My hunch about atonement

Why have I started to work on atonement theory? Here are a couple of reasons:

1. I need a locus of systematic theology where I can test and apply my theory about aspects in theology.
2. Although I am not a pragmatist by any stretch, the one thing I did learn from all these years of reading pragmatism is that faith must be related to lived experience if it is to have any meaning. Well, not meaning (strictly speaking), but something like intelligibility and plausibility. Here I owe a debt to John E. Smith’s reflections on faith and experience. Here the idea is that various atonement theories promote the myth of redemptive violence, thus sacralizing both violence and leading to the romanticizing of total submission to abuse (see here Rita Nakashima Brock’s book)
3. Atonement seems to be a hot topic today, especially within my own Evangelical tradition, where it is taking flak from at least three directions:
   1. Emerging church theology: as a direct consequence of downplaying the importance of doctrine and theology, atonement theory too (and penal substitution in particular) is discarded as an idolatrous rationalization of what God did in Christ.
   2. Evangelicals that have been influenced by various liberation discourses, such as feminism.
   3. Evangelicals like Steve Chalke, who think that penal substitution is a case of cosmic and divine child abuse (the Father abusing his Son).

The whole direction of my research follows a hunch: namely that a constructive dialog can take place between a Davidsonian-Rortyan understanding of metaphor, on the one hand, and the various metaphors of atonement within the Bible.

My own thesis comprises the following points:

1. All language is at base metaphorical
2. The difference between the metaphorical and the literal does not consist in the accuracy of which the latter has more than the former.
3. I adopt a critical-aspectival realism which holds that reality does not have a single correct description, but an infinity of such descriptions.
4. Our language is adequate to the world if it manages to bring to speech real aspects of this plenary reality.
5. What metaphors do is that they trigger, evoke, provoke, occasion, new perspectives on reality.
   1. Davidson believes that this triggering happens non-cognitively, i.e. metaphors do not have a separate cognitive content, but they cause new beliefs.
   2. Rorty supplements Davidson’s account of metaphor with an account of cultural change: thus for Rorty, geniuses (like Jesus) have a gift for tossing out new metaphors which simply change the way we view the world.
6. Thus, the difference between the literal and the metaphorical is that the literal is comprised of metaphors which have survived as literalizations, because the new perspective they inaugurated caught on and captured our imagination.
7. To come back to the Bible: it is futile to create a contrast between the propositional and the performative, or between the literal and the metaphorical. Knowledge of reality always involves our being disposed to it in a certain way, without precluding the reality of our grasping some of it’s real aspects.
8. The Bible contains normative metaphors, which instantiate and constitute a series of normative stances (not simply propositional descriptions) on the work of Christ. We cannot simply strip away the metaphorical and the imaginative and get at a bare cognitive content. The very notion of a pure description does not make sense. A description always takes place from a certain vantage point.
9. To say that the Biblical metaphors are normative is to say that we are stuck with those metaphors.
10. However, metaphors have an open texture. Being open ended, they invite our imaginative participation.
11. Thus, theological work is a matter of re-performing, of non-identically repeating the performance of Scripture. In this task we are not bound by something simply propositional (although not less than that), but by an initial performance. Maybe the category of story is also appropriate here, but I am intending something slightly different, because these normative stances (there are a number) are not necessarily embedded in stories.
12. What might be concluded from this is that we cannot simply discard penal substitution, as a model of atonement. What we can do, however, is to try to re-perform it (here I am indebted to Vanhoozer’s suggestions in The Drama of Doctrine), or re-stage it. And here the trick is to convey whatever it was that the normative performance conveyed in a world which no longer shares the assumptions of first century Palestine and, moreover, also has a number of prejudices which can affect the very intelligibility of Penal Substitution.

Savy?