• The Good vs. Evil Theory
  By incarnation, death and Resurrection, Christ triumphs over Satan and rescues humanity from evil


• The Paying-a-Debt Theory
  Christ sacrificed himself to make amends for sins against God


• The Role-Model Theory
  By his example, Christ inspires people to live in obedience to God's ways

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

The Theories: The Meaning of Christ's Death
www.time.com/time/covers/1101040412/box1.html

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That is, not who (on earth) killed him or even exactly how much he suffered. But what was the cosmic reason for his agony? What is its purpose, its divine calculus? How precisely does his death, usually referred to in this context as the atonement, lead to the salvation of humanity? The atonement "is the centerpiece of Christianity, and it's what distinguishes it from all other religions," says Giles Gasper, a religious historian who has written a book about one of the topic's great medieval interpreters. Without at least an intuitive comprehension of atonement, a believer stands little chance of making sense of the faith's promises of redemption and eternal life.

Yet, oddly enough, in many churches the issue of why Christ died is inert, if ever-present...

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For roughly a thousand years, the church fathers seem to have viewed Christ's suffering and dying less as salvation's all-important tragic fulcrum than as one more necessary step in God's triumphant campaign into the human world and, eventually, the devil's precincts. They saw the incarnation and the Resurrection as far more important to reconciliation and a new start for humanity. In fact, a position close to this is still maintained by the world's 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christian believers, rendering them less susceptible than most to extended images of Christ's agony of the sort Gibson presents. Says Frederica Mathewes-Green, who has written several books on Orthodoxy: "It's like a fire fighter who goes into a building and comes back out covered with wounds and scars but carrying in his arms a baby he was able to grab from the crib. The victory is that he did snatch eternal life out of sin and death. And that's what Orthodox Christians focus on."

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[size=2]"The Cross is at the center of Christianity, and we know that it was at the center of Jesus' own thinking," says John Stott, an Anglican preacher and the author of The Cross of Christ, who suffered a stroke last year. "I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross." He is almost pleading. "In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" [/size=2]

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"The Cross is at the center of Christianity, and we know that it was at the center of Jesus' own thinking," says John Stott, an Anglican preacher and the author of The Cross of Christ, who suffered a stroke last year. "I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross." He is almost pleading. "In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?"

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Originally posted by PotOnWheel

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