A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • Yet another perspective on atonement

    This one’s from Clark Williamson, whose work I’m a fan of. The article is called “Atonement Theologies and the Cross.” Williamson surveys some of the main atonement theories and defends a semi-Abelardian view by way of Luther and with a tip of the hat to Girard and process theology. He emphasizes that the cross is the revelation of God’s unchangeable love for us and God’s identification with a suffering creation. Personally, I have always found this to be the most devotionally meaningful way of looking at the cross, even though I recognize intellectually that there’s something to be said for other perspectives.

    I don’t agree with everything in the article, but he makes a strong case and identifies some important questions we need to ask when thinking about this. For example, does Jesus constitute our reconciliation with God “such that we cannot be reconciled to God without him,” or does he “disclose to us that we have always been reconciled to God?” And does our atonement theology “place a foundational act of violence at the center of Christian ideas of salvation”? Williamson maintains that our atonement theory will depend in large part on what we are willing or unwilling to affirm about God. Worth a read.

  • More on Anselm and atonement

    I just finished listening to this presentation by Fr. Thomas Williams–an Episcopal priest, distinguished philosopher, medieval scholar, and blogger–on Anselm and the atonement. Fr. Williams does a terrific job of clearing up some misconceptions about Anselm’s soteriology, and he provides a spirited defense of some of its essential elements.

    One interesting and I think important distinction he makes is between a “substitutionary” understanding of atonement and a “vicarious” one. The former posits Jesus as an object (of God’s wrath, say) to whom something is done instead of us (our substitute); the latter emphasizes Jesus as the one who takes the initiative of acting on our behalf. Anselm emphatically takes the latter route.

    Another key point is that Cur Deus Homo was written in response to the objection that God would be acting irrationally and in an “unseemly” fashion by securing our redemption through the Incarnation and Passion. After all, in the context of a classical view of God, it does seem a mark against the divine majesty for God to become a squalling, squirming human baby or to die a shameful death between two thieves on a cross. Thus Anselm was motivated to show not only that it was rational and fitting for God to act in this way, but that it was the only way God could’ve redeemed humanity. Even though he is associated with the slogan “faith seeking understanding,” Anselm holds that pure reason alone can demonstrate–without relying on scripture or Christian tradition–that, given human sin, God had to become incarnate. And yet, the only thing Anselm thinks he can show by pure reason is that the God-man must give up his life to provide satisfaction, not that he had to die in any particular way, such as crucifixion. Which is why, according to Fr. Williams, Anselm doesn’t go into the “gory details” of Jesus’ death, a la Mel Gibson (at least, not in CDH).

    Fr. Williams provides a clear summary of Anselm’s key argument in the logically direct form beloved of analytic philosophers:

    1. Necessarily, if human beings sin, God offers reconciliation.

    2. Necessarily, if God offers reconciliation, the Son becomes incarnate and offers his life as a recompense.

    Therefore, necessarily, if humans sin, the Son becomes incarnate and offers his life as a recompense.

    Support for the first premise: God, by his very nature, will not let the project of creation come to nothing. The only alternatives in dealing with sin are punishment or recompense–and Anselm explicitly rejects punishment. Punishment may take care of the debt humanity owes to God, but it can’t restore the relationship. God doesn’t just want to right the balance, but to restore the relationship that sin has breached. (Which is why, incidentally, Anselm’s theory is not a variety of “penal substitution.” In Anselm’s account, punishment and satisfaction are mutually exclusive alternatives.)

    Support for the second premise: The only way for reconciliation to happen is for the Son to become incarnate and offer himself. This is not something imposed on the God the Son by God the Father, because the Son has the purposes for creation in common with the Father. Christ’s self-offering, because his life is divine and therefore infinitely precious, can make up for the infinite badness of human sin. And because he is man, it is an offering made by humanity. Human beings have to do something to repair the relationship, but we can’t. Fortunately, the God-man can! However, the self-offering must be voluntary if it is to truly be an act of reconciliation. Violence–a death “unwillingly sustained”–can’t solve the problem. This goes some way, Fr. Williams maintains, toward addressing the critiques of feminists and others who see Anselmian atonement as tantamount to “divine child abuse.”

    In Fr. Williams’ summary, Anselm’s argument can be stripped of some of the cruder commercial and feudal metaphors and essentially comes to this: The voluntary self-offering of the infinitely precious life of the God-man repairs the infinite breach that sin had opened between God and humanity and restores the possibility of eternal happiness that God had always intended.

    Fr. Williams stresses that he’s not saying this is the right understanding of the Atonement. For that matter, Anselm says this too! The mysteries of the faith are so deep and inexhaustible, no one account gives you the uniquely right way of thinking about them. However, there does seem to be something deeply right about this basic picture. Anselm’s theory has been badly misrepresented by careless readings and second-hand rumors and should not be lightly dismissed.

    Having Fr. Williams lay out Anselm’s position so clearly and elegantly reminded me how compelling it can be, but it also clarified some remaining issues I have with it, which I’d put under two headings:

    Death as a result of sin. Jesus’ sacrifice is meritorious in part because, being sinless, he didn’t have to die. Anselm shares with most pre-modern theologians the belief that death occurred as a result of human sin. But living in a “post-Darwinian” world as we do, it’s much harder for most of us to see death as a result of sin. What happens to Anselm’s account if death is seen as a natural process rather than something that only enters the world in the train of human sin?

    The apparent salvific irrelevance of Jesus’ specific life. Anselm’s rationalist methodology requires him to abstract away from the concrete details of Jesus’ life. But doesn’t this imply that the specific life the God-man led is irrelevant to our salvation? And doesn’t this seem contrary to the gospel accounts? In his proclamation of the Kingdom, his acts of healing and forgiveness, his miracles, his preaching, his consorting with sinners and outcasts, Jesus seemed to be mediating the salvation of God–restoring relationships and making new life possible. Can an Anselmian atonement theory make room for this?

    I appreciate Fr. Williams’ effort to dispell the many misconceptions and half-truths that tend to circulate about Anselm, particularly in “liberal” theological circles. But I also think a satisfying contemporary theory of atonement would have to modify Anselm’s account, possibly in fairly significant ways.

  • Friday Links

    –With the death of bin Laden, the U.S. has accomplished the aims that justified the war in Afghanistan. Time to leave.

    –An interview with “eco-economist” Herman Daly: Rethinking growth.

    –A primer on Christian nonviolence.

    –The collapse of the “progressive Christian” big tent?

    –The Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to allow non-celibate gay and lesbians to serve as clergy. Support for the change came from some surprising places. And see this article from theologian Eugene Robinson on how same-sex couples can image the faithfulness of God.

    –Catholic theologians and other teachers take Speaker of the House John Boehner to task on the GOP’s budget priorities. More here.

    –Theologian Roger Olson on how “inerrancy” became a litmus test for evangelicalism.

    –The Obama administration is trying to figure out how to continue the war in Libya without congressional authorization.

    –An interview with historian Adam Hoschchild on the World War I pacifist movement.

    –Lord Vader announces the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  • Thoughts on atonement (with some help from Gerald O’Collins, James B. Torrance, and C.S. Lewis)

    I’ve been reading and thinking about the Atonement (i.e., the work of Christ in reconciling us to God) again lately, so I thought I’d jot something down on how I see things. The view I’m now inclined toward is that “Abelardian” and “Anselmian” theories of atonement are complementary rather the mutually exclusive. An Abelardian view emphasizes the revelation of God’s love for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the power of this outpouring of love to move our hearts to repentance. By contrast, the Anselmian view emphasizes Jesus’ role as offering on behalf of us all the perfect human response of love God the Father. This is a response that we, mired in sin and brokenness, are unable to make. By being joined with Christ in faith and baptism, we participate in his act of self-offering. (The Anselmian view needs to be carefully distinguished from the penal substitutionary view.)

    In short, the Atonement is bidirectional: there is a movement from the side of God toward humanity, in revealing and pouring out the divine love and forgiveness. And there is a movement from humanity toward God, in the self-offering of Jesus, which makes it possible for us to share, by adoption, in his filial relationship with the Father. The kicker is that both aspects of this divine-human reconciliation are products of God’s grace.

    In his review of Gerald O’Collins’ excellent book Jesus our Redeemer, Robert Imbelli summarizes this nicely:

    Facile categorizations and contrasts, happily, find no place in O’Collins’s catholic vision. Thus, for example, both Anselm and Abelard receive an appreciative hearing. “Anselm,” O’Collins writes, “laid fresh stress on the humanity and human freedom of Christ, who spontaneously acts as our representative and in no way is to be construed as a penal substitute who passively endured sufferings to appease the anger of a ‘vindictive’ God.” Abelard’s insistence upon love as the key to redemption “shows how salvation is not primarily a ‘process,’ and even less a ‘formula,’ but a person, or rather three persons acting with boundless love.” Both Anselm’s sense of the depth of sin’s dysfunction and Abelard’s sensitivity to the height of redeeming Love provide irreplaceable elements of a comprehensive approach to salvation.

    Scottish Reformed theologian James B. Torrance (younger brother of the more famous T.F. Torrance) helps clarify this bidirectional aspect of the work of Christ in his book Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace. Torrance emphasizes the “God-humanward and human-Godward relationship (movement), both freely given to us in Jesus Christ”:

    Grace does not only mean that in the coming of Jesus Christ, God gives himself in holy love to humanity. It also means the coming of God as man–to present us in himself through the eternal Spirit to the Father. (p. 53)

    Torrance notes that to forgive sin implies judgment. This is because if there’s no guilt, then there’s no need for forgiveness. Forgiveness is “logically prior” to repentance. It is the forgiveness itself that clearly reveals the guilt in the one being forgiven. And this is what elicits repentance. Torrance contrasts “legal repentance,” where repentance is understood as a precondition for forgiveness, with “evangelical repentance,” which occurs as a result of being forgiven. When we truly repent, we submit to the verdict of being guilty–we acknowledge that we need forgiveness. Thus repentance is one part of the total act of reconciliation or atonement (at-one-ment).

    However, because of our brokenness, we can’t repent as we should, if we understand repentance as a “real change of mind, an act of penitence…(metanoia), conversion, reconciliation” (p. 55). This is why God, in his grace, provides a means of making repentance:

    God in Christ has spoken to us his word of forgiveness, his word of love which is at the same time the word of judgment and condemnation, the word of the cross. But implicit in our receiving of the word of grace and forgiveness, the word of the Father’s love, there must be on our part, a humble submission to the verdict of guilty. It was for our sins that Christ died. That lies at the heart of the Reformation understanding of grace–of “evangelical repentance.” But who can make that perfect response of love, that perfect act of penitence, that perfect submission to the verdict of guilty? What we cannot do, God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ stands in for us in our humanity, in our name, on our behalf, to make that perfect submission to the Father. That is the wonder of God’s grace! God not only speaks the word of forgiveness to us. He also provides for us one, in Jesus Christ, who makes the perfect response of vicarious penitence. So God accepts us, not because of our repentance–we have no worthy penitence to offer–but in the person of one who has already said amen for us, in death, to the divine condemnation of our sin–in atonement. (pp. 55-6)

    Jesus’ entire life–his ministry, his passion, and his death on the cross–is this perfect response of love. This dovetails with seeing the Incarnation as creating a “new Adam,” or as “recapitulating” human existence without succumbing to the temptations and snares of the Evil One. In Jesus, God gets the human project back on track. As Anselm argued, the true “dishonor” that sin causes is that it threatens to derail God’s plans for his creation. Because God won’t allow that to happen, the Son becomes incarnate in human flesh to restore God’s intentions to bring creation to fulfillment.

    As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, repentance is the whole process of surrendering our selves, of offering them back to God. This is not some legal requirement; it’s just what constitutes turning back to God. And this is what God in Christ does–blazes the trail back to the Father as it were. “He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God” (“The Perfect Penitent,” Mere Christianity, p. 58). This entire movement, from God to humanity and back, is the manifestation in history of the very triune life of God, into which we are drawn by God’s grace.

  • Friday Links

    –A challenge to libertarians on the coecivene power of private entities.

    –A.O. Scott on superhero movies as a Ponzi scheme.

    –Richard Beck of Experimental Theology on why he blogs.

    –A political typology quiz from the Pew Research Center. (I scored as a “solid libera.l” Although I’d take issue with the way some of the choices were presented.)

    –An end to “bad guys.”

    –Def Leppard’s Hysteria and the changing meaning of having a “number 1” album.

    –The folks at the Moral Mindfield have been blogging on the ethical implications of killing bin Laden, from a variety of perspectives.

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Abraham Lincoln and slavery.

    –Marvin had a good post earlier this week on the death of bin Laden and Christian pacifism.

    –Christopher has a post on problems with the language of “inclusion” and “exclusion” in the church.

    –I don’t always agree with Glenn Greenwald, but I’m glad he’s out there asking the questions he asks. He’s been blogging up a storm this week on the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s death.

    –Brandon has a concise summary of the history behind Cinco de Mayo.

    ADDED LATER: How do you feed 10 billion people? By eating less meat for starters.

  • Cursing our enemies before God

    Given the debate over the last few days about whether it’s appropriate to be happy about, and even celebrate, the death of Osama bin Laden, I thought it would be worth revisiting Ellen Davis’s discussion of the cursing (imprecatory) psalms in her book Getting Involved with God. These psalms, which call God’s wrath down upon the psalmist’s enemies in what often seems like a very unchristian spirit, are frequently glossed over or heavily edited, if not extirpated entirely from contemporary Christian worship.

    However, Davis argues that “the cursing psalms are in fact a crucial resource for our spiritual growth, indispensable if we are to come before God with rigorous honesty” (pp. 24-5).

    The cursing psalms help us to hold our anger in good faith. Sadly, most of us feel about our enemies more like the psalmist does than Jesus did. We must pray to be healed from our hardness of heart, but healing will not come through a cover-up. Healing for ourselves and even for our enemies requires that we acknowledge our bitter feelings and yet not yield to their tyranny. Rather we must offer them, along with our more attractive gifts, for God’s work of transformation. In several ways, the cursing psalms give us strong practical guidance in making that offering of anger. (pp. 25-6)

    What is this practical guidance? Davis says that it comes in three forms. First, the cursing psalms give us words to express our anger. And not only do they provide a means for venting our anger when we are betrayed or victimized, they can help us move past anger. By giving us words with which to externalize our anger, they allow us to look at it more objectively and, perhaps, to recognize the element of self-righteousness it contains. “For the cursing psalms confront us with one of our most persistent idolatries, to which neither Israel nor the church has ever been immune: the belief that God has as little use for our enemies as we do, the desire to reduce God to an extension of our own embattled and wounded egos” (p. 26).

    Second, the cursing psalms can be modes of access to God. They teach us that God is known in judgment on evil as well as in mercy. “The God who created us for life together (Genesis 2:18) is, like us, outraged by those who violate trust and rupture community” (pp. 26-7). It is part of our baptismal vows to name evil when we see it and to reject it wholeheartedly.

    Finally, and most importantly, these psalms direct us to give the desire for vengeance or payback over to God. “[T]he cry for vengeance,” Davis says, “invariably takes the form of an appeal for God to act” (p. 27). The cursing psalms don’t authorize us to take matters into our own hands. “On the contrary, the validity of any punishing action that may occur depends entirely on its being God’s action, not ours” (p. 27). Moreover, leaving vengeance in the hands of the Lord means relinquishing control of the outcome:

    Through these psalms we demand that our enemies be driven into God’s hands. But who can say what will happen to them there? For God is manifest in judgment of our enemies but also, alas, in mercy toward them. Thus these vengeful psalms have a relationship with other forms of prayer for our enemies. (p. 27)

    So, if there’s a lesson here for us, maybe it’s that we ought to bring our feelings about enemies like bin Laden–whatever they are–before God. If I’m happy about bin Laden’s death, then I should say that to God in prayer. But doing so in the spirit of the psalms means that I may come to recognize an element of self-righteousness in my righteous anger and satisfaction. It means naming the evil that he was responsible for and our anger about it. But it also means giving up the position of ultimate judge of his, or anyone else’s, fate. (It’s noteworthy, though not particularly surprising, how many people are confident in consigning bin Laden to hell.) Human justice may have required bin Laden to be killed, or at least to be sufficiently disabled to prevent him from wreaking more terror. But ultimate judgment remains beyond us. Navy SEALs might have been the instrument that drove bin Laden into the hands of the living God, but what happens once he gets there remains a mystery.

  • The prayer of suffering

    Another insightful passage from Ellen Davis on the Psalms:

    The preponderance of laments in the Book of Praises is a fruitful contradiction from which we can learn much. But we live with a second discrepancy that should trouble us more than it does; namely, the contrast between the biblical models of prayer and our own contemporary practices in the church. It seems that ancient Israel believed that the kind of prayer in which we most need fluency is the loud groan, and they have bequeathed us a lot of material on which to practice. Therefore it is troubling that most Christians are almost completely unfamiliar with the lament psalms. Except on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, these psalms almost never appear in worship services. Evidently modern Christian liturgists define the business of worship more narrowly than did ancient Israel, and as a result our lives as individual believers and as a church are impoverished. The shape of the Psalter–the fact that the laments are brought to the fore–suggests that our own worship is deformed by our failure to bring the language of suffering into the sanctuary as an integral part of our weekly liturgy. (“With My Tears I Melt My Mattress,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 15-16)

    There’s a tendency among Christians to see the expressions of raw emotion in the Psalms–including despair, anger, and longing for vengeance–as sub-Christian and to conclude that they have no place in public worship or private prayer. But as Davis points out, most of the psalms of lament have an internal movement that finishes in praise. “[T]he lament psalms regularly trace a movement from complaint to confidence in God, from desperate petition to anticipatory praise” (pp. 20-21). Bringing the experience of suffering into God’s presence is necessary for that suffering to begin to be healed.

  • The First Amendment of faith

    The problem with [many common] notions of prayer is that we cannot have an intimate relationship with someone to whom we cannot speak honestly–that is, someone to whom we cannot show our ugly side, or those large clay feet of ours. We in this culture are all psychologically astute enough to know that honest, unguarded speaking is essential to the health of family life or close friendship. But do we realize that the same thing applies to our relationship with God? That is what the Psalms are about: speaking our mind honestly and fully before God. The Psalms are a kind of First Amendment for the faithful. They guarantee us complete freedom of speech before God, and then (something no secular constitution would ever do) they give us a detailed model of how to exercise that freedom, even up to its dangerous limits, to the very brink of rebellion.

    -Ellen F. Davis, “Improving our Aim: Praying the Psalms,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 8-9

  • Friday links

    –On Christianity, the Holocaust, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

    –Recent posts on what’s apparently now being referred to as the “new universalism” from James K.A. Smith, Halden Doerge, and David Congdon.

    –Does having a monarchy lead to greater equality?

    –Redeeming the “L word.”

    –Appreciating both N.T. Wright’s and Marcus Borg’s views of the Resurrection.

    –Why liberals should embrace classical (small-r) republicanism.

    –Love and service are more fundamental than “rigorous theology.”

    –Was the Civil War a “tragedy“? (More here and here.)

    –Hiding the truth about factory farms.

    –Kate Middleton for the win.

    ADDED LATER: What’s going on with the Canadian election?

  • The binding of Isaac and the binding of God

    I’m reading a wonderful book by Duke Divinity School professor Ellen F. Davis called Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. It’s a series of loosely connected essays and meditations on various OT books and stories, what she calls an “unsystematic introduction.” Davis’s purpose, she says, is to provide an alternative to the way Christians usually approach the OT. Conservative Christians may read it primarily as a moral rulebook or a set of prophecies of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, while liberal Christians, if they read it at all, tend to view the OT as morally and spiritually primitive, fully superseded by the New Testament. In contrast to either of these approaches, Davis commends a “spiritually engaged” reading of the OT, focusing on “what the Old Testament tells us about intimate life with God” (p. 2).

    As her title suggests, a common theme running throughout the book is that the God of the Bible is unique among ancient deities in that he is deeply concerned and involved with the plight of humanity. “God’s life is bound up inextricably with ours” (p. 1). As she says a little later, “the fundamental article of biblical religion [is] that God’s life, God’s glory, even God’s well-being, are indissolubly linked with our lives. For Christians, the sublime expression of that indissoluble linkage between God’s glory and frail human life is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ” (p. 19). God actually takes a risk in entering into a covenant with creation–the success of this covenant depends in part upon the free response of human beings.

    Which brings us to the story of the Binding of Isaac, which Davis rightly calls one of the most terrifying stories in the Bible. She notes that modern “enlightened” Christians are deeply uncomfortable with this story, and she identifies two strategies they use to get around it. One is to simply reject it as an expression of an archaic, sub-Christian conception of God. (Davis says she heard one preacher emphatically declare that “I do not worship the God of Abraham”!) The second strategy is to see the story of the aborted sacrifice of Isaac as a symbolic representation of ancient Israel’s leap beyond the widespread practice of infant sacrifice and its transition to “ethical religion.”

    But, Davis says, neither of these approaches take the Bible and this story with full seriousness. She proposes a closer reading to see what’s really going on here. What this story is about, she argues, is God and God’s plan for blessing to creation. “Genesis is primarily a book about God, and secondarily about human beings encountering God” (p. 58). Davis notes that previously in Genesis we’ve seen God’s plans for humanity go awry time and again: first in the garden of Eden, then in humanity’s descent into violence culminating in the flood, and finally in the Tower of Babel incident. God’s new strategy in the remainder of Genesis (and the whole Bible for that matter) is to bless all of humanity by creating a covenant with a particular people. “At this point, God gives up on trying to work a blessing directly upon all humankind. From now on, God will work through one man, one family, one people, in order to reach all people” (60).

    For this to work, however, God has to find out what kind of man he’s dealing with in Abraham. That’s the purpose of God’s test in asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. After seeing that Abraham is willing to go through with it, “God knows something now that God did not know before. Genesis offers little support for a doctrine of divine omniscience, if by that we mean that God knows everything we are going to do before we do it” (p. 58).

    God’s new strategy is hardly surefire. We should not be surprised if adopting it makes God anxious, for now everything depends on the faithfulness of this one man Abraham. God, having been badly and repeatedly burned by human sin throughout the first chapters of Genesis yet still passionately desirous of working blessing in the world, now chooses to become totally vulnerable on the point of this one man’s faithfulness. It is, to say the least, a counter-intuitive solution to a problem. (p. 60)

    One reason this story appears so early in the Bible, Davis thinks, is that it teaches us something fundamental about Israel’s “complex witness” to God.

    The Binding of Isaac shows us a God who is vulnerable, terribly and terrifyingly so, in the context of covenant relationship. We are more comfortable using the “omni” words–omnipotent, omniscient–to describe God. Yet if we properly understand the dynamics of covenant relationship, then we are confronted with a God who is vulnerable. For, as both Testaments maintain, the covenant with God is fundamentally an unbreakable bond of love (hesed). And ordinary experience teaches that love and vulnerability are inextricably linked; we are most vulnerable to emotional pain when the well-being and the faithfulness of those we love are at stake. And as we have seen, the Bible shows that the faithfulness of even the best of God’s covenant partners is always up for grabs. So it follows that God’s vulnerability in love is an essential element of covenant relationship. (p. 62)

    This is one reason that the Binding of Isaac resonates so strongly with the story of Jesus’ Passion (which brings us to today):

    It is in Christ hanging on the cross that we see, for once in history, the two sides of this story fully joined in one person. In Jesus Christ we see a son of Abraham sparing nothing, totally faithful in covenant relationship with God. At the same time, we see in Jesus God’s total faithfulness, expressed now as excruciating vulnerability, even to death on a cross. These two images–Abraham binding Isaac, Christ nailed on a cross–are the supporting structures for the long convoluted story of sin and salvation. When reason fails, as it does at least one Friday each year, then we must listen to the stories with our hearts. (pp. 63-4)