In Defense of God

On sacrifice, human responsibility, and the possibility that transformation never required a victim

There is a question I have carried for a long time, although I am only beginning to understand how large it actually is: Why did Jesus have to die?

The question is so familiar within Christianity that its premise can become almost invisible. We ask why his death was necessary before asking whether it was necessary at all. Yet the historical event at the center of Christianity is not simply that Jesus died. Jesus was executed. Human beings, operating through religious and political institutions, made decisions that resulted in his death.

Whatever theological meaning has subsequently been placed around the crucifixion, that fact remains.

People killed him.

I find myself increasingly unwilling to move too quickly past that.

Christianity has never had only one explanation for what the crucifixion means. Across its history, Christians have understood the death of Jesus through many frameworks: victory over death and evil, reconciliation, ransom, moral transformation, satisfaction, substitution, participation in divine life, and others. The idea that Jesus had to suffer a punishment owed by humanity is one influential interpretation, but it is not Christianity’s only account of the cross.

That matters to me because I have never been able to make complete sense of the idea that God required a body in order to forgive humanity.

The problem becomes particularly clear when I remove, for a moment, the theology constructed around the event and return to the human story itself.

Jesus taught. People responded.

He spoke about love of God and neighbor, forgiveness, mercy, care for the poor, the dignity of people considered socially unacceptable, and a kingdom whose values repeatedly disrupted ordinary assumptions about power and status. His teaching challenged both individual behavior and established structures of authority.

Eventually, human beings decided that he was dangerous enough to kill.

Perhaps we should allow ourselves to remain with that reality longer than we usually do.

Because the moment we say that Jesus had to die, something subtle happens. The execution begins to appear inevitable. Violence becomes part of a necessary cosmic sequence. The people involved may still be understood as morally responsible, but their actions also become required for the story to reach its intended conclusion.

And then an uncomfortable question emerges.

Could they have chosen differently?

Could Pilate have chosen differently? Could Judas? Could the authorities? Could the people who stood near the machinery of execution have interrupted it?

Could Jesus have lived?

If the answer is no because the death was metaphysically required, then human freedom becomes strangely theatrical at the very point where Christianity so often insists that human freedom matters.

I find myself returning instead to a simpler proposition: choice has to be real for transformation to be real.

If another response were never actually possible, then what we call transformation would become merely the unfolding of a predetermined sequence. There must be some genuine point at which a person, a family, an institution, or a civilization can encounter what has been inherited and decide not to repeat it.

This question became clearer to me through a much older story, the Greek myth of Admetus and Alcestis.

Admetus is given an extraordinary possibility: he may escape his appointed death if someone else agrees to die in his place. Eventually, his wife Alcestis accepts the substitution. Beneath the mythology lies a structure that remains painfully recognizable. Something unbearable approaches, and rather than encounter it directly, the burden is transferred to another body.

I cannot bear this consequence. Can someone else carry it for me?

Once I began seeing that structure, I found it everywhere.

Families can avoid confronting their collective dysfunction until one person becomes identified as the problem. Institutions can refuse to acknowledge impossible expectations until a particular worker absorbs the cost through exhaustion. Societies can carry fear, humiliation, instability, or resentment until a population is selected to bear the blame. Individuals can experience anger, shame, grief, or powerlessness and discharge those feelings into someone else rather than metabolizing them themselves.

The details change, but the structure persists. Something difficult appears. We do not know how, or do not wish, to face it directly. So we find somewhere else to put it.

Someone becomes the container.

Someone pays.

Human history contains countless variations on this pattern, and religion has not been immune from it.

This is where I unexpectedly find myself wanting to offer a defense of God.

We have attributed an astonishing amount of human behavior to divine intention. Wars have been described as God’s will. Hierarchies have been defended as God’s order. Exclusion has been justified through God. Political power has claimed divine sanction. Punishments have been delivered in God’s name. Violence has been made sacred by locating its authority somewhere beyond the people actually committing it.

Then, after human beings create suffering through these structures, we sometimes stand among the consequences and ask why God created such a world.

At some point, I think we have to ask whether God has become humanity’s largest scapegoat.

That is not the same as claiming that human beings control reality. We obviously do not. We are born into bodies, families, histories, economies, climates, cultures, governments, and systems we did not create. Illness happens. Death happens. Natural disasters happen. Other people exercise choices we cannot control. Reality is vastly larger than individual agency.

But being unable to control everything is not the same thing as having no responsibility for anything.

Agency is not omnipotence.

It is participation.

And this distinction may help clarify another assumption that appears again and again in religion, mythology, psychology, and ordinary life: the belief that suffering is necessary for transformation.

We often say that suffering changed us. Sometimes it does appear to. But suffering can also traumatize people, narrow their lives, reproduce violence, deepen fear, and destroy what might otherwise have grown. Pain has no automatic moral wisdom embedded inside it.

So perhaps suffering itself is not what transforms us.

Perhaps suffering frequently forces something else: encounter.

Loss forces us to encounter attachment. Illness forces us to encounter embodiment. Failure can force us to encounter the limits of an identity. Collapse forces systems to confront what they refused to acknowledge while they were still functioning.

Because the encounter so often arrives through pain, we mistake the vehicle for the mechanism.

We say suffering transformed us when perhaps what actually happened was that suffering made avoidance impossible. We finally encountered reality, and within that encounter, something became available that had not been available while we were still avoiding it.

Choice.

If that is the mechanism, then suffering is not necessarily required.

Encounter is.

We can tell the truth before a relationship collapses. We can repair an institution before someone burns out maintaining it. We can acknowledge grief before it is converted into rage. We can confront prejudice before persecution makes the lesson unavoidable. We can recognize another person’s humanity without needing tragedy to force the recognition. We can examine our beliefs before reality destroys them for us.

We can learn without requiring a victim. That possibility changes the meaning of sacrifice.

Perhaps what humans have frequently called necessary sacrifice is what happens when encounter has been avoided for too long. The pressure accumulates somewhere. Eventually someone absorbs the consequence of what the larger system refused to face.

Someone becomes Alcestis.

And then I return to Jesus.

What if the deepest revelation of the crucifixion is not that God required a body, but that human beings produced one?

What if the cross shows what can happen when fear, political power, collective certainty, institutional self-preservation, and the preservation of existing order converge upon a human being?

Then the crucifixion is not merely the solution to a theological problem. It is also the exposure of a human pattern.

This is what we do when encounter becomes intolerable.

We find somewhere to put the consequence.

And viewed in that light, resurrection takes on a different meaning as well. It need not be understood as God’s justification for why the killing had to occur. It can be read as God’s answer to what human beings did.

You killed him, and still love is not defeated.

You attempted to end the story, and still the story continued.

Violence does not possess final authority over reality.

That interpretation does not make the cross less sacred to me. It makes it considerably more serious, because it removes the comforting possibility that everyone was simply playing an unavoidable part in a divine script.

It leaves choice standing in the center of the story.

And if choice was real there, it must be real here.

This is why I have become wary of any explanation that places all causation outside human participation. God’s plan. Fate. Destiny. The universe. The stars. History. Systems. Each of these can describe forces that genuinely influence human life, but each can also become a place where responsibility quietly disappears.

A system is real, but systems are sustained through human participation. A culture is real, but culture continues through repeated human behavior. History constrains us, but history also moves through the actions of living people. Institutions exert power, but institutions are still composed of people who make decisions, enforce rules, resist, comply, intervene, or remain silent.

We are not individually responsible for everything that happens.

But neither are we merely spectators.

We participate.

We choose, repeat, permit, resist, repair, create, and sometimes refuse to see what our participation is producing.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest implications of taking human freedom seriously. We keep looking upward for the authority responsible for what is happening here, when sometimes there is no invisible hand arranging the pieces.

Sometimes it really is us.

That realization is frightening because it deprives us of some very powerful excuses.

But it is also profoundly hopeful.

If human beings participate in producing suffering, then human beings can participate in reducing it. If institutions are built through choices, they can be rebuilt through choices. If violence is learned, legitimized, and repeated, then perhaps it can also be interrupted.

We do not need another sacrifice.

We do not need another Alcestis.

We do not need another person to become the problem a family will not face, another exhausted worker holding together an institution that refuses to change, another population carrying the fear of a society unwilling to examine itself.

Something may have to be confronted.

Something may have to change.

Something may have to end.

But someone does not necessarily have to be destroyed.

Perhaps maturity—psychological, spiritual, and even civilizational maturity—begins when we stop asking who will carry the consequence for us and begin asking more difficult questions.

What is happening here?

How am I participating in it?

What belongs to me?

What have I inherited that I am continuing simply because it was handed to me?

And now that I can see it, what will I choose?

This is not, for me, an argument against God. Strangely, it has become an argument in God’s defense.

Perhaps God did not demand every sacrifice we have attributed to God. Perhaps God did not authorize every hierarchy we constructed in God’s name. Perhaps God has not been directing every act of violence while humanity helplessly performs an assigned role.

Perhaps love has always required something much more difficult from us.

Not sacrifice.

Responsibility.

Not suffering for its own sake.

Encounter.

Not obedience to an invisible script.

Participation.

And choice.

Because choice has to be real for transformation to be real.

If that is true, then the question left by the crucifixion cannot only be, Why did God allow this?

We also have to ask:

Why did human beings do this?

And once we are willing to ask that question seriously, another follows immediately behind it.

Now that we can see the pattern, what will we choose to do differently?