My engagements over the past couple of days (one here, another here) with issues raised by Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity work has raised a complex of issues that dovetail nicely with the course I’m teaching this summer on the cross in the New Testament.
Recently, my students have been responsible for engaging with the atonement model that Joel Green advocates–the
kaleidoscopic model.
As you are no doubt aware, the kaleidoscopic model of the atonement is the one in which, at the judgment, God holds you up to the light of the sun to see if any color comes through or if your dark heart obscures all light…
No… wait… that’s not it.
Ahem.
The kaleidoscopic view of the atonement is a model that strives to embrace the multiple atonement models that we find in scripture. Rather than recognizing one view as primary (such as penal substitution or christus victor) and other ideas as subservient to the one or built upon it, the kaleidoscopic model insists that the death of Jesus for our sins is the thing itself, and all the others are simply ways of striving to articulate what we, as limited humans, can never fully capture.
There are a couple of driving reasons for embracing such a model. We are limited, God’s work are infinite–even God’s works on our behalf. Moreover, the Biblical writers do not submit all their atonement models to one master or fit into one overarching model’s schema. And, this way of holding onto multiple models even allows us to start coming to grips with the life of Jesus itself as having saving value.
But here’s the other part.
Once we realize that there are multiple ways of talking about salvation (redemption as though in a marketplace, justification as though in a courtroom, reconciliation as though in personal relationship, victory as though in battle, sacrifice as though in the temple) we start to understand that every time we talk about what God has done for us in Jesus we are making a choice to relate that saving action with something in the world around us. Such connections, such inculturation, is required for us as human beings to understand the work of God.
And this is where we find ourselves bumping up against the anti-culturally relevant way of understanding Jesus that McCracken seems to have on offer. The point is that every way of talking about Jesus, of talking about salvation, of talking about its effects, is always
going to be deeply embedded in our particular human worlds.
Joel Green’s kaleidoscopic model of the atonement draws our attention to the fact that there is no one way to talk about Jesus. There is no one way to talk about the effects of salvation. There is no one way to try to help people make sense of why we must say “Jesus died for our sins” in order to know the Creator God.
But it also highlights a possibility that many of us who hold fast to the Bible as our rule of faith and practice will find nerve racking.
That possibility is that we witness in the New Testament the beginning of a process of articulating models of atonement that make sense in different ways to different people in different places and times–and that we, as the heirs of this witness, must continue the work of creating faithful models for understanding the atoning work of Christ.
This is not a free-for-all. The death of Jesus is necessary. The need for human repentance and restoration is necessary. The loving hand of God is necessary. But it is also necessary that we speak these things using metaphors that are apt for our own day and age.
The overall point here is to recognize that here, near the very heart of the Christian faith–our articulations of what it means to say “Jesus died for me”–we have clear indication that culture and circumstance impact how we say what is true. And if we recognize the variation called for in this, the explanation of the good news itself, due to cultural and other such factors, we should realize that all of our Christian confession must walk the same path.
We must faithfully tell the story of the God of Israel saving the world through a first-century Jew in a way that makes sense in the post-post-modern world of the twenty-first century.
I think we have to acknowledge the following things about the metaphors employed in the New Testament to explain the significance of Christ’s work:
1. Christ was not mute about the significance of his own death but was self-interpreting, providing his own metaphors for the significance of his life, death and resurrection.
2. Those metaphors used in the NT are drawn from the OT – part of what God was doing in his covenant relation with Israel was planting within them conceptual, linguistic and cultic tools for understanding they would later need to understand the significance of Christ’s coming so they wouldn’t be left to interpret a mute Christ with metaphors they made up for themselves.
3. The apostolic authors of the New Testament that provide us with metaphors for thinking about Christ’s significance do so with unique apostolic authority given them by Christ.
4. The plurality of biblical metaphors for Christ’s work and the fact that they make no sense when you try to harmonize them does commend a kaleidoscopic view, not allowing any one model to dominate the others.
5. In light of #3, though I agree that we must continually re-speak and re-signify the meaning of Christ’s work to the world, the biblical metaphors offered in the NT must always retain a primacy and all of our subsequent constructs must seek to translate the meaning of these models into our own cultural context, rather than making them up out of nothing.
6. In light of #2, the purpose of our newer constructed metaphors ought to be to point us back to Scripture and the metaphors it employs, seeking to understand their significance afresh, rather than to replace them.
Excellent.
And the people said “Amen.”