On Clichés: “Sacrificed Himself To Himself”, “The Sin He Gave Us”, Etc.

If you’ve debated with anti-Christian atheists online – not all atheists, but often those devoted to arguing against Christianity on the web – there’s a decent chance that you will bump into some of the same cliché descriptions of Christianity. Some of the lines used include:

• “God sacrificed himself to himself“
• “God created humanity with original sin“
• “God saves us from himself/what he will do to us”
• “God impregnated a woman with himself“
• “God invented sin/evil/death“

Taken from Amazon.co.uk

… and so on. You’ll often see them shared in image macro form, as shown on the right side of this page. These aren’t arguments that apoligists can’t answer; people like John Shore (Crosswalk.com, 25 Feb 2008) and Heather Riggleman (Christianity.com, 28 Jan. 2021) talked about these topics before me. In a debate hosted on Primier Christian Radio’s ‘Unbelievable?‘, the atheist Matt Dillahunty argued with the evangelical Glen Scrivener on this point (full video in “Glen Scrivener & Matt Dillahunty • Morality: Can atheism deliver a better world?“, 10 Jan. 2020 on YouTube – clip version shown below).

However, I decided I would give my own response to these claims. To be frank these talking-points are less “arguments” than they are misrepresentations. They are distorted images of Christianity that only vaguely resemble what Christianity actually teaches. As I will show, it’s not hard to explain why.

“God created humans with original sin / created evil”

Taken from Atheist Republic on Facebook

God didn’t “create evil” or “create sin” because evil and sin are the absence of what is good. Oh, and no, Isaiah 45.7 doesn’t say what you think it does. The ancient church fathers explained so, like St. Athanasius noting “what is evil is not, but what is good is” (De Inc. 4.5), or St. Augustine noting “evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name ‘evil’” (De Civ. Dei 11.9). If you are wondering why this isn’t explained in the Bible itself, that’s because it’s already in the word “sin” itself, or at least in ancient languages. In Hebrew the word used is חטא (khata) (H2398), and in Greek it’s ἁμαρτία (hamartia) (G266); both of these words mean ‘missing the mark’ or wandering from the right way. It means going away from something – or, in other words, lacking something.

Similarly, God doesn’t create us with original sin any more than he creates us starving or thirsty. We are born without God’s sanctification, yes, but whether we choose to seek it afterwards is our own choice. This is why St. Paul in the New Testament says “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God” (Romans 1.21 KJV); St. Athanasius explained this in more detail in saying “men, having rejected things eternal, and, by counsel of the devil, turned to the things of corruption, became the cause of their own corruption in death” (De Inc. 5.1).

“God sacrificed himself to himself / impregnated a woman with himself”

Taken from /r/exchristian on Reddit

It’s strange how in just five words – “God sacrificed himself to himself” – so many wrong assumptions can be woven. To start, it’s a butchering of the Trinity doctrine. We do believe Jesus is God, yes, but not that he is God the Father. The Bible explains that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1.15 KJV) and “the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1.3 ESV) (also translated “express image of his person” in KJV). In other words, Jesus is a different person than the Father, but he has all of the Father’s qualities and attributes as his exact image. That’s why, in the Gospels, Jesus tells us that “the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” (John 5.19 KJV).

Taken from /r/atheism on Reddit

But the Trinity isn’t the only thing butchered here; the idea of Christ as a sacrifice is misrepresented too. When we talk about Jesus as a sacrifice this isn’t meant that he’s some sort of burnt-offering human sacrifice. The animal sacrifices of the Old Testament were “a shadow of things to come” (Colossians 2.17 KJV). The Bible explains how “they serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Hebrews 8.5 ESV) and “the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities” (Hebrews 10.1 ESV). Jesus on the cross isn’t so much a sacrifice to the Father, but more so someone givin themselves up for others like a sacrifice does. There’s only one place in the Bible where Jesus is described as “an offering and a sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5.2 KJV) and even that is in the context of how we should be “imitators of God” (Ephesians 5.1 ESV). Jesus on the cross is only a sacrifice to God in the sense that it’s a good deed. That’s how St. Paul can call the saint a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12.1 KJV), and how the Psalms can praise God like this:

“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.“

Psalm 51.16-17 ESV

“God saves us from himself and what he’ll do to us”

Taken from lisa-am-laerm on DeviantArt

When we are told that Jesus “saves” us, it is reasonable to ask “saved from what?” The Bible answers; when Jesus is given his name, the reason for the name is “he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1.21 KJV). In the Old Testament, God says “I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them” (Ezekiel 37:23 ESV) (though the KJV says “dwellingplaces wherin” instead of “backslidings in which“, the point remains either way). Think back to how sin is described earlier in this article; it’s a deprivation, a lack of what is good. As sinners we are broken and sick – St. Paul talks about how sin works in his epistle to the Romans:

“We know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.“

Romans 7.15-19 ESV

Taken from lisa-am-laem on DeviantArt

That is why, in the Gospels, Jesus says “they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2.17 KJV, c.f. Matthew 9.12-13, Luke 5.31-32). This is what Christ saves us from: our sins themselves.

Granted, you can find passages in the Bible that say “we shall be saved from wrath” (Romans 5.9 KJV) and the like. However it doesn’t say that’s why Jesus came, but a consiquence of it. If you are saved from a thing itself, you are also saved by what comes after it; for example if you are saved from a dangerous place you are also safe from any dangerous thing that may or may not be there. Similarly if you are cleansed of sin itself, as a side-effect you are also free from the wrath it provokes.

Endnote: On Clichés in General

Given that these are blatant strawmen, why did I post an article responding to them? While these sorts of talking points are common, they are far from well thought-out. So why are they common?

Robert Jay Lifton (taken from the page “About” on robertjaylifton.wordpress.com)

In 1961, Robert Jay Lifton coined the phrase “thought-terminating cliché” when describing how the Chinese Communists were able to indoctrinate people. Here is what he said:

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.“

Robert Jay Lifton, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” (1961), p. 429 (available on Archive.org and Google Books) (quoted on Wikipedia)

The use of thought-terminating clichés isn’t limited to totalitarian regimes. In fact, many phrases that become them were originally just innocuous things that were misused overtime. The webpage English-Prime.com has a list of common phrases used as such: “everything happens for a reason“, “it works in theory but not in practice“, and “there’s no smoke without fire” are all common examples in everyday speech. Among believers, some phrases invoking God are commonly used such as “God works in mysterious ways” or “only God can judge me“. Even passages from scripture, when plucked out of context, can be misused as clichés.

But while casual conversation can produce a thought-terminating cliché, the most impactful of them are the ones that are used in debates. Terminating a thought would have more use in a debate than another setting, after all. A certain type of cliché is one that involves begging the question or asking a loaded question; this is when you give a question or other statement that’s loaded with assumptions, like asking someone “why do you hate the poor/our country/women/God?” Another kind of cliché involves framing a slogan like it’s a definition; examples from all different sides of any debate include “evolution is a religious belief“, “fascism is capitalism in decay“, “progressives are the real racists“, or “faith is believing what you know ain’t so“.

The clichés I talk about in this article can be phrased in either of those two ways. The reason thought-terminating clichés are used to begin with is because they are easy to use and hard to refute – compare how much text is in my responses to how much text is in the cliché lines themselves. That’s why they are often in image macro form; to be shared around like cards. If someone phrases an accusation (“you believe in [X]“) as something other than an accusation, like a question (“why do you believe [X]?“) or claim about themselves (“I do not believe [X]“), it can make the accusation sound more like a plain fact. But don’t be decieved by these tricks; no matter how confident they are said, they are misrepresentations either way.