Who’s got the problem here?

God does not need or demand Jesus’ death so as to be able to “change his mind” about us, to be moved from wrath to mercy. That is the mistaken assumption of at least some vicarious satisfaction theories. Rather, God sends Jesus because of his immutable resolve to have mercy, concretely to do the mercy that he is. Because God insists on having mercy even in and to a sinful world, he sends not another lawgiver but his only Son, the preacher of forgiveness. The Son, therefore, does “only what he sees the Father doing.” He does mercy. God may be said to “need” the death of Jesus only in the sense that solely through Jesus can he actually do who he is. The death and resurrection of Jesus, therefore, ends the wrath of God in the creation of faith. Christ is the end of the law to those of faith.

…the “original sin” of the human race is precisely that it does not believe in a merciful God but rather in its own ability to control its destiny under law. We live inexorably, therefore, under wrath — not because God is naturally vindictive but rather because we refuse his mercy in order to keep our control. — Gerhard Forde, “In Our Place,” from A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism, p. 111)

One of the things I like about this way of thinking about the work of Christ is that it highlights that we are the obstacle to reconciliation, not God. Often discussions of the Atonement make it sound like there is some third force – justice, honor, the law, or perhaps the devil or demons – that prevents God from being reconciled to us. But Forde’s approach allows us to maintain the New Testament view that it is God who initiates and carries out this process of reconciliation from start to finish and that we are the ones who need to be reconciled.

As Forde puts it elsewhere:

But why then must Jesus die? Bearing in mind that this “must” is always a posteriori, not a priori, not an abstract, logical “must” determined beforehand but one that flows out of what the act itself accomplishes, perhaps we can say something about how it might look “from God’s point of view.” If what we have been saying about the murder of Jesus by us is at all the case, then God’s “problem” comes more immediately into view. God’s problem is not that he can’t be merciful until he has been satisfied but rather that he won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually having mercy on whom he will have mercy. God, that is, won’t be satisfied until he succeeds in actually giving the concrete, unconditional forgiving he intends. As we can see from Jesus, God’s problem is how actually to have mercy on a world that will not have it. The question for God is whether he can really succeed in getting through to a people that likes the idea of forgiveness but doesn’t want an actual forgiver, a world that turns everything God purposes to do into a theory with which to protect itself from him. God’s problem is just how actually to have mercy, how to get through to us. (“Caught in the Act: Reflections on the Work of Christ” in A More Radical Gospel, p. 94) [Read the whole essay here]

When asked why God couldn’t simply up and forgive sins rather than going through an elabortate scheme, Forde’s reply is that he did. Forgiving sins just is what God was doing in Jesus, because it was, it seems, the only way to do it. Or, as he put it in Theology Is for Proclamation, Jesus is the man in whom God “does God” to us.

On Forde’s view we are well-advised to stick as closely as possible to the brute facts of Jesus’ preaching, suffering, and dying. Too often Atonement theories skip over this messy reality to uncover the metaphysical machinery supposedly lying behind it (or “above” it in some heavenly transaction). For Forde Jesus quite literally bears our sins on his body in that he comes preaching forgiveness and we respond with mockery, beating, scourging, and death. In not retaliating Jesus shows that he is the “perfect victim,” as Rowan Williams describes it in his book on the Resurrection. He’s the only one not caught in the cycle of returning evil for evil. Jesus enacts God’s love and forgiveness, and we can’t even put a stop to it by killing him, as the Resurrection shows.

I like this account of Christ’s work, but I do wonder if it gives short shrift to some of the concerns that motivated the traditional Atonement theories. Thoughts?