Giles Fraser Quotes
Four Quotes by: Giles Fraser of Church of England Vicar, St Mary's Putney. London. ... The basic idea is that human beings owe God an unpayable debt on account of their sin, and that Jesus pays off this debt by being nailed up on a cross. To many of us, this account turns God into a merciless loan shark, deaf to our pleas for forgiveness. Whatever happened to “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (Hosea 6.6, Matthew 9.13)? Another weakness is that it gives the resurrection nothing to do in the overall scheme of human salvation. If we are saved on the cross, then there is no saving work left for the resurrection to do. Thus it gets sidelined as a spectacular after-party to the main event, which gets wrapped up on Good Friday. That just can’t be right. ...
Sourced from an article: Church Times Issue 7623 by Giles Fraser. Dated: 24th April 2009
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Thinking about the celebration of Holy Week in my new adopted cathedral brings home to me quite how important it is for Christians to insist upon a non-sacrificial reading of the death of Christ. For too long, Christians have put up with a theory of salvation that has at its core the idea that God requires the sacrifice of his own son so that human sin can be cancelled. "There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin," we will all sing. The fact this is a disgusting idea, and morally degenerate, is obvious to all but those indoctrinated into a very narrow reading of the cross.
No, Jesus is not a blood sacrifice to appease a vicious God. The story is not an endorsement of the idea that sacrifice brings peace with God but an attack on it. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," Jesus insists, going on to side with the scapegoats themselves. The Gospel is clear. I am with the hunchback. I am with the one cast out. He became one with the rejected and the cast out. And thus he suffered the same fate. This is not to endorse sacrificial theology but to condemn it. Yet despite this clear identification with the victim, much official Christianity holds on to the sacrificial reading of Christ's death. The present pope has insisted that the Eucharist must be seen as a sacrifice rather than as a meal among friends, and evangelical Christians remain committed to their theory of Christ being sacrificed to offset human sin. Lord have mercy.
Article in The Guardian entitled The Merciful Crucifixion. Dated: 11th April 2009
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Some of us are struggling for the dream of an inclusive Church. … The Lambeth Conference have excluded the one person they should really be listening to. I'm proud that Bishop Robinson is speaking here.
BBC News. Dated: 13th July 2008
For, once again, what he [Dr. Jeffrey John, Dean of St. Albans] has been saying is nothing other than a truth known by most people in the pews: that the idea of God murdering his son for the salvation of the world is barbaric and morally indefensible. It turns Christianity into "cosmic child abuse".
Source here on the Internet. Dated: 7th April 2007.
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Please note: Quotes are displayed in reverse date order. Undated quotes are listed last.