|
Home What is Catalyst? AFTE What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program? Back Issues Subscriptions |
St. Irenaeus puts it this
way: “This then is the order of the rule of our faith, and the foundation of
the building, and the stability of our conversation: God, the Father, not
made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is
the first point of our faith. The second point is: The Word of God, Son of
God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to
the form of their prophesying and according to the method of the dispensation
of the Father: through whom all things were made; who also at the end of the
times, to complete and gather up [recapitulate] all things, was made man
among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth
life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third
point is: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and the
fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led forth into the
way of righteousness; and who in the end of the times was poured out in a new
way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man unto God” [Demonstration §6]. This passage, though it
precedes Nicea by about 150 years, nonetheless has a distinctly Trinitarian
pattern. The church’s “rule of faith” has three elements: one God and Father,
the Logos of God, and the Holy Spirit. It is within this trinitarian structure
that Irenaeus locates the recapitulation of human existence by the eternal
Son of God. The church’s rule of faith locates the passion of our savior, the
recapitulation of Adam’s race, squarely within the loving embrace of the
triune God. The trinitarian backdrop
to the recapitulation narrative is of great significance in the light of
contemporary critiques of traditional atonement theology. These objections
against the Christian doctrine of redemption tend to focus on the violence of
the cross. How could the Father allow, perhaps even instigate or inflict,
such violence against his innocent Son? Since all traditional atonement
models—Christus Victor, satisfaction, and moral influence—hold that the cross
is the outcome of divine purpose, contemporary attempts to remove divine
violence from our interpretation of the cross tend to object not just to one
but to each of the traditional models. The result is a focus on the life of
Christ as an example for us to follow, while the cross gets reduced to the
tragic and inevitable outcome of such a faithfully lived life. Redemption is
thus located in the life of the believer or the church instead of in the Paschal mystery accomplished in Christ’s life,
death, and resurrection. For an example, as well as a helpful overview of
many such accounts of redemption, I would recommend J.D. Weaver’s book, The Nonviolent Atonement (Eerdmans,
2001). One way to counter such
objections—the approach I have taken in my recent book, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross (Baker Academic, 2004)—is to
focus on the human nature of Jesus and to explain why it is that the Son of
God had to be truly human, and why it is that God used the suffering of the
human Jesus to deal with law, sin, and death. The result is, naturally, a
focus on God saying “no” to sin; on God drawing the necessary boundaries
against the power of evil; on God’s wrath against sin; on God punishing human
transgression of his will. There is a sense in which this emphasis is right.
But it also has its limits: boundaries in and of themselves are not enough.
Punishment in and of itself is meaningless. And anger and wrath by themselves
turn demonic. We need to remember that in God they are always the outcome of
and the instrument toward something much greater: “God demonstrated his own
love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom
5:8). “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for
us” (1 John 3:16). Any talk about redemption ought to be an exploration of
the mystery of the love of the triune God in and through the cross of Christ. Hans Urs von Balthasar
(1905-88), the great Catholic theologian, comments that it is in Christ “that
God breaks forever all the ‘wisdom’ of the world by the ‘folly’ of his love
which chooses human beings without reason, by his entering into the chaos of
the history of humanity, by his bearing the guilt of his lost and fallen
creatures. This incomprehensible love of the God who acts in the event of
Christ raises him far above all the incomprehensibilities of philosophical
notions of God ….” Even when we encounter love in our world, explains Balthasar, we are unable to define it. Divine love, therefore, is utterly
incomprehensible. “Where it is genuine it transcends in its sovereign freedom
every why and wherefore. It has its necessity only in itself. It can be
encompassed by no concept. Even more, the ground of the absolute divine love
outstrips immeasurably all human thought” (The Von Balthasar Reader [Crossroad Herder, 1982] 186). What this implies is that the
church’s rule of faith—the doctrine of the Trinity—ought to be the
starting-point, the guide, and the end of a true theology of redemption. It is precisely the
bracketing, and at times the denial, of trinitarian theology that renders the
objections to the cross as divine violence persuasive. When a narrative
approach does not receive metaphysical support by means of trinitarian
theology, it is hard to see how the cross is not an instance of divine child
abuse. What this means is that objections to traditional atonement models as
sanctioning divine (and human) violence tend to go hand in hand with
objections to classical trinitarian thought. The formulas of
Nicene-Chalcedonian christology, Weaver insists, “assume Greek philosophical
categories and a world picture of a hierarchical universe” (Nonviolent Atonement, 92). The
“abstract categories” of “humanity” and “God” have allowed the church “to
accommodate the sword and violence.” Only if we take the narrative of Jesus’
life as key will we end up rejecting violence, insists Weaver. There is
nothing either in Nicea (trinitarian theology) or in What is particularly
striking about Irenaeus’ approach is that for all his emphasis on the
biblical drama and the historical narrative, he is at pains to ground this story—not in human rationality,
to be sure, but in a theological metaphysic. That metaphysic is one that
looks remarkably trinitarian. It is also a theology in which the incarnation
is an expression of the very heart of God. God’s eternal plan of the
incarnation provides the model, as it were, for his creation of human beings.
The Word of God is the eternal template for the creation of human beings.
That eternal template only gets an imperfect and initial embodiment in the
creation of Adam and Eve, and gets its full realization in the incarnation of
the eternal Word of God. Thus, the one who retraces Adam’s existence is the
eternal Word of God become flesh. If we bracket Nicea and But what happens when we
open our horizons and adore the trinitarian mystery? Then we see the eternal
Logos in loving obedience to the Father taking on human flesh, and as the
second person of the Trinity in human form retracing the story that we messed
up. Nobody wants to worship a divine child abuser. That is exactly why the
Christian tradition has always maintained the necessity of a trinitarian
metaphysic, which allows us to see the eternal bond of love as the origin of
God himself taking on human suffering and death. This principle, that the
eternal plan of the triune God is to “produce a community of union between
God and man,” as Irenaeus puts it, is one that we find reflected in each of
the main branches of traditional atonement theology. Each of these models
goes back to the principle of recapitulation which, in turn, is grounded in a
trinitarian metaphysic. St. Irenaeus links the recapitulation of the eternal
Logos with the Christus Victor model, which looks to Christ’s life, death,
and resurrection as constituting victory over sin, Satan, and death: “[Christ]
has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both
waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led
us away captives in Adam …” (Against
Heresies V.21.1). Christ has gained the victory. “How can anyone enter a
strong man’s house and carry off his possessions,” Jesus asked the Pharisees
in Matt 12:29, “unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his
house.” Irenaeus interprets this to mean that if Satan is the strong man,
Christ has come and tied him up. He has defeated Satan and set the captives
free (V.21.3). How is it that Christ ties up the strong man? What does the battle with Satan, sin, and death, look like? This question brings us to the satisfaction and the moral influence models. When the charge of “violent atonement models” is brought up, it is often particularly the Anselmian satisfaction model (along with the later Calvinist modification of penal substitution) that is looked at with suspicion. This model emphasizes satisfaction of divine wrath, payment of debt, sacrifice for sin, and judicial vicarious punishment, with Christ taking the place of the sinner. How can such a model possibly be an expression of love? Surely, this is a tit-for-tat kind of theology or, putting it in a slightly more sophisticated manner, an economic exchange model. To be sure, it is important to remember that the satisfaction model is not meant to serve on its own. It is part of a much greater and more encompassing mystery. When evangelical theologians acknowledge the reality of God’s wrath or the
necessity of divine punishment, they do need to remember that God’s wrath and
punishment are not ultimate categories, but are realities that result from
the much deeper reality of God’s love. That said, both “economic exchange”
language (debt, purchase, price) and “economy of law” language (curse, wrath,
punishment) have obvious biblical backing: “You are not your own; you were
bought at a price” (1 Cor 6:19). “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the
law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). It is true, of course, that
exchange economies can be selfishly capitalistic and that a focus on our
juridical obligations to God can result in a de-personalizing of that
relationship. Nonetheless, God’s relationship with us is not one-sided. It is
not just about God giving himself
to us. Relationships are always exchange relationships, because it is love
that makes the world go ‘round. It is only when we commodify or juridicize
these relationships, that we have a problem. Exemplarist or moral
influence theories of atonement, usually traced back to Abelard (1079-1142),
have often been critiqued for their emphasis on the humanity of Christ and
for reducing Christ to a mere example to be followed by individual believers.
These are indeed legitimate risks
of moral influence theories, as the history of the nineteenth-century Liberal
school of theology illustrates. The moral influence tradition always runs the
risk of anthropocentrism. Attention can easily be diverted from Christ to
ourselves. Then, indeed, we may question: Are we not simply valorizing
suffering, violence, and abuse, telling the victim that they should imitate
the suffering Jesus? When we see in Christ’s suffering the obedient love of
the eternal Son of God, however, then to share in his suffering means to be
taken up into a divine company—into the ecclesia,
the body of Christ here on earth. Then we are, as Balthasar puts it,
co-crucified, along with Christ (Mysterium
Paschale [Eerdmans, 1993] 134-36). Then we say with Atonement expresses the mystery of trinitarian love. Balthasar insists
that God himself entered into our world and into our suffering, even while
conveying his wrath and punishment in the cross. Redemption, explains
Balthasar, is truly the act of God’s Son as “God-man”: “Who, apart from him
would have the ‘power to lay down (his) life, and power to take it again’
(John 10, 18)? Who would have the power to die ‘not for the nation only’
(which the martyr in his selflessness could also do) but also to ‘gather into
one the children of God who are scattered abroad’ (John 11, 52), and so to
found the true By Hans Boersma, J.I. Packer Professor of Historical and Systematic
Theology, Regent College. |
©1998,
2005 Catalyst Resources
If
you have problems viewing this site please e-mail webmaster@catalystresources.org.