Re: The story of Jesus and the place of the cross

I was quite interested that my use of the phrase ‘born to die’ made your ‘blood boil’, Graham (previous post). Sounds quite a violent reaction to me! (Sorry - that was a totally gratuitous provocative remark).

Your outline of a non-violent interpretation of the atonement is along the lines of Gustaf Aulen’s Christus Victor interpretation - in which Aulen claimed to be rediscovering the view of the early church fathers (rather than the ransom theory - incorrectly understood).

It is increasingly popular today, because, as you say, it seems to be more directly related to issues of social injustice and domination structures in society. It also seems to provide great continuity with Jesus’s teaching - as you have said.

It does depend on the idea that violence is the primary manifestation of the human disorder, the primary manifestation of sin. I think this is questionable, and that Jesus came to address, ultimately, issues which were more profound in the human condition, of which violence was just one manifestation.

Also, it depends on a somewhat superficial understanding of the penal substitution theory of the atonement - that justice is satisfied by violence inflicted on one party by the other. Hence violence is ‘institutionalised’ in the Christian system, and we are encouraged to respond to violence by passive suffering -so that it is never adequately addressed.

I don’t agree that the latter follows from the former - or that the atonement, in its penal substitutionary presentation, is actually suggesting that justice is done by violent retribution. However, I have to agree that this is often how it is presented - but I think there is something which radically modifies the simplistic interpretation - even for those who would accept the notion of the need for a satisfaction of justice.

The drastic modification of a simplistic view of penal substitution arises when we consider that Christ changed our view of God to include himself (from almost any way of looking at it - including the narrative/historical perspective). So instead of the atonement encouraging us to think of the moral necessity of retributive punishment and passive suffering, it actually encourages us to look at God taking into himself all the injustice and evil which had been perpretrated by sinful humanity.

I think this is where Christus Victor and Penal Substitution tend to converge - in that Jesus was indeed living out his teaching (in the way you have described), but was doing something rather more profound than giving us an example of how to respond in the face of evil. Also that he was doing something rather more profound than exposing the bankruptcy of evil (interpreted as violent oppression) - though he certainly did that as well.

One has to ask, if the Christus Victor interpretation is taken to be the sole understanding of the cross, in what sense have the ‘powers’ (meaning earthly structures of oppression and violence) been exposed as bankrupt? Presumably by Jesus rising from the dead. So we in turn can face violent oppression with the same hope? But this isn’t doing anything more to undermine the powers on earth than any other atonement theory.

On the other hand, penal substitution offers a more profound understanding of the cross, in recognising that a new order of humanity needed to come into being, by the conclusive end of the ‘old creation’ humanity whose heart was as universally sick as Israel’s. This was realised in the renewed people of God.

My suggestion is that we need to take the best from all the atonement theories, and I think Christus Victor, as interpreted by yourself, is powerful. But I continue to think that penal substitution (as here interpreted) offers a profounder level of understanding, in which sin is not simply viewed in relation to societal injustice, but to a range of disorders arising from the very nature of humanity which we all have in common - oppressors and oppressed alike. I don’t take the view that this way of seeing penal substitution conducts us into an abstract spiritual realm any more than Christus Victor does. It is quite valid to see Jesus’s death both as substitutionary and as an example with which to face injustice and violence.

You will deduce from this that I tend to take the anabaptist position on peace and justice.

In one sense then the cross was a means to an end - the inauguration of the new covenant. But I argue that the cross was and remains the pivotal event, revealing astonishingly and more profoundly than anything else the true nature of God - not as a retributive monster, but as the most self-denying being in the universe, thereby offering the profoundest challenge to human structures and psychology which are based on the promotion of self-interest, to the detriment and damage of the entire creation. The power which was unleashed was more than an example and illustration, however, but was actual and real in the lives of the people of God who took Jesus as Lord.