Many commentators presume that in Romans (7:7 ff), Paul is repeating the Edenic scene of the fall in Genesis 3, and is demystifying the story, explaining that which animates sin, or that which gives it a speaking role, is a deception in regard to the law (the role of the Decalogue is also presumed to be proleptically contained in the original prohibition). He displaces the serpent with sin, repeating throughout the events of the fall, so that “the serpent deceived me” (Gen. 3:13) becomes “sin deceived me” (Rom. 7:11) and the deception regards the 10th commandment on coveting, which serves to sum up the previous 9 commandments, while also centering in on the point of the original prohibition in Genesis. Covetousness or desire of the other, be it God in Genesis or the neighbor in Exodus (20:17), is the root problem behind sin’s deception.
Paul locates this Edenic event in “I” and describes the unfolding of death, not simply as physical demise, but as an internal split, in which he is pitted against himself, incapacitating his will in a psychological and spiritual bondage (7:14). He sums this up as “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (7:11). The “promised life” is death, which in the lie is the special knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) or the law enacted. The attempt of the “I” to possess the commandment, is turned back on the subject, and sin-possessed (λαβοῦσα) “I”. Where sin lies dead in Romans 7:8 apart from the law, under the law the “I” lies dead in v. 9 and sin becomes an animate force in the exchange.
Paul then goes on to explain how it is that Christ addresses this situation, defeats it, providing life in place of death dealing desire and deception, summed up as, “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). What he has described in the shorthand of the early Church Fathers is dubbed “Christus Victor,” the defeat of sin, death, and the devil. It is also described, in a slightly different image, as “recapitulation” (as in Romans 5 Christ retraces and reverses the steps of human history, succeeding where Adam failed).
Paul’s description by-passes a Devil centered atonement, but unfortunately subsequent explanations of Christus Victor will focus on the serpent and the Devil in a manner that will give them a key role, and then in legal theories of the atonement, though the key role of the Devil is displaced, the law will begin to play the same central function. The Augustinian, Anselmian, and Calvinist, readings will mystify the problem of sin in original sin, in legalistic notions requiring restored honor, or a punishing payment, missing where and how this dynamic unfolds. Paul’s demystification of the serpent and the law, locates the dynamic of sin in a process of reification and personification (either a demonizing personification or a reification of the law) that names the mystery of sin as enfolded in its blinding deception. Sin is not a mystery but a system, with its own logic and structure, and in the explanation of its structure lies the explanation of its propagation.
Early explanations of Christus Victor and then legal theories, fail to locate sin, as in the woman’s and Paul’s complaint – “the serpent/sin deceived me” (Gen. 3.13; Rom. 7.11), which are held together in the “I” as an existential self-identification within Adam or humankind. The failure is within humanity (corporately and individually), and is in a particular dynamic, which projects, reifies, and destroys. In the deception the law, language, the symbolic, is a means of establishing the self, but it is the self that has become the sight of a destructive desire. The deception produces an inverted economy of exchange in which life is gained through death, which is the pull of this desire.
The Focus on the Devil
The early Church Fathers, in their working out of Christus Victor, are still bearing the weight of what René Girard refers to as “mythological crystallizations” in notions of a personified Devil whom God tricked in Christ, such that there is not a complete exposure of the centrality of desire and its role in reifying, personifying, and projecting. As David Dawson describes, there are still notions of a contest, a “quasi-sportive or pugilistic event” in which Satan deceives humanity and absconds with God’s people, and Christ is able to trick the Devil and win them back. These explanations, in focusing on the Devil, miss the role of desire, as present even in their own explanations. “All the strategies of scandalized desire are on full display, from the Devil’s envy of Eden’s blessedness and inveiglement of human credulity, to the feigned inadvertence of Christs exposure to death and his rival’s homicidal covetousness, which he outfoxes.”[1]
The story is at once mythical and yet descriptive of human failure and conflict. The violence, the reification of death and its power, the fundamental deception as containing the self, reduces Christ to a special version of the scapegoat. Dealing in death as if death is the divine fulcrum, by which to leverage power, is still in place as the ground of society. The victims’ death is still required and divinely-willed, which “occludes the violent role of the human community in the exchange of a merely human victim to save its own skin. That human beings play a passive role in Christus Victor, first as dupes, then captives set free, means that little is revealed of their culpability, which pales in comparison with the malevolence of Satan, the undisputed agent of destruction.”[2] God and Christ are made out as deceivers, with the incarnation a divine hoax played on the Devil. This victim, Christ, is not so innocent, and then in a penitential economy all of the blame will be legally placed on Christ, with both systems missing the point.
The Focus on the Law
Anselm of Canterbury may be one of the most sophisticated theologians to attempt an explanation of the atonement, but rather than begin with a biblical explanation (which is not the point of his effort) Anselm provides what he considers an illustration (at the end of which, he says if it is helpful, use it, if not, dispose of it). The problem is Anselm’s explanation is ingenious enough that it will become the standard interpretation of the Western church, and it will be presumed he has concluded the issue, taking him more seriously than he may have imagined. Anselm moves the discussion from Satan, and presumes the primary issue is meeting the requirements of the law.
Like Paul, he deals with human interiority, focusing not on desire but on will (which he equates with a capacity for keeping the law). Will is the vital force that would take the basic equipment of the rational self, and if restored to its proper “rectitude,” could preserve a subject fully present to itself or able to completely remember itself and in rightly remembering itself encounter God. One is enabled to close the gap in the will by restoring God’s honor to him (an honor impugned by breaking the law), by fulfilling the demands of the law, and thus enabling right willing. But only God is able to satisfy the just requirement of the law, and this he did in Christ, closing the gap in the will. Throughout the book Cur Deus Homo, Anselm describes the atonement in terms of repaying to God the honor taken from him by sin, which makes Christ’s death necessary to pay back to God that debt. For Anselm, Christ’s death works according to the logic of law in that the satisfaction demanded by the law is rendered by Christ (but the economy itself is not disturbed or displaced). Though Anselm is not focused on punishment, it is by means of bearing the requirements of the law that Christ pays the debt. Anselm argued without direct appeal to Scripture (though Scripture is assumed throughout his argument), but the power of his argument was such that it affected future biblical understanding of the atonement. Anselm’s theory of divine satisfaction will dominate in the Western Church (Catholic and Protestant) until Calvin’s additions.
Calvin’s basic premise is that the debt owed to God is eternal punishment and only Christ can make this payment. The way in which he reaches this conclusion is an intricate argument about one of the most obscure passages in the New Testament, I Peter 3:18-22 (which I describe here). My summation of his explanation is that he fuses Gehenna (the place of future punishment) and Hades (the place of the dead), and argues that eternal punishment should also be fused with the chastisement of Isaiah 53. Then both of these passages should be moved to the context of the trial and punishment of Christ.
The debt owed no longer pertains to Anselm’s will, but to an eternal punishment, which Christ paid. There is a split in God, not in human will, and God must close this gap. Jesus is pictured as being not only forsaken by God but the object of God’s hatred (as I have explained here). As Dr. Abner Chou describes, “In that death the wrath of God was poured out on Christ, and the darkness exploded. In that instant God cursed Jesus, putting Him in a position of absolute, perfect hatred. God hated Him and desired to make Him nothing.”[3] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman propose that, “God chose to violate His Son in our place. The Son stared into the mocking eyes of God; He heard the laugher of the Father’s derision and felt Him depart in disgust. . . . In a mysterious instant, the Father who loved the Son from all eternity turned from Him in hatred. The Son became odious to the Father.”[4] As Tim Keller put it on Facebook (and quickly revised, due to subsequent criticism), “If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of the Father, out of his infinite love for you, it will melt your hardness.”[5]
As Dawson describes, in Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, and Calvin’s penal substitution, it is as if the role of the Devil is projected onto God, giving us a Janus-faced God, with violence and retribution now part of his character. “The victim is now completely innocent and the people stand fully condemned. But then the God of Christus Victor has also undergone a fearsome transmogrification. The Devil may no longer be a player of any consequence but the polarization of divinity into opposed faces has scarcely been reduced.”[6] Christ is now the victim of the Father, who requires death for his justice, and any notion of divine nonviolence (as in Christus Victor) is relinquished for divine retribution as the expression of God’s justice. Now it is God’s justice and violence from which all require deliverance. To fail to locate “divine violence” within humanity and to project it onto God, loses the exposure of human violence, reification and projection onto God: “This will is the divinized energy of the mob, violence writ large. A more unanimous act of murder could hardly be imagined. Christian soteriology now undergoes a last, unprecedented, and ultimately fatal transformation.”[7]
God needs the persecutors as his instruments so that he might have them kill Christ. The war is within God and “Death now expresses a relation of the divine itself.”[8] God is inherently violent, and death dealing and violence, in turn, are divinized. This is arguably worse than paganism, in that there is no room for human entry into this divine economy. “Rather than opening the flow of trade, this annuls it. The act of violence still discharges itself within the closure of the sacred as answering a divine necessity, and its deflection belongs undeniably to an economy of salvation. This economy is, however, petrified at inception, reduced to a theological symbol.”[9] Calvinism may be the final stage of this failure, in which God only provides symbols, and there is no room for a real-world human transformation, a forsaking of violence and entry into peace.
Paul’s Focus on Deliverance from Deception and Death
In Paul’s summary statement of the human problem, which he calls “the body of death” he locates the problem of sin and death as it has impacted the “I”: Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? (Rom 7:24). The law divides, and sin deploys the law in its deception, creating the exchange of life for a living death. “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (7:25).
Paul’s understanding of the law introduces a series of categories in chs 6, 7, and 8, which demonstrate that the law mediates sin but, in contrast to Anselm’s and Calvin’s understanding, for Paul, the law does not mediate salvation. Salvation destroys the law of sin and death (resulting from the law), and ultimately obliterates any role for Satan in an economy of life and peace. In the conclusion of his letter to the Romans, Paul once again appeals to the image of Genesis (3:15), “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you” (Rom 16:20). The deceiver is destroyed with the sin which animates him.
(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule.)
[1] David Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 78-79.
[2] Dawson, 79.
[3] https://www.adamsetser.com/blog/2015/7/25/the-big-picture-of-gods-mission-a-concise-over[1]view-of-the-entire-bible-by-dr-abner-chou. [June 19, 2018] Quoted from Joshua R. Farris & S. Mark Hamilton, “This is My Beloved Son, Whom I hate? A Critique of the Christus Odium Variant of Penal Substitution” (Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2).
[4] Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, In the Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, [1999] 2015), pp. 184-85. Quoted from Farris and Hamilton.
[5] https://calvinistinternational.com/2017/07/27/tim-keller-the-cross-and-the-love-of-god/ From Farris and Hamilton.
[6] Dawson, 80.
[7] Dawson, 82.
[8] Dawson, 83.
[9] Dawson, 83.