I didn’t sign up for the Christian Doctrine course expecting my faith to be deconstructed. Rather the opposite.
But there I was, considering the essay prompt on atonement and finding myself thrown out of my theological comfort zone.
The question, on first glance, didn’t seem quite as outrageous as some of the previous assignments (such as “Explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity” – which was indeed supposed to be answered in one week). My tutor simply asked, “How should we understand the idea that Jesus Christ died for humankind?”
There’s a good Sunday School answer to that question. It’s best explained in a common metaphor:
We’ve sinned and God – easily provoked and just waiting for a chance to pour out His infamous wrath – now has the chance to condemn us to fire and brimstone. We are “sinners in the hands of an angry God”; the noose is around our throats; we’re strapped to the electric chair. We are in the courtroom and God is both plaintiff and judge.
This metaphor hinges on the definition of sin as our breaking some rules that the angry God has capriciously created. He’s also declared that the punishment for breaking these rules is death. We knew this when we sinned; we have no excuse. (Not that it would matter if we didn’t have the rulebook.) The result of this trial is not looking good.
Enter Jesus into the Sunday School theological system. It’s like a murderer is on trial and about to get the death penalty. In comes some innocent fellow who says, “Hey, now. We know that guy’s guilty and I’m innocent. So how about this: set him free and kill me instead.” God, who really only wants blood, thinks this is a great idea. So Jesus dies in our place; we’re set free; the wrath of God is appeased.
As soon as I answered my essay question with the above picture which I’d been hearing in various forms all my life, I knew something was wrong.
That was not justice. That was not mercy. That was not grace. That was not the gospel.
I certainly don’t want innocent people going into courtrooms and taking the death penalty for murderers. Why do we think that’s what Jesus did? Why do we think that serves God’s justice, if it clearly wouldn’t work for ours?
I’d been hearing “Jesus is the answer” for so long that I’d forgotten I didn’t really know what the question was. Or how Jesus answered it.
If Jesus is the answer, what is the question? (And how is it answered?)
I don’t mean to imply that soteriology is a calculus formula or a simple Q-and-A logic game. I’m not certain that the cross can be explained by anything but metaphor. The Biblical metaphors describing the Christ-event are richly varied: Jesus as sacrifice, as propitiation, as payment of debt, as ransom, as victor. It must be understood, therefore, that as I here offer some thoughts on what it means that Jesus is “savior,” this is hardly an exhaustive article. I’d like to meditate on the idea of Jesus’s action as cancelling debt and how that changes our “courtroom metaphor” – but I’m not also casting aside the other images of Jesus’s work.
Even metaphors need to be true, particularly when they are trying to explain problem and solution. When my wrathful-God-courtroom-scene-metaphor understanding of salvation was exposed as rather less than just and merciful (and hardly even Biblical), I found that I had to question the truth of the Christ-event itself. In order for me to believe that Christ saves us by the cross, I need to know why and how the cross was necessary. Contrary to popular evangelical assumptions, it’s not intuitively obvious that the death of someone else saves you.
(Not all sacrifice is saving. Sometimes it looks rather more like suicide.)
What was it about Jesus’s death that made it more than just Jesus’s death – what happened on the cross which transformed the way God relates to humanity, which tore the curtain of the temple in two, from top to bottom?
Without my “system”, I was thoroughly muddled. Then, Colossians. And Anselm. And Ayn Rand. And some clarity.
I moved from Hebrews to Paul, sifting through metaphor and furrowing my brows at terms I thought I understood. Grace. Forgiveness. Mercy. Transgression. Suddenly, truth jumped out in Colossians – a legal scene, but one rather different from the Angry God version I’d been taught.
“And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” (Col 2:13-14, emphasis mine)
What does it mean that we are “in debt” to God? What do we owe God?
Enter my stumbling across a medieval theologian, Anselm. Anselm lived in a world rather different from ours: the concepts of honor and tribute were still very much alive in the feudal society. A knight owed homage to the feudal lord; his life was literally devoted to the lord and was consequently lived for the lord rather than for the knight himself.
Likewise, said Anselm, God is our lord and by virtue of his identity, we owe him our lives, our complete honor and tribute. Sin is trying to wrest our lives from the hands of God, trying to be gods ourselves. Sin is missing a payment of homage. The consequence of sin is death because the only way we can pay the debt is with our life.
Anselm’s understanding of sin may in fact be a bit too colored by medieval social structure. But I think he was on to something.
“Atonement,” from the phrase “at-one-ment”, is basically synonymous with “reconciliation,” a term indicating that a shattered relationship has been made whole – the disparate parties are again “at one.” Here, then, is the first clue in understanding “the question,” the elemental problem of mankind: something relational has gone wrong and man is not at peace.
Man is estranged from God. Christians through the centuries have taught that the reason for this estrangement is “sin,” but what is sin? Certainly, sin is breaking God’s commands, but as Paul’s letters make clear, all have sinned, even those Gentiles who did not receive the Law. The key to grasping the full definition of sin is partially expressed in Romans 1:21: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”
Sinning is not honoring God as God; it is disregarding his identity and setting something else – something mortal, something less than God – up as “the ultimate principle of coherence and meaning” (Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement, 12).
Sin is blasphemy and idolatry.
Nothing, however, can be done without consequences. Breaking a human relationship often means the end of the joys of friendship; breaking a relationship with the Almighty means the end of life itself. The wages of sin is death not because God is vindictive or spiteful, but because he is Creator and Sustainer. It is “natural” that cutting oneself off from God through sin results in death – to sin is to turn away from Life himself. “Death is the summation of all the dark consequences that flow from enmity with God” (Spence, “A Unified Theory of the Atonement”, 418).
Back to Anselm. We “owe” God our lives because of who he is – not because he’s some medieval feudal lord, but because he is Creator. We are contingent. Like a caring Artist and Author, God wants good things for his creation.
It’s dangerous, then, to deny this divine Artist.
Good artwork (perhaps a bit like Anselm’s good medieval knight whose status has been “created” by the lord) is glorious and noble in and of itself – it is communication and inspiration to others – but it ultimately points back to its Creator (or Lord). The life of the artwork belongs to the artist. This is particularly true when thinking of the artwork as work in progress, as clay still on the wheel or novel still being written.
We owe our lives to God because he is working on us, sculpting us, writing us – and working against him leads to our own destruction.
Another way to think of our createdness is to consider being made “in the image of God.” If nothing else, our purpose is to reflect the Creator in our selves - or to be knightly emissaries of the Lord, bringing him honor in all our actions.
In Anselm-ian terms, sin (blasphemy and idolatry) is refusing to “pay homage” and is therefore accruing a debt of honor owed to God.
This understanding of sin creates a different “legal” picture than the one described at the beginning of this article. Our relationship with God is broken, but it’s not because we’ve disobeyed number one or six of his list of rules and the law codes declare that the punishment is death. Rather, the relationship is broken because in our disobedience, we’ve accrued a debt which can only be paid by life.
A major difference between the two pictures is the conception of God. There’s first the Sunday School God whose primary purpose is to write legal codes and punish people. This God doesn’t care about his people, only about his rules. This God likes the electric chair. This God likes watching Mel Gibson movies.
Then there’s Anselm’s God. This God’s priority is maintaining a proper relationship with his people. Their sin and debt to him is not cause for him to get excited about exerting his wrath; it’s instead cause for him to show them his mercy.
We’re back to the beginning question: Why the cross?
Insight came in Atlas Shrugged, a book I was reading by Ayn Rand espousing “objectivism”, the “moral theory” which places the individual at its center. An interesting read, however much I disagreed with its conclusions.
There’s a point at which a character in the book is asked by his family to forgive them. They’ve basically hurt him, mooched off him, and used him financially throughout the story. They’re now coming to him destitute and asking for his forgiveness – and his continued support. He replies, “…here’s what’s wrong with your idea of forgiveness: You regret that you’ve hurt me and, as your atonement for it, you ask that I offer myself to total immolation.”
Forgiveness is an utter scandal. This is Rand’s point, this is her argument for non-forgiveness.
Forgiveness means absorbing a debt within oneself. This is why the character in the book refuses to do it – he knows that it’s illogical, that he can’t afford it, that he’ll end up dying if he forgives the huge debt his family owes him (and especially if he continues to support them).
Forgiveness is violent to oneself. “A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks.” Yes, yes indeed. The cross is a scandal. The Christian’s sign of strength and triumph is the sign of torture, failure, and defeat - of death. This is why Christians are (read: ought to be) joyful; God is far bigger than logic.
Justice, in Anselm’s legal metaphor, demands that the debt of honor we owe God be paid by our lives. Instead, God forgives. He absorbs the debt himself – by dying.
Our sovereign, incarnate Lord – incarnate in his creation, continually misunderstood, offering himself to total immolation. And now – now the debt is paid, now we are forgiven. And now, now the Lord is vindicated: through death he has paid the debt and through resurrection he has destroyed death itself. There is nothing more to fear – not even our forgiveness of others, hard as it may seem.
The cross is necessary not because God is vengeful, but because forgiveness is scandalously violent. The cross is necessary not because God’s primary attribute is wrath, but because God is merciful.
My Sunday School faith was deconstructed, but for the good, for the sake of knowing God more truthfully. We are meant to fear God out of reverence for his holiness, not out of terror of his Edwardian wrath. If we accept his forgiveness and return to be reconciled to our Creator and Lord, we must live atoned, “at-one-ed”. We are free, we are forgiven, we are people of a scandalous and merciful God.
