Wednesday, March 18, 2020

If Jesus' Atonement was a trick, so what?

More al-Qâsim, through Ryan Schaffner - pages 223f. Here Islam rewrote Genesis for what's now its sura 7 and sura 20. I hear that these suras also aimed against the Cave of Treasures.

Al-Qâsim assumes an Allâh so powerful and alien that It doesn't set up rules for the cosmos nor for justice. Christianity, by contrast, does - or at least did in Late Antiquity. As a result, al-Qâsim feels free to expose those Christian rules to ridicule.

In Late Antique Christianity, Eve and Adam followed the Interloper and subjected our whole species to this satan. There are echoes of this theory in the Quran, as well. Where Christianity departs is in how God has solved the problem. Basically: He didn't. Instead He worked through subterfuge, tricking the Devil's agents into performing a substitutary sacrifice.

In my thought, God is finite and faces some limits on His power. But for the Christian, more to the point is that God feels affection for this His creation. God limits Himself from wielding a heavy hand. To that, what better way to demonstrate the Devil's ultimate impotence than to beat him at what he prides himself best at - trickery.

There may exist arguments against The Atonement, but al-Qâsim didn't use a good one.

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