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What evangelicals fight about: atonement

Posted 28 May, 2009 - 19:28 by Andrew

A recent edition of Christianity magazine (March 2009) ran an article by Ruth Dickinson and John Buckeridge on the current health of Evangelicalism in the UK. It captures a spectrum of opinions from Nims Obunge’s upbeat opinion that ‘evangelicals are becoming more conscious of the need to be a visual healing part of a hurting society’, to David Coffey’s despair over the ‘growth of judgmentalism and isolationism’, to Jacky Oliver’s avowed preference not to use the word ‘evangelical’ at all because of its associations with ‘intolerance, judgmental fundamentalism and people who lack humility or grace’.

A sidebar to the article highlights eleven issues over which Evangelicals in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere) are still fighting. I plan to take each one and outline a brief (and tendentious) response from my particular emerging theological perspective. I don’t want to suggest either that these issues are open to easy resolution or that I think my own approach is representative of anything like an emerging consensus. But I would like to consider some provocative alternatives to the options typically available.

The first issue on the list is the atonement: ‘Sharp disagreements about penal substitution triggered by the publication in 2003 of The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalk and Alan Mann.’

The very fact that this controversy is so often approached as a debate about ‘theories’ of atonement has the effect of confining us to a rationalizing, modernist mentality that will inevitably miss the point. There is no theory of atonement – there are no theories of atonement – in the New Testament. What we have is a story about how the people of God found a means of escape from the historical impasse into which they were being driven by their persistent state of revolt against YHWH. Their hearts were hardened, they refused to listen to the voice of God, and sooner or later they were bound to suffer destruction as a consequence of – as punishment for – their sins. But a few would find the narrow and difficult path leading to life.

Jesus presented his people with a course of action, a way of salvation – a lifeboat, if they dared to jump ship. But because the Jewish leadership regarded his actions as mutiny, it proved to be a way of rejection and suffering, a way of the cross. The encounter with the resurrected Lord and the dramatic shared experience of the Spirit of prophecy and renewal convinced his followers that the only hope for Israel, for the descendants of Abraham whether according to the flesh or according to promise, was to have faith in the faithfulness of Jesus – to trust that this way of rejection and suffering would eventually lead to vindication and life.

Within that narrative it made complete sense to re-interpret Jesus’ shameful death, in the light of possibilities imagined by the prophets, as a sacrificial death for the sake of Israel, an expiation because of national sin. The Romans would crucify rebellious Jews in their thousands during the war, in long lines outside the walls of the city. That was the punishment that Jesus suffered in anticipation, as a consequence of Jewish political short-sightedness, at the hands of the pagan oppressor – but he suffered so that a community might live; he suffered in its place.

There you have – crudely stated – a ‘doctrine’ of penal substitutionary atonement that makes adequate historical and theological sense. It can be expanded upon; we can find ways to include the nations in the process; we may begin to see how, particularly in the pagan world, the early church saw in the death of Jesus a realistic victory over the powers that resisted their mission. What we cannot do is discard the narrative-historical setting as though it were merely the husk around some essential theory of atonement. Indeed the opposite is true: the narrative is at the heart of the matter, the theology is merely interpretation.

Evangelicalism will not settle the debate over the atonement, in my view, until it grasps the fact that not only is it the product of the narrative, it remains subject to the narrative. As long as it insists in dealing with abstractions, it remains a sub-biblical movement.

Next up: creation.

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Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Semaphoric - 28/05/2009 - 20:26

Andrew, it seems to me the debate (and overly abstract emphasis) on the theories of atonement largely ignores other soteriological metaphors found in the NT. Trevor Burke writes about this in the second chapter of “Adopted into God’s Family: Exploring a Pauline Metaphor” (Downers Grove: IVP, 2006). He points out that NT scholarship typically focuses on justification, redemption, and propitiation as major soteriological themes at the expense of ignoring others. Here Burke points out the theme of adoption merits further investigation. Thus Burke goes on to say that “to insist on and isolate any one of the above terms as the sum total or description of Paul’s understanding and teaching on salvation is ‘an error of some magnitdude’. This is because Paul’s understanding of what God in Jesus Christ has done for sinful humanity is so rich, diverse and kaleidoscopic that it ought not to be reduced to a single expression” (37).

So the issue here is whether the debate about atonement theories detracts the church from seeing salvation from a different perspective, namely that of adoption. The narrow focus on propitiation in many ways negates the diverse richness of the Gospel. In Burke’s analysis, the metaphor of adoption (Romans 8:23 and Ephesians 1:5) provides a much richer understanding of what it means for humanity to be taken out of an alien state and transferred into a new family and give a new status as sons and heirs of God. Even still the adoption metaphors provides a deeper understanding for the church on what it means to be a family as inter-related individuals whose salvation and head is Christ himself. Thus understanding soteriology under this rubric also has an ethical dimension.

The debators involved in delineating atonement theory ought to take a step back and look at the wider picture of what Paul says, including other metaphors for salvation so that the richness of the Gospel message isn’t lost with a narrow focus on one abstract understanding of it.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 28/05/2009 - 20:56

Yes, your point is well made. I agree that the atonement language is part of a wider set of images and concepts that define the relationship of the believer to God, etc., some of which may actually be much more appropriate for us now than the metaphor of penal substitution, for example. It seems reasonable to suppose that the participation of Jews and Gentiles in the renewed people of God would be described in different ways, because they relate to the narrative in different ways.

But the limitation with the kaleidoscope model is that it still sidelines the narrative thread that I think must be allowed to organize and set the boundaries to the theological material. The kaleidoscope simply presents us, as I see it, with a more subtle and complex, but no less static, abstraction. I don’t know Burke’s book, but I would argue that we cannot properly understand the adoption metaphor in Paul without perceiving how it works within an eschatological narrative about the suffering and vindication of those who are called to participate quite literally in the experience of Jesus. It is those who suffer and are glorified with him who are fellow heirs with Christ, who are ‘conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers’ (Rom. 8:17, 30).

I think we over-generalize this adoption motif and have lost sight of the quite specific argumentative purpose that it served in Paul’s letter, which is an argument in the light of a narrative-historical condition.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Jacob - 28/05/2009 - 21:46

Tony Jones wrote this on penal substitution:

Do I deny the Penal Substitution?

No. I simply deny it pride of place.  Here’s what I wrote in October, 2006 about my lunch with John Piper:

One thing that won’t surprise anyone who knows about these things: John Piper basically equates a penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement with the gospel. I am unwilling to do that. I don’t disparage that theory of the atonement (see my recent endorsement on the back of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Stott’s The Cross of Christ), but I believe the birth/death/resurrection of Jesus Christ to be the pivot point of cosmic history. Thus, I do not think that one theory interpreting that event to be sufficient. Every theory of the atonement is 1) human, and 2) bound to a context. The penal substitution — while there are seeds of it in Pauline writings — is tied to the development of the Western legal mind. Nor am I willing to condemn the billions of faithful Christians who have lived and died in the past two millennia with alternate understandings of the atonement (here see Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor).

In other words, PSA is one theory of the atonement. Beneficial, but not exclusive. Not even first among equals.

Andrew, how do you respond to Tony’s reservations regarding penal substitution?

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 28/05/2009 - 23:04

Well, it’s a very ‘emerging church’ response - not dissimilar to Semaphoric’s kaleidoscope model, which suggests that these different theories or metaphors simply cooperate in offering us multiple perspectives on the cross. My response would be that the narrative may give us a rather less arbitrary or democratic or indiscriminate principle of organization.

In place of the kaleidoscope model I prefer to think of these images or concepts as traffic signs along a road that interpret or direct the journey. The sign makes sense in context, but ‘danger of falling rocks’ is only really meaningful where there is a danger of falling rocks. It’s only a rough analogy, but I think it does better justice to the relation between text and history.

On that basis, I am (ironically) inclined to side with John Piper against Tony Jones’ attempt to level the significance of the different metaphors. It seems to me that in the New Testament the story of judgment on Israel because of sin and the need to find forgiveness is given considerable prominence, not just in bits of teaching, but in the whole shape of narrative. Within that interpretive narrative I would suggest that the idea that Jesus in effect suffered Israel’s punishment is indeed a pivotal thought.

But of course, neither Piper nor Jones thinks narratively. They are arguing how to arrange these concepts on the flat table of a modernist theology. And as long as they go about it that way, the debate will continue.

The Christus Victor theme, by the way, is also narratively determined. It becomes important to see Christ’s death and resurrection as a victory over enemies, supremely the last enemy death, when the church is itself confronted with persecution. It is the other side of a martyrdom theology.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Jacob - 29/05/2009 - 03:04

“But of course, neither Piper nor Jones thinks narratively.”

Could you emphasize the distinction you are getting at here? In other words, can you illustrate to me the difference between your narrative atonement and Piper’s non-narrative atonement?

You also say:

“My response would be that the narrative may give us a rather less arbitrary or democratic or indiscriminate principle of organization.”

How is a commitment to a narrative reading of atonement less arbitrary than any other reading? Why is less arbitrary so important?

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 29/05/2009 - 11:47

This will have to be brief and inadequate, I’m afraid. If we say something like ‘the essence of the gospel is that in his death Jesus bore the punishment for my sins so that I will not have to receive that punishment myself’, the assumption is that this constitutes an abstract and universally true principle that principally affects the individual. It can be illustrated and defended by reference to certain biblical texts, but it is now felt to exist apart from those texts, and little attention is given to the function that those texts have in the biblical narrative or argument.

My contention here is that what we have come to regard as stand-alone doctrines, things to be believed, are always part of a text, and the text itself is something other than a compendium of beliefs: it is narrative, it is argumentation, it is historically contextualized. That is why I think the narrative is reading is less arbitrary. It is a matter of genre – and of a way of reading that respects the literary integrity of the texts.

In the case of the atonement, it seems to me that it arises out of an argument about the historical circumstances and fate of first century Israel. it comes to us not as a principle of personal salvation but as reflection on the significance of Jesus’ death for a people facing an extreme political-religious crisis.

So for example, if we take the wider narrative coordinates into account, I think we have to read a statement such as Romans 4:25 (he ‘was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification’) as an integral part of this historical narrative. Paul speaks on behalf of Israel: he was delivered up (as in Isaiah 53) because of the historical sins of Israel, the nation’s persistent defiance of the Law and will of God; he was raised for the sake of the justification of that part of Israel that remained faithful. Within that story Jesus’ death is quite readily interpreted by the early as the sort of sacrificial act described in Isaiah 53.

The question then is how do we translate that contextualized narrative account into something that is felt to have significance for the church and for the world today. I don’t think the answer is to resort to ahistorical abstractions. There is a real sense in which it is proper to say that ‘Jesus died for my sins’, but if we are to be a genuinely biblical people, i think we have to look much more carefully at how an atoning death for Israel provides the basis for an argument about personal salvation today. But my main point here is that we greatly diminish the force of scripture if we think that we do justice to the biblical narrative by condensing it down to a handful of core doctrines.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Jacob - 29/05/2009 - 15:02

What you say depends so much on the concept of “narrative.” You seem to attach that label to your theological perspective and urge us to believe that it makes a whole lot of difference compared to non-narrative renditions. But I still don’t see the significance of the difference: you and Piper, Driscoll and others are all still arguing for a penal atonement. You just happen to attach “narrative” and “context” and “genre” to the penal atonement approach.

While your reading may well be of a “narrative” type that is rooted in the “contexts” of the Bible and the “genres” of the various books, your interpretation of atonement appears to be blind to the *present* context in which you speak it. In other words, you are here today, using language invented relatively recently, to talk about atonement back then. But what does atonement mean for us now? How does “narrative” atonement play out for us today?

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 29/05/2009 - 09:01

Andrew - what I think you cannot see is that you are simply adding yet another theory of atonement to all the others. When you focus on your theory (of atonement), it actually says something hideous about God - worse even than the crudest form of penal substitutionary atonement in evangelical (or any other) systems.

All of your ideas on narrative/historical interpretation are simply just that - theory. Interesting, yes; provocative, maybe. Flawed - yes, I think deeply. You will respond to questions and criticism with plenty of detailed bible references, though even here there are huge issues of interpretation which remain unaddressed. The wider implications of where your views are taking you (or anyone who pursues them for that matter), and the many problems of practical application and personal appropriation, you seem quite unaware of, or happy to avoid facing.

Anyway, against my wiser instincts, I suppose I will watch to see how things unfold. My wiser instincts tell me: ‘for goodness sake let him say what he wants and don’t get involved!’ At least it’s all a storm in a very small and generally unobserved theological teacup. (I spend a lot of my time in teacups - so don’t take that amiss).

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 29/05/2009 - 10:27

When you focus on your theory (of atonement), it actually says something hideous about God - worse even than the crudest form of penal substitionary atonement in evangelical (or any other) systems.

That’s quite an accusation. Would you care to explain it? The thought that YHWH ‘punishes’ his people through military disaster because of their sin is deeply ingrained in scripture – right up to New Testament prophecies about a disastrous war against Rome. Jesus, in seeking to remain faithful to YHWH, got caught up in that reality and suffered as a consequence, as collateral and pre-emptive damage, you might say. I understand that the thought of God punishing a nation is difficult to stomach, but it is integral to Old Testament covenant theology. I don’t think we can deal with the offence simply by pretending it’s not there – it’s the same with the whole issue of the ‘Canaanite genocide’. If that’s not what you’re getting at, then what is it that appears so ‘hideous’?

This is, of course, ‘theoretical’ in the sense that it is an attempt to interpret primary data. Sure. But it is theoretical at the hermeneutical level, not as an attempt to construct another model for the atonement alongside existing models. It is a matter of how the classical models relate to scripture and to each other; it is a matter of how our theology is organized and framed.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 29/05/2009 - 12:04

It was just a statement. A God who takes out his anger on an innocent proxy is the issue which makes some interpretations of penal substitution so repugnant to many - including myself. But this has never been the interpretation of any branch of mainstream Christianity, which has always interpreted the atonement as God bearing the suffering in himself which was due to Israel, and as becomes abundantly clear in the NT, was due to all mankind. Unfortunately, you are left with the caricature version of penal substitution which our contemporaries find so grotesque, and nothing to modify its hideousness - God’s a monster, and I wouldn’t want to come near him on those terms.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 29/05/2009 - 13:18

But this is surely just confused. On the one hand, you object to the idea that God takes out his anger on an innocent proxy; on the other, you say that God bore the suffering in himself which was due to Israel. What does ‘due to Israel’ mean if not that the nation was subject to divine punishment? And what does God bearing the suffering mean if not that Jesus suffered the punishment that was due to Israel?

Apart from that, where is it clearly stated in the New Testament that God suffered for the sins of Israel or for the sins of the world? I know you don’t approve of me bringing scripture into this, but surely the core argument in the New Testament is that Jesus suffered as a representative of Israel not on behalf of God. The New Testament does not put God on the cross, however powerful that thought might be as a subsequent reflection on the significance of the story.

What I did not say – and this is very important – is that ‘God takes out his anger’ on Jesus. That would indeed be hideous, but as so often you have misrepresented and caricatured my argument. The idea of the ‘wrath of God’ in scripture is a way of interpreting disastrous events within the context of a covenant theology. If Jesus in his death, as I have argued, anticipates such a disastrous event, he has in some way become implicated in the wrath of God. He suffers what Israel would suffer, which is destruction; he suffers the consequences of Israel’s punishment.

When Isaiah imagines a ‘servant’ who suffers in the context of a story about historical judgment on Israel (the Babylonian invasion and exile), he quite frankly says that he was ‘wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed’ (Is. 53:5). The word for ‘chastisement’ (ysr) is used by Jeremiah for the punishment of disobedient Israel:

All your lovers have forgotten you; they care nothing for you; for I have dealt you the blow of an enemy, the punishment (musar) of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great, because your sins are flagrant. (Jer. 30:14)

The servant, therefore, suffers the punishment (‘the blow of an enemy… the punishment of a merciless foe’) that was Israel’s because its sins were flagrant. This is not God taking out his anger on an innocent proxy (nor, for that matter, is it God suffering the punishment himself), but the servant is necessarily embroiled in the concrete reality of the wrath of God against the nation. There is a crucial difference between God directly punishing the innocent servant (hideous and grotesque, as you say) and the servant, because of his faithfulness, suffering the punishment of Israel.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 29/05/2009 - 14:19

No, I think your reply shows your confusion. Jesus was, in your view (and mine) the innocent proxy, because in every respect he was the obedient Israelite, who never, ever deserved to die - least of all, by Roman crucifixion. I think everyone agrees with that. You have a problem, however, in saying that God was prepared to take an innocent human victim (if such a person existed), put him through death by crucifixion, and accept that as some sort of compensation for the sins of Israel. This is certainly not the God of the scriptures, and not the God I believe in.

Your language at this point becomes so opaque that I think you are having real problems in coming to terms with what you are actually trying to say. It means penal substitutionary atonement - one person being punished on behalf of the sins of someone else. That is what you have already affirmed. I am saying that Jesus was not an innocent human proxy - human sacrifice was always repugnant to YHWH - he never, ever required it. He opposed it with every fibre of his being. It was God bearing the punishment and the suffering - and not of Israel alone.

Denied or ignored by you, but affirmed and illustrated time and again on countless occasions over a few years by myself on this site, Jesus was identified in himself with YHWH, the Lord, the temple and dwelling place of God, who not only fulfilled the requirements of the law, but also rescinded some of the law’s injunctions (especially the ritual purity requirements and inclusion of those whom the law excluded), thus exercising an authority which no human agent could possibly ever have dared to suggest.

Jesus was not simply a human agent, God’s human proxy (which, it is quite clear, you make him out to be), but YHWH in person, dwelling in his temple, bringing to fulfilment the history of Israel, which was always on behalf of and for the whole world. You need to see my comments here on the Abrahamic promises (which are reaffirmed by Isaiah and seamlessly adopted by the converted Paul), and the renewal of creation (which only the creator himself had the authority to bring about - not a human proxy).

God never required an innocent human proxy to suffer anything on anyone else’s behalf - and least of all one who died for the sins of the world. The God you have created is a worse monster than the caricature God of the anti-substitutionary atonement lobby - who forget that Jesus was God, and that nobody was inflicting ‘cosmic child abuse’ on anyone. YHWH was suffering the punishment due to Israel - and since Israel was the world’s proxy, the punishment due to the whole world.

You selectively ignore in your citation of texts that the promise of Abraham was expressly for ‘all nations’, and this is precisely the language that Isaiah picks up in his dramatic prophecies of the forthcoming fulfilment of Israel’s destiny - which came through Jesus. You ignore that Jesus was, in the first place, in himself the promised ‘seed’ of Abraham, through whom all nations would be blessed. Do you really think that Jesus was ignorant of these promises, and how they came to be picked up again by Isaiah, but modified through the suffering servant narrative? Jesus was also, at the climactic moment of his life, acting out the Passover narrative with his disciples, but a Passover which was to bring in the new covenant, which was to include Jews and Gentiles - or to include all the nations of the world. This is writ large in Isaiah. Do you think Jesus was ignorant of it?

I think I have a greater respect for the bible than you, since these features of the story, so resoundingly proclaimed by Paul, are edited out of your version of Israel’s and biblical history. Jesus did die for the sins of the whole world - the very narrative/historical method of interpretation which you contend for affirms that emphatically. How can you so comprehensively fail to see it?

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 29/05/2009 - 15:46

Let me try a different approach. In his commentary on Romans Wright says this with regard to Romans 3:25-26:

The major point to be made here is that in Isaiah 40-55 we have a sustained exposition of the righteousness of God, focused more and more tightly on a suffering figure who represents Israel and fulfills YHWH’s purpose of being a light to the nations and whose sufferings and death are finally seen in explicit sacrificial terms. We have, that is, exactly that combination of elements that we have observed, and that are otherwise puzzling in exactly that combination, in Rom. 3:21-26. In other words, the sacrificial language of 3:25, used in connection with the violent death of a righteous Jew at the hands of pagans, makes sense within the context of the current martyr stories; but those martyr stories themselves send us back, by various routes, to Isaiah 40-55; and when we get there we find just those themes that we find in Romans 3. (Romans, 475)

This does not consider the ‘punishment’ theme in Isaiah 53, but the suffering that here is interpreted sacrificially, as I pointed out earlier, is a consequence of the fact that Israel has been punished because of its sins, which can be illustrated from other parts of Romans. Otherwise, this quotation states extremely well what I mean by the narrative framework of the atonement and the implications it has for how we understand it. It stresses the representative character of Jesus’ death, depicting him as a ‘righteous Jew’. It takes seriously the analogy with the martyrdoms under Antiochus, which are interpreted n the Maccabean writings as the saving deaths of the righteous for unrighteous Israel. It nowhere suggests that we must see the atonement as God accepting the punishment that was due to Israel, which borders on docetism. That is quite alien to the narrative.

The New Testament does not put God on the cross. It puts Jesus on the cross as a prophetic representative of Israel who has enacted prophetically both the exodus journey of Israel and the restoration of an exiled people to Zion, who is then appointed Son of God (still not God the Son) in power by his resurrection from the dead, who after his resurrection is given the name which is above every name, who is seated at the right hand of the Father. That is the story that is actually told, and if it entails the thought that Jesus’ death, like the suffering of the servant in Isaiah 53, was an entailment of God’s punishment of Israel, I don’t see the problem with that. It is part of the identification of the messiah with his people, both in their oppression and in their eventual vindication.

Incidentally, we have the same basic argument in Habakkuk. When Israel is punished by God because of its wickedness, what happens to the righteous? They remain part of Israel, but they will live by virtue of their faithfulness. Similarly in Daniel. The saints of the Most High are not exempt from the suffering that is inflicted on unrighteous Israel, but the oppressor will eventually be overcome and the suffering saints will be vindicated before the throne of God. This is the background against which New Testament atonement theology needs to be interpreted. Indeed, Jesus makes use of the story of the Son of man precisely because it accounts both for his own suffering, caught up in the punishment of Israel, and the suffering of his followers.

And let’s not make this a competition about who has the greater respect for the Bible…. I’ve no doubt that John Piper has greater respect for the Bible than either of us. :)

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 29/05/2009 - 16:27

Agreed with your final point. But I disagree with you and Wright here. Wright mistakenly, I think, adopts the martyrdom theology of 4 Maccabees 17:22 in his understanding of the use of the term ‘hilasterion’ (which is a crucial part of Paul’s argument in Romans 3), and applies it to Jesus. But there is no evidence that Paul or anyone was using the Maccabeean sense of the term. Here I side with Holland, who asserts that we should focus more on the unique use of terms such as ‘hilasterion’ within the biblical corpus itself, and not resort to uses in other traditions which were never accepted as part of the scriptural tradition of Israel (Jesus’s death always being according to ‘the law and the prophets’ - not the Maccabeean writings).

Within Romans 3, ‘hilasterion’ brings together, in a much more powerful way, the imagery of the Day of Atonement, and the Passover (both of which are combined in the figure of the eschatological king/priest in Ezekiel 45, who makes sacrifices in the eschatological temple). Jesus is not simply a martyr representative; in fact he is not that at all. He is fulfilling the dual and combined role of atoning sacrifice and passover sacrifice, brought together in one act.

Wright prevaricates here (in my opinion). He wants Jesus to be a martyr representative of Israel, as per Maccabees, but he also wants Jesus to be a penal substitutionary sacrifice. He also wants Jesus to be someone onto whom the combined weight of evil coming together against him in his life is heaped in his death. He doesn’t seem able quite to decide what he wants.

But bringing Maccabees into the picture muddies the waters, and distracts us from a much more powerful (and scriptural) meaning which is contained in Romans 3:20ff.

Sorry, but Wright is off target here.

P.S. You will find all of this debated in The Sir Toby Chronicles - In the Sauna. You should have been following it, Andrew.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 29/05/2009 - 17:28

Here I side with Holland, who asserts that we should focus more on the unique use of terms such as ‘hilasterion’ within the biblical corpus itself, and not resort to uses in other traditions which were never accepted as part of the scriptural tradition of Israel…

Wright does make the point, however, that the Maccabean  martyrdom theology is in continuity (‘by various routes’) with the atonement theology of Isaiah 53 as it functions within the broader narrative of Isaiah 40-55. It simply illustrates how Isaiah 53 could be used to interpret Jewish suffering at the hands of a pagan enemy. Wright sees Paul’s argument as making sense within the context of that theology, but I’m not sure he would say that Paul was dependent on it.

And of course, from a linguistic point of view it would be irresponsible to dismiss the evidence of the Maccabean literature simply on the grounds that it is not canonical. The theology of the Maccabean texts is not the same as Paul’s theology: the hope is not of a new covenant in the power of the Spirit but of a restoration of the status quo ante. But that in itself is not enough to dismiss the use of hilasterion to express the atoning significance of the death of a righteous Jew.

He is fulfilling the dual and combined role of atoning sacrifice and passover sacrifice, brought together in one act.

I think the response here would be that these are metaphors which Paul uses to bring out the soteriological significance of the underlying event. They do not preclude the martyrdom theology: they are part of its reinterpretation. They certainly reinforce the point that Jesus’ death is seen to have significance within a narrative about Israel. Paul, like the Maccabean writer, like Isaiah interprets the death of a faithful and righteous Jew (not of God) as an event like the day of atonement or like the redemption from Egypt.

Anyway, the point is that it is within this narrative worldview that atonement language makes sense. Extract it from that context, shake it till it’s dead, dissect it, preserve it in formaldehyde for white-coated scientists to squabble over, and you have merely a puzzling theological anomaly. It can live only in its natural habitat.

I agree somewhat with your comments on Wright’s prevarication. My view is that he is not consistent enough in thinking through the implications of his narrative theology – I think he loses his nerve. You, of course, think he has already gone too far.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 29/05/2009 - 17:58

Well, we can sleep peacefully in our beds this weekend then, now that we agree on something - which is that ‘it is within the narrative worldview that atonement language makes sense’. We don’t agree on the sense, but we do agree on the procedure.

I don’t really see how the Maccabean martyrdom view can harmonise with what I (now) take to be Paul’s view in Romans 3 - but from your point of view, maybe that doesn’t matter.

Also, naughty old us, to disagree with Wright. It’s not that I think he goes too far, but that he is inconsistent, or doesn’t bring things to a clear enough coherent focus. Which is quite a major issue, when we are talking about ‘the atonement’.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Ron Henzel - 29/05/2009 - 18:33

I’ve put some of my thoughts on this subject in a blog post that can be found at http://midwestoutreach.org/blogs/the-lamb-that-was-slain.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 30/05/2009 - 19:59

I feel that my questions and points have either been deflected, or quietly kicked into the long grass, shunted into a siding, as it were. The question of God’s identity as a worshipped being remains. Is God a monster, or is he the most self-sacrificial being in the universe (according to which view of the atonement you take).

In the narrative/historical method of interpretation, since there is at least as much, and I would argue considerably more, evidence for the divine identity of Jesus than not, why not adopt this and have a better way of appreciating his death on the cross as well - without the horrendous problems of a God who requires, and is satisfied by, a human sacrifice of an innocent victim who endures unimaginable suffering?

The ‘martyrdom’ understanding of Jesus’s death, fed by the use of the word ‘hilasterion’ in both 4 Maccabees 17:22 and Romans 3:25, takes us down the path of Jesus experiencing ‘in advance’ the sufferings of Israel to come, and accepted by God as a righteous alternative to judgment. On the other hand, if we accept the combination of redemptive and atoning significance in the word, reinforced by the LXX use of the word in Ezekiel 45, a divine identity of the figure who is suffering - in this case, Jesus - is suggested. The combined roles highlight his royal and priestly functions, a combination which was, obviously, forbidden in any human representative of Israel.

Furthermore, the worldwide scope and significance of Jesus’s death is reinforced by his fulfilment of the Abrahamic narrative, and insofar as this is taken up by Isaiah, the merging of that narrative with the Passover narrative. We have here the two cornerstones of Jewish identity, and both are fused in Isaiah to bring the objectives of Israel’s servanthood, and that of Israel’s representative, to ‘all nations’. Jesus must have been aware of these strands of Israel’s destiny, so warped by the political and nationalist ambitions of his contemporaries, but perfectly fulfilled in himself. Paul, taking his mandate directly from Isaiah, understood the significance of Jesus’s death for ‘all nations’ perfectly. Peter also understood it, but it took time for him to become convinced, and he backtracked notoriously on one occasion.

Well, there we have it. This is my contribution to the narrative/historical debate. Whose version would you rather have - mine or Andrew’s? Have a nice weekend.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by Andrew - 01/06/2009 - 15:14

Peter, don’t get cross with me, but it would really help if you could explain how you come to the conclusion that the cross is interpreted biblically as God sacrificing himself in some sense either for the sins of Israel or for the sins of the world. I can see that in the light of a more developed trinitarianism we might jump to the conclusion that Jesus is God on the cross suffering for the sins of his creation, but I don’t see anything in the New Testament that suggests that this is how it was interpreted in these primary texts. Certainly God suffers because of the sins of his people – he is heart-broken, angered, grieved, etc. But what leads us to suppose that when the New Testament speaks of Jesus’ death in sacrificial terms it has in mind the sacrificial suffering of God?

Surely when Paul says that ‘God put Jesus forward as a hilastērion’ (Rom. 3:25), this is quite different to God putting himself forward as a hilastērion. Nothing in the Old Testament prepares us for such an inversion of the whole idea of an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of Israel. Ezekiel 43 (I presume that’s the passage you mean) describes a restored temple in which YHWH again dwells following judgment on Israel because of their ‘whoring and the murders of their leaders’, etc., and in which the priests make sacrifices to atone for its previous desecration. There is no divine figure in this who suffers for the sins of the people.

Finally, to make the point clear again. The argument I am putting forward does not entail the grotesque thought that God punishes an innocent person in the vindictive manner that you imply. If you are going to ask people to choose, Peter, please at least put the choice accurately before them.

Isaiah 53 tells a story in which the punishment or ‘chastisement’ that Israel should receive is suffered by a servant, who ‘was wounded for our transgressions… crushed for our iniquities’, upon whom the Lord has laid the iniquity of us all – that is of Israel. That suggests to me that this righteous servant is somehow caught up in the punishment of Israel, and because he is in some sense Israel, he suffers that ‘punishment’ in his own body.

That cannot be taken out of the story of Israel – we cannot translate this into an ahistorical myth about an innocent person who is arbitrarily subjected by God to ‘unimaginable sufferings’ just to satisfy his anger. To my mind the whole controversy over penal substitutionary atonement has been sustained by this theological abstraction. But as long as we stay within the story, it seems quite reasonable and quite biblical to speak of Jesus’ death in similar terms. In the heat of the debate this aspect of the New Testament understanding of Jesus’ deathy has probably been overstated: my basic point is that these are all narratively determined interpretations of Jesus’ death. But to suggest that Jesus suffered because of the punishment of Israel, and in some sense suffered the punishment of Israel, implies a no more horrifying conception of God than we find in Isaiah 53.

OK, one last point of clarification. An act of atonement is not itself ‘penal’. The point is, I think, that when the innocent becomes implicated in the punishment of Israel and suffers as a consequence (whether in Isaiah 53 or 4 Maccabees 17), the possibility emerges that that suffering should come to have an atoning function in bringing the punishment of Israel to an end. Something like this thought is present in Daniel 9:24 LXX (Th.).

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by shiert - 02/06/2009 - 00:54

Might I suggest you start here, Peter, though you certainly need no help from me.

The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ As the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology by Jurgen Moltmann.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by shiert - 10/06/2009 - 22:48

As a matter of shameless self-promotion, I direct your attention to my recent post at http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/06/a-note-on-postmodernism-noncontemporaneity-and-me.html. It doesn’t have anything to do with atonement, which I need to make for this post, but it does have something to do with what “we” in the ecumenical sense fight about.

Tracy

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 11/06/2009 - 11:47

Shameless it may be, but I appreciated the post, and its intriguingly tantalising hints about ‘noncontemporaneous Christianity’. I’m really looking forward to learning more about what this might mean. I also agree totally that we are not in a new epoch, that we are in a corrective period, and that modernist/enlightenment values live on - to our benefit.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by shiert - 11/06/2009 - 18:22

Thanks Peter. For now I am content to leave the notion of noncontemporaneity vague, as did Metz I might add. But let me suggest that the tension between contemporary and noncontemporary is invitingly demonstrated by juxtaposing Andrew’s notions of a hermeneutic based on historical narrative with Jacob’s insistence on a hermeneutic in the “here and now.” I have posted on this website before about this tension as has Samuel Carr.

Another example from a prior dialogue might be the occasion when in a very early posting of mine on a conversation on homosexuality I brought in the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. If my memory serves, someone (I think it was John Doyle) said, “Why should we pay attention to a 13th century Dominican monk?” or words to that effect. I didn’t have a quick, pithy response at the time, but let me suggest now that relying on seemingly “anachronistic” ideas can be productive in some sense of that word. After all, aren’t we thinking and writing about even older ideas that date back more than 2000 years?

Sorry, Andrew for interposing this little diatribe into another conversation. Maybe you could spin it off?

Tracy

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by john doyle - 11/06/2009 - 19:22

“someone (I think it was John Doyle) said, “Why should we pay attention to a 13th century Dominican monk?””

Now Shiert, I acknowledge my own curmudgeonly qualities (as well as a certain cynicism regarding elements of my Catholic upbringing), but I am quite interested in what the ancients have to say. As I mentioned to someone (I think it was Peter), old-fashioned topics like transubstantiation, the nature of the trinity, and Jesus’ god-man status might have gone out of fashion a few centuries ago, but translated into a PoMo context they take on new life.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by shiert - 12/06/2009 - 21:49

Please believe that I was not casting stones. I misused the word diatribe, I think, and I was going on a vague recollection of the past. Could it be that our gospel writers did the same thing? Your response as I recall was a good one, but I was simply going for the connection with noncontemporaneity.

Tracy

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 02/06/2009 - 12:37

Andrew - shiert has suggested that an answer to your question is to be found in Moltmann. I would simply say that the answer is to be found, in the first place, in the question of the identity of Jesus, which is raised not by later Greek theologians but his contemporaries and followers in the gospels. It is extremely difficult, I would say impossible, to argue for a Jesus who is a mere human agent from the way the evidence is presented, not least from a narrative-based viewpoint. I have already given a number of pointers, looking at the evidence from within a 1st century Jewish worldview and understanding. If you want to go over this in more detail, a separate thread is called for. It is astonishing that not once is Jesus presented as directing people’s attention away from himself and towards YHWH in his ministry. This is either blasphemy, or he was YHWH!

Non-trinitarian sects have to come to terms with the difficulties in insisting on a non-divine identity for Jesus, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, try to present a Jesus who was of a different order from ordinary humanity, though not God. Socinians (Unitarians) argue that Jesus was all that we were meant to be, but avoiding the question: how did Jesus, as an ordinary human being, become all that we were meant to be, but we could not be, or have failed to be?

From within the biblical narrative, theology has already answered your question in various ways. The creation could not be renewed by anyone less than the creator. Jesus began the renewal of creation in himself. Israel, and therefore the nations, could not be released from their Babylonian captivity to sin (in which there was an exile not of 70 years, but 70 times 7 - Daniel 9:25ff). Only YHWH could bring about release from this captivity - and yet Jesus took that role on himself, even before he was crucified, by authorising the forgiveness of sins without reference to YHWH!.

A key issue, when picking up biblical interpretation from a narrative standpoint, is which narrative are we talking about? Both the Passover and Second Exodus narratives (really the same narrative prefigured for latter days by the prophets), as taken up by Jesus in the gospels, have in view a very large picture indeed - which is the fulfilment of the promises of Abraham (which were always to the world - to ‘all nations’), and the formation of a renewed people of God by the new covenant - which in the imagery and language of the prophets reversed the corruption of sin and death which had marred the old covenant.

Whilst much of this is not spelt out explicitly in Jesus’s teaching, it is dramatically acted out in his life - leading up to crucifixion and resurrection. It is understood by Paul without his having to go through generations of theological reflection and modification of his Jewish background. Why is this the case? Because to Paul, the fulfilment of this wider story in the life and death of Jesus became blindingly obvious - if you’ll excuse the pun. He knew the scriptures better than any of his contemporaries, and better than us, it would seem. This was within a few years, at most, of Jesus’s death - not generations.

Coming back to ‘hilasterion’ - paradoxical it may seem, but it makes perfect sense. The only way that the redemptive and atoning sense of the word could be fulfilled, as it is prefigured in the sacrifices made for the Passover feast in Ezekiel 45:21-25, was by God fulfilling the sacrifices himself. The eschatological prince of the passage, so contradictory for Jewish understanding, was fulfilled in the person of Jesus, worshipped as God by his contemporaries, and presented as God in the primary texts in his own lifetime.

We are entirely within the story of Israel, but bear in mind that by the time of Jesus, the interpretation of that story had become very warped in the mind of Israel, and it took a Jesus to provide the meaning and fulfilment of the story in his own person. It is an enacted meaning more than a spoken or taught meaning in the gospels, but actions speak louder than words!

It is still grotesque, to my mind, to say that, whether he was being vindictive or not (I never said that he was), God should require a human sacrifice to provide a means of escape from the judgment that was to come. Human sacrifice was something that God rigorously opposed, as it reflected the worst aspects of the debased religious practices of the surrounding cultures. There is nothing theologically abstract here; we are invited to worship God, eg through the psalms, for his person as much as for his acts. Human sacrifice is a contradiction to his character, and as already implied, is not even necessary to support a perfectly valid narrative based interpretation of the bible.

Re: What evangelicals fight about: atonement

by peter wilkinson - 04/06/2009 - 10:46

I came across this inteview with Stanley Hauerwas on the atonement, in connection with his book on the last seven words of Jesus. Andrew quotes approvingly of Hauerwas in a recent book review on andrewperriman.com. I think he would approve of Hauerwas’s sentiments here, but would feel that Hauerwas has not yet caught up with narrative theology.

I just realised what a bizarre post this is: me replying to myself and conjecturing what Andrew’s response might be to Stanley Hauerwas. This is truly conversation disappearing down its own navel. The interview is worth reading for its own sake in the context of the subject under discussion on the thread. It adopts a critical stance towards the narcissism of a ‘me-centred’ understanding of the crucifixion.

God says sorry: a powerful transformational narrative

by richard - 12/06/2009 - 13:09

As we now know, there was no actual event that we may call original human sin, so it makes little sense for any event to effect universal human atonement. This is a strength of Andrew’s interpretation, as it is strongly historically contingent, not based on myths claiming universal applicability.

But I would like to suggest an alternative/another layer on Andrew’s interpretation. Atonement is God taking the fall for all the pain and suffering that has been inherent in the creation from the beginning. In this narrative Jesus prophetically demonstrates that God feels the pain and suffering in the universe, takes responsibility for it, and forgives any intermediary agents that caused that pain. It is God’s abandoning/inaction in response to inevitable pain that is the true cause of suffering.

This is all you need. God takes responsibility. In effect God says sorry, allowing the people that he had dominated for thousands of years to move on, and allowing growth into a new mutual relationship, if we want it. This is a powerful narrative in the current context as former Christian colonising powers apologise to the groups that they have dominated, freeing both parties to move forward into a new constructive relationship. The idea of God punishing us for the tiny amount of suffering that any of us have caused becomes absurd as he owns up to and accepts the consequences of the suffering that he has caused and allowed. Instead of being us punished, God justly accepts the blame and we are freed from supernatural domination.

Atonement is us accepting God’s sacrificial apology, and moving into a new mutual co-creative relationship with God.

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