A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • “Negative” theology is not enough

    Experience with seminary students over several decades indicates that they turn surprisingly agnostic when the time comes to think about God, declaring that “the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,” so any ideas one might have about God are just as good as any others. Such agnosticism has its roots either in intellectual laziness or in a theological despair at ever getting things right. In either case, it is sorely mistaken. Our task is not to overcome what Bernard Meland called the “fallibility” of all our forms and symbols for God. It is to come up with ways of talking about God that are appropriate to the revelation of God attested to in the biblical witness. All ways of talking about God are arguably inadequate. Yet, some are more clearly inadequate than others. There are ways of talking about God that are more appropriate to the norms of the Christian faith than others and that are also more helpful in the face of the challenges that confront us in the death-dealing times in which we live. (Clark Williamson, Way of Blessing, Way of Life: A Christian Theology, p. 103).

    I can understand why people emerging from religious traditions that suffer from an excess of certainty might be tempted to retreat into a purely “negative” (or “apophatic”) theology. But Williamson is right here that some “ways of talking about God . . . are more appropriate to the norms of the Christian faith than others.” For Christianity, it is more appropriate to speak of God as loving than as hateful, wise rather than ignorant, personal rather than impersonal, etc. The central belief of Christianity– that Jesus is God expressed in a human life–entails that God has a particular nature and character. In other words, the cure for bad theology isn’t no theology, it’s better theology.

    Sure, there have been great saints and mystics throughout the history of the church who have stressed the unknowability of God virtually to the point of recommending utter silence. And their writings provide an indispensable reminder of the limitations of all our language about the divine.

    But this apophatic reticence has always been balanced by the “kataphatic” tradition of affirming the appropriateness of at least some language about God. This tradition is particularly important in prayer and liturgy, not to mention the Bible itself. And as Williamson suggests, only if we can speak intelligibly about God can we say that certain “death-dealing” ways are contrary to God’s will or nature.

  • Hans Urs Von Balthasar: the Rob Bell of his day

    I started reading the great Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?”, and right off the bat what struck me is how similar the public controversy over Von Balthasar’s views was to the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.”

    Obviously there are vast differences here. Von Balthasar was a brilliant (and at times obscure) theologian; Bell is an evangelical preacher whose talents lie more in communicating his message than theological originality. But the controversy, at least based on Von Balthasar’s account here, was drawn along remarkably similar lines.

    Here’s Von Balthasar on the criticisms leveled at him by some of his contemporaries (this all took place in the mid-80s). The question at hand is “whether one who is under judgment, as a Christian, can have hope for all men”:

    I have ventured to answer this affirmatively and was, as a result, called to order rather brusquely by the editor of Fels (G. Hermes); in Theologisches, Heribert Schauf and Johannes Bokmann added their voices to this reprimand. . . . At a press conference in Rome, besieged about the question of hell, I had made known my views, which had led to gross distortions in newspapers (“L’inferno e vuoto“), whereupon I published, in Il Sabato, that Kleine Katechese über die Hölle (Short Discourse on Hell), which was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano without my knowledge and aroused the ire of the right-wing papers.

    Bokmann is perfectly correct: “If one were certain of attaining the ultimate goal no matter what, a quite essential motivation to conversion and absolute Christian resolve would be lost.” However, I never spoke of certainty but rather of hope. The three critics, by contrast, possess a certainty, and G. Hermes expresses it with matchless force: “Such a hope does not exist, because we cannot hope in opposition to certain knowledge and the avowed will of God.” It is impossible that “we can hope for something about which we know that it will certainly not come about.” Therefore, the closing sentence of the essay declares tersely: “There is no hope for the salvation of all.” If I speak “no less than five times” of the fully real possibility, which confronts every person, of forfeiting salvation, the retort I get is that the matter is “not” treated “seriously by putting on a stern face but by stating the entire and full truth. And the full truth about hell is not stated if one only speaks of its possibility . . . and not its reality.” At this point, a first paradoxical statement occurs: “If we once admit that it is really and seriously possible, even considering all the opposing arguments, that men are damned, then there is also no convincing argument against men’s really being damned.” This is not comprehensible to me: if God sets the “two ways” before Israel, does it necessarily follow that Israel will choose the way of ruin? There was certainly no lack of seriousness behind the presentation of the two ways. But G. Hermes, of course, knows that the possibility is reality; he is not the only one, as we will see, who knows this. Just how will become evident from what follows here.

    But first one other regrettable thing: as a consequence of not sharing in this secure knowledge–and R. Schnackenberg, for instance, does not share it when he says of Judas Iscariot that it “is not certain that he is damned for all eternity”–one is then numbered among those “average Catholics” who veil the hereafter in a “rose-red fog” and “wishful fancies”, participate “irresponsibly and cruelly” in “operation mollification” through their “salvation-optimism”, adopt the “dull and colorless garrulousness of present-day Church discourse”, practice “modernistic theology” and call for “presumptuous trust in God’s mercifulness.” So be it; if I have been cast aside as a hopeless conservative by the tribe of the left, then I now know what sort of dung-heap I have been dumped upon by the Right. (pp. 16-20, footnotes omitted).

    Change a few names, and lower the general level of erudition all around, and you’ve essentially got the debate between Bell and many of his evangelical critics.

  • Atonement as the restoration of human nature in Athanasius (and Anselm)

    Fr. Aidan Kimel (who theo-blog veterans may remember as Al Kimel, an Epsicopal priest who used to run the blog Pontifications before converting to Catholicism–and now apparently to Eastern Orthodoxy) has been doing a series on St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation.” The latest installment looks at Athanasius’s understanding of the Atonement as the healing of human nature and the defeat of death:

    Athanasius’s soteriological reflections are not motivated by a concern for the satisfaction of justice. The penalty prescribed by God in the garden is not assigned for the purpose of retributive punishment. It symbolizes, rather, the natural consequence of human disobedience: to break fellowship with God, and to thus separate oneself from the only source of life, is to fall into natural mortality. Eternal life is not something that we possess naturally; it is something that we can only enjoy by grace in communion with our Creator.

    […]

    The plight of man is ontological and thus only an ontological solution will suffice. Athanasius, following Scripture, employs commercial, juridical, and sacrificial language by which to speak of the saving work of Christ; but the significance of this language, I suggest, is determined by the ontology of death and resurrection. What is needed for salvation is not the legal rescindment of the law of death, much less the propitiation of divine wrath (as suggested in some Protestant versions of the atonement). What is needed is the re-creation of human nature, and this re-creation can only occur if the Word dies in the flesh.

    I came to a similar conclusion when I blogged some thoughts on Athanasius several years back: The Incarnation effects an “ontological change in human nature,” and by “becoming united to our human nature, the Word of God heals the corruption and proneness-to-death that followed as a result of sin.”

    I’d also add that, despite his reputation as the progenitor of the Western, “juridical” theory of the Atonement, St. Anselm can be read in a very similar way. For Anselm, the damage that sin causes to God’s “honor” does not consist in any damage to God in Godself. This is because God is immutable and impassible, so nothing creatures can do can harm God (at least according to the Anselmian tradition). Rather, the “dishonor” consists in the damage it causes to God’s creatures and their ability to properly honor God–damage that threatens to frustrate God’s purposes for creation.

    The role of the God-man, then, is to restore human nature, making it once again capable of honoring God properly. As has been pointed out a number of times, for Anselm, this restoration–and not some kind of vicarious punishment–is what constitutes “satisfaction.”

    It’s true that for Anselm (and arguably for Athanasius too), the death of Christ still constitutes a kind of “payment,” but it’s one that is necessary for the restoration of human nature, not to assuage the divine anger.

  • Rob Bell’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”

    I think the book suffered a bit from not being as tightly focused as “Love Wins.” The earlier book could assume a fair bit of common ground, as it was tackling what is mainly an intra-Christian debate, but here Bell’s target audience seems to more explicitly be the skeptic, the seeker, and the “spiritual but not religious,” as well as the disaffected evangelical.

    The results are mixed. We get an overstuffed yet not-fully-persuasive chapter on science and faith. At the same time, the chapter on religious language does little more than make the point that language about God is symbolic. (This is a bit ironic given the book’s title.)

    On the other hand, the three central chapters on God “with,” “for,” and “ahead” of us were golden. Chapter 5 (“For”) in particular is pure gospel. Bell doesn’t wear his influences on his sleeve (or in his (largely nonexistent) footnotes), but it’s not hard to detect a little Tillich here, a dash of Moltmann there, and a dollop of process theology. But he’s really at his best in expounding the story of Jesus and his love–once again giving the lie to critics who’d like to brand him as some kind of heretic or post-Christian.

    Throughout, Bell amply justifies his reputation as a first-class communicator. Reading this book brought home to me how much even the most “accessible” religious books tend to be steeped in theological jargon. It wasn’t a life-changing book for me by any means, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the first book I’d recommend on the topic. Many mainliners in particular, I imagine, would regard a lot of what Bell writes as old hat to some extent.

    But Bell is doing something that hardly anyone else is doing: delivering (more-or-less) solid, progressive-leaning Christian theology in a way that (apparently) communicates far beyond the frontiers of the church. That seems like something mainline Protestants in particular could learn from these days.

  • Idealism in twenty minutes

    Keith Ward gives a concise overview and defense of metaphysical idealism:

    This lecture is essentially a summary of the argument from his 2010 book More Than Matter. The basic claim is that mind or consciousness is a fundamental component or aspect of reality, and it can’t be reduced to or explained exhaustively in material terms. Ward points out that we’re immediately aware of consciousness, while the material world–at least as it appears to us–is something that is in part constructed by our minds. This doesn’t mean that the physical world isn’t real; but it does suggest that there’s something problematic about arguing for the reduction of mind to an aspect of reality that is itself partly mind-constituted. Minds are the only “things-in-themselves” we know first hand. On that basis, Ward says

    What idealists maintain is that the ultimate nature of reality itself is mind-like, and that human and other finite minds are the best clues we have to what objective reality is like. The cosmos is not a mindless, unconscious, valueless, purposeless, yet somehow strangely intelligible, mechanism. Such a view is the result of extrapolating a machine-model, very useful in many scientific contexts, to provide the most comprehensive and adequate picture of the real cosmos.

    Idealists propose that the human mind provides a better model from which to extrapolate to the cosmos as a whole. That is not because the cosmos looks like a very large human person or because there is some large person hovering just beyond the cosmos. It is because human minds play a creative and constructive role in producing the phenomenal world. They seem to point to a level of reality that is not merely phenomenal or an appearance to consciousness. Human minds generate an idea of reality as mind-like in a way that far transcends human mentality, yet that does include something like consciousness, value, and purpose as essential parts of its nature. (More Than Matter, p. 58)

    Ward doesn’t claim to offer a knock-down argument for idealism, but he thinks it’s at least as reasonable as competing views, if not more so. He also points out that some form of idealism is arguably the majority view in the history of philosophy.

    Even when I was an atheist, I never found materialism particularly compelling. And studying philosophy–particularly early modern philosophy–only reinforced that. It’s hard to come to grips with the arguments of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant and still think that materialism is a straightforward, much less obviously true, understanding of reality.

  • Gary Dorrien’s social gospel

    At the heart of modern capitalist economics is the idea of infinite accumulation. At the heart of Christian social teaching, however, is a strong conception of distributive justice and the related notion that there is such a thing as having enough. The prevailing American preoccupation with piling up money and material possessions is spiritually deadening. The readiness to defend ill-begotten privileges with force is immoral. The prevailing view of nature as a commodity to be conquered and exploited degrades the sacredness of creation. These themes have marked Christian ethics at its best. Figures such as [Walter] Rauschenbusch and [William] Temple were powerful advocates for progressive Christianity, partly because their minds were rooted in the biblical and spiritual wisdom of the past, partly because they were alive to new challenges and horizons for the church, and partly because they believed that Christianity has an important social mission. If liberal Christianity is to regain its public voice, it must recover this spirit.

    That’s the conclusion to Gary Dorrien’s 1995 book Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (pp. 375-6). It traces the history of liberal, mainly Protestant, Christian social ethics in America from the social gospel period, through the rise of Niebuhrian “Christian realism,” to the more recent development of liberation, black, feminist, ecological, and other “pluralizing” theologies.

    According to Dorrien, a signature concern of Christian social ethics–one that runs like a thread through all these movements–is extending democratic principles to the economic sphere. This has taken a variety of forms: Rauschenbusch’s calls for a “cooperative commonwealth,” Niebuhr’s early Marxist-influenced analysis of social power and class conflict and his later evolution toward New Deal-style reformist liberalism, and the aspiration toward democratic forms of socialism among liberationist voices. Contrary to the impression you might get from the current political scene, American Christian social ethics has long had a strongly social-democratic, if not outright socialist, bent.

    Dorrien is far from uncritical of this tradition. He agrees with some–though not all–of Niebuhr’s criticisms of the social gospel tradition. He acknowledges the failures of central-planning approaches to the economy. He also points out that more recent theologians’ calls for “socialism” often have a dreamy, unreal air, and they fail to spell out what they want in concrete terms.

    But Christians can’t give up on the need to press for greater distributive justice. Dorrien reviews some recent experiments with greater economic democracy (a term he generally prefers to “socialism”). These include worker ownership and management of firms and public mutual funds for directing investment. In general, he prefers  pragmatic experiments in making the economic system more just and democratically accountable that don’t rely on overly centralizing power in a bureaucratic state. Dorrien also emphasizes the ecological impact of economic growth and the pressing need to pursue distributive justice and “eco”-justice simultaneously.

    Neoconservative Christian ethicists like Michael Novak have turned their back on this tradition and embraced what they call “democratic capitalism” as the only viable economic system after the fall of Communism. But Dorrien points out that actually existing capitalism not only fails the tests of distributive justice and ecological sustainability–it leads to a cultural coarsening that conservatives themselves deplore, even though they tend to blame it on “liberal elites.”

    Dorrien is realistic about the state of liberal, mainline Protestantism. Too often, it has focused more on making sweeping social statements and lobbying Washington than on nurturing vibrant religious communities. While he disagrees with those, like Stanley Hauerwas, who are critical of Christian attempts to create a more just society, Dorrien argues that a progressive Christianity that isn’t rooted in a genuine “spiritual experience of Christ” has lost its reason for being. It’s because of what Christians believe God has accomplished in Christ that they act to foster signs of the in-breaking Kingdom in the social order:

    The kingdom to which Christians belong and owe their loyalty is partially prefigured in the world; it calls Christians to bring the transforming virtues of love, peace, and justice into the world; it calls Christians to join sides with the poor and oppressed to attain justice; but it does not make political success the criterion of its action or seek power over the social order. The social ethic of the way of Christ is an ethic of faithfulness to the prophetic biblical ideals of freedom, equality, community, and redemptive love. It calls the body of Christ to be a moral community that incarnates these ideals in the world and lives faithfully by them. It seeks to bring sustainable justice and peace to the world but does not live by the world’s tests for worthwhile activity (pp. 374-5).

    This is a responsible social ethic for a post-Christendom world: one that embraces  the duty to work for structural justice without surrendering Christian distinctiveness or assuming the role of “chaplain” to the existing order.

  • Technology, love, and paying attention

    I really enjoyed this post from Michael Sacasas at his blog “The Frailest Thing.” He argues that it’s not smartphones (or any other attention-grabbing gadget) per se that make it hard for us to pay attention to the people we encounter–it’s us.

    It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all.

    This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved.

    Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

    Even though this is a problem endemic to the human condition, technology can exacerbate it:

    But the smartphone is not altogether irrelevant, nor is any other technology to which we might lend our attention. The thing about attention is that we can only direct it toward one thing at a time. So when we are in the presence of another person, the smartphone in the pocket may make it harder to pay attention to that person. But the smartphone isn’t doing a thing. It’s just there. It’s not the smartphone, it’s you and it’s me. It’s about understanding our own proclivities. It’s about understanding how the presence of certain material realities interact with our ability to direct our intention and perception. It’s about remembering the great battle we fight simply to be decent human beings from one moment to the next and doing what we can to make it more likely that we will win rather than lose that battle.

    This made me think of a post I had recently read by Frank Schaeffer as part of his series of “12 commandments of happy parenting”:

    Never give a child your divided attention once you’re playing with them, unless it’s an emergency. That doesn’t mean you should give them your attention all the time. Far from it.

    Playing alone is good. But don’t be rude when you are being a hands-on parent.

    Watching a young mother or father texting friends while his or her child is trying to talk to them is just plain cringe making. It’s teaching a lack of empathy and respect.

    It’s also teaching all the wrong priorities about what is important in life. Don’t be surprised if you tune your child out and later your child tunes you out.

    I see this all the time. I’m also guilty of it. Though I don’t have a smartphone and I generally avoid text messaging, it can be a challenge to give my kids my undivided attention. Not always, mind you–there are times when I’m fully and effortlessly engaged in some game we’re playing, or reading a book with my daughter, or making my son laugh through various facial contortions. But often–too often–my mind and attention are (at least partially) somewhere else. Maybe I’m thinking about work or worrying about something that needs done around the house. Or maybe I’d rather be reading a book or surfing the Internet.

    It may also be, as some have suggested, that our multi-media, information-saturated lives (for some values of “our” anyway) are actually changing the way our minds work, diminishing our ability to maintain focused attention on one thing at a time. If so, that’s an even deeper problem.

    Regardless, it does seem that Sacasas is right that giving someone our attention requires an act of will or a kind of discipline. Maybe this is partly why so many spiritual traditions have cultivated practices that require people to focus their attention. I’m thinking especially of various forms of meditation and contemplative prayer. What these practices seem to have in common is an effort to focus on a reality beyond the self–to the extent that the ego recedes into the background.

    And one of the “fruits” of such practice is–ideally at least–that we become the kind of people who can more easily set aside our own desires and be attentive to others and their needs. We can certainly invoke here the example of Jesus, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to make each person he encountered feel the full force of his loving attention. To love others–including especially our children–as Jesus loves us would seem to require, at a minimum, learning to give them our attention.

  • The Nonviolent God

    One of my worries about J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement was that I didn’t think a determined critic would be persuaded by his case for seeing God as essentially nonviolent. He offers some suggestive interpretations of various New Testament passages, but there’s no developed theology of the divine nature or an overarching argument for how his nonviolent understanding of God fits with the Bible as a whole.

    In light of that, I’m excited to see that Weaver’s next book, The Nonviolent God, looks like it will tackle just this issue:

    This bold new statement on the nonviolence of God challenges long-standing assumptions of divine violence in theology, the violent God pictured in the Old Testament, and the supposed violence of God in Revelation. In The Nonviolent God J. Denny Weaver argues that since God is revealed in Jesus, the nonviolence of Jesus most truly reflects the character of God.

    According to Weaver, the way Christians live — Christian ethics — is an ongoing expression of theology. Consequently, he suggests positive images of the reign of God made visible in the narrative of Jesus — nonviolent practice, forgiveness and restorative justice, issues of racism and sexism, and more — in order that Christians might live more peacefully.

    I’m not a fully convinced pacifist, but I am convinced that the relationship between God, violence, and Christian ethics is hugely important–and that those of us in the mainline traditions have a lot to learn from “peace church” perspectives. So I’m looking forward to reading this book (which, alas, isn’t scheduled to be published till November).

  • Cautious optimism about the new pope

    Look, I’m a Protestant, so no pope is ever going to satisfy me. And I totally get that progressive Catholics would be upset by the same-old, same-old on women’s rights, LGBT rights, and other issues about which the Catholic hierarchy remains steadfastly conservative.

    But there are reasons for cautious optimism about Pope Francis (né Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio). He is, by most accounts I’ve seen, a humble man attuned to the condition of the world’s poorest people and less hung up on doctrinal minutiae than his predecessor. He also appears to be more oriented toward ecumenism and interfaith relations and less concerned with asserting the superiority of Catholicism in all things. As a Jesuit, he reflects a tradition of engagement with and openness to the world that can be very appealing. I don’t expect him to revolutionize Catholicism, but these provide hints that he could do some real good.

    One major concern that’s been raised is whether he’s got it in him to undertake certain reforms needed within the Vatican machinery, and given his age (and Benedict’s re-establishment of the precedent of papal retirements), it’s not unthinkable that his papacy may have little impact at all. But as a fellow Christian I’m certainly happy to pray for the new pontiff and pray that he will represent the love of Jesus to a world sorely in need of it (as we’re all called to do!).

  • “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer?”

    In this month’s Christian Century, Anglican theologian Charles Hefling offers a take on the Atonement that’s very close to where I find myself on this nowadays. He rehearses the well-known points that the church has never dogmatically codified a particular theory of the Atonement but has cultivated a variety of models. He also gives a fair hearing to the penal substitution theory, acknowledging that it not only offers a fairly straightforward explanation but also has great emotional and imaginative power. Nonetheless, he thinks it’s fatally flawed, due to its reliance on a retributive understanding of justice:

    Recall the beginning of the argument summarized above: God is just. That sets the context for everything else, and the sequel makes it clear that by justice is meant, more specifically, retributive justice, which consists in attaching rewards to merit and penalties to fault. Now justice, so defined, is an attribute of the God described all through the Bible. There can be no objection on that score. The problem, rather, is that penal substitution cannot be squeezed inside the same definition. To punish the guilty is just. They deserve it. The innocent do not. To punish them is not just; it is just outrageous. But Christ was innocent, tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15). Nobody would deny that Pilate, Caiaphas and the rest acted unjustly; but if by doing what they did they were executing a divine plan—if God intended to punish his Son by their hands—then evidently God is not just after all.

    From this internal contradiction there are two escape routes, one incredible, the other reprehensible. The first introduces the remarkable claim that Jesus was guilty, but only because the guilt of others was transferred from them to him. This expedient so undermines the very idea of moral responsibility that it would be better not to speak of justice at all. Guilt in the relevant sense is not the sort of thing that can be siphoned out of one person and into another. Nor is it any better to argue that punishing the innocent, though admittedly wrong as a rule, can in exceptional cases be just, provided it serves to “send a message” that dramatizes the heinousness of disobedience in order to deter those who might be inclined to disobey. There is a name for that: terrorism.

    Hefling goes on to emphasize is that this is a sub-personal way of understanding atonement–one based on a model of impersonal justice instead of reconciliation between persons. Forgiveness isn’t just letting someone off from a penalty; it consists of mending a personal relationship, which requires “a change in both the forgiver and the forgiven.” And a willingness to accept suffering “is intrinsic to what forgiveness, in the personal sense, is.”

    Why so? Because, in the first place, evil is like the good it undoes in that it is infectious. It propagates itself. Suppose, then, that I have injured you. As a person, you are free to choose your response. If you choose to retaliate, you perpetuate the evil by causing a new injury. The choice may be wholly justifiable, but it is no less injurious for that. If instead you choose to hold a grudge, to brood on your injury and cultivate your dudgeon, you will still perpetuate the evil, internally, by diminishing yourself, souring your character and becoming your own victim as well as mine. On the other hand, if you choose to forgive, you are choosing to absorb the infection, as it were; to contain its self-diffusion, to forgo the gratifications of revenge, resentment, self-vindication and righteous indignation. Furthermore, you are choosing to make your willingness known to me, to offer me your friendship, to accord me a status and value no less than yours, all without denying my offense or ceasing to be my victim. At the same time, conversely, until I have chosen to acknowledge you as such, to own the injury, ask for your benevolence and reciprocate your offer, the forgiveness that we must both choose if it is to occur has yet to be fully chosen.

    In this regard, Hefling calls forgiveness “an instance, perhaps the defining instance, of a more general, more inclusive pattern” exhibited in the teaching of Jesus.

    Also, and most important here, it is enacted in the way he is reported to have met the final surge of hostility to that teaching and to himself. The hostility was probably inevitable; in that sense it was “necessary that the Christ should suffer” (Luke 24:26). But the necessity was not absolute. Things could have gone otherwise, to judge by the Gospels. Jesus could have chosen to flee, to fight arrest, to summon 12 legions of angels. All these he chose to refuse.

    By so doing he chose to bear the cross, and his choice gave the bearing of it a meaning it would not otherwise have. Among thousands of Roman executions, this one is meaningful—not in the way a quantum of suffering might be meaningful, weighed in the scales of retributive justice, but meaningful as a communication, a word, an expression of willingness consistent with what Jesus had until then been expressing in deed and speech.

    Has all this got anything to do with atonement? No. Not in the sense that because Christ accepted his suffering we do not have to suffer. It is the other way around. He accepted it because we do have to. His was a cross that had always been ours, the one way open to us, in a skewed world, for putting a stop to the consequences of our own malice without adding to them. Accepting that way, the way of the cross, was an act of solidarity with us and an offer of solidarity with him—an appeal for us to follow him by willingly taking up whatever crosses the world imposes, by making them occasions for joy, by forgiving.

    Hefling anticipates that this could be seen as a “merely” exemplarist theory–that Jesus’ passion provides nothing more than an example for us to imitate. But this objection overlook the fact that taking up our crosses is not something that comes naturally to us.  We depend on grace to be conformed to the pattern established by Christ. This is why we need to recover the teaching that God effects reconciliation not just through the Son, but through both the Son and the Spirit (the two “hands of God” as Irenaeus put it).

    One of the peculiarities of Western Christianity has been a tendency to speak of God’s initiative in reconciling his human creatures as though it were entirely a matter of sending his Son into the world. But God’s Spirit too has been sent—and continues to be. On the well-founded assumption that this second divine initiative complements the incarnation, there is reason to suppose that part of the indwelling Spirit’s job description is to be the “drawing” that attracts self-sufficient persons to the self-emptying person of Christ. In other words, the motivation for choosing this exemplar is itself a gift, “the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us” (Rom. 5:5). It would follow that reconciliation—atonement, if you like—can be understood as the action of a tri-personal God, rather than a transaction between the Father and the Son.

    The reconciliation effected by the tri-personal God exhibits a form of justice that is more restorative than retributive. God brings good from the evil of the cross not in the sense of exacting punishment but in breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence to make reconciliation possible.

    Presumably God has always been able to purge the world of its evils with an apocalyptic blast of power. Instead he has chosen to conform to the same justice he requires of his human creatures, to submit to the conditions of at-one-ment with them, to become all they are and are to be. And that is good news.

    Hefling’s account has some obvious affinities with J. Denny Weaver’s non-violent Christus Victor motif as well as the more nuanced “exemplarist” theories I discussed here. A common thread is the rejection of a retributive understanding of justice on either biblical or more general moral-philosophical grounds. Although one can certainly cite biblical texts on both sides of this issue, I think Weaver, Hefling, and others have a strong case that a non-retributive understanding of atonement is more consistent with the teachings and practice of Jesus himself.