Deconstructing Fundamentalism

Week 4: Jesus Didn’t Die Instead of You

This is week 4 of a series I will do every Wednesday for the next several weeks called “Deconstructing Fundamentalism”. This won’t be an exhaustive approach to deconstructing these harmful teachings. Instead they are my reflections on the things that cracked my cognitive dissonance and helped lead me to a healthier Christian spirituality.

I was nine years old when I got saved.

That sentence carried enormous weight in the world I grew up in. It was treated as the most important decision a person could ever make. It was more important than education, relationships, or anything I would ever do with my life.

And I made it before I understood fractions.

No one thought that was strange. It actually felt normal. Expected, even. I was afraid of hell, and if hell is presented as the most urgent danger imaginable, then of course a child would do whatever they’re told stops it. When the invitation came, (“ask Jesus into your heart”) I did it immediately.

Looking back, I realize I had no idea what that phrase even meant. I could not have explained it if someone asked me. I didn’t know what salvation was saving me from beyond “fire forever,” and I definitely didn’t understand what it meant to give my life to someone I couldn’t see. But that wasn’t the point. The point was safety.

Of course everyone celebrated. In a world where eternity always feels close to danger, relief looks like faithfulness. No one was manipulating me. The adults believed this was protection. And parents especially carry that weight… if hell is real and near, waiting feels like neglect. So urgency replaces understanding, because love is trying to outrun fear.

At nine.

I never questioned that structure because it surrounded me completely. Even years later, when my own kids were baptized around eight or nine years old, it didn’t feel controversial. It felt responsible. Loving, even. You’re told eternity hangs in the balance, so what parent would risk waiting?

That’s part of the hidden weight inside this system… not just on the child, but on the parents. If salvation is a narrow doorway and hell is always close, then raising a child becomes spiritually terrifying. Every unanswered question feels dangerous. Every doubt feels risky. You aren’t just guiding a kid through life; you’re guarding their eternal fate.

And when fear is the foundation, urgency always wins over understanding.

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The Phrase We Never Examined

The message I absorbed growing up was simple:
Jesus died for my sins so I wouldn’t have to go to hell.

I heard that thousands of times. But I never heard anyone ask what the sentence actually means. What are the words saying? How does that even make sense?

In English, “for” sounds like substitution. Someone takes a punishment instead of you. That’s the assumption most of us inherited: God needed to punish sin, Jesus took the punishment, now you can be forgiven. But the New Testament wasn’t written in English.

When you go back to the Greek, the phrase usually translated “for our sins” uses the word hyper (ὑπέρ) or sometimes peri (περί). Neither word means “instead of.” They mean things like on behalf of, because of, concerning, or in relation to.

I understand that sounds small, but it changes the shape of the sentence. Rather than “Jesus died instead of us,” the text reads closer to “Jesus died because of our sins” or “on behalf of us in our sin.”

That isn’t substitution language. It’s participation language.

The cross stops being a legal transaction and starts looking like God stepping directly into the consequences of human violence.

And doesn’t that match the story better? The gospels don’t show God demanding a payment. They show human systems, (religious and political) killing someone who exposed them. Jesus dies not because God needs blood, but because love refuses to cooperate with power.

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What Sin Actually Meant

The word we translate as sin in Greek is hamartia (ἁμαρτία). It’s an archery term. It literally means missing the mark. Not moral filth. Not inherent depravity. Not being disgusting to God. Missing the target.

That alone already changes the tone. The problem isn’t that you are a bad object God can’t stand to look at. The problem is direction. You’re aimed somewhere that won’t give life.

I’m not sure how many people have thought about this but Jesus didn’t teach in Greek. The gospels were written in Greek later, but the conversations themselves happened in the everyday language of first-century Galilee… Aramaic. And behind hamartia sits an older Hebrew/Aramaic family of words built from the root ḥ-ṭ-ʾ (חטא).

The idea overlaps, but the emphasis shifts. It isn’t just missing a target — it’s stepping out of alignment with the source of life. Not primarily rule-breaking, but relational disconnection.

Less like committing a crime.
More like losing your orientation.

And if the problem is orientation, then the solution isn’t punishment, it’s restoration. Which suddenly makes Jesus’ behavior look less surprising and more inevitable.

That’s why the prophets constantly describe people as wandering, straying, forgetting who they are, or turning aside. The problem isn’t merely that a command was broken. The problem is that life itself is being lived out of sync with God, with others, even with your own self.

Over time this became “you are fundamentally bad and deserve punishment,” but the words themselves don’t carry that meaning. They describe misalignment… a life pointed the wrong way. Not something to be thrown away, but a traveler who’s lost their bearings.

Paul even talks about sin less like a list of bad choices and more like a power people get trapped inside. Almost like gravity. You don’t wake up deciding to fall; you just keep finding yourself pulled downward unless something interrupts it. People act destructively because something in the human condition is bent, not because God is keeping score waiting to retaliate.

Which makes Jesus’ responses make more sense.

He doesn’t approach people primarily as a judge evaluating behavior but as someone restoring connection. Sight is returned. Outsiders are brought back to the table. Shame dissolves. People stuck in destructive patterns are given a way to live differently. He certainly names harm seriously (sometimes more seriously than anyone else in the room) but always toward restoration.

Forgiveness, in that framework, isn’t a judge canceling a sentence.
It’s re-orientation.

Not God deciding to tolerate you, but God bringing you back into the life you were made to live. And that turns salvation from a legal escape into something far more human… coming back to yourself, to others, and to God.

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So What Was Jesus Saving Us From?

If sin is misalignment and disconnection, then salvation isn’t primarily about escaping a location after death. It’s about rescue from a way of being human that keeps damaging us and each other.

The patterns are familiar once you start looking for them. We protect ourselves by hardening. We secure belonging by excluding. We manage fear by finding someone to blame. We maintain order through pressure, shame, or force. We learn to dominate before we learn to understand. And then we justify it all because it feels necessary to survive.

Fear.
Violence.
Scapegoating.
Domination.
Shame.

Those aren’t just individual mistakes. They’re systems of living. Ways entire families, cultures, and religions learn to function. They promise safety but quietly produce isolation. They keep repeating because they work in the short term, even while they erode us in the long term.

If sin is missing the mark, this is the mark we keep missing… a life rooted in trust, mutuality, mercy, and love.

That’s why the story of Jesus matters the way it does. The cross isn’t just a random instrument of death; it’s what happens when a person refuses to participate in those systems. He doesn’t shame the shamed, doesn’t answer threats with threats, doesn’t return exclusion with exclusion. And when confronted by both religious and political power, he keeps telling the truth without trying to crush his enemies.

Eventually power does what power does. It eliminates what exposes it.

So the cross isn’t God venting anger onto Jesus. It’s human violence reaching its logical conclusion and God refusing to mirror it back. Jesus doesn’t out-violence violence. He absorbs it and stops the chain reaction. The cycle that normally escalates… hurt, retaliation, escalation, revenge… hits him and goes no further. The cross doesn’t solve God’s problem with humanity. It reveals humanity’s problem with love.

And then resurrection reframes the whole thing.

Regardless of how you see or understand the resurrection, the meaning lands in the same place: the life Jesus lived is vindicated.

Resurrection isn’t mainly about explaining biology after death. It’s about God’s answer to the question the cross asked. The world said that way of being human fails. God says that’s the only thing that actually endures.

Self-giving love turns out not to be naïve after all. It’s the deepest structure of reality. Which means salvation isn’t mainly about getting your destination changed later. It’s about being freed now from the patterns that keep producing death while we’re still alive and not a legal status granted after saying the correct prayer.

It is an awakening into a different way to exist… where fear loosens, blame softens, enemies become neighbors, and you slowly learn how to live without needing someone else beneath you in order to feel secure.

In that sense, salvation isn’t a moment you secure.
It’s a life you enter.

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Where This Leaves Me

I don’t look back at nine-year-old me with embarrassment or shame.

For a long time I did. Once my beliefs started shifting, it was tempting to feel foolish. Like I had been tricked, or naïve, or overly sincere. But that’s not actually what was happening. He was a kid who had been handed a picture of the world where danger was always close and eternity was always fragile. He was trying to feel safe. And he did exactly what he had been taught would bring relief.

That deserves compassion, not correction.

The prayer mattered because the fear was real to him. The adults around him weren’t trying to harm him either. They were passing on the only map they had been given. Everyone in that moment was reaching for safety, even if the safety was built on a misunderstanding of God.

So I don’t need to disown that moment in order to grow past it.
But I also don’t need to freeze it in time.

For most of my life I thought salvation was a transaction that happened that night… a line crossed, a status secured, a permanent answer filed away in heaven’s records. The rest of faith became maintenance: stay sincere enough, certain enough and don’t drift too far.

What slowly unraveled was the realization that my spiritual life kept moving long after the prayer was over. My understanding changed. My fears surfaced and softened. My view of God kept expanding. If salvation was a single completed exchange, why did it keep unfolding?

Eventually I had to admit the moment wasn’t the finish line.
It was the beginning of awareness.

It was the beginning of noticing how much of my relationship with God was built on trying not to be rejected, of seeing how often fear had been doing the interpreting and discovering that trust grows slower than certainty but lasts longer.

Maybe that’s where some of you are right now… feeling like if one piece of the structure shifts, the whole thing might collapse or that if you let go of a particular explanation it means you’re letting go of God.

I don’t think it works that way.

If God is actually real, then truth doesn’t threaten God. And if something only survives by keeping you afraid to look closer, it probably wasn’t holding you… you were holding it.

Letting go of an understanding that no longer produces life isn’t betrayal. It’s what growth has always required in every other part of being human. We don’t shame children for outgrowing shoes that once fit. We don’t accuse them of rebellion for needing a bigger world once they can see farther.

So I don’t believe I was saved from God that night, rescued from divine anger waiting just beyond a thin line of belief. I think I was slowly being saved into God… into trust instead of terror, into relationship instead of transaction, into a life that keeps widening instead of narrowing.

And the strange thing is, letting go of the fear didn’t take God away.
It made room to finally meet God without it.

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