Friday quote

The story of the atonement does not call on readers to see Jesus as a get-out clause, one who will live a life of narrative coherence for them and allow God to author his life so that they do not have to. It is more that the reader is called to identification—an identification which, for the post-industrialized self, requires the story of the 'Other' (Judas and the other disciples) as much as the story of Jesus. For it is they who reveal the self as being without narrative (ontological) coherence. They are the ones who demonstrate what it means to live in the absence of mutual, unpolluted, undistorted relating. Jesus, by comparison, opens up the radical possibility of the removal of that incoherence of the self, but only by the willingness to walk a similar path of intent which will require an act of repentace: living with God as the author of our life by dying to self and embracing the 'Other' in a act of at-one-ment. In this way Jesus' story leads the post-industrialized self 'exactly to the “places” he must occupy with his person: on the one hand, to the place of the person rejected by God and before God; on the other hand, to the place of a child living near with God', and with his, or her, fellow human beings.”— Atonement for a "Sinless" Society, pp. 144-145