I thought only this theory of salvation was held:
No, that's a common misconception among both Christians and non-Christians. The reason for that is that, as I said, evangelicals hold this theory, and are very vocal about it; so, as with many things (homosexuality, the role of other religions, the nature of faith, the nature of the Bible, etc, etc, etc), non-Christians assume that the evangelical view is "the" Christian view.
and my intention was to ask why couldn't God just let us go without sacrificing anyone? I mean, he's omnipotent and benevolent, he made the rules, why must he retaliate our sins to someone? If I think about humane forgiveness, revenge isn't integral part of it (but usually understood rather as opposite of it (though actions has nothing to do with forgiving, I think)).
On the other hand revenging to someone else than sinner doesn't sound justice to me. It would imply that God wouldn't care about justice, but only about revenge. Perhaps one could say that whole idea of justice is revenge or equal amounts of suffering, but it wouldn't explain this scapegoat-thing. Unless God would be interested only about the total amount of suffering.
Thats what I'm puzzled about: If the above mentioned is the explanation to why Christ had to die (and at least to lutherians it seems to be), then what's the explanation of God's blind hate?
I don't think there is a very good one, to be honest. In my opinion, this theory of the atonement (normally known as "penal substitution", to express the idea that Jesus is punished in the place of sinners) is open to more objections than any others. Now evangelical theologians (something of a contradiction in terms, but still) would typically answer that God's justice demands that sins be punished. God cannot just forgive the sins without doing any punishing, because that would be unjust. Personally I don't see the force of this at all, especially when you bear in mind that it's normally unjust to punish one person in the place of another; it seems pointless.
It's worth remembering that this theory of the atonement was developed when Roman law was standard in Europe; under this system, a crime has to be punished. It's quite different from the medieval law that was operating when Anselm worked out his own theory, under which no-one needed to be punished provided restitution could be made for the crime. Calvin and co were thinking of God operating under the legal system that they knew, just as Anselm had been. The problem, of course, is that legal systems change, and are ultimately fairly arbitrary; why should God operate under Roman law and not some other system?
Many other objections have been made to the theory of penal substition, such as:
(1) Jesus is only one person, so it seems impossible for him to be punished in the place of many people.
(2) If salvation comes from Jesus being punished in our place, then we ought to be saved irrespective of whether we believe or not: there is no need for anyone to be forgiven later. (This, and the previous objection, were made by Faustus Socinus in the sixteenth century.)
(3) The punishment for sin is supposed to be eternal damnation. So if Jesus is punished in the place of sinners, he ought to be eternally damned, not just crucified.
(4) If salvation is just a matter of a sort of cosmic forensic exercise, then it doesn't actually affect anyone: no change of heart
in the sinner is required or effected by it.
(5) If salvation comes just from Christ being punished in our place, then there is no role for his resurrection. But traditionally, Christians believe that the crucifixion and resurrection are both vital to salvation.
Now this Abelards answer sounds very good, not only because it is reasonable, but also because it's true. I don't even believe in God, and still the example of Jesus has saved my life! I just don't understand the death part: If he was only to show example, he died for no one, how is that a sacrifice? Or did Abelard think that the death was to only show how comitted he was to show the example?
Abelard's actual texts on this matter are very brief, surprisingly so given that they have been so influential. In fact this is what he says:
Peter Abelard said:
Now it seems to us that we have been justified by the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this way: through this unique act of grace manifested to us - in that his Son has taken upon himself our nature and persevered therein in teaching us by word and example even unto death - he has more fully bound us to himself by love; with the result that our hearts should be enkindled by such a gift of divine grace, and true charity should not now shrink from enduring anything for him... Everyone is made more righteous, that is more loving towards God, after the passion of Christ than he had been before, because a realised gift incites greater love than that which is only hoped for. Therefore, our redemption through Christ’s suffering is that supreme love in us which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but also acquires for us the true liberty of sons of God.
As you can see, in the last sentence there, Abelard actually identifies "our redemption" with "that supreme love in us". But it's not entirely clear exactly what Abelard himself thought this means. Did he think that Christ's death functions
purely as an example? That's what Bernard of Clairvaux thought, and he denounced Abelard and had him condemned as a Pelagian (Pelagianism is the heretical belief that we save ourselves). But perhaps Abelard actually thought that the influx of love into sinners, as a result of Christ's death, is an act of God. There are disagreements of interpretation here. However, the objection you raise is in fact a very good one that has been raised before. If Christ's death functions
solely as an example, then it's not particularly inspiring. Only if you
already think it saves will you be that inspired by it. Now as I said before, Abelard also seems to have thought of Christ's death as working in some way as penal substitution, so he avoids this objection. Many modern theologians have been very impressed by Abelard's theory and tried to make it work as a complete account of salvation in its own right, without needing any alternative one to back it up; such attempts are often open to objections like yours.
Well maybe it's there just to give us impression that life isn't that bad. There are many people who think life is hell allready, and even more people who are in a threat to start to think that way. Wouldn't it make sense then that there are just as much goodness as it's necessary to prevent the majority of mankind thinking that way.
Perhaps; but if life
seems good then it
is good, I'd say. If you believe yourself to be having fun you probably are. Perhaps the malevolent God plunges everyone into an eternity of suffering after they die, in which case happiness in this life is nothing by comparison, and perhaps that earlier happiness makes the later suffering so much worse. Still, people aren't normally very impressed by the reverse of that reasoning: that is, if you try to say that suffering in this life isn't so bad given that there will be an eternity of happiness after death, most people would respond by saying it would still be better if there were no suffering now.
One more question: Wasn't there some sect that tought that the God of Old Testament was really malevolent, and Jesus was sent here from a good God to save us? When I think about those answers you gave, many of them seemd to have common element of Jesus scheming to betray God in oder to save us. (It was btw coincidence that my first questions relate to each others this way, I'm not pushing any agenda here, I'm not religious at all).
That was the Gnostics, mostly in the second century AD. There were many Gnostic groups, who believed all kinds of different things, but they generally agreed that the Old Testament God was either ignorant or actively malevolent. Some, known as the Ophites, venerated the serpent of Genesis 3, because that was the first creature to teach humanity how to disobey the wicked God (normally known as the Demiurge, that is, the Creator).
There was another group called the Marcionites, after the second-century theologian Marcion, who wanted to remove all Jewish elements from Christianity: Marcion rejected the Old Testament and carefully edited the New Testament to get rid of all the Jewish bits. He seems to have come to this view after reading the Old Testament and deciding that the God described there was pretty nasty and cannot be identical with the loving God of the New Testament. There's some disagreement over whether Marcion should be considered a Gnostic; he doesn't seem to have held the most characteristic Gnostic view, though, which is that the physical world is inherently evil.
The various theories of the atonement aren't meant to suggest that Jesus conspires to betray God; obviously, for orthodox Christians, Jesus
is God, and what he does is thus entirely in accordance with God's plan. So proponents of penal substitution believe that God has
himself suffer in our place (John Stott calls it the "self-substitution" of God). That makes God sound a bit nicer than if he is punishing some random sinless person in the place of everyone else, though I don't think it really addresses the problems raised above. Still, some Gnostics believed that Jesus was a sort of double agent. As the Messiah, he was sent by the Demiurge, and his teachings were therefore bad. However, he was also possessed by a divine Saviour, sent by the true God; and if you meditate carefully upon his words, you will see the underlying, allegorical message from God, which a surface reading will not provide.
