I just received a copy of British theologian Paul S. Fiddes’ Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement. As the title indicates, Fiddes is concerned with the relationship between the historical event of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and how the salvation those events make possible is appropriated in the present.

Here’s a snippet:

Salvation happens here and now. It is always in the present that God acts to heal and reconcile, entering into the disruption of human lives at great cost to himself, in order to share our predicament and release us from it. This may seem obvious, and if we examine the hymns of popular piety we can often detect just such an appeal to a present experience of atonement, expressed in phrases like ‘Jesus saves.‘ It is ironic, however, that when this devotion has been translated into sermons it has often emerged as more equivalent to ‘Jesus saved.’ For there is a great deal of difference between believing that God ‘saves’ through Christ, and believing that we simply claim the benefits of a salvation that has already happened, a deal that has already been concluded. Salvation in the present tense has frequently been depicted as if it were merely picking up a ticket to paradise which was issued long ago, and which has been waiting through long ages on the counter of a celestial travel agent. But a transactional view of atonement like this is highly impersonal. If salvation is the healing of a broken relationship between persons, then it must actually happen now; it must involve the human response as an intimate part of the act of atonement. (p. 14)

Any adequate understanding of the atonement, Fiddes thinks, has to keep both the “objective” and “subjective” aspects in view. God was doing something on the cross of Christ, something essential for our salvation, but its goal is the restoration of a relationship between God and us, which requires our participation. Fiddes thinks that Peter Abelard’s so-called subjective theory of the atonement can help us here:

Earlier theories of atonement (with the partial exception of Abelard’s) tended to begin at the objective end of the spectrum of understanding with some kind of transaction, and then added a subjective appendix. Modern ideas have tipped the balance the other way; they tend to begin at the subjective end with the present human response to God, and then to affirm an objective focus for response. This, I believe, is basically the right orientation for Christian thinking today. If we are to serve our age and our culture–though this includes being prepared to challenge it at some points as well as being shaped by it–we must learn from insights of the human sciences into the nature of relationships and personality. We are bound to understand reconciliation by analogy with the process of healing rather than by analogy wiht a legal or commercial transaction. Using traditional terms this might be called ‘subjective’, but it will work hard at understanding the ‘objective focus’ of God’s activity, both in past and present events. This means, I believe, understanding the cross of Jesus as an event which has a unique degree of power to evoke and create human response to the forgiving love of God. An event of power like that goes far beyond an ‘example’ or ‘window into God’s love,’ important descriptions though these are. (p. 29)

I think Fiddes is right that any satisfying account of atonement has to take the “subjective” dimension into consideration. Sometimes the atonement has been presented in ways that make salvation an event that happens “over our heads” in some heavenly transaction between the Father and the Son (or between God and the Devil!). But if reconciliation means the restoration and healing of a relationship, then it seems like it has to be a process in which we are intimately involved, not something entirely “external” to us.

As I work my way through Fiddes book I hope to post on some of his ideas in more detail.