ends in flames. And sadly, he wasn't wrong. Within a generation, Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome. So when Jesus references the fire of Gehenna, he's not describing the afterlife, he's describing consequences. But somehow along the way,
Those consequences got repackaged as GPS coordinates. Add in Hades from Greek mythology, a gloomy, pagan underworld, and Tartarus from a few scattered references in Greek texts and one mentioned in 2 Peter, and you start to see where things get blurry. By the 2nd or 3rd century, early Christian thinkers, many of whom were steeped in Greco-Roman thought, began merging all of these ideas together. Then along comes Augustine.
John Williamson (07:13.557)
one of the most influential theologians in church history. Augustine embraced the idea of hell as a place of eternal torment and tied it to the doctrine of predestination, the belief that God had already chosen some to be saved and others to be damned forever. No do-overs. A few centuries later, Dante Alighieri took that framework and turned it into an experience. In The Divine Comedy, Dante gave hell a shape. Circles
punishments, and horrifying imagery. His version of was creative, poetic, and terrifying, and it stuck. Dante's Hell became the Western world's Hell. It influenced art, literature, sermons, and eventually, American revivalism. Enter Jonathan Edwards, who famously described sinners as, loathsome spiders held over the fire by an angry God. And just like that, fear became the fuel
for salvation. But here's the problem. Most of what modern Christians believe about hell didn't come from Jesus. It came from poets, philosophers, and preachers with a flair for the dramatic. So if your idea of hell looks more like Dante than it does the Bible, that's not coincidence. And if you were ever told that this hell is what makes Jesus's death good news, just wait until we talk about where that idea came from.
All right, so now we got to get into the devil, the big red guy, you know, and how he got his pitchfork because that's a thing too. So if you grew up in the church, chances are your mental image of the devil is pretty clear, right? Red skin, horns, pitchfork, goat legs, maybe, and possibly even a creepy voice and a contract for your soul. But here's the thing. None of that is in the Bible. None of it. The figure we know today as Satan.
is the result of thousands of years of myth-making, a theological game of telephone that took bits and pieces from ancient texts, cultural fears, and medieval art, and turned them into one of the most iconic villains in history. So let's rewind. In the Old Testament, or Hebrew scriptures, Satan isn't the Prince of Darkness. In fact, the Satan isn't even a name, it's a job title. The Hebrew word satan means accuser or adversary.
John Williamson (09:39.954)
and it shows up as a kind of heavenly prosecutor. Think like courtroom drama. In the book of Job, for example, the satan, with a lowercase s, is a member of the divine council. He's not God's enemy, he works for God. He challenges God's assumptions about Job's loyalty and asks for permission to test him. And God grants it. So in Job, Satan is basically playing the role of the cosmic skeptic, not the evil overlord of hell.
You see a similar role in Zechariah 4, where the satan accuses the high priest Joshua. Again, not a demon, not fallen, not red or scary, just the accuser. That's it. So how did we get from heavenly prosecutor to horned ruler of a fiery underworld? The big shift happens during the second temple period or intertestamental period, that time between the Old and New Testaments, when apocalyptic literature starts gaining traction.
Books like First Enoch and Jubilees introduce new cosmic characters, fallen angels, demonic forces, a looming battle between good and evil. It's in this period that you start to see a more dualistic framework take shape. The universe split between divine light and diabolical darkness. By the time we get to the New Testament, Satan has become a tempter, a deceiver, the father of lies. He shows up in the wilderness, tempting Jesus, enters Judas,
and is cast down from heaven in apocalyptic visions. Still, even in the New Testament, Satan's resume is murky. He's not in charge of hell, he's not omnipresent, and he's not all-powerful. He's an oppositional force, a personification of chaos, temptation, and accusation, a shadow on the stage, not the director. And then came the Christians, and the artists, and the storytellers.
As Christianity spread across the Roman world, its theology didn't evolve in a vacuum. It absorbed and interacted with surrounding religious systems, including Greco-Roman mythology, which contributed ideas of underworld gods, trickster figures, and judgment after death. But there's another, often overlooked influence that deserves mention, Zoroastrianism.
John Williamson (12:02.386)
During the period of time where the Jewish people were essentially ruled over by the Persian Empire, the Jewish people were exposed to Persian religious thought. And Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion of the Persian Empire, had some striking features that might sound familiar. It taught a dualistic cosmic struggle between Ahura Mazda, the god of light and truth, and Angra Menu, or Aruman, the spirit of darkness, deceit, and death.
The two were locked in a battle for the fate of the world and humanity played a role in that conflict. Sound familiar? Zoroastrianism also featured a final judgment of the righteous and wicked, resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell as moral destinations, and a future messianic figure who would help usher in a new age of peace. All of these themes begin to surface in Jewish apocalyptic literature after Persian rule.
in books like Daniel and later in First Enoch and other inter-testamental writings. That word is really hard to say sometimes. In other words, the idea of a singular evil adversary like Satan, as well as the concept of an end times reckoning between good and evil, didn't just drop out of the sky. They emerged in conversation with surrounding cultures. Scholars still debate whether this was a direct influence or just parallel development. But what's clear
is that Zoroastrianism created a theological framework that helped shape later Jewish and Christian views of things like the devil, hell, resurrection, final judgment, and even the idea of a messiah. So while modern evangelicals might insist that their beliefs are just what the Bible says, the Bible itself was written in a cross-cultural world by people who lived under Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, and whose ideas evolved as they wrestled with those powers.
In modern evangelical theology, the devil has become more than just a character. He's a scapegoat, a theological catchall, a way to blame invisible forces instead of confronting human behavior, broken systems, or inconvenient truths. Feeling anxious or depressed? Probably demonic oppression. Questioning your church's leadership? You are, quote, under spiritual attack. A pastor gets caught in misconduct or abuse.
John Williamson (14:24.296)
That's just the enemy trying to take down a man of God. man, and if victims speak up, they're accused of giving Satan a foothold. Entire ministries have built empires on this kind of spiritual warfare theology. Take deliverance ministries international or John Ramirez ministries, where followers are taught to cast demons out of their thoughts, finances, and household items. Or Greg Locke, the Tennessee pastor who claimed autism and OCD
were signs of demonic possession and who held public book burnings of Harry Potter and Disney materials. Or Bethel Church in Reading, California, where students are taught to identify and remove demonic influences from furniture, clothing, and even their own minds. These aren't fringe. These churches have global platforms, and their message is clear. If it's hard to explain, it must be the devil. But here's the danger with that.
When everything is Satan's fault, no one is held accountable. Abuse gets spiritualized, accountability gets deflected, and victims get silenced. And leaders? They get PR coaching and six months off for restoration. Which brings us something else worth naming. Something that's directly tied to how evangelicalism softens language to protect power. So forgive me for this brief aside on moral failure and the language of deflection.
You've probably heard the term moral failure used when a pastor is caught in a scandal, but let's call it what it is, a euphemism, a way to smooth over what might actually be abuse, grooming, coercion, or straight up criminal behavior. Moral failure makes us sound like the guy just had a bad week, like he made a mistake any of us could have made. It's vague, it's sanitized, and it's deeply convenient.
because it lets the system save face without ever naming the harm. Just like when the devil gets blamed for everything, language gets used to hide the truth. And we'll come back to this, but for now, let's talk about that system. Why did Jesus have to die in the first place? And why does evangelicalism insist that it had to be bloody? So let's get into the atonement theories they never told you about. So far, we've talked about hell and we've talked about the devil.
John Williamson (16:50.15)
Now we come to the question at the center of it all. Why did Jesus die? And if you grew up in an evangelical setting, the answer was probably simple and pretty brutal. Jesus died because you are a sinner and God had to punish someone, so he punished Jesus in your place. The technical name for that particular belief is Penal Substitutionary Atonement, or PSA. But here's the thing. PSA isn't the only theory of atonement.
It's not even the oldest one. It's one of many, and for the first thousand years of Christianity, it wasn't even the dominant view. So why did it become the centerpiece of modern evangelicalism? Because PSA does more than explain the cross. It explains suffering, it explains obedience, and it gives authoritarian systems the perfect spiritual logic for why you should never question authority. Think about it.
In a theology where God requires violence to forgive, who are you to question what your pastor does? In a theology where suffering is sacred, maybe what happened to you was part of your sanctification. In a theology where submission is holiness, resistance becomes rebellion. This is why penal substitution, especially when combined with spiritual warfare theology, becomes more than a doctrine.
It becomes a tool for control. And when that tool is used to silence victims, shield leadership, and turn questions into spiritual attacks, we're no longer just talking about theology. We're talking about behavior that meets recognized markers of high control religious systems, or what experts often call cult dynamics. And I don't use that word casually. According to experts like Dr. Steve Hasson,
who spent decades researching cult dynamics and organizations such as the International Cultic Studies Association, or ICSA, which specializes in the study of high-control groups, these kind of environments often share specific traits. Fear-based obedience, demonizing of dissent, elevating leaders beyond reproach, reframing harm as spiritual attack, discouraging outside information or critical thinking.
John Williamson (19:13.254)
If you've ever been in a church where abuse was downplayed as a moral failure and holding leaders accountable was labeled divisive or demonic, you're not just remembering a bad experience. You're remembering a system that meets the actual criteria for cultic behavior. Here's a quick self-assessment for listeners. If you're wondering whether your church, ministry, or former spiritual community falls into this pattern, here are a few red flags to look for.
Were you told that questioning leadership was a sign of rebellion or spiritual weakness? Were you ever warned not to read or listen to, quote, outside voices that might challenge church teaching? Was pain minimized as, quote, God working on you? Were victims asked to stay quiet, quote, for the good of the church? And did the leader claim special access to God as though they heard God for you? If you're nodding along to several of those, you weren't just in a strict environment.
You were in a high control system, using theological language to shield power and suppress people. Which brings us back to the cross. Because when you hold theology that centers punishment and obedience, and you pair it with authoritarian leadership, you get a religion that protects systems, not people. But the early Christians didn't understand Jesus' death in that way. They weren't talking about wrath. They were talking about rescue. So let's talk about
Christus Victor. Long before anyone ever talked about wrath or legal substitution, the earliest Christians understood the cross through a different lens. They didn't see it as a courtroom drama. They saw it as a cosmic rescue mission. This model is called Christus Victor, Latin for Christ the Victor. And in this view, Jesus didn't die because God was angry, he died because the world was broken. Ruled by powers of sin, death,
and injustice, and his death, far from being a payment, was a confrontation, a final showdown. In Christus Victor, the cross is not a receipt, it's a battlefield, and the resurrection is the victory.
John Williamson (21:29.438)
To really understand how this theology developed, you have to remember what early Christians were facing. They weren't middle-class suburban churchgoers. They were persecuted minorities living under the violent boot of the Roman Empire. They watched their friends be thrown to lions. They lived in fear of execution, imprisonment, or being branded enemies of the state. And when they looked at Jesus on the cross, executed by the state as a political threat, they didn't say, God did that to him.
They said Rome did that to him and God raised him anyway. The message wasn't God's wrath has been satisfied. The message was the powers of death don't win. Empire doesn't win. Fear doesn't win. Jesus' death in this view is God standing in solidarity with the oppressed, absorbing the worst the world can do and then overturning it with resurrection. So let's compare the two.
Christ is victor and penal substitution or PSA. Under Christ is victor, Jesus defeats the powers of evil, sin and death. Under PSA, Jesus satisfies God's demand for punishment. Under Christ is victor, the cross is rescue. Under PSA, the cross is a legal transaction. Christ is victor, the problem is oppression. PSA, the problem is God's wrath. Christ is victor, God is the liberator.
PSA, God is the judge. Christus Victor, evil is real and Jesus overcomes it. PSA, sin is the crime and Jesus takes the penalty. Christus Victor, you are freed. PSA, you are forgiven. So you see the difference? Christus Victor says the world is broken and God came to rescue you from it. Penal substitution says you are broken and God had to punish someone to forgive you.
One builds hope, the other builds fear. One centers on God's love, the other centers on God's anger. And yet for many of us, only one of these was ever taught. But there's more. Because early Christian thinkers didn't just stop at Christus Victor, they also wrestled with how Jesus' death changed hearts, not just systems. That's where we go next. The Moral Influence Theory.
John Williamson (23:57.307)
and why it was so radical for its time. If Christus Victor was about liberation, a rescue from the powers of sin, death, and empire, the moral influence theory takes the next step. It asks, what happens inside us when we see a God who loves like that? This model says Jesus didn't die to satisfy wrath. He died to reveal the depth of divine love. A love so profound, it reshapes the human heart.
The idea is that we're not saved because God finally got paid, we're saved because love broke through our fear. So where does this come from? This view has roots in the early church, but was made famous by theologian Peter Abelard in the 12th century. He looked at the brutality of penal substitution and said, how does this reflect the love of God revealed in Christ? And it's a fair question. Because when you read the gospels, really read them.
You don't see a God obsessed with punishment. You see Jesus healing, forgiving, breaking bread with traitors, and telling stories about prodigal sons coming home with no penalty required. You see compassion, not condemnation. You see love, not wrath. And here's where this model connects back to something even older. The God of Genesis 1 creates the universe not through violence, but through speech.
not by slaying monsters or battling chaos gods like Marduk or Baal, but by saying, let there be, and it was good. The biblical story opens with a God of peace, creativity, and blessing, not domination. So it shouldn't surprise us that the same God would enter human history not to demand blood, but to show love. In this view, Jesus' death is not a transaction. It's a mirror.
It shows us what divine love looks like and invites us to become like it. This is where the tension with PSA becomes unavoidable. Because if God is love and Jesus is the exact representation of that God, then why would that God require violence in order to forgive? Why would the one who taught love your enemies require brutal punishment for his children? Why would the God who ran to the prodigal son demand blood first?
John Williamson (26:23.953)
That's not just a theological glitch, it's a contradiction in character. The moral influence theory says the cross isn't what makes God loving, it's how God proves he always was. Love that bleeds doesn't demand punishment, it absorbs the worst and answers with grace. That's the kind of love that changes people, not through guilt, not through shame, but through transformation. Before Christus Victor was fully formed,
Early Christians were already trying to make sense of why Jesus died, and ultimately what it accomplished. One of the earliest atonement models to emerge was called the ransom theory. In this view, humanity had become enslaved to sin, death, or even the devil himself. We had sold ourselves into bondage, and the only way to free us was to pay a price, and that price was the life of Jesus. The cross in this model is a kind of divine trade-off.
God gives Jesus over to the powers of death as a ransom to purchase our freedom. So where did this one come from? Because this model didn't come out of nowhere. It was rooted in how people in the ancient world understood slavery, captivity, and empire. If someone was enslaved or in prison, you needed ransom, a payment to set them free. So early Christians living under Roman oppression and shaped by stories of Israel's exile,
used the same language. We were in chains and Jesus paid the price. Some versions of this theory, like the writings of origin, even say the ransom was paid to Satan. And to our modern ears, that sounds wild. Why would God owe anything to the devil? But the point wasn't about Satan's rights. It was about God's determination to rescue. This wasn't about satisfying wrath. It was about liberation, even if the metaphor was imperfect.
So over time, theologians started asking better questions. Wait, why would God negotiate with the devil? Was this a trick, a trap, a real payment? So the theory evolved. The metaphor of ransom became less literal and more symbolic, pointing not to a transaction, but to a victory. God didn't pay off Satan like a cosmic mob boss. God defeated the powers of sin and death, took back what belonged to him, and set the captives free.
John Williamson (28:51.175)
That's the moment the ransom theory gave way to Christus Victor. So if you imagine the ransom theory as Act I, Christus Victor is Act II, the fuller version, the clearer theology, the more powerful story. It's not about a bargain. It's about a God who comes straight into the prison of human suffering and breaks the locks from the inside. So at this point, we've talked through several different models, ransom theory, Christus Victor, moral influence, and here's something important to say out loud.
These are all just that, theories, attempts, interpretations. And believe me, there's more than just those three. And nobody has a video recording of the Atonement working behind the scenes. These are human efforts, shaped by culture and context, to make sense of a cosmic mystery. And it's okay to sit in that mystery without pretending we've nailed it down. But why ultimately did PSA become the dominant view?
So if you've ever heard one version of the atonement, the courtroom version, where you're guilty and Jesus takes your punishment, it's probably not because it's the most biblical. It's because it was born in the perfect storm of political power, legal philosophy, and theological reform. So in the 11th century, a theologian named Anselm of Canterbury laid the foundation for what would later become penal substitution. But it's important to know who Anselm was.
He lived in a feudal society where honor, debt, and hierarchical loyalty were the core values. In his view, sin wasn't just breaking a rule, it was dishonoring God's glory, like insulting a king. And when you dishonored a king, someone had to restore that honor. So Jesus came to offer satisfaction on our behalf. To pay the debt we couldn't. Anselm's model wasn't about punishment yet, but it laid the groundwork.
Fast forward a few centuries to John Calvin and the Protestant Reformation. Calvin was trained as a lawyer and his theology reflected that legal mind. In Calvin's framework, sin wasn't just dishonor, it was a crime. And crimes demand punishment. God being perfectly just couldn't simply forgive. Someone had to be punished and Jesus volunteered. So this is where penal substitutionary atonement was born. Jesus takes the penalty, you get the forgiveness.
John Williamson (31:17.053)
It's a legal swap, a courtroom drama. And for Reformation-era Christians, surrounded by authoritarian rulers and legalistic structures, this model made emotional and cultural sense. It felt orderly, it reinforced obedience, and it put God's justice front and center. So why did it stick? PSA became the dominant view in Western Christianity, not because it was better theology, but because it fit the legal and political imagination of Europe.
And later, as evangelicalism spread, this model came with it, riding on the back of empire, missions, and colonialization. It was simple, it was portable, and it was emotionally powerful, especially when paired with revivalist fear tactics. But powerful doesn't mean true, and simple doesn't mean complete. And the truth is, the cross is too big to fit in one metaphor.
Theologians through the centuries have reached for language, ransom, victory, substitution, moral transformation, trying to describe something unspeakable, a moment where divine love collided with human violence, and somehow, love won. So here's where we land. Everything we've talked about, ransom, Christus Victor, moral influence, penal substitution, these are theories.
They are not the gospel. They are attempts, metaphors created by human beings in specific cultures at specific times, trying to make sense of the same mystery we're still wrestling with today. Some emphasize justice, some emphasize love, some emphasize cosmic evil. But none of them, not one, can fully capture the depth of what happened when Jesus took his last breath on a Roman cross. There are more than we even covered.
We didn't even get to all the others. Recapitulation, where Jesus redos the human story correctly. Governmental theory, which tries to show how the cross maintains moral order. Or solidarity models, where Jesus joins us in suffering. There are dozens of lenses through which Christians for centuries have looked at the cross and asked, what does this mean for us? But here's the shift. We're not meant to worship a theory. We're meant to follow a person. And that person, Jesus,
John Williamson (33:44.529)
showed us again and again what God is like. Healing the broken, welcoming the outcast, forgiving the undeserving. And when Jesus described his own death, he didn't say, I'm about to satisfy my father's wrath. He said, greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for their friends. The earliest Christians didn't obsess over how it worked.
They celebrated that it did. That death didn't win. That violence didn't have the last word. That love broke through anyway. But what about maybe you're hearing all this and thinking, so you think you're right in 2000 years of Christianity is wrong, or this is what Christians have always believed, or even if we throw this out, what next? Do we stop believing in resurrection too? These are real questions and they come from fear.
Because when a system is built on a single interpretation and you start poking holes in that interpretation, it feels like the whole thing might fall apart. But here's the truth. Christianity has never had just one view of atonement. The church has always debated, explored, revised, and rediscovered. Not because the gospel is weak, but because it's so expansive. It refuses to be domesticated.
Letting go of penal substitution doesn't mean letting go of Jesus. It means refusing to reduce him to illegal transaction. It means trusting that the God revealed through Jesus doesn't need blood to be good or violence to be just. It means admitting that if Jesus is what God looks like, then love, not wrath, is at the heart of the cross. So no, you don't have to choose between faith and honesty.
You don't have to choose between Jesus and your conscience. You just have to be willing to ask better questions. Because maybe the cross isn't about a God who had to hurt someone. Maybe it's about a God who came to rescue everyone. And maybe, just maybe, that's good news worth holding onto. So let's recap. What we've talked about, hell, and how the version you were taught came more from Dante than from Jesus.
John Williamson (36:12.485)
The devil, how Satan evolved from an action to a being and how he's being used to deflect accountability and control people. And atonement theories, plural, as in more than one way Christians have understood the cross over the past 2000 years. We've looked at ransom theory, Christus Victor, moral influence, and how penal substitution became dominant because of politics, power, and fear, not because it was what Jesus taught.
And maybe that's the part that's hardest to unlearn. Because if you've grown up in evangelical spaces, you've probably been told, this is what Christians have always believed. This is the gospel. But that's simply not true. The early church believed many things and debated them vigorously. Penal substitution didn't show up until over a thousand years after Jesus. So stating that that's the theory Christians have always believed,
isn't just bad theology, it's bad history. And the idea that God can't forgive without punishing someone? That is more in common with empire than with grace. So the real question is this. If you know these are just theories, if you've seen the historical record, then why are you still holding onto it? Is it really because it reflects the heart of God revealed in Jesus? Or is it because it's familiar?
Because it aligns with your identity, your tribe, your theological team. Or maybe deep down, because it helps you stay in a system where you benefit from obedience, hierarchy, and certainty? Because if your theology is more about defending your position than seeking the truth, that's not faith. That's politics. And it might be time to let that go. Jesus didn't come to found a theory.
He came to reveal what God is really like. And what we see in his life, his death and his resurrection is not a demand for punishment. It's a love that goes all the way to the grave and comes back for us anyway.