#now tbf many people do understand Jesus to be God and still push penal substitutionary atonement constantly

[gayleviticus]

i read a quite interesting book in my undergrad by a Jewish scholar on how the binding of isaac is a subversion of pagan myths about sacrificing children for the prosperity of your nation, in proving quite definitively that this is something God doesnt and will never want. and he went on to talk about how by reading this story as foreshadowing of Jesus' crucifixion, Christians actually revert back to the pagan myth of blood sacrifice being skewered in the first place!

which i think is entirely true - unless we understand Jesus to be God, in which case it's fundamentally flipping the script all over again. it's no longer 'humans scramble to kill their children to appease an angry God', it's 'God is willing to be vulnerable and die for the sake of reconciling with wayward humans'. it smashes the idea we need human sacrifice to appease an angry God because that angry God does not exist; he's too busy being found in human form and dying miserably to reach out to his children. the crucifixion is not an offering to God; it's an offering by God. God is the subject, not the object. anyway that's just Reason #43784 why a robust understanding of the Trinity is good and helpful and not just abstract theology