Leaving Penal Substitution...Whereto Next?

I begin this course and theological investigation by reading a substantial amount of Stricken by God: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ, edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin.  This week's introductory essays, written by the editors themselves, set the stage for the conversation to be had by the various contributors.

Probably the most important thing to be gleaned from these two essays  is vocabulary.  Jersak uses the subtitle of the book, Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ, as the common ground between the books participants.  A nonviolent view of the cross is not a denial that the cross is a violent episode (this would surely be nonsensical), but rather an insistence that at the cross "we are not witnessing God's violence" (Stricken 19).  The term identification refers not only to Christ's incarnation and his taking up humanity, but also his call for us to identify with him.  Or as Paul would put it, "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death" (Philippians 3:10 NRSV).  Finally, the cross must be seen as a victory in which Christ defeats "Satan, sin and death as he confronts and defeats them through his resistance, obedience, and resurrection" (Stricken 19).

From my current theological perspective, I find myself onboard with the project represented in Stricken By God.  However, I feel I must admit that two years ago I would not have been able to even espouse such a vocabulary of the atonement.  Further, I relate to Jersak's confession that in the past I have held the opinion that "one must believe in penal substitution to be a Christian" (Stricken 21).  I can vividly remember discussing such a notion with my old mentor in ministry espousing my frustration that Rob Bell was seriously missing the point of the cross on his The Gods Aren't Angry speaking tour.  This is more than slightly embarrassing to admit as I am stunned by the fact that I managed to come to this conclusion only through hearsay of what said tour was about, and that at the same time I was reading Girard in a class titled "Theories and Practices of Self-Sacrifice," and I apparently failed to make any connection between my academic and theological enquiries.

Jersak, in moving away from his previously held theological convictions, lists some common charges against penal substitutionary atonement.  One objection which interests me greatly is that, "It pits Father against Son" (Stricken 23). The idea of the Jesus taking upon himself God's wrath on the cross while at the same time praying for the forgiveness of those who are crucifying him, has always seemed problematic.  Has the Trinity allowed God to be in different bipolar moods at the same time, with the Father experiencing a serious wrathful episode while the benevolent Son declares pardon?  In the past I remember being taught that at least two actors were in play in the crucifixion: God and humanity.  God sends the son to serve as perfect sacrifice for the world's sin against God.  Humanity (i.e. the Jews and the Romans) conspires against its own creator and kills him for being too moral (or something along those lines; only recently as I have studied political readings of the gospels has the conspiracy to kill Jesus gained any coherence). If indeed God is doing violence against Jesus at the same time as his earthly persecutors, how does it make sense that Jesus prays for their forgiveness?  God forgive them for something you wanted me to do anyway.  Furthermore, if the cross is Jesus appeasing an angry God, then Christ's passion predictions are transformed into mystic fortune tellings about his own demise instead of Jesus' reading the signs of the times and explaining the most likely outcome of his resistance to the temple and Rome.

Michael Hardin's opening essay "Out of the Fog: New Horizons for Atonement Theory," gives a nice overview of some of the options proposed by contributors to Stricken and also by others.  Hardin's foremost desire is to analyze how atonement theories operate in our theological systems and to "discern how atonement theories are influenced by pagan thought forms" (Stricken 57).  His three major categories for such analysis are dualism, scripture, and God's honor. I won't address his analysis of dualism, but I would recommend Brian McLaren's chapter on "What Is the Overarching Story Line of the Bible?" in A New Kind of Christianity for a nice summation of how the Hellenistic dualism of real and ideal has influenced Christian theology.  Much more pertinent (at least in my mind) to a discussion of nonviolent identification and the cross is Hardin's section on scripture.

I cannot express how refreshing it is to see someone admit, "what is missing most in work on the atonement is an exploration of the presuppositions regarding the role of Scripture and the hermeneutic operative in the interpreter" (Stricken 59).  It seems blatantly obvious to state that one's assumptions about the Bible will influence every subsequent reading and conclusion.  To my friends who hold to the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture (who probably aren't reading this blog anyway), I want to say up front: I care deeply about the Bible.  I too derive great meaning in life from the Bible and I do not want to suggest another source to which Christians should turn. One strategy inerrancy and infallibility advocates use is to attack the character of those who would question their hermeneutic with accusations of laziness (You just want an easy way out.) or collusion with some more "worldly' influence.  Against such accusations I would simply say: Stop!  No one is impressed by how much you trust the Bible.

A friend of mine once suggested that an infallible bible is to Protestantism what the immaculate conception of Mary is to Roman Catholicism.  That is to say that both groups desire an unblemished source for their picture of God.  For this reason, I agree with Hardin's assertion that, "Jews and Christians don't need a perfect Bible; the perfect Bible will ultimately be distorted as myth" (Stricken 60).  In this assertion based on mimetic theory, "myth" refers to stories that are predicated on the guilt of the victim and the justification of the community's right to retribution.  If the Bible is meant to be read as a self-evident, perfect document, then it can be (and has been) easily interpreted to meet the needs of the violent systems we live in.  However, if scripture is self-critical it will be much more difficult for it to be co-opted by those looking for justification for their own agendas.  For instance, if part of the Old Testament is a story about good kings (namely David and Solomon) and bad kings (namely Ahab), then one could surmise that in order to rule over people one must simply imitate the good kings and avoid the mistakes of the bad kings.  If instead the Bible is portraying an anti-king (or anti-empire) agenda where the line between good and bad kings is blurred, then it presents a problem to anyone trying to justify their authority on scriptural grounds (they will of course try, but their justifications will be more easily opposed).

The question remains, "How does this relate to theologies of the cross and atonement?" Hardin puts it best writing that, "a text that is self-critical allows us as humans to hear another voice besides the prevalent, prevailing and dominating voice of the gods of human culture" (Stricken 60).  Following this line of thought, I would assert that in scripture we do not see Jesus as the fulfillment of the sacrificial system, but the abolishment of it.  I sometimes worry that Christians do not understand how quotidian sacrifice systems were in the biblical world.  If in fact Jesus is the propitiation for humanity's sins, taking upon himself the wrath of God, Christianity is in fact no different than many of the sacrificial religions of its day.  If this is the case, then Christianity might actually be worse.  Given the choice between sacrificing a human or sacrificing a virtually infinite amount of sheep, I (even as a vegetarian) would hope we would always choose the sheep.  Michael Hardin quotes Mark Heim who reminds us, "The cultic altar still defined sacrifice in terms determined by the model of founding murders" (Stricken 63).  The Bible does not present a cosmology based on Marduk's murder of Tiamat, but of the Creator God lovingly bringing all things into being and declaring them "good."

Hardin's discussion of God's honor does a nice job in breaking up the idea that the cross was "merely" a human plot to execute Jesus.  He writes, "To say the cross is merely the result of the evil plot of human beings is like saying the genocide in Darfur or the Balkans or the Holocaust is merely the result of an evil plot" (Stricken 67).  One contention often heard is that only penal substitutionary atonement takes sin seriously.  I would offer that this thesis is based far more on the human desire for retribution than on a concern for God's honor.  What happened to Jesus was deplorable, but we must not superimpose our own systems of justice onto it. On the cross we witness Jesus' forgiveness and the resurrection confounds all expectations (not only because it is unexpected for a man to rise from the read) by being the great act and promise of God's blessing.  Hardin notes that, "If God were retributive, then the resurrection would have been the terrible apocalypse of Jewish eschatology, the place of reciprocal retaliation for killing Jesus" (Stricken 71).  Instead, "By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading" (1 Peter 1:3-4).  Man's worst action leads to his greatest blessing.