atonement

Atonement in the Gospel of John

The atonement theory of John might be described, from the prologue, with its echoes of Genesis, as new creation. “In the beginning” of Genesis repeated in John ties together creation and redemption. The “it is finished,” pronounced from the cross, brackets the ministry of Jesus (his life and death), within the first and final words of creation, so that from the tree of the cross there is a planting of a new tree of life. In chapter 16, Jesus describes this new life springing from death as on the order of birth pangs. He describes the lamenting surrounding his death as giving way to an unending joy (16:22). Throughout the Gospel, the life that is imparted has this same quality – it cannot be disrupted or despoiled by death (darkness cannot overtake this light), as it is a life that has overcome death.

In chapter one, with its depiction of the first week of Jesus’ ministry and the calling of a new humanity, maybe this new creation is more of a recapitulation; something on the order of Paul’s depiction in Romans five of the second Adam becoming the head of a new race, in which life, and not death, is the controlling factor. These two Adams though are not separate but conjoined even in Irenaeus’ description (the originator of recapitulation). What was begun in the Adam of the dust is completed in Adam of the Spirit. As Irenaeus describes it, the two Adams are on a continuum: “For never at any time did Adam escape the hands of God, to whom the Father speaking, said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.’” So what was begun in the first Adam is completed in the second: “And for this reason in the last times, not by the will of the flesh, nor by the will of man, but by the good pleasure of the Father, His hands formed a living man, in order that Adam might be created after the image and likeness of God.”[1] Though Irenaeus describes his theory as recapitulation, this speaks not so much of a redoing as a finishing. Maybe it is best described as creations completion.

If there is a singular theological point to chapter two, the temple cleansing pointing to Christ as ordering the true cosmic temple, heralded by the wedding supper (of the lamb) and the new wine of a new age, proleptically offered up at Cana, the singular point might fit the theory of Christus Victor (Christ’s defeat of sin death and the devil). There is direct reference to the violent destruction (crucifixion) of Jesus, which inaugurates the new temple/cosmic order: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (2:19). This Christus Victor motif, fits with Jesus’ depiction of “being lifted up” and in the process casting out the prince of this world and dragging all people to himself (12:32). The emphasis though, is not so much on what is defeated, overcome, or set aside, as upon temple construction and a new order of life.

This cosmic vision is made personal, if not individualistic in the next two chapters with the discussion with Nicodemus and the woman at the well. Once again there is direct reference to the death of Christ, but in this instance the cross is depicted as therapeutic or curative. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life (3:14-15). This is not exactly “the hair of the dog that bit you” but it is a reordering of life in which the sting of death is accounted for. The cross, like the bronze serpent, is an antidote to death through trust in the cure or the life that God offers. There is the same lifting up as in chapter 12, but in this instance the focus is upon the individual believer rather than a universal humanity. While Jesus appropriates the sign of Moses, he is also claiming, with his “no one has ascended to the father” (3:13), that he is greater than Moses (as well as Enoch and Elijah, claimants of heavenly ascent) as he says they have not ascended, but only he has ascended. The ascent seems to be only through being lifted up, and none of them qualify. None of them have conquered death and none of them have access to the power of eternal life which defeats death.

The lifting up through death qualifies the nature of the life that Christ offers. This is echoed and stated explicitly in the story of the man by the Sheep Pool in chapter 5. The paralyzed man can find no “human” to help him into the healing waters. Christ tells the man to “rise” (5:8) and to take up his bed, bringing on the condemnation of the authorities, who claim that both Jesus and the man have broken sabbath laws. Though no resurrection has yet occurred in John, Jesus treats the miracle as on the order of resurrection: “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes” (5:21). He is making divine life available through his “work” as he presumes to demonstrate in the miracle unfolding as part of sabbath work. This healing is on a continuum with his rising into new life and in this seventh day of redemptive work (the ongoing completion of creation) the life of God is fully given and death defeated.

Death though, is not a singular thing in John, as it may be the means of access to life – as in the seed that is planted which produces new life through its death (John 12:24) or it may be the wrong kind of death, even if it is of the sacrificial kind. The death of betrayal describes not only Judas’ suicide from despair but Peter’s willingness to betray the way of Christ by killing. The two betrayers are set side by side, and all of the apostles seem to be represented in their respective stories. At the foot washing, the particular dirt which they all share is not simply that of Judas, but of the apostolic spokesman Peter. Their two stories of betrayal unfold from this point. Judas sells out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but Peter also involves himself in betrayal.

As he testifies after the foot washing, he is willing to lay down his life (13:37), and as it turns out, he is willing to lay down the life of as many as he can kill in fighting for Jesus. Before this, he is portrayed as attempting to prevent Jesus’ death, and Jesus identifies Peter (as he did Judas) with Satan: “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s” (Matt. 16:23). This misdirected following, and misoriented willingness to kill and die, gives rise to Peter’s denial of Christ (18:15-27). Peter’s betrayal may be of a different order than that of Judas but is it somehow more acceptable? Or is his attempted homicide more acceptable due to our sense that killing for Jesus is more socially respectable than betrayal for greed. Isn’t Peter also a potential suicide when Jesus finds him and restores him through his three-fold demand for love displacing his three denials? The point is, there are many ways to die, but there is only one form of dying that is salvific.

As Jesus had already warned Peter, the one who would prevent him from facing death is the devil, and ultimately, in his manner of death Jesus takes on death and the devil. However, the lifting up on the cross, the lifting up in resurrection and ascension, is also, as explained above, the lifting up associated with his healing. As he describes in the most explicit terms after his healing of the man by the pool, he has life within himself, like the Father: “For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself” (5:26). Resurrection, healing, therapy, making whole, are all facets of the life he gives. As Jesus says in the Apocalypse, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades (Revelation 1:17–18). Christ’s passage through death, his becoming dead, opens up the “risen” quality of life which is divine life. He shares in the quality of life of the Father, in that they both have life in themselves and are the source of life, but this is a life realized through his death.

The whole of the book of John may seem to offer too many sides to the saving work of Christ to call each a facet of salvation, but this is the writer’s description of his purpose: “these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (20:31). The life he gives is made evident in his healing ministry. Those paralyzed are raised up, those who are blind are enabled to see. Jesus heals where life is defective and provides sustenance where life is short. There is a cosmic theme in Jesus’ identity as the Logos behind creation and in his identity as true temple. This cosmic salvation is inclusive of individual orientation, and there is consistent depiction of life, new life, spiritual life, and the accessing of this new life through a specific and individual reorientation to death. Atonement or redemption cleanses of death through life, it heals, it is spiritually therapeutic, and it resolves the problem of desire. At the cosmic and individual level, death is displaced with life. This might be called new creation, recapitulation, Christus Victor, or simply creation completion.

[1] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.1.3.

The primary human problem is not, as John Calvin portrayed it, the wrath of God. It is not as Anselm pictured it, that God’s honor is impugned by the breaking of the law. The biblical focus is not on future punishment in Gehenna nor is it that some necessary punishment is required to satisfy or propitiate God. Neither God nor his wrath, nor his punishment, nor his righteousness, nor his law is the problem. God is not the problem. Sin and evil are the problem, but the confusion concerning law, righteousness, punishment, etc., is in how each of these relate to the definition of this primary problem. We all recognize the destructiveness, violence, and harm we call evil but what is this thing at its root and how does the work of Christ address this root problem?

Paul sums up the biblical depiction of the anatomy of sin as the reign of death (Ro 5:14). However, even to say that death is the primary problem may miss that sin and death cannot be equated – though they are aligned. The emphasis should fall upon the reign of death – the orientation to death included in its “reign.” As Paul subsequently explains, “sin reigned in death” (5:21), so that the reign of death is inclusive of the response to this primary limit. Human mortality, the limits of life, the biological destiny of the body, is not the problem, but the human response to death is the problem. The reign of death (inclusive of the human response) may manifest as political, social, or interpersonal. It may be experienced as the antagonism between the sexes, between races, or tribes, or religions. Or it may be experienced as between the individual and God or the corporate body and God. But again, the manifestation of the problem is not the thing itself.

It is difficult to describe a negative – the negating power of death which we come to embody – which may be why consequences of the problem so often stand-in for the problem itself. The absence of peace (violence), the absence of life (death), the absence of love (hatred), the absence of relationship (alienation), has its punishing effect but to imagine this punishment or wrath is a destiny, a primary attribute of God, or an ontological condition of the universe is to miss the secondary quality of sin and evil. The possibility of the parasite of evil is to be found in the goodness it perverts, the life it destroys, the peace it violates, and the grace it refuses.

Maybe this negativity is easiest to grasp and recognize at the corporate level. It is on the order of the image of the idol – that which is essentially nothing invested with supreme importance. The idol marks the spot where nothing would be transformed into an absolute something and yet it is also the point of absolute frustration and desire. The idol never gives up its secrets, never makes immanent the promised transcendence, but it stands as an impossibility to achieve what is desired.

Many things can serve in place of the idol: money in the modern economy is a purely imaginary value as it signifies no actually existing entity and yet it marks the supreme value in capitalism; nationalism requires continual human sacrifice so as to ensure freedom and to lend it final substance; modern democracy or even pop culture distills the acclamation of the crowd into a glory or “power” which is a palpable (non) existence and ultimate reality. Each object is not an actually existing thing and yet it marks the final goal, the ultimate value, or what people “live” to attain. This living death holds out its impossible object of desire as the true source of life, substance, or existence. Maybe this is easy to understand, and in the understanding, there is already the recognition that this negativity is a delusion – this proposed “knowledge of good and evil” never gives the god-like life it promises.

What is more difficult is our personal and individual participation in this structure. The ultimate incomprehension must pertain to how the object of desire can be one’s own image (the self-image and the idolatrous image are the same Hebrew word). This interior logic reverberates and confounds so that it is no easy task to describe how the pursuit of self (saving one’s life) is actually the loss of life, but this is the theme of the New Testament.

Usually, Paul will pair the negative with its positive element, so that we understand alienation through reconciliation, hostility through peace, etc. In Romans 7, however, Paul sustains a prolonged description of the dynamic of sin without appeal to its opposite. The negative force, from within this sinful perspective, bodies forth in an unreality, an un-birth, an “essence” which is the place between two antagonistic laws or two parts of the self. These two laws, one centered in the mind and the other centered in the body, create the struggle which causes Paul to cry out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7.24).

This wretched ego (“I”) arises with a lack of self-consciousness and only becomes gradually cognitively aware as part of a negative process (there are no cognitive verbs in 7:8-11). The ego makes its appearance only in coming up against, or in resistance to, the law, but this law is not an externally imposed force. Subjectivity arises as subjection to a force within, so that it is not mere subjection to an exterior authority. It is self-subjection, such that one part of the self stands opposed to another part of the self, so that the struggle for existence is from out of a not yet existent reality.

In the Freudian picture, the ego emerges from and continues to be partially situated in the id (the place of drives and the unconscious), which may be a complicated way to say the ego is an imaginary construct – a fiction. But it is a fiction which one would make true; it is an imaginary entity one would give birth to. The subject takes itself as an object and this object needs to be established, needs to be brought to life, or given substance. The self as object must be brought into oneness as there is a failure to completely be the self. Self-difference or self-objectification must be overcome, yet this self-antagonism is the very definition of self-experience.

All of this simply articulates the feeling of incapacity inherent to the ego. The self is its own symptom, the primary mental illness in being human. As in Genesis 3, the ego becomes an articulate consciousness only as the center of fear and shame, as if it is loss and death incarnate. Alienation not only marks the ego; the ego is this alienation. It is a purely negative entity – an absence which would be made present.

One way of approaching this negativity is by recognizing the impossibility put upon the self in the prohibition of desire in Romans 7:7. The command not to covet seems to allude to the tenth commandment of the Decalogue, but the question is why Paul shortens it so that the objects of desire named in the Law are absent? The original commandment has a fairly exhaustive list of things that are not to be desired, but desire itself is not forbidden. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exod. 20.17). But as Paul pictures his discovery of the commandment, he comes upon it too late. “You shall not desire” causes what it forbids.

Paul formulates v. 7 in such a way that both the prohibition in the Garden and the Law of Sinai are echoed but these laws are not inherently problematic. They do not necessarily generate their own transgression. Yet in Paul’s description, sin and law (at 7:7) have already been fused in an obscene or perverse desire. As he puts it, desire is the force of sin as it takes control: “sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind” (7:8).

Paul’s shorter version of the command lends itself to being readily applied to two alternative distortions of the law, in pursuit of either good (zeal for the law) or evil (transgressive desire), but these two generate their opposite – and this is Paul’s point. The more zeal the more desire and the more desire the more zeal. One can try to gain life through the commandment (zeal for the law) but one’s zealous desire is already a transgression.

Forbidden desire literally isolates the letter of the law or a portion of the command (which Paul explains elsewhere is death dealing). It is as if “Kill” is isolated from “Thou shall not.” Covetousness is isolated from particular objects and from the intent of the law. Sinful desire reduces the law, voided of its context and purpose, to a deadly letter which prompts the transgression it would forbid. Where the law is sin (7:7), sin will establish the law (7.23).

Doing evil is a means of establishing the good, and doing the good is realized only in its identity with evil – “evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good” (7:21). Paul recognizes throughout that he cannot actually split his mind from his body as he is this mind/body. Nonetheless, one who embodies this law is split in an agonizing struggle of law keeping and transgression: “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (7:19). Paul depicts subservience to this law as a war in which the law of the body is a separate entity or “another law waging war against the law of my mind” (7:.21) as the law divides and pits the self against the self.

The mind/body split is an instance of the inherent antagonism of any dualism. The mind does not and cannot exist apart from the body and the body cannot exist apart from the mind, nor can there be an absolute incomparable difference or there would be no point of comparison. Just as (in the knowledge of good and evil) the evil must inhere in the good and the good in the evil, so too the law of the mind and the law of the body must be an interwoven opposition. The opposed pairs are necessary to one another, so that one side of the pair is in the service of the other.

The imagery is not of possessing (though to embody or possess the law may describe the desire) but of being possessed by a force that kills (ἀπέκτεινεν) and deceives (ἐξηπάτησέν). Paul describes the process as one of being reduced to a cadaver; this alien force found an opportunity or opening (ἀφoρμν) and “came upon me” (λαβoῦσα), reducing him to a site of production (κατειργάσατο) for desire and death. The law of sin has colonized “my members” (7:23), and Paul (“I”) is at war with himself in a losing battle. “Sin came alive” as an animate force displacing the “I” and “I died.”

Paul has already provided the solution to the problem in Romans 6. To die with Christ in baptism is to be joined to Christ and it is to reorient oneself to death and the law. The likeness or form of Christ in his incarnation mediates or makes possible a “joining to” which defeats the death dealing attempt to be joined to the law or to be joined within the self. The idea of being joined or “united with him” is of being “knit together” or being made to “grow together” or to unite as in fusing or healing a wound or to “plant along with/together.” This being “united with his likeness” ends the alienation characterizing sin.

Here the gap is closed between subject/object (the image or likeness of the idol) as there is no gap between the subject and the image of Christ. The alienation is overcome in this likeness or participation in the form or likeness of Christ. The gap within, the gap with God, and the objectifying gap with the world is healed. To die with Christ is to be joined to a form which will bring about a conformity without alienation or objectification. The form of the subject in Christ displaces the form of the subject under the law. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (8.2).

There is a suspension of the alienation of the law and a reorientation to death: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8.1). Paul proclaims victory over the forces of evil that work through the force of law and sin’s deception. The “condemnation” (katάkrima) or the curse (Rom. 5.16-18; Gal. 3.10; Deut. 27.26) is suspended as the orientation to death is displaced by life.

In Paul’s description, sin may be abundant but grace is “super-abundant” (Ro 5:20). “If by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many” (5:15). The reality of God and his grace (his gift of life, peace, and unified wholeness) has the final word.

This is the work of atonement.

Beyond Divine Satisfaction, Penal Substitution, and Christus Victor to a Healing Atonement

If salvation is a harmoniously functioning body (a body “at one” with itself) in which we are united under the head, who is Christ (the thematic picture in the New Testament is of being “in Christ” as part of his body), then the image would seem to also account for the entire movement from damnation to salvation. Sin as discord, disharmony, sickness, or the cancer to be rooted out rules out not only the predominant notions of salvation (salvation from the effects of sin), but the prevailing understanding of punishment, wrath, suffering and damnation. A good doctor wants to get to the root cause of the problem and so too the Great Physician does not simply address our symptoms but the disease disrupting and destroying the body. Our root problem is not the result of sin. Our root problem is sin itself and yet the prevailing understanding is that sin has caused a series of unfortunate events (God’s honor impugned, the wrath of God unleashed, the law broken, the prospect of hell, suffering, etc.) toward which salvation is directed. Yet, none of these are themselves the cancer of sin which Christ destroys and a Christianity solely focused on dealing with symptoms is inadequate and devastating to the Gospel message (the great insight of George MacDonald). A doctor who only treated symptoms and not the disease would be no doctor at all, so too the primary New Testament picture of Christ as the Great Physician is lost in an understanding focused on the effects of sin rather than the problem itself.

The shift of focus onto sin itself explains how suffering, punishment, anger, and damnation are part of salvation as part of the same process. The destruction of sin, something on the order of radiation treatment destroying cancer, might give rise to suffering but to confuse the suffering with the cure would be the worst sort of doctoring. A doctor who insisted on making his patients suffer would be a sadist or psychopath and such a notion is certainly not worthy of God. Suffering is not curative, nor is it a means of meting out justice. It is an odd sort of justice or righteousness which imagines suffering “makes right,” the very point of God’s rightness or righteousness given to humans. Suffering is a symptom of sin and increasing it does not address sin nor satisfy anyone but the sadist. Every sort of suffering is a futility (Ro 8:20), even that suffering to which the creation is subjected in redemption. Suffering does not satisfy God nor justice, any more than suffering figures into the cure for any disease. Suffering may play a part in the destruction of the cancerous sin and one might speak of a doctor punishing a disease or of God destroying sin, but only the worst sort of doctor or judge imagines that punishment or suffering is inherently restorative.

To say God’s honor is restored by extracting a pound of fleshly suffering is already odd, but then to say he punishes someone unconnected to the crime and finds this satisfying, falls short of the goodness of God and in no way addresses sin. Evil is precisely the pursuit of this sort of satisfaction – the pursuit of a human sense of justice. The way we would make things right and what we project onto God is the notion of getting our pound of flesh.

If a theft occurs, punishing the thief does not restore what was stolen, even if it is the honor of God that has been taken (as in Anselm’s picture of atonement). Neither would a good doctor imagine that receiving radiation for his patient will help the cure. A good judge would not presume that punishing someone other than the criminal is justice. Where God is presumed to be satisfied and penalties meted out in his anger, punishment, and inducement of suffering (whatever one makes of it) this has nothing to do with the work of Christ in making people right by incorporating them into his body.

Part of the issue is to specify how and why sin disunites, alienates, and separates (from the self, others, and God). If salvation is a body united, sin is the resistant core, the alienating power, which as Paul depicts is the turning of self against itself. In the corporate body the foot might refuse to be a part of the body because it is not a hand, or the ear might refuse its place as it wants to be an eye (I Cor. 12:15-26), or as in Ro. 7, it may be that the individual experiences this turning against the self as the mind pitted against the body. This violent turn is a taking up of death as if it is life, as the darkened mind is deceived, given over to “lusts of deceit” (Eph. 4:22) so that humans violently turn on one another and themselves (James 4:1-2). The deceit, to which the self-deceived do not have access, is to imagine theirs is a pursuit of life or a lusting after life (being, power, gratification) when the desire itself is death dealing (“sin deceived me and I died” Ro 7:11) as it is alienating and isolating (it is “I” alone in Paul’s description). Sin is interwoven with death as it is always violence against life together; it is always a sin against the body. What would have us be lone rangers, Marlboro men, individualists in the worst sense, is simply that which causes us to take up death into ourselves. Sin is death because it is a turning from life together (in Christ) and life together is the only kind of life there is.

In Christus Victor, Christ defeated sin, evil, and the devil, by resisting the lie in his manner of life (he resists the temptations as a grab for life through material gain or powerful status) and undoing or defeating the lie in his death (death and the devil are made powerful in death resistance or the grab for life), and in exposing the lie in his resurrection (death is not absolute, the grave is empty and emptied of its power). The fruit of this defeat, though, is the emergence of a new form of humanity which puts on Christ (in his life, death, and resurrection). In this way, the law of sin and death is displaced by the law of life in the Spirit. The defeat of evil and the overcoming of death must be combined with all of the positive atoning (at one-ing) or incorporation into his body through the Spirit.

The gift of the Spirit is life, shared life, and all of the gifts of the Spirit are aimed at promoting this communal reality. These gifts are not bottled separately so that we have the Spirit apart from being in community. The Spirit indwells us communally. There is no such thing as a private gift of the Spirit. The entire point of exercising a gift is for the community, whether that of the body of Christ or participation in the intra-Trinitarian community. God’s grace is channeled to us in community or not at all.

The whole point of grace, gifts, indwelling Spirit is to bind us together. God does not care about individual souls drifting in isolated units up to heaven any more than God cares about torturing individual souls forever so that he might delight and find satisfaction in their suffering. The entire problem of sin is that we are cut off from God and others and the whole point of salvation is to bring about incorporation into the body of Christ.

Kierkegaard’s Alternative to Hegelian Atonement Theory: Curing the Sickness Unto Death

One of the key confrontations in human thought (philosophy/religion/psychology. . .) occurred in Denmark with the clash between the thought of Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (or SK). In that Hegel is summing up the possibility of human thought (not only the history of thought in philosophy and its various forms but its future) and SK is positing his own Christian understanding as the alternative to Hegel, it might be said that one has the choice of either being Hegelian or Christian.[1] Overlooking for the moment the questions this might raise, I would like to blunder along with the two-fold assumption that Hegel sums up the possibility of human thought and potential under a fallen perspective and SK provides a summation of the Christian diagnosis of the problem (represented by Hegel) and the alternative to Hegel (authentic Christianity). Hegel, in this reading of SK, is not simply wrong but is a summation of how we have all gone wrong and of how Christ addresses the primordial human problem (represented and articulated best by Hegel). At the same time that Hegel offers deep psychological insight gone bad, SK builds upon this insight – providing at once an alternative analysis and resolution. We are sick (with a sickness unto death) and we need to be clear about the diagnosis so as to understand Christ’s intervention into the disease through his death.[2] At the same time, the contention between Hegel and SK is over the meaning of the death of Christ – Hegel’s understanding poses the problem as the cure and SK sees the cross as specifically confronting the Hegelian cure. Continue reading “Kierkegaard’s Alternative to Hegelian Atonement Theory: Curing the Sickness Unto Death”