Article in Providence Journal relating local clergy & rabbi responses to Gibson film. The minister, countering rabbi's wish for more emphasis on Jesus' teachings & good works, says that the important thing is the "theological statement". Quoting Isaiah ("by his stripes we are healed") he offers the standard atonement version ("it was God's will that Jesus suffer & die. That's why he was born," etc.).

The language of theology is not simple or reducible to sound bites. But this narrow "atonement" perspective troubles me. If the suffering & death were all part of God's Plan, then human free will, & the human choice to commit sin & evil, are thereby negated. This is a murky kind of absolution, a sloughing of responsibility in the name of divinely-ordained fate.

I don't think it was ever God's will that Jesus be crucified, just as it was never God's will that Cain or anyone after him commit murder. Rather, Jesus may have willingly undergone the ultimate assault of human evil (murder, represented by the Roman crucifix), trusting in God's will nevertheless, in spite of all and in the face of the end.

No, I think God's will was that Christ, enduring, defeat death and evil, a victory represented in the Resurrection. God did not design the universe as a total scapegoat process, or mechanism, in which the death of one liberates the rest of us. It's the spirit that liberates, and we are called upon to "work out our salvation" in that light.