Jesus Didn’t Save Us Through His Death, But Through His Life
There’s a lot about conservative Christianity that doesn’t make much sense. Many of their core beliefs would seem absurd if we encountered them for the first time as adults, but because we’ve heard these ideas repeated throughout our lives, most accept them without question. (1)
Perhaps the most stupid — and horrific — notions of conservative Christianity is the idea of substitutional atonement: that God, the divine lawgiver of the Universe, demands punishment for all sin, and Jesus, his only son, steps in and accepts punishment meant for us through the crucifixion.
If you’re reading this post, I assume at some point you have questioned, doubted, or rejected this asinine, backwards, horrific theology.
If we believe that God is love — the force of everything good in the universe (which is said explicit in the Bible) — then how could a loving God require that all sins be punished? (2) Can God really be love itself if “law and order” is more important than nurture, care, and forgiveness?
And what kind of “loving” father not only allows for but approves the horrific execution of his only child? The two simply do not go together. One cannot be loving and accept violence, especially violence produced by an unjust system or violence against one’s own child. That is the opposite of love.
But if we reject this notion that Jesus “saves” us from eternal punishment by taking punishment on our behalf, can we believe that Jesus “saves” us at all?
Salvation through transformation
In her groundbreaking 1993 book Sisters in the Wilderness, Womanist (3) theologian Delores Williams presents a radical but deeply compelling reimagining of Christian salvation: Jesus saves us not through his death on the cross, but through the way he lived his life.
Williams, a Black woman, was born into a Seventh Day Adventist family in Kentucky in 1937. She married a Presbyterian minister, and with him, raised a family while working on the struggle for civil rights.
When her husband passed away in 1987, Williams went to seminary school herself — in her 50s. In 1991, she graduated Union Theological Seminary in New York City with a Ph.D. in systematic theology. She would go on to become the first Black woman full professor at Union. (4)
What Williams saw in conservative Christianity was a religion that glorified suffering and sacrifice in ways that easily enabled and justified oppression. (5) It was her experience as a Black woman in America that led her to question one of the central tenets of conservative Christian theology: the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross was a necessary sacrifice to atone for humanity’s sins. To Williams, that was anathema.
“Jesus did not come to redeem humans by showing them God’s ‘love’ manifested in the death of God’s innocent child on a cross erected by cruel, imperialism, patriarchal power,” she writes. “Rather, the text suggests that the spirit of God in Jesus came to show humans life.” (6)
Williams argues that Jesus’s salvific power comes through what she calls his “ministerial vision” — a way of living that showed humanity how to exist in right relationship with God, ourselves, and each other. This vision was demonstrated through:
- Jesus’s ethical teachings, like the Beatitudes and parables
- His healing ministry, touching and being touched by those society rejected
- His resistance to evil and oppression
- His practice of prayer and connection with God
- His ministry of compassion and radical love
- His work transforming traditions that no longer served life
For Williams, Jesus conquered sin through how he lived, not how he died. She points to Jesus’s resistance of temptation in the wilderness as the model: he overcame sin by refusing to value material things over spiritual ones, by choosing life over death, and by rejecting the urge for power and domination.
The cross, in Williams’ view, represents not divine sacrifice but human evil. It’s an attempt by oppressive powers to destroy Jesus’s liberating vision of life and love. The resurrection then represents not a victory through death, but the triumph of that life-giving vision over the forces that tried to kill it. (7)
To be fair, what Williams presented was not a new idea. Ever since Jesus’s death, his followers have been struggling to understand what his message means for their lives. Nearly all of his followers believed Jesus somehow righted the connection between God and humans, but there has never been total agreement on how.
This remains true today. The Roman Catholic church never fully embraced the idea of sacrificial atonement — an idea that was pushed hard by Protestant reformers (particularly Calvin). Eastern Orthodox churches tend to view salvation more as a process of transformation (what they call “theosis”) rather than a single transaction of Christ paying for our sins.
Even in Western Christianity, thinkers like Peter Abelard (1079–1142) proposed alternative views, suggesting that Jesus’s life and death were meant to demonstrate God’s love and inspire humanity to moral transformation — a view that shares some similarities with Williams’ understanding.
Reclaiming the religion of Jesus
But going back even further, Delores Williams’ understanding of Jesus aligns remarkably well with what scholars believe about the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
As Marcus Borg, one of the leading historical Jesus scholars, points out, Jesus’s mission and message were not about heaven or how to attain a blessed afterlife. Though Jesus likely believed in an afterlife, as did many Jews of his time, it wasn’t his primary concern. (8)
What Williams believed about Jesus’s message matches what historians tell us about the historical Jesus. Jesus was a prophetic figure who taught a transformative wisdom, challenged oppressive systems, and demonstrated an intimate connection with God. Both Williams and historical scholars see Jesus not as someone focused on his own death as a cosmic sacrifice, but as someone showing humanity a new way to live.
This alignment isn’t coincidental. Williams, like other liberation theologians, sought to strip away layers of later church doctrine to recover the original, radical message of Jesus.
In doing so, she found what historians also discovered — that the historical Jesus was less concerned with correct beliefs about himself than with inviting people into a transformed way of living centered on love, justice, and right relationship with God and neighbor. Her theology thus represents a recovery of the religion of Jesus, as opposed to the religion about about Jesus, developed through the centuries by later followers.
Williams’ vision of salvation through transformation — through participating in Jesus’s way of life and love — offers something both more ancient and more life-giving. It suggests that Jesus “saves” us not by dying for us, but by showing us how to truly live. He “saves” us by demonstrating a way of being that transforms us from the inside out, teaching us how to live in right relationship with God, ourselves, and our neighbors.
The good news, then, is not that Jesus died to appease an angry God, but that he lived to show us a better way. His “ministerial vision” of radical love, compassionate healing, and transformative justice continues to offer salvation — not from God’s wrath, but from the destructive patterns that break our relationships with God and each other.
This is a faith worth believing in. Not because it demands we accept illogical ideas about divine child sacrifice, but because it invites us into the transformative way of life that Jesus demonstrated. It calls us not to worship suffering but to work for justice, not to glorify death but to build the Kingdom of God here and now through lives of love.
Perhaps that’s what salvation has always been about — not a transaction but a transformation, not about believing the right things about Jesus’s death but about living the way Jesus lived. In recovering this understanding, Williams helps us recover not just the religion of Jesus, but Jesus himself.
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FOOTNOTES:
- This phenomenon is known in psychology as the “illusory truth effect” — our tendency to believe information is correct after repeated exposure to it. Numerous studies have confirmed that repeated exposure to a statement increases its perceived accuracy, regardless of whether it’s actually true.
- 1 John 4:7–8: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
- The term “womanist” was coined by author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Amistad, 2023). Walker defined a womanist as “a Black feminist or feminist of color” who loves herself, other women, and the spirit. Womanism emerged as distinct from mainstream feminism because it specifically centers the experiences and perspectives of Black women and other women of color. Womanist theology, developed by scholars like Delores Williams and Katie Geneva Cannon, applies this framework to religious and theological thinking, examining Christianity through the lens of Black women’s lived experiences with racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. The term emphasizes the unique insights that come from Black women’s position at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression. Williams felt “feminist theology” was too focused on white women, and “Black theology” was too focused on Black men.
- For more on Delores Williams life, see this obituary from Sojourners magazine.
- The Bible’s silence on the morality of slavery was an important tool for supporters of slavery before the Civil War, and the New Testament’s acquiescence to Roman authority was (and is) and important tool justifying state violence against Black people after the Civil War.
- Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2013), 146.
- Williams’ ideas on this are laid out fully in Chapter 6 of Sisters in the Wilderness, 163–168.
- Marcus Borg explains this in his 2006 book Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (pp. 143–144): “Jesus’s mission and message were not about ‘heaven,’ not about how to attain a blessed afterlife. Though Jesus, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, affirmed an afterlife, it was not his primary concern… The kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, is for the earth, as the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew affirms. It is about the transformation of life in this world.” This understanding is supported by contemporary historical Jesus scholarship, which emphasizes Jesus’s focus on transforming society in the present rather than securing rewards in an afterlife.
