Thinking about Atonement

Hi, Have just been alerted to your site and to the pod cast on Atonement by Mark Baker. Very interesting and I would agree we need new metaphors for this concept,not only do nine old girls need not fear God neither do the rest of us. Christianity is not to be a fear based religion, though some would wonder when you hear the retoric from some fundemental theologians. But I wonder if we do not also need to question just how central this theology is. Perhaps we may look at the cross as the consequences of the proclaimation of God’s kingdom come in Jesus and the retaliation of our community for being displaced from privalage, power and the supression of the poor in body, mind and spirit. God is (not us) ulitamately willing to pay the cost for bringing about the culmination of the “good creation”. The centrality of the gospel for me is the proclaimation of the kingdom not the cross for that only leads us back to penal substition in what ever form you may make it. We are invited to join the kingdom knowing that God has been willing to bring it about and invites us to life in all its fullness.

Take away the cross….take away Jesus. Are you prepared to do that????

The way into the Kingdom is THROUGH THE CROSS!!!

Jesus’ own words:

Matthew 10:38
Matthew 16:24
Mark 8:34
Luke 9:23
Luke 14:27

1 Corinthians 1:17
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

1 Corinthians 1:18
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Galatians 5:11
Brothers, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished.

Galatians 6:12
Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ.

Galatians 6:14
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Ephesians 2:16
and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Philippians 2:8
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!

Philippians 3:18
For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Colossians 1:20
and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Colossians 2:14
having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Colossians 2:15
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Hebrews 12:2
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

It’s interesting to me that when Jesus prayed for his murderers, he didn’t appeal to the Father on the basis of penal substitution. He didn’t say, “Father, forgive them for I am offering myself as a substitutionary sacrifice on their behalf”. He prayed, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The appeal seems to be to a Father who is ready and willing to freely forgive without payment, price, or condition.
Those who hold to the penal substitution view of atonement would say that justice was done at the cross, that God’s wrath was satisfied. They depict God as one, whose anger against sinners can only be appeased through violent bloodshed and death. Someone must pay the price!
I ask you, what kind of earthly magistrate or judge, in a fit of rage against his subjects, would satisfy his anger by violently killing his own son? What sort of father? If such an act were committed by a mere human, we would declare it bazaar. We would think him exceptionally wicked, or profoundly insane. How can we condemn such an act at an earthly level, and yet, when we consider that God did such to his own son, we think it righteous, just, and loving? It is nothing of the sort!
Better it would be to recognize that what happened at the cross was not in fact a great act of justice against sin, but rather the greatest act of injustice and sin ever committed by human kind against the sinless Son of God. It is the pinnacle of sin and rebellion against the creator, the ultimate act of rejection of his kingdom and of his lordship. “Away with him! Crucify him!”, they shouted.
It was these hardened rejecters of Christ for whom Christ himself prayed, “father, forgive them…” It is not possible that the Son, eternally united with the father could pray something inconsistent with the Father’s heart desire and will. The same Jesus who said to the paralytic man, “Son, your sins are forgiven”, said for these depraved and wicked souls, “Father, forgive them”.
Can we not see the clear message of the cross? If God so demonstrate his ready willingness to freely forgive this unsurpassable malevolence and undiluted hatred toward him, will he not also be willing to freely forgive any and all trespasses. The cross is the highest and foremost error committed against God by his creatures, and the cross is the highest and foremost demonstration of his unconditional love for his erring creatures. It is not a confusing message of an angry deity pacified by the killing of his own son. It is a clear message of a loving God who allows himself to be victimized by sinners, in order to demonstrate to them that he is willing to forgive them of their worst possible atrocities against him.
“God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against then, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us, we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

Hey,

Jon and Dale – Let’s not forget that Scripture uses a number of windows to point to particular reality, e.g. there are a number of windows on ‘sin’ just as on ‘recreation’ and its the same with the ‘Cross’.

In that sense I’m with Jon – the message of the Kingdom is central and comes to include both Cross and Christ.

We can comfortably debate what people have made of those realities, especially where and when one particular window is made dominant to the detriment of the others.

In that sense I am for developing new images and metaphors.

But to reject particular windows because ‘they don’t make sense to us’ is to fall into the early modern trap of ‘it don’t make plain sense to us so must be bogus’. In that sense I don’t feel that I agree with Dale. The OT makes it abundantly clear that there is a price to pay for Sin and the NT that it is Christ who pays it.

Though the Cross is humanities greatest error it is Godde’s greatest victory, including ‘example’, ‘victory’ and ‘satisfaction’.

There are a number of windows on the Cross noting the Atonement as: Christ as example to us, demonstration of Godde’s love, demonstration of Godde’s justice, victory over the forces of sin and evil, and as compensation to the Father.

I’ll comment again of listening to the podcast.

Just to say that I’m not arguing in defence of Penal Substitution though I do understand it to faithfully speak on behalf of the events of the Cross.

Admittedly, it is readily preached and understood and caricatured in a distorted manner.

I’m all for finding other suitable metaphors and images but don’t essentially feel like we’ve got to throw this one out.

It seems rather that the problem lies in what we’re using this tool to teach. Where we’re teaching that Godde is against us, and doing so directly or indirectly, then that’s a huge problem.

The OT and NT, IMO, argue that Godde’s war is essentially against Sin and Evil and not against us. The Cross, along with the Father, Son and Spirit’s behaviour, demonstrates that.

If we’re teaching the Cross incorrectly, e.g. teaching people to fear Godde as unfairly against them OR that sin is not really a problem and so every form of behaviour is now acceptable, then we’re out of line.

Mark Baker points out, rightly so, that the challenge in finding images and metaphors lies in their relation to the historical events and to whether they’re conveying these.

We need images and metaphors that exegetically faithful to Scripture rather than eisegetically unfaithful.

Is there a link anywhere to the winners of this competition?

Congratulations Emerging Church – You have managed to not only create another Jesus – another Gospel – You don’t have to feel to proud of yourselves, however – The Jehovah’s Witness did it years ago but tried to keep it quiet – Now, the truth is out that they believe Jesus is the incarnation of Michael, the Archangel>
They want you to think it’s the same Jesus you know— They came to my house for a long time—before I realized their deception—The last time they came, I told them their was a big, pink elephant in the room that no one was noticing. I said to them – we don’t have anything more to talk about because you do not worship the same Jesus that I do. They never cme again. So, I will say to you Emerging Church – you do not worship the same Jesus – I would be afraid of that, if I were you.

If we reject the action of the Father in bringing His just judgement upon His Son at the cross, we are left with an impotent God. It makes no sense to reject penal substitution and then to turn around and say that the cross is God’s greatest demonstration of love in allowing this crime to be committed against Jesus. Both are the Father sending his Son to the cross! If we are so desperate to preserve the niceness of God and to avoid the notion of substitution, we can only say that God had no control over the events of the passion, had no power to stop it, and was only able to step in at the last moment and bring Jesus back from the dead – to patch up the mess we had made. That god may be nice and friendly, but I can’t rely on him to run the universe. The cross was either the sovereign loving gracious and holy action of the Father in giving his Son in our place, or we might as well all become atheists.
PS ‘Godde’??

All of this debate is built on the assumption that language is reliable. No one is throwing out the cross – just reading it differently – as a model for sacrificial love.

If we read this part literally, why don’t read all scripture literally? If we did, we would be doing some pretty horrible things – and they did during the trans-Atlantic slave trades. They took the the hamitic curse literally.

The fact of the matter is, language is problematic. Meaning is obscured by vocal inflection, hyperbole, inside jokes, and the distance of other cultural particulars. And someone will certainly suggest that this is why we have hermeneutics. However, keep in mind that this is still a product of the Modern mind, attempting to extract meaning from texts written at a particular time, for a particular culture, and deals with the abstraction of cosmology.

Shawn

Well in that case, thank goodness for the Modern mind!