"For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly... But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement." Romans 5:6, 8 - 11 The Authorized King James Version
Atonement is such a dicey theological topic, especially for Christianity. In fact this is my second attempt to write a post about it. Why it is so dicey is, in my opinion, that it begs a question that haunts me and, I have no doubt, other thinking Christians:
"Did Jesus have to die for our sins?"
I have no doubt that Jesus was wrongfully killed, and I can certainly understand the temptation to make out of such a tragedy something purposeful, and yet, if its purpose was to forgive the world its sins (a worthy cause) as in atonement for the sins of the world or to pay the debt of sin for the world, who was the payment going to?
If the wages of sin is death, who was paid off? Who or what was satiated by the death of Jesus? God? Satan? Death?
ATONEMENT
In order to understand the quandary, we need to understand "atonement." The Hebrew word, כפר (kaphar), means to atone; as in, to cover over, to pacify, to propitiate. From it comes the Hebrew term we're most familiar with, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, יום םיפורWhat interested me most about this word is how infrequently it is actually used in the Bible. In the Hebrew Scriptures it is used in 92 verses of which 44 verses are found in the Book of Leviticus and 11 verses are found in its neighbor the Book of Numbers. The term is not used in the Greek New Testament. That it finds its way into English translations is because one can infer it, but the term is not specifically used in the original texts. So why do Christians use it?
Here I think we need to rely on historical and hermeneutical context. If one were to rely on defining atonement as forgiveness of sins, then the logic is that atonement appeases God; in that we are powerless against the effects of sin and must appease God to take care of it by turning away from them, covering them, or removing them - a very ancient belief that has managed to stick around.
In an earlier post, I stated that the essential nature of God cannot be offended. I'm going to stick with that assessment. So what brought us to this quandary of sin needing to be atoned? I believe we managed to get there through the differentiating paradigm of religion - of not being able to reconcile the differences we encounter, in the suffering caused by our perceptions of difference between each other, creation, and the God who created all things. We suffer from knowing good and evil; in knowing that something - whatever it is - either has to be right or wrong - good or bad. It sounds so simple, but let's face it, we're obsessed with this adventure of differentiating in the form of discrimination, of judging things and people.
According to Genesis, it is the burden we bear as the "know-it-alls" we have evolved into. By stepping back and looking at the broad spectrum of human history, what we know is that we never feel completely satisfied with or are sure of ourselves or others. This sense of incompleteness, of being different, of lacking certainty, endlessly gnaws at us and made us into the religious creatures we are, clumping around diverse ideological beliefs about who we are, why we're here, where we've been, and where we're headed.
That atonement is a prominent fixture in Judaism and Christianity is the result of finding a logical way out of the perceived hole or holes we find ourselves in, which is identified as sin - the chasm we feel between us and the concept of God as the holy, the righteous, and the complete.
I believe atonement finds it footing in our desire to do something about this divided feeling which is often brought to our awareness when things in our lives get rough and tough. We need a sense that we can do something about the uncontrollable situations we find ourselves in, including, when we perceive things are not right between ourselves and God. We seek power, in order to find a way out. We appeal to the power of God through appeasement in the form of ritual sacrifice.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Book of Leviticus is concerned with Temple Worship and personal cleanliness as a constant state of being worship-worthy under the guise of Moses's instructions on Tabernacle worship. Everything from eating to bodily functions has a ritual attached to it. The Book of Leviticus comes across portraying God as a demanding deity who has no tolerance for screwing up when it comes to acts of worship. Most notably is the story of Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, who used incense in a way not prescribed by God and are summarily killed by God on the spot.
This is not the patient portrayal of God found at the beginning or the end of the Torah, in Genesis and Deuteronomy. Theologically, the Torah does not appear to be linear set of writings. Let me clarify by saying that while there is a historic storyline, the theology of the Torah is highly evolved from its presentation of history. In fact, there are different theologies presented in the Torah. Atonement is a theological perspective that is associated with priestcraft and ritual purity.
Like the Gospel of John in the Christian New Testament, the Book of Leviticus is written during a time of religious crisis for the Jewish people. It was likely written over prolonged period of time extending from just before the destruction of the first Temple to around the fourth century BCE.
Both Leviticus and the Gospel of John engage in a great deal rhetorical finger pointing as to why the first and second Temples are destroyed without actually saying it.
In Leviticus the answer is that the people are not worshipping God properly, that they have defiled the Temple and ritual worship. The Jewish people have also led unclean lives, and there becomes an almost obsessive compulsion towards ritual purity as necessary to be absolved for sins that have corrupted the Temple and led to its destruction. Atonement, in the sense portrayed in Leviticus, is used to appease and appeal to God so that God overlooks, covers, and forgives their many sins and iniquities which, given the number of purity rituals, wouldn't be hard to mount up.
Ritual sacrifice as worship was high theater. It was meant to be dramatic and awe inspiring. Worship as a total sense experience in ritual sacrifice was meant to impress upon the worshipper the seriousness of the situation. While human sacrifice was considered an abomination in Judaism, the fact that the beating heart of a living, breathing animal was stopped, its blood splattered on an altar dedicated to God as a substitute for humans would not have been lost on them.
After all, human sacrifice was not foreign to them. Their neighbors regularly engaged in appealing to their gods through the sacrifice of their own children, and child sacrifice was suspected to have occurred during the reign of Judah's king, Manasseh.
Although atonement is not specifically mentioned in the New Testament, the concept of atonement in Christianity is well established both in doctrine and theology. Jesus becomes the once and for "many" atoning sacrifice for their sins. (Heb. 9:28) This is certainly implied in Johannine scripture, as Jesus is portrayed as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Paul also talks about Jesus dying for the sins of the world. This is understandable given that sacrifice was very much part of worship ritual when the New Testament was being written.
HERMENEUTICAL CONTEXT
Early Christian theology sees the death of Jesus as the final propitiation, appeasement, atonement for humanity's entire body of sin and iniquity (past, present, and future sins). That the word atonement is not specifically found in the New Testament may be due to Greek being unable to find a suitable word to capture this sense of atonement or perhaps that the Greek word interpreted as atonement in English was intended to mean something else entirely. The word that is sometime defined as atonement is ίλάσχομαι, which means forgiveness or in another form as a means of forgiveness.
In studying this word, I found an interesting notation in the "Greek-English Lexicon of New Testament" by Johannes Louw and Eugene Nida which states, "Though some traditional translations render ίλαστήριον as 'propitiation' this involves a wrong interpretation of the term in question. Propitiation is essentially a process by which one does a favor to a person in order to make him or her favorably disposed, but in the NT God is never the object of propitiation since he is already on the side of people. ίλασμός and ίλαστήριον denote a means of forgiveness and not propitiation."
[Greek-English Lexicon of New Testament based on Semantic Domains, by Johannes Louw and Eugene Nida, United Bible Studies, 1989, section 40.12, pg. 504]
This distinction by Louw and Nida is very helpful and telling, which brings me to what I see as a problem in trying to make hermeneutical and historical contexts consistent. To be truthful, other lexicons (ex. Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich) render ίλασμός and ίλαστήριον in terms of propitiation and expiation, but they also acknowledge the fact that they can be translated differently; as in, a means of forgiving sins. Earlier lexicons may do so to bring conformity to how ίλαστήριον was translated in the English translations and the doctrinal teachings of the times. I can understand how a "means of forgiveness" is interpreted as atonement from a historical perspective, but it makes little sense from a hermeneutical point of view; especially, when it is not clear that there is a direct translatable correlation.
What I would bring to bear on this discussion of hermeneutics is that with the historical context of the destruction of the second temple, the meaning of atonement shifted in Judaism where atonement became a matter of the heart that led to a sincere reparation. For example, an act of reparation between an individual and a person offended or wronged by that individual as being pleasing to God who then overlooks the original misdeeds. Ironically, in Christianity, the idea of a physical sacrifice being a necessity for the forgiveness of sins stuck, as in Jesus became the once and for many atonement for their sins.
Christian theology seems to struggle with God's role in the death of Jesus; in that, it doesn't fully explain it and tends to deflect any such questions about it to the realm of mystery. Did Jesus's Father require Jesus to die to appease him or, as it is suggested in some theological circles, did God require it in order to maintain God's righteousness (being consistent with his mandates) while extending his mercy to sinners. I find such explanations in need of an explanation. They simply don't make sense.
The only role I see God playing in Jesus's death is in raising him from it.
CONSISTENCY VERSUS CONSTANCY
There is a great deal of complexity involved in maintaining a consistent Christian theology of atonement that necessitates Jesus having been a willing sacrifice to remove the sins of the world, as paying some cost created by our sinfulness. In recent times atonement has been subjected to a theological makeover. Terms like "atunement" and "at-one-ment" come to mind as a way to lessen the graphic and barbaric implications of a physical blood sacrifice as necessary for the forgiveness of sins and being right with God.
I'm not a big fan of the trendy theological remake of specific terminology in the Bible. I see most remakes an attempt to make the Bible appear consistent in the face of changing theological perspectives. Even progressive theologians who argue against inerrancy are prone to engage in the act of remaking something they find unpalatable in scripture to offer a consistent portrayal of God and God's purposes.
Our attraction to consistency is, in my opinion, a play for control; a way of exercising power over the powerful or the powerless. We want our world leaders to be consistent - to be predictable, to stick to what they say or said, no matter how long ago something was said. If they don't, whatever it is they changed their mind on is considered a flaw, a "flip-flop" In a like manner, we want God to be consistent, to be predictable, to stick to whatever is said in the bible - in the way that one can interpret it.
Consistency was a term I frequently heard in the field I worked in, mental health; as in providing consistent treatment in order to imprint mental wellness on a patient who was considered unpredictable. We want a predictable God, just like we want predictable people, so that we know where we stand and what we can do when things go awry.
As a human rights advocate, I frequently found consistent approaches as diminishing the dignity and individuality of the patient. Trying depict God as a predictable entity that we have a handle on reminds me of the dangers of consistency. At work, I had two quotation on subject of consistency taped above my desk:
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead." - Aldous Huxley
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative" -Oscar Wilde
Consistency gets in the way of perception, of seeing things for what they are and, as Wilde says, it gets in the way of imagination. God is inscrutable. God's ways are not our ways. In the recesses of our reptilian minds, I think the idea of physical sacrifice is desirable because it means we can do something to deflect divine attention from who we think we are.
The problem with Jesus being the atoning sacrifice is that, in the ritual sacrificial the atoning sacrificial victim stays dead - that's the point of atonement - payment is made - and the misdeeds is done. If God required the sacrifice of his child to pay for the sins of the, God reneged on his own requirement that the wages of sin is death by raising Jesus up. It was all just an act. I don't see where this preserves God's righteousness while offering mercy to us sinners. To be frank, I think trying to make the death of Jesus, the atoning sacrifice needed to wipe out the sins of the world is simply poor theology.
Now having said that, am I saying there is no connection between Jesus's death and God forgiving the sins of the world?
No.
What I am saying is that it is poor theology to think that God required Jesus to die in order to forgive the sins of the world. There is another approach to viewing the death of Jesus that has nothing to do with atonement as the means by which God forgives the sins of the world and that means is kenosis, which I believe has also been subjected to an erroneous theological application regarding the New Testament.
The Bible offers a smorgasbord of theological perspectives that differ greatly at times. In fact God is depicted as changing God's mind on several occasions. Having that in mind, I see the concept of atonement as requiring a physical sacrifice an evolutionary step in theology of forgiveness and the practice of worship. In my opinion, it's value is historical rather than functional. As such, I am content to leave atonement as a physical sacrifice or as a human act intended to make reparation for wrongs done to another human and thus pleasing to God without trying to make it something other than that and without turning the death of Jesus into an act of grisly atonement.
By now, if you are a regular reader of my posts, you are aware of my being particular with the certain concepts. Words that are frequently considered synonymous in common usage, I have discovered, are not in theology. For instance, in an English dictionary belief and faith are considered synonymous. By now you know I don't consider them as such. Consistency is shown to be synonymous with constancy. I do not consider them as such in theology.
To illustrate this, allow me to make some observations about science and the pursuit of a unified theory of the universe. I don't think there is anything wrong with looking for a theory that can be consistently applied; that will unlock the mysteries of the universe. The purpose of science is to look for such things, but in my opinion this search is proving that while there appears to be a constancy to the universe, the universe is constantly inconsistent. Likewise, there is a constancy about God that is, in my opinion, inconsistent in application. It has to do with the notion of "God" being what I have referred to as a nominal verb. The universe is still coming into being. God is still being creative. As such, God is love. God is light. The physical properties of the universe appear constant, but their applications may vary given certain conditions. Love and light are constants but change according to circumstances, or as God famously said to Moses, "I will be what I will be."
Both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures offer a different view of what God is looking for in us and in those who worship. Metaphorically speaking, God is looking for a way into our lives, into our hearts, like Abraham and like Jesus. The spiritual reality is that God is, and has, and always will be in our lives, but we are limited in grasping the full immensity, immanency, and intimacy of God's presence. On this side of life we need narratives and high theater to help us wrap our limited senses and our minds around this. This where worship comes in. Worship is that place where we can unload and reconnect in an atmosphere of love, forgiveness, and letting go and letting God, if but for a moment.
In Christianity, atonement and kenosis have a shared application as having happened for our benefit; that our only participation in atonement and kenosis is that we are sinners who have been saved by the blood of Jesus who emptied himself of his divinity to become like us and who atoned for the collective debt our sins have accrued over the centuries. Such atonement, of course, is based on the condition that we believe this narrative to be true, and it may be true.
But I consider what I or any one believes does not make things true - no matter how much I want to believe it. Truth, ultimately, is not a matter of belief but a matter of what is. As such, I feel there is another possible narrative in the scriptures that is just as likely. The other narrative that the Hebrew scripture and the New Testaments offer is that there is a way into kenosis or into a kenotic state connected to worship that gives us a better sense of who God is, who Jesus is, and who we are. Instead of God in the form of Christ coming down to our level, God in Christ is raised up in us, into our awareness by emptying ourselves as Jesus emptied himself of self to become one with God. In my opinion, this is the true nature of worship - the divestiture of self - of the illusion of power. On the surface, that may sound all warm and fluffy, but I contend that it is not; that it has a pragmatic application in theology.
Here's my simple and yet profound take on Jesus and God: Jesus has always been fully and only one of us from the day of his birth to the day of his death, and God has been, is, and will always be part of us from the dawn of creation till its completion or, to put it the other way around, we have been, are, and always will be part of the constancy of God from the dawn of creation till its completion. This is captured in the concept of Christ being the Alpha and the Omega.
In the present application of God's constancy, we are the individual manifestations of God's image. In this sense, death is not curse or the price one pays for sin. As I have indicated in a previous post, death is an end to suffering; suffering (not as physical or mental illnesses or disease) as the result of sin is suffering as a loss of relationship with God and with each other; suffering in seeing life as a toil and unfulfilled desires, suffering as a spiritual despair over unanswered questions as to who we are, why we're here, and where we're going. Theologically, I try not to go much beyond that, as that is plenty.
In my next post, I will discuss the contrite heart as kenosis.
Until then, stay faithful.
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