Is Molech Hidden in Christianity?

What happens when you take the concept of punishment out of your theology?

Notice that I said punishment, not judgment.

When you remove punishment from your theology it affects everything you preach.

Instead of a Janus-faced god, you find instead the One God revealed as Abba, Son and Spirit, internally self-consistent and self-giving. You may genuinely construct a theology grounded in the only theological axioms found in the New Testament (I John), viz., “God is Love” and “God is Light.”

The moment you incorporate punishment into your theology everything changes. When you make this move you have brought the revelation of God under the control of an economy of exchange, you have turned the Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer of creation and all humanity into the likeness of every god of human imagination from the dawn of time.

Idols are not simply false gods, but a specific type of false god. Idols are deities that are Janus-faced, a mix of yin and yang, mercy and torture, peace and war, love and hate. All idols are Janus-faced. There is nothing wrong with Ba’al or Molech if you are one of their worshippers. Sure they need sacrifices, all the gods need them. Sure they need special sacrifices, like your children, but hey, everybody does it, so why not you as well? Ba’al and Molech are not bad gods; it is just that we know them as heinous because the Israelite prophets told us so. The Israelite God did not require child sacrifice and sometimes the prophets are at great pains to remind the people of that.

Christianity has been enthralled with a Molech of its own for far too long. This is especially true in Protestantism. This god requires the death of a beloved child in order to appease some sense of divine justice.  Advocates of a penal substitutionary atonement theory can indeed find it in the Bible; it is not as if it isn’t there. It is, especially in the Jewish Bible. However, one already finds in that literature a critique of such a view with some text like Genesis 22 and Isaiah 53 really struggling to bring forth a non-sacrificial view. These texts only appear confusing because they are ‘texts in travail.’ By the time you get to Jesus and his entire non (anti?) sacrificial program and hermeneutic and then later to Paul, the writers of Mark, Luke-Acts and John, as well as the writer of the Hebrews sermon, you find a decidedly non (anti) sacrificial rendering. It is virtually impossible to exegete any of these writers from the perspective of a sacrificial ideology, unless one first comes to the text with this view as a presupposition.

The last thirty years have seen a sea change in all manner of theological topics, but none more important than that of atonement theory and the complete and virtual annihilation of the penal substitutionary view. Only those who ultimately hold to a Janus-faced god need such a sacrificial view. The time is coming and now is when all sacrificial ideologies found in Christianity will come toppling down and the Gospel, the good news of God’s peace apart from sacrifice, forgiveness apart from an economy of exchange and reconciliation apart from retribution or any eschatological lex talionis will shine forth bright as the noon day sun.