theoretically Yours.

I use words. I use them to express joy, and confusion, understanding, love and sometimes a misguided sense of superiority. I don't always use them well, or convey exactly what I intend to convey. Sometimes, I use them poorly. I use words to gloss over complicated ideas, and to wiggle out of having to explicate my beliefs in wholeness and honesty.

Sometimes, most often, that's because I don't know enough to be whole and honest.

If, instead of saying that Christ died for my sins, I can say that "Christ represented a radical love," I am able to stay safely out of the fray. Christians will read the line about radical love, and assume I am on-board with atonement. Non-Christians will read the same words, and accept them without offense. Everyone's the better?

No, not really. The truth is that I don't know now what I believe. And so when I write and speak about the issues, I find myself saying things that are...well, fuzzy. I'm saying fuzzy things because I'm thinking fuzzy things.

One person says to me, "Christ died to atone for your sins." Another says, "Christ came into the world to show you that His love bridges the gap between your sinful nature and His perfection." Two very different concepts. The first assumes a literal debt, and a literal transaction. The second proposes a more of a metaphorical role for Christ's sacrifice. Both theorists, by the way, consider their theologies to be biblically-based. And both are, in a sense.

I grapple with this: That God would come into our world to show us a better way in one specific time, and one specific place, without leaving a form through which all subsequent generations might understand Love, would not suggest a living God. Only a God of 33 AD. One may believe that the scriptures are that living legacy. But scriptures can tell us of God, they cannot be God. If God was on earth only to act as an example, as though to say "I love you past your sins," what does that mean for our sins? What hope have we then got, that we can give and receive a perfect love? If unable to live in Christ, who, in a sense, absorbs that sin, what will we ever know of Truth? Sin fractures vision. And vision is necessary to see Truth. Love cannot exist apart from Truth.

For me to say that I've sinned, but that Christ came to show me how to Love, says nothing of His love for me. His example is useless without my own ability to follow it. And that ability cannot come from within me. Thus, that He entered the world means nothing if not coupled with His death, and resurrection. Because any theology that addresses Christ's Love, is empty without also addressing sin. And to say that we are justified through Christ's love, is an incomplete picture, in that His greatest act of Love is His death. But only if His death changed something. Only if it altered, or made right, some condition of humanity. Only if it made it possible for us to Love in the way that He died attempting to teach. For Christ to have died to fulfill the example of perfect love is powerless. For God to have remained dead would be nonsensical. And without the choice to enter into these acts through acceptance, we would have no hope of ever seeing Truth, of ever loving wholly.

In so far as sin to us is death, not only after our lives, but during, Christ chose then, to die instead. So that we might live in the full light of Truth. Unable to justify ourselves, He died in our place.

What do I believe? Do I have a choice?