Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren is best known for his book Agape and Eros, which argued for agape as the essence of divine love in Christianity. But his little book The Essence of Christianity: Two Essays is worth reading too. For my purposes I want to focus on the second essay, “The Atonement as a Work of God.”

Nygren begins by distinguishing between pre- or non-Christian and Christian ideas of atonement. The fundamental religious problem, he says, is fellowship with God. We recognize that we aren’t worthy to stand in the presence of God, that there is a barrier to fellowship caused by our unworthiness. This gives rise to various attempts at making atonement. At the most “primitive” level we have the literal offering of sacrifices. Then we move to an ethical or moral approach where people attempt to have fellowship with God on the basis of their good works. Finally, sensing the failure of these other methods, there is an attempt to base fellowship on an offering of humility and contrition.

What all of these attempts have in common, he says, is that atonement and fellowship with God are understood to have their basis in something we do:

All these different kinds of sacrifice have something about them which disqualifies them as means of reconciliation. Every attempt on man’s part to put himself right with God and make himself acceptable to God, conceals ultimately a piece of human presumption. There is an inner contradiction in all human attempts to make atonement and effect reconciliation. For by the very fact that he seeks reconciliation, man acknowledges God’s right to make demands on him, acknowledges Him to be God. Yet at the same time he denies the divinity of God, when he imagines that by means of something of his own–his gifts, his righteousness, or his humility–he can put himself right with God. (p. 90)

By contrast, the Christian idea of atonement is that reconciliation is rooted in God’s love and is, from beginning to end, God’s work. Agape, in Nygren’s account, consists of four elements: it is spontaneous, it is not motivated by any value intrinsic to its object, it is creative, and it establishes fellowship with God. From this Nygren can say that, far from having its basis in our holiness, our fellowship with God has its basis in sin! To our natural way of thinking it seems fitting that we should become holy or pure before entering into fellowship with God. But the Christian scandal is that God wills to have fellowship with us as sinners.

Nygren draws a distinction (perhaps too starkly) between Catholic and Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) understandings of how fellowship with God is acheived. In his telling, Catholicism founds our fellowship with God on the righteousness in us. We aren’t fit for communion with God until we are actually made holy. This isn’t Pelagianism since our holiness is wrought by grace, but it differs from the Evangelical approach because it makes our holiness the basis of fellowship. The Evangelical perspective, on the other hand, is that God “stoops down to sinful man and seeks fellowship with him” (p. 108). We don’t rise up to God, even if by grace, God comes down to us. Fellowship is established by God and is fellowship with sinners, preceding any holiness of our own.

The signature feature of agape is that it loves without respect to any qualities of the beloved. The good news is that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. In fact, Nygren says, agape and atonement are essentially the same thing. Atonement just is God’s love coming among us to establish fellowship with us sinners. “God’s love is in its essential nature Agape-love; it is downward-moving love, a love which seeks the lost and wills to have fellowship with sinners, a love which is spontaneous and creative of fellowship” (p. 113).

But this raises the question, Why then talk of Atonement at all? If God’s love is unconditional love that forgives by its very nature, why the sacrifice of Jesus? Why the Cross? Why, as is often asked, can’t God simply up and forgive our sins without requiring the death of his Son?

Nygren responds that this question misunderstands both the nature of God’s love and the nature of sin. First, God’s love is not an indulgent, sentimental love; it is by its very nature opposed to sin. But to see why, we have to get clear on what sin is. Sin isn’t simply a series of discrete misdeeds which God could just overlook. Sin, as Luther and others saw, is a fundamental disposition or orientation of the self. The self that is “curved in on itself.” A self in such a condition simply can’t love God; it doesn’t want to, except perhaps when it sees God as a means to some end (such as happiness, wealth, self-improvement, etc.). This is what Luther meant by the “bondage of the will” – not that we can’t will, but that what we will is, inescapably, to be our own. If God is love and sin is selfishness, there can be nothing but contradiction between them.

Into this world that is closed against Him, indifferent to Him, God wills to bring His love. Here above all it becomes clear that it is precisely God’s love that makes it impossible for forgiveness to be the superficial, easy-going and self-evident thing commonly called by that name, and that forgiveness can only exist in inseparable connection with a real atonement. The sin that has to be forgiven is not simply a matter of a few moral misdemeanours standing in the way of God’s loving purposes; therefore forgiveness cannot simply mean that God magnanimously overlooks these faults and pursues His purpose of love without regard to them. The sin consists precisely in the fact that man selfishly shuts himself up against God’s love, showing no interest in it, and in so far as he seeks God at all, he seeks Him for selfish ends, so that–as Luther puts it–‘even in God he seeks only his own.’ (pp. 121-2)

If it were possible for us to simply give up our selfishness and love God, we would have atonement and fellowship based on our acheivement. But selfishness isn’t prepared to do that – how could it? Selfishness can’t sacrifice itself! So love sacrifices itself instead:

God, the divine love, takes the sacrifice upon Himself instead. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.’ Here in the most literal sense it is possible to speak of vicarious sacrifice and vicarious suffering. When selfish human life refuses to conform to the divine love, God’s love does not refuse to submit to the conditions of selfish human life. The question may be raised whether such a procedure is worthy of the divine love, and from an ordinary human point of view the answer must be that it is not. But such is divine love, such is God’s Agape, that it does not allow even human selfishness to set a limit to its giving and self-giving. It comes down into the world of sin and does not hesitate to give itself away to selfishness. It becomes a sacrifice in a new and deeper sense than that in which the lover always sacrifices himself for his beloved. It suffers itself to become lost love, a love spurned and trampled underfoot by selfishness. That is the way of divine atonement. (pp. 124-5)

God’s sacrifice is that he expends his love on this selfish world, even though it may end up as “lost love.” “But God’s love does not come to an end, God does not cease loving, because his love is spurned and trampled on by human selfishness, so that it becomes quite literally outcast and lost” (p. 126). Jesus’ entire life is this sacrifice, this spilling of God’s love upon often ungrateful sinners, and it culminates at the cross:

But where does divine love meet us as lost love more truly than in the Cross of Christ? Yet the love which does not cease to be love even when it is lost, is for that very reason the victory over all that stands against it. Here, and only here, is there any room for talk of the omnipotence of love. The way between God and a world fast bound in selfishness has been opened. Therefore the Christian faith sees in the atoning work of Christ the unshakable foundation of our fellowship with God. (p. 126, emphasis added)

I think the strength of Nygren’s position is that it roots the atonement squarely in God’s love. Some crude versions of atonement theory have seemed to imply that God was changed from wrathful to loving by what happened on the cross. Nygren makes it clear that it is entriely a work of God’s love. He repeatedly quotes Paul that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” It’s God who initiates reconciliation.

Questions for Nygren’s account: Does it overlook the penal element in atonemnt? (Is there a penal element in atonement?) Also, he doesn’t talk about the Resurrection; can an account of atonement stand independently from the Resurrection? Does the Resurrection simply ratify or validate what happened on the cross? And what about the cosmic aspect of reconciliation? Nygren seems to focus almost exclusively on human fellowship with God, but doesn’t the work of Christ have implications for all of creation?