Untangling Cliché: "Pleading The Blood of Jesus"

From the Mailbag:

I was wondering if you have ever heard the phrase "plead the blood of Jesus", and if so do you know what it means?

I received an email from my church prayer chain asking us to pray for a lady in the church who was diagnosed with breast cancer. The email asked us to plead the blood of Jesus over this lady. I've heard the phrase before, but really have no idea what it means. Do you?

That term is rooted in what's called the "forensic atonement," also called "penal substitutionary atonement," theory of the cross of Jesus.

Broadly speaking, the idea of "forensic atonement" is the idea that (1) you have inherited the guilt of Adam and / or have sinned and incurred guilt; (2) that God's wrath for this guilt requires ultimate payment: death (or separation from God); (3) that the death of Christ is meant to be that payment."My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus, reciting Psalm 22 from the cross, was chanting (or trying to chant) the great psalm of hope that goes beyond death and which leads to the Gentiles' ("nations'") conversion, a point Mark emphasizes with his converted Roman centurion, played by John Wayne, and the rending of the curtain in the temple.

The doctrine itself is derived most firmly from the Book of Romans.   And once having derived it, you can go back and read the gospels and other epistles through the lens of forensic atonement fairly neatly.  I think this is an abuse of both Romans and the rest of the New Testament, but I'm seldom consulted by The Very Clever Nibs In Charge of Doctrine and Practice.  Just to take one example, though, proponents of the doctrine sometimes say that Jesus' plaint from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34), indicates God had "turned his back" on Jesus, thus plunging him into hell and satisfying God's just wrath.  Which is in my view a fanciful misreading that shows a total ignorance of what Psalm 22 is about, and thereby abuses scripture in order to elevate the doctrine to the level of a "controlling model" for all scriptures.

The historic doctrine itself (as distinct from the scriptures used to support it) is sometimes seen to be pretty recent (the 11th century or so).  And I think there's no doubt that its formulation in the terms I give here can be traced to Anselm (1033?-1109).  Gustav Aulen delivered a pretty withering critique of it in his Christus Victor, a book every Protestant ought to read: but alas, I think he overstated his case a bit and in so doing might have made it a little too easy for his opponents to evade him.

In any event, Anselm's pretty subtle compared to the Reformation thinkers who drafted his doctrine of substitutionary atonement to serve their cause.  And even today Reformed theologians who hold to some form of the substitutionary / forensic atonement (perhaps a little abashed by their fellow Protestants' abuse of Anselm) are at pains to qualify what they do and don't mean by it.

The imagery can be pretty compelling: you are guilty.  You stand before a court in which God is judge and jury.  You are accused of being sinful (or, in some versions, being human).

At that point, the theory runs, you have to plead "Not guilty" (and be damned), or "guilty" (and be damned), or "the blood of Jesus."  That is, you are thought to have a third plea.

"Pleading the blood of Jesus" from that point gets extended into other realms.

For instance, since it is often thought by Western Christians that sickness is a result of guilt, pleading the blood of Jesus extends the imagery of forensic redemption to the temporal consequences of sin.  It becomes in this imagination a sort of shield between the sufferer and the guilt that ultimately causes the suffering.

Note that this is a temporal application of the forensic model of atonement: the real payoff, most would say, would be reserved for after death.

And this raises lots of good questions about what the connection is for such Christians between the now, when pleading the blood of Jesus is sometimes not efficacious to deliver one from the consequences of sin (as they see it) and the afterlife when it is thought that it will be.

I don't ask this to cast doubt on Christianity as a system, but to point to the fact that theology is most often primarily imaginative, and not rational or logical in any exact sense.

And if you imagine God as judge and jury, well, you better plead the blood.

It's not, however, your only option.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

So interesting. I had never thought of that term in relation to the atonement. It does make sense now that I think about it though. My husband read some stuff about "pleading the blood" last night, and it seems that it's thought that Jesus' blood contains some sort of magic power to heal, forgive, etc. (Although they would not use the word "magic"; that's my take on it.)

I agree with you on substitutionary atonement. I've rejected it myself. But I've yet to find a church (aside from Eastern Orthodoxy) that doesn't believe it or have it listed in some form on their statement of faith. I find that I have to keep my mouth shut about what I believe, or people will look at me funny and question my salvation.