Tag Archive - atonement

Does Mercy Seat Work for You?

January 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

How do we understand what Jesus is on the cross?

Romans 3:25 speaks of Jesus as a hilasterion. This is translated in some versions as “sacrifice of atonement,” in others as “a propitiation,” and now the CEB is translating it, “the place of sacrifice where mercy is found.”

The word is used in the LXX (Greek translation of the Old Testament) to refer both to the sacrifice of atonement and to the “mercy seat” inside the holy of holies. So what I’d like to hear from you is whether this “mercy seat” idea works for you as a reading of Rom 3:25. Does it make sense in the verse? Can you see how it’d work? Thoughts?

Here’s the passage:

All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, but all are treated as righteous freely by his grace because of a ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus. Through his faithfulness, God displayed Jesus as the place of sacrifice where mercy is found by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness in passing over sins that happened before, during the time of God’s patient tolerance. (Rom 3:23-26, CEB)

Freedom from Sin

January 17, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

When the Bible talks about the work of Jesus, it uses an abundance of metaphors.

We sometimes get ourselves stuck. We have an idea of what it means to confess that Jesus “died for our sins,” and we bring this idea with us wherever we go. Often in the world of Western Christianity the idea that Jesus died for our sins brings to mind the idea of legal infraction, a penalty that has to be paid for breaking the law.

But the idea of legal infraction is often not present. Yes, there is sin; yes, Jesus dies for this sin; and yes, there is forgiveness. But it can be imagined in other ways as well.

In Colossians 1, we read this description of salvation:

He made it so you could take part in the inheritance, in light granted to God’s holy people. 13 He rescued us from the control of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. 14 He set us free through the Son and forgave our sins. (CEB)

The metaphors in vv. 13-14 have to do, not with guilt but rather with slavery.

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Freedom here is not freedom from guilt or punishment. It is freedom from a controlling power, from “darkness.” The solution to a problem of slavery is liberation. The kingdom transfer laid out here–form darkness to the Son–is a transfer from a domain of slavery to a domain of freedom.

Entailed in this transfer is “forgiveness of sins.” Where does that play into the slavery metaphor?

Perhaps the sort of enslavement that we should envision is the slavery of debt. This metaphor is taken up in 2:14:

He destroyed the record of the debt we owed, with its requirements that worked against us. He canceled it by nailing it to the cross. (CEB)

The work of Christ in bringing forgiveness is cancelling debt. That debt was, or lent, its enslaving power to those who controlled us and made us hostile to God. And thus Paul can continue, after claiming that the debt certificate was nailed to the cross:

When he disarmed the rulers and authorities, he exposed them to public disgrace by leading them in a triumphal parade. (Col 2:15, CEB)

With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the authorities and powers that were created through and for the sake of the Son are disarmed and subjected to him again. In forgiving our debts, Jesus opens the door for the Father to transfer us from the kingdom that is hostile into the reconciled, cosmic space that Jesus created afresh through his death and resurrection.

The work of the cross is not one in which “freedom” becomes a next calling after God has “forgiven” us in a court of law. The act of salvation itself is a transfer from one lord to another Lord, from one kingdom to another Kingdom.

Debt is forgiven.

And we are free.

At Work in Your Midst

December 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

Ever pray for God to be at work in a situation, in a place, in a relationship, in a church?

I’m pretty sure I have. And it never much occurred to me that I might be doing something exceedingly dangerous. It was reflecting on “atonement” in the Luke-Acts that made me think twice.

I remember being taken aback my first semester of my PhD program when people were off-handedly talking about Luke not having an atonement theology. But as I started to dig in I saw the point: Luke seems to have purposely eliminated Mark’s ransom saying. It may be replaced by the saying about coming to serve at table. And, if Bart Ehrman is right, Luke may have eliminated the sacrificial overtones of the last supper.

The cross serves a different kind of purpose in Luke: it makes the Jewish people, in particular, realize that they need God’s forgiveness (rather than making such forgiveness possible).

But then, that brings us up to the problem: the reason they should see they need forgiveness is that God was at work in their world–and they didn’t see it.

Worse, they didn’t merely miss seeing it, they actively worked against it. They opposed the one through whom God was at work, actively and powerfully.

And here is where I circle back to my question: are we really sure we want God to be at work in our midst? What if he is, and we miss it? What if he is, and we actively oppose it?

If the ministry of Jesus shows us anything, it is that the people who should have the clearest vision–both because of their knowledge of scripture and the ways of God and because of their proximity to God’s work–are the ones who oppose the work of God most vehemently.

Yes, of course, I want God at work.

But we should be as diligent in praying for eyes to see and celebrate that God at work as invoking the action in the first place.

Can’t God Just Forgive?

November 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 16 Comments

When people wrestle with atonement theology (i.e., how does the cross, in particular, bring about forgiveness of sins), the objection to atonement theology as a whole is sometimes voiced: why can’t God just forgive? Does God really need some sort of payment?

On the one hand, yes, God can do whatever God wants. This is possible.

On the other hand, we develop our understanding of how the cross works ex post facto. We’re not setting up parameters that have to be met, but trying to understand the biblical witness about how the death of Jesus did, in fact, function. We have books like Hebrews that say things like, “You could almost say that without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” We have the language of Jesus’ death as atoning sacrifice.

So atonement theology is our attempt to make sense of what did happen, not to set requirements on God.

But there’s another piece of the biblical puzzle as well. That piece is Luke-Acts.

Luke seems to go out of his way to mute the idea that Jesus’ death is somehow a ransom or payment for sins. You know that, “Son of Man didn’t come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” saying? It’s replaced by the son of man being among his people as one who serves the table.

Look at the sermons in Acts. Here, of all places, we should get a clear exposition of the purpose of the cross. And we do! But its focused purpose is to fulfill the scripture about Israel rejecting its own Messiah, so that Israel will see that they, as much as the Gentiles, stand in need of the forgiveness of God.

God forgives.

God isn’t paid.

Sin isn’t covered.

Blood doesn’t cleanse.

Canonically, this is not enough. There is more to be said, other developments of the significance of Jesus’ death that need to be incorporated into a fully developed understanding of the atonement.

But here’s the question: is this atonement-free forgiveness a viable starting point for us to take with people who find the idea of God needing payment to be barbaric, weird, etc.? Can we set aside the other angles on Jesus’ death and cultivate a Lukan theology of the God who forgives, and who is at work in the world through Christ and the Spirit, as the gospel with which we begin?

Discuss.

Judgment & the Story of Israel

May 22, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Atonement is tricky. On Thursday I was wrestling with the giving of Jesus by the Father in comparison to the self-giving God of more developed Trinitarian thought. Part of the challenge is that the language and larger theological framework of God giving God’s beloved for the sake of the world is larger than just Jesus’ self-giving.

Jesus’ becomes the pattern for believers’. And, tying together earlier posts about Romans 11 and atonement, it seem to be the language Paul uses to describe how God is currently postured for Israel: “If their rejection be the reconciliation of the world…”

Karl Barth places the whole idea of judgment on God’s people within a much larger biblical story.

As the bearer of the revelation imparted to it, Israel only too clearly means catastrophe for the surrounding world. But even more clearly Israel itself as the recipient of revelation has to suffer in this world. It encounters in its history incomparably much more evil than good. (Dogmatics 1.2, 86)

Prophets can’t advocate the cause of the nation AND YHWH, but must always advocate for YHWH, and so are rejected. The constant rebellion and rejection of God means that its only hope, continually, is in deliverance and salvation, unmerited, by its God: “Between covenant and its fulfillment there is suffering and death for those in whom it ought to be fulfilled.”

And as if Barth insists on saying in its most dangerous form what is most dangerous to say, he continues about the faithful ones in Israel:

They are themselves the first to have to suffer, and they are themselves the ones who have to suffer most, for the truth of their proclamation, for the fact that the God who has ever loved Israel is such a hidden God. And the same order is repeated again in the figure of the single righteous man, who, without special office, simply lives concretely the existence of Israel before his God… Thus the end of the world, or the judgment of the world, is seen above all in Israel. To it especially God is a hidden God. It especially, the beloved, chosen, sanctified nation, the house of God, must be the place where the old aeon begins to pass in face of the coming of God and His new work. (88-89)

From the NT we might remember the saying that it’s time for judgment to begin with the house of God, or we may think of Jesus’ prophetic ministry about the coming destruction of Jerusalem–and then, also, we must think of the cross.

This is, of course, all quite dangerous. It can lead to the problem of thinking that Israel bears all of this judgment, or is the place of all this judgment, because it is especially bad and thus especially worthy of judgment.

But there are two very good ways of heading this off.

The first is to recognize that in this pattern of giving the beloved in judgment, Jesus does stand at the middle. Jesus becomes the curse of the Law, death, thus ending the reign of the Law as the curse- and death-bringer. Jesus himself stands in this role of judged with death.

And the pattern does continue out into the church. We are summoned to take up our cross and follow. We are called to be the judgment-bearers. We are called *gulp* to fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.

This talk of being the place where judgment is made known to foreshadow the final judgment is not only about Israel, it is about the cross, and it is about the church. Perhaps getting hold of this is a first key in getting hold of a more biblical understanding of the death of Jesus and our own participation in it.

Here, in this death, in this judgment, the holy God is revealed. Because the holy God must be revealed in a world of sin and death.

Atonement: I’ve Got a Problem–But So Do You

May 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 26 Comments

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I had a chance to listen to the Roger Olson interview on Homebrewed Christianity’s podcast. He articulated something that I’ve heard from quite a number of theologians. It’s a beautiful answer to the problem of God giving God’s Son to die for us, an answer to accusations that the cross is tantamount to divine child abuse.

It goes something like this: the idea that God is abusing his Son misses the point that Jesus is God. This is not God sacrificing some human, but God giving Godself for humanity.

This is a challenge to me on two fronts.

First, as a biblical scholar, this is not the language that the NT uses to describe the relationship between Jesus and God as it comes to describe the cross.

Even the high Christology of John puts it like this: “God so loved the world, that He gave his one and only son.” Indeed, John’s Jesus says that the Father loves him because he does the Father’s will–going to the cross to die for his friends.

Mark is more stark, with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying for deliverance from the cross.

In the “high Christology” passage of Philippians 2 says that Jesus’ exaltation comes because he was obedient to the point of death on the cross. This is the same act of which Paul speaks in Rom 5–the one act of obedience through which the many are made righteous.

Jesus is pleasing to the Father, to God, precisely because as Son he obeys the command of the Other, the Father, to die.

When, for example, feminist critics of atonement complain about the atonement as divine child abuse, they are basing their hermeneutical dissatisfaction on a more accurate exegesis of the New Testament than the theologians who defend the cross by saying that God gave Godself.

It is, in fact, God the Father “who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all.” Those are strong and troubling words, and I’m not sure that we can hear them on the basis of the Trinitarian objection. This is not self-giving love in that Trinitarian sense, but the sacrificial love that gives the most dearly loved other for the sake of salvation.

The second reason I am hesitant to jump on board with the Trinitarian answer to the problem of atonement is this: the suffering of Jesus the son is the story of the other sons and daughters of God as well.

It’s all well and good to say that God gave Godself, not another, to suffer on behalf of the world.

But what, then, are we to do with Romans 8? There, the way that we know we are children heading toward eternal inheritance is that we are suffering with the Suffering Child.

The Trinitarian formulation makes this worse, to my mind. God chooses to suffer of God’s own accord. As incarnate God, Jesus executes this divine decision. And then, God calls those who are not God to suffer if they want to be like the God who chose suffering freely. The Messiah suffers of his own decision, but those who would follow him are bound to follow the order that Jesus had from within (not from without): to take up their crosses.

Or, again, if it’s out of character for God to give up another, to not spare this human Messiah, what then are we to make of the God “who did not spare the natural branches” for the sake of the gentiles?

To remove the scandal of the Messiah’s death by pushing the Messiah back into the divine person only takes the problem of the suffering people of God and edges it back one notch. Left behind is still the entire NT ethic that insists that the identity of us–those who are not members of the Eternal Ontological Trinity–is also cross shaped.

If the only answer to the divine child abuse accusation is to appeal to the Trinity, doesn’t that make God a divine child abuser for having us, his earthly children, suffer with Christ if, indeed, we are to be glorified with him?

So yes, my late high Christology causes me a problem. I can’t simply say that when the NT says “the Father gave the son” that this really means “God gave Godself.” But the Trinitarian answer has its problem as well.

My God, My God…

April 22, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

While hanging on the cross, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

This cry of dereliction is an allusion to Psalm 22, a lament of Israel’s king who has been handed over to his enemies.

Riffing off of Walter Brueggemann’s theology of lament: lament is when we join with the world as it is but should not be, taking its side and crying out to God to fix what has gone wrong.

To cry out to God in lamentation is to confess that God is sovereign and good–and that this sovereignty and goodness is not being so displayed as to bring God the glory God is due.

In this case, the “wrong” is that Israel’s God has abandoned Israel’s king to the king’s enemies.

Too often, we spiritualize this cry, as though at some moment God turns God’s face away from Jesus, Jesus feels the absence, and thus cries out here. Perhaps we reckon that Jesus here has become sin and God cannot look upon it.

But the abandonment is much more tangible, and no less horrific for it: God has abandoned Jesus by delivering Jesus into the hands of Jesus’ (and God’s) enemies and allowing them to kill Jesus, the King of the Jews.

The very fact that Jesus is hanging on a cross means that God has delivered up God’s own son–and it is this abandonment, God apparently playing a parallel role to Judas the one who “hands over” Jesus to his enemies, that evokes Jesus’ cry of abandonment.

The world is not as it should be.

Jesus cries out in lament.

What has gone wrong?

Jesus, the king, is still saying, “My God,” to the point of death; while God, it would seem, is not standing by, delivering Jesus from his would-be killers, and saying in this deliverance, “My king! My son!”

Yes, God had said this. Twice the voice has rung out from heaven. But now, heaven is silent.

The king is abandoned.

He is hanging on a cross to die.

O God, O God–why have you abandoned your anointed?

The Death of Jesus–some wonderings

April 16, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In Rom 3, Paul says that God publicly displayed Jesus as a hilasterion.

Some of our Bibles translate this “sacrifice of atonement,” some “a propitiation.”

The other option is that this word is being used as it was employed in the Greek Old Testament (LXX): a place where sacrifice is made. The point would be here that God’s patience and passing over of earlier sins comes to an end when he publicly displays Jesus as the place where humanity is reconciled with God, the mercy seat.

This reading has the advantage of fitting into the argument Paul has been making for 2.5 chapters and will make for another full chapter afterward: God is not only the God of Jews. God did not make final atonement in a hidden, secret inner room of the Temple. He made it in public, on the cross. Or, as Paul says in Gal 3: “Before your eyes Jesus was publicly placarded as crucified.”

Hmmm….

The other wondering I had was tied into questions of law, sin, and atonement. As it is laid out in some of its renditions, the penal substitution idea begins with the twin premises that God is holy and we are unholy–the latter being more clearly articulated as, “we are law-breakers.”

But Paul doesn’t seem to think that the appellation “law breaker” applies to all of us.

Just Jewish people.

In Rom 5, the one place where the notion of sin being “imputed” to someone is spoken of, what we hear is that sin is not imputed where there is no law. The points are that (a) Adam did break a rule from God; (b) death still reigned even over people who had not broken any kind of law; and (c) there is still a sense of all people sinning–despite not having a law to break.

So it seems to me that Penal Substitution, and a number of Christian theologies in general, have some work to do in reframing how it is that all people are guilty. It’s not by breaking some law–that’s what happens to Adam, what happens in Israel, but not to everyone.

It also seems to me, that as much as I want to avoid it, I keep coming around again to N. T. Wright’s claim that the purpose of the law is to exacerbate sin and death within Israel per se, so that God could disarm them where they were strongest. Sin is not reckoned where there is no law, and that is why God gives a law–so that through Israel’s faithlessness God’s faithfulness might abound (3:1ff.), so that within a world that manifests God’s wrath God’s righteousness might be made known (1:16-19).

Cosmic Restoration

March 30, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 22 Comments

I’m getting ready for “The Cross in the New Testament,” a course I’ve been teaching once or twice a year since coming to Fuller. One question we wrestle with has to do with atonement models.

How do we understand how the death of Jesus works as a saving event?

The way we answer that question has rather significant implications. It lies at the root of the universal versus limited atonement debate (did Jesus die for everyone or just for those who will eventually put their faith in him)? It impacts how we share the gospel–did Jesus take the punishment you deserved when he died on the cross? And, of course, the extent of salvation–is there a hell, and if so, does it have a population?

In addition to all this, the way we talk about how Jesus’ death works will either foster or curtail our ability to connect it back to Jesus’ ministry and our own lives. What does the ministry of Jesus have to do with his death? (What’s the connection between kingdom and cross?) And, what does this death and life have to do with the lives we are called to live? Is there a coherent narrative that runs from life through death and resurrection and even into the life of the Christian community?

The most common take on Jesus’ death in contemporary evangelicalism is probably penal substitution: Jesus took our penalty for us and thus frees us from condemnation.

Once we start probing this, however, there are two significant problems. One is exegetical and the other is theological/pastoral.

The exegetical problem is that a strong “penal substitution” reading both depends upon and creates interpretations of biblical passages that do not actually work.

Take, for example, the ransom saying in Mark 10: The son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

When we approach this with a strong penal substitution framework, we read it as an indication that Jesus dies in our stead, to remove the penalty incurred by our guilt.

But this is not what the word “ransom” typically means.

While a penalty refers to what is paid to someone who is guilty, the word “ransom” trades on a different metaphor, a metaphor of captivity. The difference between penal substitution and ransom is that the former envisions the person as a guilty, condemned prisoner needing to pay the court; the latter envisions a person as taken hostage. Are hostages guilty criminals needing to pay a penalty to secure their freedom? No, the guilty party is the one who has ensnared them and is requiring a ransom for the hostage’s freedom.

Even the allusion to Isa 53 that may be generated by Mark 10 does not necessarily mean that Mark is envisioning Jesus’ death in terms of penal substitution. There are passages that point toward something like penal substitution. This is just an example that the Bible doesn’t always say what we think it does, and that our assumption can deeply color our reading.

So where do I go with my understanding of atonement?

I am working with a category I’ve been referring to as “cosmic restoration.”

The goal I’m trying to achieve with this is to create a category that is both specific enough to communicate something significant and yet broad enough to encompass the full breadth of the saving work of Christ in both cross and resurrection.

There are powers to be defeated. There is guilt to be expiated. There is a humanity that needs to be reconciled to God. There is a creation groaning in the pains of childbirth. And there are people who are living within the systemic failure of the world in individual and corporate alienation from one another, from God, and from the created order.

Any viable model of atonement will have to encompass all of this. And, once it does, we might find some of our old questions reframed. More on that soon.

The gospel of the crucified Messiah is not merely “forgiven sinner,” but “new creation.”

The Task of Our Generation

March 24, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

Sitting in my living room, at the ripe old age of 35, typing on a laptop while the winds howl and the rain dances upon the metal cap of our fireplace–somehow all of this compels me to the full assurance that I know what the theological task is for this generation. (Ok, the fact that I’m and INTJ might have something to do with my confidence, but bear with me.)

In the post-conservative Christian circles in which I run, people have often experienced a shift. From an entry into Christianity that is all about Jesus dying for my sins, people later discover a Kingdom of God that demands active engagement with the world.

Within the world of Pauline studies a parallel distinction is sometimes highlighted. On the one hand, there is Jesus dying “for me,” with its concomitant substitutionary language of justification and the like. On the other hand, there is my “dying with Christ,” with its concomitant participatory language of co-crucifixion, co-glorification and the like.

And over the past century in Western Christianity, I would say that different parts of the church have held on to different halves of this story. The conservative evangelical types have grabbed hold of the atonement as the gospel, while the liberal mainline types have grabbed onto the world-changing life of Jesus as the gospel.

I see the ask of our generation to overcome this false dichotomy by (1) insisting that it’s not a dichotomy after all; and (2) articulating atonement in such a way that action and transformation are inherent to the saving story of Jesus.

There are many ways to put the question we must answer.

At the Institute for Biblical Research this year, Tom Wright put the question, “What does the Kingdom of God have to do with the cross?”

Or, as I put it in my Mark class, “What does Mark 1-8 [the wonder-working, healing, cleansing, parables, feeding, stilling] have to do with Mark 8-16 [the road to the cross, the disruption of the Temple, the prediction of coming suffering, the Supper, Garden, arrest, trial, and death]?”

It seems to me that we are going to have to step back and reconsider how we tell the story. We are going to have to find fresh ways to articulate what the death of Jesus is all about, so that it wraps up a life of transforming power.

We are going to have to find fresh ways to tell the story of Jesus’ inauguration of the Kingdom of God, so that we are not left, like Peter at the transition point in Jesus’ ministry, wondering why on earth death of the Messiah is the logical culmination.

In fact, I might suggest that until we can so tell the story of Jesus’ life that the death is not only the inevitable (from an earthly point of view) but necessary (from the divine accomplishment point of view) outcome, that we have not yet comprehended the Kingdom of God.

And, until we can so tell the story of Jesus’ death such that his life is not only an anticipation (in a preparatory sort of way–you know, like keeping Jesus free from sin and all that) but inseparable from his atoning death, that we have not yet comprehended what it is to say that Jesus died for our sins.

I don’t think we’ve done it yet.

But I believe we can.

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