Bored With Basketball, Finding ‘Madness’ In Scripture
(ANALYSIS) I’ve watched a lot of b-ball games these past two weekends. At some point I became bored, which is saying a lot.
I’m the guy who, not long after we married, Kathy asked: Do you play basketball every night? And when March Madness rolled around, she probably wondered if I watched every televised game. I tried to.
But as I said, at some point, I got bored watching all these games. So I tossed the remote to Kathy and looked for something else to do. I ended up stumbling upon a poem, “Red Pilled,” which can be found in Ventriloquise, a collection of poems written by Ned Denny. It seems Denny has taken the red pill. But it was the overview of his book that caught my attention. “The poet reaches most deeply into the abyss.” And what does the poet see?
… that the gods have departed, and in the rootless, heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods’ traces…
And what sort of traces does Denny see? At least two, the first being the madness of a world that doesn’t recognize what he calls its vanished beauty. Many Christians recognize this in our popular renditions of the cross. The beauty of the original has vanished.
This began in the eleventh century A.D., when Anselm of Canterbury proposed a “satisfaction” theory of atonement. Jesus atoned for our sins on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath. His payment functioned as a gift to God on behalf of humanity to restore the order of justice subverted by sin. This view of the cross is based on the law.
The original view of the cross is based on love. It recognizes Jesus paid for our sins as our Redeemer, but notes that Jesus is like Boaz, the Kinsman Redeemer, who took a wife, Ruth. The cross is about satisfying the law, yes, but out of love, not wrath, according to St. Augustine, who wrote that the cross is the marriage bed of Christ.
To read the rest of Michael Metzger’s post, please visit his Substack page.
Michael Metzger is the president and founder of The Clapham Institute, which consults ministries and nonprofits.