Archive for the ‘Doctrine’ Category
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
Mark Helm, Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, Massachusetts, last year published his book, “Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross”. Using insights from Rene Girard, Heim focuses his thesis on the concept of scapegoating, suggesting that God used the human sinful practice of scapegoating to end that paradigm.
Heim begins by outlining the indictments against the doctrine of substitutionary atonement that focuses on the cross as punishment for our sins. The concept of sacrifice is no longer current in most cultures. The cross has been used as the keystone of Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. Critics point out that the death of Jesus stands alongside many other accounts of dying and rising in other cultures. “The theology of the cross is indicted for ignorant parochialism and spiritual immaturity”. Traditional understandings of the cross are criticized for painting God as a transactional ogre who must find violent means to bring about forgiveness. Heim points to the growing number of critics who connect atonement doctrines with validation of guilt, retribution and violence.
“The critiques of atonement theology are like magnets run over the biblical texts. They attract and lift out a whole range of problematic portions about which the church generally practices discreet avoidance”.
Heim says that the significance of the cross stands out with particular clarity when seen in the light of scapegoating violence that encompasses both the individual and society. With Girard he explores the treatment of violence in the Hebrew scriptures, both in descriptions of sacrificial and scapegoating practices, and in narratives (such as Job) that explore the involvement of God in human suffering.
Heim summarises Rene Girard’s approach to scapegoating in the Old and New Testaments. Sacrifice was a real solution to communal violence. For people to buy into the myth of sacrifice, the violent nature needed to be obscured. Religion provided a way for this to happen. The voice of the scapegoat had to be silenced. Scapegoats were chosen from marginalized groups, powerless people. Further, the murder of the scapegoat must not be portrayed as divinely sanctioned sacrifice rather than murder or abuse. The scapegoating mechanism must be exposed to save us from this collective sin.
Jesus, the resurrected victim, speaks out as the murdered one, challenging the powers that have chosen him as scapegoat. Through the resurrection we discover that God has stood by the victim and not the perpetrators. God has not punished or abandoned Jesus. The vindicated Jesus, in turn, does not condemn his killers.
Heim, along with Girard, explores the letters of Paul and the letter to the Hebrews to test this out. Paul uses the sacrificial theme but focuses on the role of faith in the one who has been unjustly murdered. The letter to the Hebrews begins with the ritual sacrifices written up in the Hebrew Scriptures but concludes with the assertion that the sacrifice of Jesus has made all sacrifices unnecessary.
Heim finishes by engaging with Anselm’s theology of atonement. He cannot agree with Anselm’s premise that Jesus offered unmerited suffering to pay the price of our punishment. He would rather say that God suffered the effects of our sin as God rescued us from it. He says “the passion is a divine act revealing, reversing, and replacing our redemptive violence, which we so long and tenaciously hid from ourselves in the very name of the sacred.”
“The God who paid the cost of the cross was not the one who charged it. We are saved from sacrifice because God suffered it. To be reconciled with God is to recognize victims when we see them, to convert from the crowd that gathers around them, and to be reconciled with each other without them.”
Saved From Sacrifice at Amazon.com
See Richard Beck’s summary of Saved From Sacrifice on his blog, Experimental Theology.
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Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
J Denny Weaver, professor of religion at Bluffton University in Ohio, focuses largely on the ‘narrative Christus Victor’ aproach to atonement in his attempt to grapple with violent dimensions of the traditional ‘appeasement’ understanding of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Bluffton University is a liberal arts university associated with the Mennonite Church USA.
Weaver acknowledges that the continuing focus on the punishment of Jesus on our behalf is understandable, given the prevalent systems of retributive justice found in contemporary society. The greater the misdeed or evil, the greater the punishment. However he brings to light the growing number of critiques of traditional atonement theories.
Weaver builds on the work by Mennonite theologians Gordon Kaufman and John Howard Yoder who attempted to recover the traditional ‘Christus Victor’ model of atonement. He draws on the work of Catholic theologians Rene Girard and Raymund Schwager, who had unpacked the mimetic violence embedded in the appeasement model of atonement.
Weaver’s work is given courage and strength by contextualist theologians from the Black, feminist and womanist streams of theology.
James Cone, in God of the Oppressed, points out that white people have used the traditional atonement perspective to claim salvation (in the after life) while accommodating and advocating the violence of racisim and slavery.
Feminist and womanist theologians, such as Joan Carlson Brown, Rebecca Parker, Rita Nakashima Brock and Delores Williams, write about the classic atonement doctrine as images of ‘divine child abuse’ or ‘divine surrogacy’.
Weaver draws on insights from postmodernity to consider the contexts in which classic doctrines of atonement originally formed and were then perpetuated. He sets out to explore the possibility that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus may have particular and distinctive meanings in different contexts.
Weaver sets out to develop an understanding of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that avoids all the dimensions of violence in traditional atonement imagery. He explores the assumed violence found in the traditional images of atonement: accommodation of the violence of sword and various forms of systemic violence by the abstract formulas of satisfaction atonement, modeling of submission to abusive authorities, and modeling the assumption that doing justice or making right depends on punishment or sanctioned violence.
The Narrative Christus Victor is first set out in an analysis of the Book of Revelation. On the surface it would appear as though this apocalyptic work is about universal cosmic conflict between good and evil in which the church confronts the empire. Weaver argues that the church in Revelation is called to a nonviolent participation in the already achieved victory of Jesus’ resurrection.
Weaver goes on to explore the non-violent approach of Jesus as he proclaimed and lived out the Kingdom of God.
“Jesus was ready to die and he was willing to die. It was not a death, however, that was required as compensatory retribution for the sins of his enemies and his friends. It was a death that resulted from fulfilment of his mission of his mission about the reign of God.”
Weaver challenges a narrow understanding of atonement based on retributive justice. Here, he says, we see Jesus talking about and modeling an understanding of salvation that is about being free from the evil forces represented by the imperial structures, the holiness code, the mob and the compromising actions and attitudes of his own disciples.
The resurrection, Weaver suggests, is more than an inspirational event. It reveals the balance of power in the universe, whether people recognise it or not. The resurrection overcomes acts of evil and becomes an invitation to join in the life-transforming rule of God in the world.
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
I’m writing a paper on the impact of modernism on doctrines of atonement and making my way through a few texts.
First book on my reading list is Stephen Finlan’s 2005 book, “Problems with Atonement: The Origins Of, And Controversy About, The Atonement Doctrine”.
Finlan graduated with a PhD in Pauline Theology, University of Durham, in 2004, focusing on the background and content of Paul’s cultic atonement metaphors. He’s now a research assistant for the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture at Drew University.
Stephen draws attention to a pattern of correction, rationalization and spiritualization that has dominated both scholarly and confessional discourse on atonement. He’s concerned that Hebrew, Gentile and later metaphors of atonement have been uncritically conflated and calls for a re-examination of life, death and resurrection through the lense of the doctrine of incarnation.
Sacrifice and Scapegoat
Finlan’s first chapter explores the depth of meaning found in the Hebrew and Gentile rites of sacrifice. He begins with sacrifice as gift, propitiation, an offering of the best to please and/or appease God. On another level Hebrew sacrifices were used as form of purification, releasing the life-force of the blood to restore order, cleanness to the temple and God’s people. Sacrifice came to be seen as a means of expiation, bringing forgiveness, dealing with sin. The Hebrew concept of ‘kippering’, translated into the English word ‘atonement’, is described as payoff, ransom, turning away potential retaliation.
Finlan provides a matter-of-fact description of the spiritualization process associated with the concept of sacrifice in Hebrew and other cultures. An early example of substitution, hinted at in Hebrew Scriptures, would be the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. Moralizing interpretations insert moral and universal meanings into the sacrificial practices. Internalization of religion focuses on the attitudes of the sacrificer. Metaphorical use of cultic terms is found in Paul’s reference to the body as the temple. The most radical spiritualization is the complete rejection of sacrificial practice, a move seen in writing by Isaiah, Jeremiah and Hosea.
Finlan goes on to explore the expulsion rituals of the Hebrew scriptures and commonly found in Hittite, Greek and Mesopotamian societies. The scapegoat concept was used by these societies to transfer curse or sin onto the victim. Finlan stresses that the concept of scapegoat must be distinguished from the concept of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he reminds us, “has nothing to do with punishing the animal but with the purifying power that the lifeblood is thought to have”.
Paul’s Use of Metaphors
Finlan goes on to the heart of his PhD, Paul’s use of cultic metaphor. His thesis here is that Paul uses multiple metaphors and models to ullustrate the meaning of the death of Christ. Paul refers to Christ’s death in terms of sacrificial sin-sprinkling and sin-bearing scapegoat. He also appears to have made references to the Hellenistic rhetoric of nobly dying for his people (later seen in terms of martyrdom). He goes on to use social metaphors to describe the beneficial results of Christ’s death for believers: justification (from the legal court), reconciliation (diplomatic metaphor), and adoption (family metaphor), and ransom (freedom for slaves). Paul used many of these metaphors in the same sentence, focusing on the many meanings of the death of Jesus, rather than developing a systematic theology. It was in the combination of the metaphors that the concept of penal substitution began to emerge.
I like this quote from Finlan:
“In the interests of making the Gospel marketable, Paul poured the new wine into old conceptual forms, spiced with a dose of spiritualizing, and enlivened by the real spiritual experience that he and his fellows were having. But this means that some incompatible religious ideas were yoked together. Whatever could “preach” could stay; but this has caused confusions to later Christians”.
Buy your copy of Stephen Finlan’s Problems With Atonement online at Amazon.com
Atonement After Paul
Finlan provides an analysis of atonement doctrines developed in the early Church (Patristic theologians), medieval Church and Reformation movement.
Rescue Theories
Finlan classes together the Christus Victor and so-called ransom theories as the Rescue Theories - concepts of cosmic rescue and triumph over evil forces. Irenaeus sees Christ rescuing humanity by rescuing human nature itself. Origen of Alexandria sees the whole of life and teaching of Christ as saving. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, is described as seeing salvation as a salvage and restoration job that emanates from the incarnation itself. Augustine combines a ransom theory (tricking the devil) with a judicial theory in which Christ takes the penalty for our sin.
Satisfaction Theory
Finlan writes that Anselm (11th century) constructed a theory based on the social structure of his time, providing a feudal structure to salvation. God, the offended Lord, must have compensation for the affront to his honor by sinful humanity.
Moral Influence Theory
Peter Abelard, not long after Anselm, rejected all ransom and satisfaction theories, focusing instead on the moral effect of Christ’s life and death on the person who honestly believes it. Abelard pointed out that the whole of Jesus’ life counted, not just the violent end.
Reformation Theories
Finlan explores the atonement theories developed by Luther and Calvin. He points to the doctrines of absolute depravity, universal guilt and a ‘horrifying transfer of divine wrath to the undeserving Son’ as monstrous teachings that have made Christianity unpalatable to believers.
I think this section is perhaps the weakest in Finlan’s book. Finlan gives us a conflated view of the voices of the Reformation, focusing largely on Luther, ignoring the large number of alternative voices of the time.
The Incarnation
Finlan is concerned that the primary Christian doctrine of the incarnation has been interpreted through secondary doctrines such as substitutionary atonement, rather than the other way around. He acknowledges the concern that the rejection of such secondary doctrines can lead to a wholesale rejection of all doctrine. He acknowledges that much of Paul’s writing points to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus in terms of atonement metaphors. Finlan hopes to convince his readers to read the rest of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures without imposing the ‘penal substitionary atonement’ model on them. He concludes with the thought that the early Christian doctrine of theosis may be a useful way ahead in developing a deep and useful understanding of Christ.
I’ll finish with a quote from a quote from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor 5:19):
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself”.
As I read the text around that statement, I’ll be reading with an appreciation of the many metaphors being used by Paul. I’ll also be looking to see what difference it makes to read through with the doctrine of incarnation as the lense.
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