I've been thinking about this all night. If Christ is just a good teacher, the whole Christian economy of salvation--the self-giving love of the Father through the Son to whom we are drawn by the Holy Spirit--collapses. https://twitter.com/Newsweek/status/1300121153818832896

If Christ's sacrifice is not God's act of self-giving love, it is simply the cruel demand of a judge who must exact a pound of flesh. It is the heaping of punishment upon an undeserving other, rather than the sacrificial willingness of God to take sin and death upon himself.

This assumes, of course, that atonement has any place in an understanding of Jesus in which he is not the incarnate God. It many cases it does not. The idea is that Jesus teaches us how to be good people, and being a good person is the goal of life.

But then we lose any real understanding of the power of sin over our lives, the spiritual grip that it has over thoughts and emotions. We lose the any real sense in which our lives have to be redeemed, that we cannot save ourselves, that we are utterly dependent upon God.

Doctrines are not beliefs we may dine upon a-la-carte. They fit together in a coherent system. One belief comes to bear in significant ways upon another, particularly a belief as crucial as the incarnation.

Bottom line: it's clear that the American church has largely failed to teach who Jesus is and why this matters. Our pragmatism and flirtation with every new intellectual trend that comes through the academic pipeline has caught up with us, and now we must begin anew.

And first and foremost, that means we must repent.