A Thinking Reed

Category: Atonement

  • Notes on an animal theodicy and soteriology

    Early in my blogging career (on Verbum Ipsum, my Blogspot predecessor to ATR) I, perhaps with delusions of grandeur, wrote a five-part series called “The Atonement and the Problem of Evil” (the series is archived here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V). My reason for writing it was a hunch that the problem of evil is best addressed not just by trying to answer the question “Why is there so much evil in the world?” but also by talking about what God is doing about the evil in the world. Theodicy should not be separated from soteriology, in other words.

    I think it holds up fairly well, but in retrospect I see that I neglected an important topic, the problem of animal suffering. Many thinkers including C.S. Lewis and one of my old teachers, philosopher (and atheist) William Rowe see the problem of animal suffering as one of the most difficult problems for any theodicy. This is because none of the standard responses to human suffering seem available for dealing with non-human suffering. Animals can’t be morally improved by suffering, nor can they be said to deserve their suffering as punishment for sin. It can’t even be chalked up to a necessary consequence of free will, since we don’t think animals have free will, at least not in sense used by traditional “free will” theodicies. In short, much animal suffering seems to be severe, gratuitous, and without redeeming features of any sort. The question, then is whether we have reason to believe that God is a) concerned about animal suffering and b) is going to do something about it.

    I think we do have reasons to believe that God is concerned about animal suffering and will do something about it based on the kind of God that we believe he has revealed himself as. All Christians agree that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reveal the character of God. This character is one of self-giving love that enters into solidarity with us by sharing our human condition. And this love is exemplified on the Cross as nowhere else: Jesus “loved his own to the end” (Jn. 13.1). But does this have any relevance for animal suffering? In his Animal Theology Andrew Linzey suggests that the Cross shows us not only God’s solidarity with human suffering, but God’s solidarity with the suffering of all sentient creatures. “If it is true that God is the Creator and sustainer of the whole world of life, then it is inconceivable that God is not also a co-sufferer in the world of non-human creatures as well” (p. 50).

    If God has entered into solidarity and made a new covenant not only with all human beings, but with “all flesh,” then it might not be too much of a stretch to think that God will raise all flesh, all sentient creatures, to newness of life. If Jesus is the firstfruits of a new creation, why shouldn’t we follow the Bible in anticipating that this will include more than human beings? This seems a more promising approach to theodicy than one that tries to write off animal suffering as necessary to the greater good of the whole. If “not even a sparrow falls” without our Heavenly Father’s knowledge, can we consign billions of sentient creatures to exclusion from his Kingdom?

    Obviously any kind of post-mortem existence for animals raises some difficult questions since we don’t really know what kind of “selves” animals have, especially the lower ones. Then again, there are some difficult questions about post-mortem human existence and I don’t know that we can draw a bright line between human beings and other animls such that only the former are capable of surviving death. Whatever else we know it seems virtually certain that animals have some degree of “subjectivity” which could, in principle, be resurrected or re-embodied in some way.

    If Christians are right that God created the world and called it good and that he entered into that creation in a unique and miraculous way, then I think we can reasonably suppose that God has purposes for his creation that extend beyond his purposes for human beings. Clearly we occupy a pivotal position in those purposes if Christian teaching is to be believed, but we don’t exhaust them. Did God create the natural world and billions of living creatures merely to discard them? Just as we believe that our bodies will, in some way that we can’t really imagine, be raised, I think we can hopefully affirm that our animal kin will be raised to share, in a way appropriate to their natures, in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

  • Lewis on the “true myth” of Redemption

    No doubt readers are getting a bit tired of this, but the Lewis letters are so bloggable. Maybe because, at least as they appear in the book, they’re almost like blog-entries themselves.

    In the fall of 1931 Lewis is on the verge of embracing Christianity. In September he’d had an important conversation with Hugo Dyson and Tolkien about the importance of myth and how Christianity is the “true myth.”

    In October he writes to his good friend Arthur Greeves:

    What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was about the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary […]. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (“propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”) — expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

    Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

    Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amound to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approached the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened… (pp. 288-9)

    Lewis picks up on this distinction between the thing itself and the doctrines about it later in Mere Christianity where, in his chapter on Redemption, he emphasizes that the theories about the Atonement are not the objects of belief, but the event itself:

    Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works. […] A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. (pp. 54-56)

    What I find intriguing here is Lewis’s insistence that the “true myth” itself can “work on us” without our having an explicit theory about how it works. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. Many (perhaps most?) Christians throughout history have no doubt enjoyed Christ’s benefits without having much in the way of an explicit theory of Atonement. Maybe it’s a legacy of intellectualistic Protestantism to put so much emphasis on holding the correct doctrine. More sacramental forms of Christianity have always believed that the benefits of Christ’s work come to us in tangible (edible!) forms, not just through understanding.

    Of course, there’s a danger in reducing Christianity to a kind of “magic;” there must, we think, be some cognitive element. An interesting question is raised here about people who are severely mentally handicapped and may have little or no grasp of doctrine. Surely we don’t think that precludes them from being beneficiaries of Christ’s work? But, leaving aside these hard cases, it does seem that an understanding of the “how” might not be completely “separable” from the “what.” There might be understandings of the Atonement, for instance, that are so wrong-headed that they preclude a decent grasp on what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection do for us. And it’s not clear to me at least that believing that “Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself” doesn’t entail some further beliefs about how this works. “Narrative” and “story” have become important notions in some recent theology, but is first-order narrative sufficient without some second-order doctrinal reflection?

  • Once more into the breach…

    At the risk of boring readers to tears, Robert Jenson’s article on the atonement prompted me to write something about the oft-made criticism that Anselm imports the conceptual apparatus of feudal law into his theory of atonement and that this distorts the idea of God by replacing it with a deity who is an easily offended feudal lord writ large demanding his pound of flesh.

    But, as John McIntyre demonstrates in his excellent book St. Anselm and His Critics, those who’ve made this criticism often fail to read Anselm closely and don’t seem to realize that he’s pouring his own meaning into terms that seem to be drawn from feudal social arrangements such as “honor” and “satisfaction.”

    Anselm’s account of the atonement is rooted from first to last in his understanding of the divine nature, and he reworks the notions of honor and satisfaction accordingly. McIntyre argues that a, if not the, key to understanding CDH is the concept of God’s aseity. This is theological jargon referring to the idea that God exists in and through himself, utterly independent of anything else. There is nothing “external” to God which constrains him to act in certain ways.

    Thus, there isn’t an order of justice that has to be satisfied by God before he can be merciful to us, as though God were caught in some web of rules. And God’s “honor” for Anselm doesn’t refer to his wounded pride. God’s justice and purpose in creating the world are entirely internal to his nature, and his justice isn’t separate from his love. I think Anselm would agree with N.T. Wright’s point that “wrath,” understood as God’s hatred of sin, is inseparable from his love. How can God not hate that which destroys and corrupts his good creation?

    That’s why, for Anselm, the atonement is entirely a provision of God’s love, and not something “imposed” on God from without. Such an idea is absurd in the strongest possible sense. In the Incarnation of the Son God provides for the satisfaction of justice by restoring the harmony and beauty of his creation which has been defaced by sin. But this is rooted in God’s love – love for his creation and inexorable desire that it be brought to fulfillment. Where Anselm differs from Wright and other proponents of a “penal” substitution is that Anselm sees satisfaction as the alternative to punishment. Christ isn’t punished in our place; the self-offering of the God-man provides for a gift so beautiful and good that it effaces or “outweighs” the disorder created by sin. Therefore anyone who “pleads the sacrifice of Christ” is brought into reconciliation with God.

    Indeed, the concepts of honor and satisfaction are stretched beyond anything that would really make sense in a human social or legal relationship. God’s honor can’t be damaged, as Anselm points out, because God is unlimited bliss. The best we can say is that his “honor” refers to his unchangeable will to bring creation to its intended consummation. And “satisfaction” is no longer a kind of tit-for-tat proportionate recompense for discrete offenses. The gift of the God-man posesses infinite worth, completely outstripping the evil of human sin. Interesting, McIntyre argues that Anselm in fact subverts the medieval penitential system which prescribed specific penances for particular sins and lays the groundwork for justification by faith: the sacrifice of Christ truly is a once and for all response to human sin.

    So, Anselm’s theory isn’t best understood as an attempt to project a feudal social order onto the Christian story even if he employed the language of feudalism. It’s based first and foremost on Anselm’s understanding of God. Admittedly, this is an understanding that is both deeply Christian and deeply influenced by Platonism, making it suspect to a lot of contemporary theology, but that’s a different issue.

  • Cross talk

    I haven’t read either of these yet, but they’re bound to be of interest:

    Robert Jenson, “On the Doctrine of the Atonement”

    N.T. Wright, “The Cross and the Caricatures”

  • The thirsty God

    This book I’m reading by Stephen Cottrell is really terrific. It’s part theology, part mediation, part devotional, and incorporates a section on Christian practice into each chapter, connecting the meditation on Christ’s cross with Lenten practices like fasting, almsgiving, Bible reading, prayer, etc. (which really are just Christian practices). He takes the passion according to John as his main text, but draws connections to other parts of the biblical story throughout.

    Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, uses Jesus’ words “I thirst” to illuminate the passion story. “They are such sorrowful words, so simple and yet so very human: Christ, the thirsty one, one who shares deeply in the mess and muddle of human living” (p. 12). He emphasizes the themes of divine solidarity with human suffering and the love that is poured out through the life and death of Jesus. God not only shares our lot, but the cross is the definitive revelation of God as love, demonstrated by Jesus’ determination to love “to the end.” This is the victory that he wins over the powers of sin and evil.

    On the flight back from DC this morning I finished chapter 4, “The Tenacity of Love,” which I think is fair to call the heart of the book. In previous chapters Bp. Cottrell has dealth with the events leading up to the passion, but here he deals with the crucifixion itself.

    [What happens on the cross] is what I call ‘the tenacity of love’: Jesus keeps on loving those who keep on hating. He defeats sin and death by the resolute persistence of his love. To the soldiers who nail him to the cross he speaks words of understanding and forgiveness: ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34). To the thief who hangs alongside him he promises a share in Paradise (Luke 23:43). These beautiful words spoken out of the horror of the cross embody his life’s teaching, that we should love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, walk the second mile. It is the love that carries on loving, right to the end. (p. 115-6)

    But, of course, for Christians Jesus is not just a good man who persevered and died a martyr’s death. He reveals the nature of God as Love:

    If Jesus had given in to the taunts and indignity and sheer bloody awfulness of the cross, then love would have failed. It would have become less than love, and less powerful than hate. But by allowing himself to be handed over to this passion, and by fulfilling the vocation of love, God triumphs. He triumphs in the all-too-human flesh that Jesus now redeems. He risks the possibility of failure, as today he risks the possibility that we may never recognize the nature of his triumph. But that is the way with love. All it can do is go on loving. It can never coerce, and it can never wantonly hurt or manipulate that which it loves.

    The words ‘I thirst’ sum up this love because they witness to the frightful horror of what is happening — the indignity, the humiliation, the pain. But they also penetrate the deepest purposes of God. ‘I thirst for you,‘ says Jesus from the cross. ‘I do this for you: I am the faithful one who lays down his life for his friends. I do this for God: I drink the cup the father sets before me. I desire your salvation. Like a dry, weary land where there is no water, so I thirst for you and I thirst to do God’s will. See how much I love you. See the depths of the Father’s love. See my arms stretched out in love for you. Allow yourself to be embraced by my love. Allow yourself to be transformed.’ (p. 116)

    To use the all-too-familiar typology, Bp. Cottrell seems to be combining elements of an Abelardian and Christus Victor understanding of the cross. Jesus, in loving to the end, reveals God’s love to us, or, maybe better, enacts it, pours it out. “His silence before his accusers, his forgiveness of those who persecute him, his complete lack of hatred, most reveal the true nature of God’s unconditional love” (p. 108). And yet at the same time, this is the defeat of sin and hatred: “Sin and death are brought to submission by the persistence of Christ’s love. All their forces are spent upon him, but he carries on loving” (p. 116). Love, not hate, has the last word. God in Jesus takes the brunt of our sin upon himself and absorbs it, “[l]ike a lightning conductor pulling the energy of the storm out of the sky and burying it safely in the earth” (p. 115). This turns penal substitution on its head in that it’s not God punishing Jesus, but us (which is clearly much closer to the literal truth of things). And yet this fury and hate is absorbed and defeated by God’s inexorable love.

    Bp. Cottrell goes on to connect this profound understanding of God’s love with the Christian’s practice of prayer. Prayer, he says, is founded on “God’s affirmation of love for us, and our responding with the same heartfelt desire” (p. 132):

    Prayer is first of all about what God says to us. It is about allowing ourselves to be changed and shaped by God’s agenda for God’s world. We come into the presence of God with thankful hearts for all he has done for us in Christ. We thank him for the gift of life — and this can happen anywhere and at any time. We still ourselves: we are in the presence of the one who loves us and we allow ourselves to hear his voice speaking his words of love. Sometimes we need the voice of God that speaks to us through the Bible, or through the liturgy of the church, to communicate this message of love. Or sometimes it is expressed to us through songs of praise. Sometimes we arrive at a place of complete silence, where it is sufficient just to know we are in God’s presence. In each case we allow God to nurture within us, through his Holy Spirit, a deep sense of our being the beloved, of knowing we are loved. Then we can live and act with the same affirmation that sustained Christ, which enabled him to love others, which even made it possible for him to love his enemies. Only by knowing God’s love for us, by knowing that we are worthy of his love, and therefore able to love ourselves more, can we reach out with love to others. (p. 132-3)

    By my lights this is good evangelical stuff in the best sense of the word. Our response to God and to the world is based on the good news of God’s prior act of love in creating, sustaining, and redeeming us. God’s favor is sheer grace, but that grace, which is simply the love of God, calls forth a response from us. And the “the old, old story of Jesus and His love” is one we need to rehearse, in prayer and liturgy, word and sacrament, to make this good news a living reality in our lives.

  • JPII and Gerhard Forde on the Scandal of the Cross

    I have this feeling that I’ve posted on this before at the old blog, but I was flipping through Pope John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope this weekend, and found him to have some illuminating things to say about the mystery of the Cross.

    The book is written in a kind of Q&A format with the questions offered by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori. In response to a question about the problem of suffering, the Pope gives an interpretation of the meaning of the Cross that is in some ways the reverse of the view that Jesus’s death is a way of satisfying God:

    In the preceding questions you addressed the problem precisely: Was putting His Son to death on the Cross necessary for the salvation of humanity?

    Given our present discussion, we must ask ourselves: Could it have been different? Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ’s Cross at the center of that history? Obviously, one response could be that God does not need to justify Himself to man. It is enough that He is omnipotent. From this perspective everything He does or allows must be accepted. This is the position of the biblical Job. But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and-to repeat once again-Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man’s lot and participates in his destiny. This brings to light another inadequacy, the completely false image of God which the Enlightenment accepted uncritically. With regard to the Gospel, this image certainly represented a step backward, not in the direction of a better knowledge of God and the world, but in the direction of misunderstanding them.

    No, absolutely not! God is not someone who remains only outside of the world, content to be in Himself all-knowing and omnipotent. His wisdom and omnipotence are placed, by free choice, at the service of creation. If suffering is present in the history of humanity, one understands why His omnipotence was manifested in the omnipotence of humiliation on the Cross. The scandal of the Cross remains the key to the interpretation of the great mystery of suffering, which is so much a part of the history of mankind.

    Even contemporary critics of Christianity are in agreement on this point. Even they see that the crucified Christ is proof of God’s solidarity with man in his suffering. God places Himself on the side of man. He does so in a radical way: “He emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave, / coming in human likeness; / and found human in appearance, / he humbled himself, / becoming obedient to death, / even death on a cross” (Phil 2:7-8). Everything is contained in this statement. All individual and collective suffering caused by the forces of nature and unleashed by man’s free will-the wars, the gulags, and the holocausts: the Holocaust of the Jews but also, for example, the holocaust of the black slaves from Africa.

    I say this reverses the common understanding of the Cross because, instead of seeing the Crucifixion as the means by which humanity is able to satisfy God’s justice or wrath, it portrays God as, in a sense, seeking to justify himself before humanity, by demonstrating that he is a God of love.

    The Pope goes on to say:

    God is always on the side of the suffering. His omnipotence is manifested precisely in the fact that He freely accepted suffering. He could have chosen not to do so. He could have chosen to demonstrate His omnipotence even at the moment of the Crucifixion. In fact, it was proposed to Him: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mk 15:32). But He did not accept that challenge. The fact that He stayed on the Cross until the end, the fact that on the Cross He could say, as do all who suffer: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), has remained in human history the strongest argument. If the agony on the Cross had not happened, the truth that God is Love would have been unfounded.
    Yes! God is Love and precisely for this He gave His Son, to reveal Himself completely as Love. Christ is the One who “loved to the end” (Jn 13:1). “To the end” means to the last breath. “To the end” means accepting all the consequences of man’s sin, taking it upon Himself. This happened exactly as prophet Isaiah affirmed: “It was our infirmities that he bore, /We had all gone astray like sheep, / each following his own way; / But the Lord laid upon him / the guilt of us all” (Is 53:4-6).

    The Man of Suffering is the revelation of that Love which “endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7), of that Love which is the “greatest” (cf. 1 Cor 13:13). It is the revelation not only that God is Love but also the One who “pours out love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (cf. Rom 5:5). In the end, before Christ Crucified, the man who shares in redemption will have the advantage over the man who sets himself up as an unbending judge of God’s actions in his own life as well as in that of all humanity.

    Thus we find ourselves at the center of the history of salvation. The judgment of God becomes a judgment of man. The divine realm and the human realm of this event meet, cross, and overlap. Here we must stop. From the Mount of the Beatitudes, the road of the Good News leads to Calvary, and passes through Mount Tabor, the Mount of the Transfiguration. The difficulty and the challenge of understanding the meaning of Calvary is so great that God Himself wanted to warn the apostles of all that would have to happen between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

    This is the definitive meaning of Good Friday: Man, you who judge God, who order Him to justify Himself before your tribunal, think about yourself, if you are not responsible for the death of this condemned man, if the judgment of God is not actually a judgment upon yourself. Consider if this judgment and its result-the Cross and then the Resurrection-are not your only way to salvation. (all emphasis mine)

    I see a certain similarity between what John Paul says here and what the late Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde has written about the work of Christ. God’s “problem,” says Forde, is how to be a God of love for us when we won’t have it. We are the problem, the ones who need to be reconciled to God.

    Forde writes:

    Why does God abandon Jesus to be murdered by us? The answer, it would seem, must lie in that very unconditional love and mercy he intends to carry out in act. God, I would think we can assume, knows full well that he is a problem for us. He knows that unconditional love and mercy is “the end” of us, our conditional world. He knows that to have mercy on whom he will have mercy can only appear as frightening, as wrath, to such a world. He knows we would have to die to all we are before we could accept it. But he also knows that that is our only hope, our only salvation. So he refuses to be wrath for us. He refuses to be the wrath that is resident in all our conditionalism. He can indeed be that, and is that apart from the work of Christ. But he refuses ultimately to be that. Thus, precisely so as not to be the wrathful God we seem bent on having, he dies for us, “gets out of the way” for us. Unconditional love has no levers in a conditional world. He is obedient unto death, the last barrier, the last condition we cannot avoid, “that the scriptures might be fulfilled”—that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy. As “God of wrath” he submits to death for us; he knows he must die for us. That is the only way he can be for us absolutely, unconditionally. But then, of course, there must be resurrection to defeat that death, lest our conditionalism have the last word. (Forde, Caught in the Act)

    Both John Paul and Forde see the rvelation of God as love simultaneously as a judgment upon humanity. Perfect love enters our world and is caught in the net of human perfidy, beaten, mocked, tortured, and ultimately killed. And yet, in the Resurrection Love has the last word. The Cross is the inevitable outcome of God’s determination to be a God of Love, a determination that our sin is unable to defeat.