It is often said that if Jesus was killed by the guillotine or the electric chair or lethal injection that Christians would be wearing golden lethal injections around their necks or golden electric chairs.
And that their prayers like the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September, that goes:
"O Lord our God, ... with the unfailing support of the Holy Cross uphold us whom thou makest rejoice to do it an honor."
Would go:
" ... with the unfailing support of the holy electric chair uphold us whom thou makest rejoice to do it an honor"
But that doesn't seem to be the case, because there is not enough blood and the whole Jesus execution is about the worship (if not fetishization) of blood.
Protestants and Catholics may disagree about many things, but they are bound together in an inexorable blood brotherhood when it comes to the meaning of blood for redemption. They value this execution very highly, and they refuse to do without it. That's probably why Mel Gibson's "Passion" was so popular because it is so bloody that most Christian denominations saw it as the right portrayal and enjoyed it.
Just as if Jesus had died of old age or food poisoning, the so-called "redemption of the human race" would not come to grief because no blood would have flowed. Christians would be missing half of the Eucharist--the wine, otherwise known as the blood. And at mass, the priests would get to use only half their words for transubstantiation. Incidentally, this shows that today's eucharistic feasts stand or fall not only with the death of Jesus, but, above all, with the proper kind of death for Jesus.
(Practically speaking, then, it was the Romans who so-called redeemed us: Thanks to their bloody, cruel penal justice, the world found salvation.)
Indeed, Christianity is a religion that glorifies one concrete execution--the execution of Jesus--because the Church sees in it an act of redemption through blood.
God is then the supreme advocate of the death penalty since he condemned his son to death and willed his crucifixion as the means of redemption. But, of course, the death penalty had to be instituted at some point before Jesus arrived, in time to make the redemptive death of Jesus possible. Thus all the people executed before Jesus are the prerequisite, the precursors, the pioneers of his redemptive death. And all the people executed after Jesus are victims of this idea of redemption through the cross. Because the institution of the death penalty, which was divinely willed concerning Jesus, cannot be against God's will in the case of other people. From this standpoint, all the executed are martyrs of sorts. They died then and die even now for the best of all causes: the redemption of the world.
And that their prayers like the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September, that goes:
"O Lord our God, ... with the unfailing support of the Holy Cross uphold us whom thou makest rejoice to do it an honor."
Would go:
" ... with the unfailing support of the holy electric chair uphold us whom thou makest rejoice to do it an honor"
But that doesn't seem to be the case, because there is not enough blood and the whole Jesus execution is about the worship (if not fetishization) of blood.
Protestants and Catholics may disagree about many things, but they are bound together in an inexorable blood brotherhood when it comes to the meaning of blood for redemption. They value this execution very highly, and they refuse to do without it. That's probably why Mel Gibson's "Passion" was so popular because it is so bloody that most Christian denominations saw it as the right portrayal and enjoyed it.
Just as if Jesus had died of old age or food poisoning, the so-called "redemption of the human race" would not come to grief because no blood would have flowed. Christians would be missing half of the Eucharist--the wine, otherwise known as the blood. And at mass, the priests would get to use only half their words for transubstantiation. Incidentally, this shows that today's eucharistic feasts stand or fall not only with the death of Jesus, but, above all, with the proper kind of death for Jesus.
(Practically speaking, then, it was the Romans who so-called redeemed us: Thanks to their bloody, cruel penal justice, the world found salvation.)
Indeed, Christianity is a religion that glorifies one concrete execution--the execution of Jesus--because the Church sees in it an act of redemption through blood.
God is then the supreme advocate of the death penalty since he condemned his son to death and willed his crucifixion as the means of redemption. But, of course, the death penalty had to be instituted at some point before Jesus arrived, in time to make the redemptive death of Jesus possible. Thus all the people executed before Jesus are the prerequisite, the precursors, the pioneers of his redemptive death. And all the people executed after Jesus are victims of this idea of redemption through the cross. Because the institution of the death penalty, which was divinely willed concerning Jesus, cannot be against God's will in the case of other people. From this standpoint, all the executed are martyrs of sorts. They died then and die even now for the best of all causes: the redemption of the world.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
