The Second Half of Creation

About the Book

Many, perhaps most, Christians and former Christians have rejected two central teachings of traditional Christian theology: (1) the doctrine of the Fall of mankind in the sin of Adam and Eve, the “original sin,” and the consequent separation of humanity from God, and (2) the teaching that God required the bloody sacrifice of his only Son to atone for the “original sin” and repair this separation and breach. But once one rejects the Fall, and rejects the concept of a sacrifice in substitutionary atonement, there remains in traditional Christianity no coherent explanation for the mission of Jesus, no answer to the questions “Why did Jesus come?” and “What exactly did Jesus do?” So many Christians now have no understanding acceptable to themselves or to others which explains what Jesus did and how what he did is supposed to be effective. This is a major reason why there are so many former Christians and “cafeteria Christians” among us.

There is thus a need for a new explanation of the mission of Jesus. I have developed a new explanation, and I have set it forth in The Second Half of Creation. The new explanation does not depend upon the story of the Fall of mankind. It does not hold that Jesus’s death was a redeeming sacrifice; indeed, it asserts that Jesus died because of his unwavering opposition to the idea of sacrifice, the religions of sacrifice, and the cultures built upon such religions.

To the best of my knowledge (and the knowledge of the thirty or forty people who have read the manuscript, including two members of the faculty of religious studies at a prominent Jesuit university), nothing resembling my new explanation presently exists in published form, either in the professional or in the popular literature. Many writers have written of the severe deficiencies of the traditional Christian explanation of the mission of Jesus (set out most clearly by Anselm of Canterbury over 900 years ago), but none has proposed a coherent developed alternative explanation.

The explanation of Jesus’s mission set forth in The Second Half of Creation is derived from and based upon (1) a description of the behaviors of humans which are found in human genes, as established by Darwinian psychologists; (2) an analysis of the primitive natural religions of myth, ritual and blood sacrifice, as described by many cultural anthropologists (among whom the most important for my purposes are René Girard and his followers); and (3) a careful organization and analysis of the teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels. The book describes in a new way the particular condition of human civilizations and cultures which requires the redemptive activity of Jesus, and it explains how the life and teaching of Jesus accomplish the redemption of humanity, and what this means. It explains that in a systematic and thorough way Jesus taught men and women (1) to work against the naturally-selected human vices of violence, fear and hatred of strangers, dominant-submissive (or hierarchical) behavior, and acquisitiveness, all as embodied in sacrificial cultures; (2) to oppose and reject the external practices of natural religion (ritual cleanness, holy times, places and things, dietary prohibitions and ritual sacrifice); and (3) to put in their place the vigorous cultivation of the opposing virtues of non-violence, non-judging, forgiveness, humility and detachment from possessions, which Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. I assert that Jesus’s activity of teaching and preaching, and showing by the example of his life how his teachings can and should be put into practice, is the mission of Jesus, and works the redemption of humanity. Jesus’s death was not the redeeming act, but simply the unavoidable consequence of the collision between Jesus’s determination to continue his teachings, which threatened to undermine the nation of Israel, and the judgment of the leaders of Israel who felt they had to protect Israel from one who

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