A thread/reminder that a historical explanation of Jesus’s crucifixion (“he was killed by Rome b/c they viewed him a messianic political revolutionary “) doesn’t preclude a theological explanation (Jesus, God the Son incarnate, died to save humanity from Sin/our sins). (1/11)

Ppl divide these bc of a (IMO) philosophically weak opposition b/w the historical & the theological that has its roots in the theistic rationalism & deism of the Enlightenment (God is a big being “out there”) and in a lot of German rationalism in the 19th C (eg Troeltsch) (2/11)

This division can really only be sustained if you view God as a sort of large discrete being who is “outside” our reality and who may or may not come into it from time to time. This is a kind of quasi-deistic deity; a larger more magnificent version of ourselves. (3/11)

But that is not how classical Christian theology has thought about God. Is not one “being among other beings,” even a “maximally great one.” Rather, God is (in the words of the LXX of Exod 3:14) “egō eimi ho ōn” “I am the One Who Is.” (4/11)

In the words of St. Paul, God is the one who “from Him and through him and unto Him are all things” (Rom 11:36). St. Augustine speaks rightly when he says that God is “more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11). (5/11)

To summarize Aquinas’s massive corpus, God is “Ipsum Esse Subsistens” “The Subsistent Act of To Be.” And lastly, as Robert Sokolowski puts on p. 36 of his *The God of Faith and Reason*: “...the Christian God is not a part of the world and is not a ‘kind’ of being at all.” (6/11)

Here is the point: Since God and His providential ordering of creation and salvation act in non-competitive transcendence (God’s agency and human agency are not in a zero-sum game) and since God is the reason anything (including history) exists at all, the divide between..(7/11)

...the historical reasons for Jesus’s crucifixion (imperial force being used to kill a Jewish messianic claimant) and the theological-soteriological reasons (God the Son willingly atoning for humanity’s sins) is an artificial divide. It is a divide that was erected... (8/11)

...on the basis of a poor doctrine of God, a poor philosophical framework, and a rabidly elitist and ethnocentric desire to control the world and make it do what we want. An Enlightenment-born deity who cannot enter into history allows you to do whatever you please. (9/11)

A God who is “not a being among other beings” and who is “more present to us than we even are to ourselves” is one who might tell you to stop oppressing the poor and who might send you into the wilderness. (10/11)

Jesus died because the Romans executed a rival political claimant, an heir to David’s throne. Jesus died because the Triune Creator God of Love sent His Son (which is to say Himself) to atone for the sins of humanity. These are not mutually exclusive realities. (11/11)

End of thread.