Immorality of Vicarious Redemption in Christianity

To redeem is to compensate for someone's shortcomings.  Redemption in Christianity refers to reducing or completely removing the burden from someone who committed a sin.  Vicarious means "acting or done for another".  Thus, vicarious redemption of sins refers to one person redeeming sins of someone else.  Salvation means to be saved from sins.

Before we get to the topic, it is helpful to recap the traditional notion of salvation in Christianity. 

Here’s a belief statement from Costa Mesa’s Calvary Chapel.

“We believe Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, provided for the atonement of our sins by His vicarious death on the Cross... We believe all people are by nature separated from God and responsible for their own sin, but that salvation is freely offered to all by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. When a person repents of sin and accepts Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord, that person is immediately born again and sealed by the Holy Spirit, all his/her sins are forgiven, and that person becomes a child of God, destined to spend eternity with the Lord.” 

That’s the traditional view of salvation. It begins with the creation stories of Genesis. God was said to have placed a perfect man and woman into a perfect world. But they fell into sin and corrupted humanity. So because we all inherit their original sin, we are cut off from God’s love, destined to spend eternity in the fires of hell.

In this theology, God cannot rescue us until an appropriate sacrifice is made. So God supposedly sent God’s own son, clothed in the flesh of humanity, to die on a cross in order to reconcile sinners with God. In this theology, Jesus’ teaching and how he lived his life is not important; all that matters is that he died for our sins.

To be saved I must believe in my heart and confess with my lips that Jesus is my savior. The moment I do that, I am saved. But, if I resist that, I will be condemned to hell along with unbelievers and non‐Christians.  

Thinking people are troubled by these pronouncements.  Questions arise in their minds:

• How can someone redeem sins of someone else?  
• What does this mean to personal accountability?  
• What does morality mean if there is a real possibility of vicarious redemption?

Bible tells us that Jesus forgave other people's sins.  There are tremendous immoral implications associated with the idea of forgiving other people's sins.  If someone harms me, and commits a sin as a result, how dare someone else forgive that person for that sin?  How dare someone else forgive a person for sin committed against me whom I have not forgiven first?  It is just as abhorrent a thought that even God could forgive that person before I did.

Where is personal accountability for one's own sinful actions?   

• How can someone else forgive sins committed against me?  It is an abhorrent moral precept that  someone else is allowed to forgive a person for sin committed against me whom I have not forgiven first! 

Christian apologist C.S.Lewis took a hard look at vicarious redemption in the Biblical narrative and made rather harsh observations: 

"You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God."   

C.S. Lewis personally resolved this moral dilemma for himself by choosing that Jesus must be the Son of God.  Clearly, this is a personal choice and not a logical deduction.  

In his book "Mere Christianity", C. S. Lewis displays his horror at the notion of taking away the responsibility of someone else's sin (vicarious redemption):

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. 

C.S.Lewis recognizes that this is particularly a problem in a faith that separates Man from God where a prophet is needed as an intermediary:

Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

[Comment: C.S.Lewis is right that Indians see divinity within themselves.  However, when C.S.Lewis says "there would be nothing odd about it", he is implying that Indians can accept a person (with the qualifier that there is divinity within them) forgiving sins.  C.S.Lewis gets that bit about Dharmic traditions of India wrong where the personal accountability cannot actually be taken away.  Law of Karma is a distinct idea of Dharmic traditions which states that you are accountable for your actions. No one can redeem them for you - not even someone who proclaims to be a son of God.  Law of Karma is relentless.  It is just only because it is relentless.  It can be absolutely just only if it is absolutely relentless.]

C.S.Lewis asks if Christians are blinded by this abnormality because they hear this as a normal thing in their life of faith?

• One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic.  

• We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you.  

• But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. 

• Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned; the person chiefly offended in all offences. 

C.S.Lewis is concerned that Christians are sometimes blinded by the abnormality of removing personal accountability because they hear this as a normal thing in their life of faith.  C.S.Lewis then looks into the fundamental belief of Abrahamic faiths that sin is a violation of God's law. 

• This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivaled by any other character in history.   

[Comment: Does it really make sense for God to redeem sins of others?  Without any analysis or discussion, C.S. Lewis simply says that it is - in one fell swoop, there comes the deep faith in redemption by the omnipotent God.  Until C.S. Lewis makes the above comment, he is on track with his reasoning and is brilliantly incisive in his analysis.  He does not let his faith blindside him.  Unfortunately, he does so in the above statement where he limits the notion of morality to nothing more than a violation of God's laws.  Forgiving sins is OK since sin is nothing more than a violation of God's law.  After all, God makes the laws.  You violate God's laws and your sin is nothing but omnipotent God's disappointment in you for violating his laws set for you.  But it is up to God to be not disappointed.  By ingratiating yourself, you can get God to redeem your sins.   From a rationalist / Humanist point-of-view, this has serious problems - in one fell swoop,  vicarious redemption by God is justified by providing a Biblical sense of what violation of morality or sin is.] 

• Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is humble and meek and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

C.S.Lewis then says that, given the above implications of immorality of Jesus forgiving other's sins, it is no longer sufficient for a Christian to believe in Jesus just because he is a moral teacher. 

• I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.  That is the one thing we must not say.   

• A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg” or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  

• But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 

In conclusion, while C.S.Lewis raises a lot of interesting questions, ultimately he limits the idea of morality to the Biblical notion of law and thus draws justification for vicarious redemption of sins.  Unfortunately, this is inadequate:

There are open questions that Christians must answer to themselves: 

• Is morality nothing more than a violation of God's law?  

• It is one thing to say that the Universe is governed by God's laws.  It is entirely another to say that what is in the Bible is God's laws.  Given that some morals in Leviticus in the Bible are unacceptable as morals in our current society, can we affirm our faith that Biblical laws are God's absolute laws?

• If God did not pronounce some moral laws, are they not moral laws?  After all, the Bible says that there are no moral violations if there are no associated laws. If we require that we need the Bible to give us absolute morals, on what basis do we accept morals that are not in the Bible? Do we not use context sensitive application of Biblical laws? Are these contexts not outside the scope of Bible?  

• If there are morals outside God's pronouncements, can God or God's son forgive people for violating those morals?  

•  Can you understand why it is offensive when I am told that it is immoral to harm me only because God says so?   

• Can you see the danger in such a position where now we are giving the extreme power over humanity's fate to someone who claims to have in his hand the word of God?   

• Conversely, can you see why someone who claims to have the word of God in his hand want you to believe that morality is what God says it is?

• Can we do without an impersonal principle separated from God in guiding us in matters of determining personal accountability?