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Death of Jesus: Part 4 of 4

// October 30th, 2008 // church, collected thoughts, theology

Obviously the metaphor of Christus Victor was born out of the context the early Christian church found itself in, facing directly into an unprecedented barrage of persecution. It was shaped by the struggles they were facing and the cultural context in which it was born. These early Christians were giving imagery and metaphor to help them articulate their fundamental belief that through Christ they had been reconciled to God.

This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.

This idea was first articulated in the 11th century by Anselm of Canturbury in what he called Satisfaction theory. You can feel the 11th century in the language. God has been offended or insulted and he demands satisfaction. I can almost see God slapping me in the face with his white glove before drawing his rapier and declaring, “on guard”.

The major theme though is that the price for our mistakes or our sins, if that language is still meaningful to you, is too high for us to pay on our own. The idea of the connection between death and sin has a rich history. It is first developed in the language of the Old Testament. The high priest of the Jews would sacrifice a spotless lamb every year as a payment for the sins of the people. When Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God in the scriptures he is being compared to that picture. Even beyond that one symbolic moment each person was required to provide sacrifice to atone for their transgressions. The picture of death in those sacrifices was meant to continually remind people of the very serious and consequential nature of their personal decisions. This time though, God himself is making the sacrifice for us. The spotless lamb is pictured in the sinless man, his death a covering or atoning sacrifice for our mistakes.

This picture of the atonement is incredibly important because it shows us the significance of the choices both that Jesus makes on our behalf and of the choices we make for ourselves as we choose or choose not, to live the life we were intended for.

The danger is that sometimes this becomes the only picture we talk about in less rooted Christian traditions and without the multiplicity of lens through which to see the mystery of God’s atonement our language becomes incomplete, starts to break down and becomes open to criticism or even ridicule.

This picture of substitutionary atonement while, very important can become unhelpful. Picture this metaphor in a slightly different, albeit crude, context.

One day a father is sitting inside his living room watching television, enjoying his day off when a baseball comes crashing through the window shattering the serenity of the moment and the glass of the window. The father is enraged by what has happened and storms out the front door of his house, down the steps and onto the lawn, where he can see the neighborhood kids playing in the street. He demands to now who threw the ball through his window. One of the boys puts up his and hand and admits to the accident. The father calls to his son who is playing with some other kids in the backyard and proceeds to spank him in front of everyone until he feels his anger subside. He then tells his son to go back to playing in the backyard, tells the kids across the street that all is forgiven and goes back inside to finish watching his show.

This is not the picture that substitutionary atonement is trying to convey. However, without the balance of our other metaphors it can start to look suspicious to someone on the outside looking in. Substitutionary atonement is not about cosmic child abuse, a slavishly legalistic deity or even divine courtroom. It is a picture of the personal responsibility each of us have for our actions and decisions and of the great lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us back no matter how far we have strayed from what we were intended to become.

Jesus saves us by experiencing the consequences for each of our mistakes.

Mosaic
Humanity made at one with God. You and I, able to sit down again, with our God. All of creation reconciled to its creator. This is a picture that is bigger than my personal salvation, although it is that too. My journey toward God is part of a story that encompasses all of history and all of creation. Personal choices, eternal truths, environmental realities and social contexts, all of these brought back into alignment with God. This is why all of these pictures are important for us. When we speak of the atonement we are talking about the mystery of the universe, we are talking about THE story of everything. The way in which all of these different pictures or lens or metaphors interact is what gives this story its incredible magnitude, depth and beauty.

Let me go back one last time to a quote from CS Lewis
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

It’s important for us to try to come to an understanding of this story. However in that attempt we need to keep some sense of mystery there. The atonement is so big and so important that my fear is any attempt we might make to have it appear easy or concise will necessarily lose some of the significance. At the same time, an idea as central to our faith as this, can’t be ignored or left alone. It is something that calls each of us to continually come back to it, to study it, to marvel at it, to be thankful for something so beautiful in our lives that we will never be able to completely frame it. The truth is, the atonement is all of the ideas we’ve looked at and in some sense it is none of them. It is simply the mystery that God has offered each of us the place of at-onement. All of the ways we talk about that idea simply add to the beauty of what that means. To finish I go back to where we started. All of these ideas need each other. You can’t talk about the death of Jesus without taking about his life and you can’t talk about his resurrection without talking about his death. So when we look at the ideas around the atonement we need to realize that we can’t talk about his taking our place unless we talk about his influence on our lives and we can’t about his victory unless we talk about his sacrifice.

It’s in the interplay between all of these myriad ideas that we find something of what it his death means for us, that in all these ways we are saved we are saved by Jesus.