(See here for previous post.)

In chapter 3 of his Past Event and Present Salvation, Paul Fiddes tackles the question of the historical Jesus and how our knowledge of his earthly ministry should shape our understanding of atonement. He rejects the view, associated with Bultmann and others, that we can’t know much of anything about the Jesus of history, a view that drives a wedge between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” Fiddes also argues that how we see the atonement should be of a piece with the character of Jesus and his ministry as we have it in the Gospels. At some points in Christian history Christ’s work on the cross was treated in near isolation from his earthly ministry and teachings, and Fiddes wants to correct this imbalance.

Moreover, the great acts of God can’t be detached from the historical (and political) context in which they took place. Despite the fact that God’s acts transcend the categories of history and are not strictly susceptible to the historian’s investigations, it doesn’t follow that history is irrelevant to faith:

If God has really become flesh in our world, in the very marketplace where Pilate struts with his petty power, then an investigation of the scene on which God has acted is bound to be relevant to faith. A historian can only tell us about the worldly setting for God’s mighty acts, but this must throw light upon the meaning of the event as faith perceives it. (p. 37)

Understanding the ministry of Jesus, and the conflicts that it engendered with the prevailing religious and political authorities, then, will help us understand the meaning of God’s act of reconciliation on the cross. Fiddes finds the center of Jesus’ mission in his conflict with the established interpretation of the Law and the way it divided people into respectable and not respectable, clean or unclean. Not only did Jesus welcome “the poor” or the common people into his fellowship, but also sinners – tax collectors, prostitutes, and the like.

Jesus, Fiddes says, exhibited a profound freedom with respect to the Law, both in offering the Father’s free forgiveness and acceptance to sinners and in his “reduction” of the Law to its essential purpose – that of loving God and neighbor. He cut through the thicket of legal requirements by “incarnat[ing] the intention of moral rules in flesh and blood, as a skillful speaker of a language fills out the aims of the rules of grammar in his speech–and often sits loose to the letter of the rules the more beautiful and effective his speech becomes” (p. 47).

Jesus cannot be pinned down in either the simple category of a law-supporter or a law-breaker. He escapes our labels, and ‘fits no formula’. The whole thrust of his ministry was to cut through the maze of moral rules, even of the highest quality, in order to offer forgiveness and the acceptance of the Father. Even if the phrase ‘but I say to you’ is not from Jesus himself, he clearly laid claim to an astonishing authority, assuming that rules could be waived for those who accepted him as the agent of the kingdom. There is no need to set up the scribes and Pharisees as either hypocrites or unbelievers in the divine mercy in order to explain the conflict between them and Jesus; the question was who was right about the way that God was acting. In the parable of the prodigal son there is no suggestion that the elder brother was a moral hypocrite, or that he thought it impossible for his rake of a brother to be forgiven under any circumstances; he just failed in sympathy with the outrageous generosity of the father. (p. 47)

How we understand the atonement, then, should be consistent with how we understand the thrust of Jesus’ ministry. To take one example, it seems, at least on the face of things, difficult to see why the Father required Jesus’ death before he could forgive sins when Jesus seemed to freely forgive sins during the course of his earthly ministry. The atonement, Fiddes argues, should be of a piece with the character of Jesus’ ministry:

Since the act of atonement on the cross sums up and completes the whole course of Jesus’ life, the controlling aspect of any doctrine of atonement must be the forgiveness and acceptance of God. As Jesus showed a sovereign freedom over the way of the law, so a doctrine of atonement must be free from any notion of a ‘transaction’ which somehow satisfies the demands of the divine law code. It hardly makes sense that the Jesus who declined to give law any final importance and who was certified as being in the right about this when God raised him from among the dead should have died as a means of satisfying law. (pp. 47-8)

Jesus’ proclamation of the rule of God was profoundly threatening to the established powers, both religious and political. In addition to calling into question the established rules about how people are to be made right with God, Jesus’ life and death also call into question the way political power is exercised in our fallen world:

Jesus was crucified because he called the ultimate claims of human power ‘there and then’ into question, insisting upon the final demands of the rule of God. If we believe that through this death God was bringing salvation, this must have relevance for the situation of those oppressed by human powers ‘here and now.’ (p. 51)

Fiddes admits that no historical account of Jesus’ ministry can carry certainty. But part of the risk of faith is acting on incomplete knowledge. History can’t prove faith, but it can help shape and give content to faith rooted in a contemporary encounter with the risen Christ. The risen Christ, if he is not to become an abstraction, must be seen as continuous with the human pre-resurrection Jesus of Nazareth, and the character of Jesus should act as a control on our doctrinal formulations.

[This post has been edited slightly]