How does one reinterpret what the atonement means today? Should one? One of my recent favorites, John Edwin Smith, an American pragmatist and Jonathan Edwards scholar, had this to say:

“When confronted with an item of faith, we want first to know what it means; and second, we want to know to what extent it is exhibited in and intelligibly related to our experience. To fail to ask these questions posed by the precariousness of our existence and the undeniable challenge to faith presented by the thought patterns of our secular world is to fall back on some form of authoritarianism. It is to suppose that the content of faith, which indeed we have only and always in earthen vessels, is to be preserved by bare repetition (i.e. by reciting a creed or citing biblical passages in response to questions ) without criticism and without reinterpretation. The quest for analogues of faith is at the same time a quest initiated by living faith for the means of overcoming doubt by attaining a sense that our faith is grounded in the structure of what there is, and is therefore more than self-indulgence or wishful thinking.” (The Analogy of Experience, p. 31).

Granted, to speak about ‘our faith being grounded in the structure of what there is’ does not sound all that pragmatist. Maybe that’s because we have read pragmatism through Rorty (and even Dewey through Rorty) too much, something which Smith himself (bitterly?) deplores. What is right about the above is that unless our faith is intelligibly related to human experience, that is, unless we understand it by appropriating it, by seeing what inferential links it bears with the rest of our web of beliefs and practices, it remains an unintelligible faith, for others as well as for ourselves.

So the question is: are we not making experience the norm? My own feeling about John E. Smith’s own thinking about atonement is that sometimes, despite cautioning against this, he makes this mistake. But what criteria, what norms and guidelines should we use as we try to reinterpret faith, so as to make it intelligible?

One of the most pressing problems about atonement theory today is precisely that traditional formulations - and by this I do not simply mean post-scriptural theories, but models embedded in Scripture itself - are not only removed from contemporary human experience, but are plainly repugnant to it. To speak about a violent God seems to contradict common social intuitions about a supreme being of unlimited benevolence. Thus the question: as we seek to relate our understanding of the faith about what Christ did for us, how far should we go towards accommodating some of the regnant social intuitions?

S. Mark Heim’s Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, to which I want to devote a number of posts, presupposes that we have to go quite far indeed. The assumption that violence is implicitly something bad (which Boersma brilliantly unpacks), moreover, that it is the bad thing from which we have to be rescued, goes unchallenged. Thus it becomes a presupposition that in working out a doctrine of atonement, all notions of a God who condones violence and uses it to take away our sins by punishing his son must be abandoned.

But the cross does remain important for Heim. Yet not as a part of a divine mechanism. What is common in these attempts to expunge all violence from God’s purposes is the removal of the cross and sacrifice from an eternal logic, or, better, eternal plan. Even Boersma does that to some extent. For him, as I pointed out in another post, violence is part of God’s plan because God’s plan is historically constrained. Heim goes even further than Boersma. Sacrifice as a means to remove the penalty of sin is not part of God’s plan, even as constrained by this-worldly limitations. Then why did Christ die?

“Christ sheds his own blood to end that way of trying to mend our divisions” (xi). By ‘that way’, Heim means our way of dealing with conflict: scapegoating. Indeed, he makes it seem (from the preface at least) that violence is the problem that we need rescuing from: our own way of fighting violence with further violence. No wonder, then, that he should take exception to the classic penal substitution view which, arguably, redeems, sacralizes, legitimizes, glorifies and even celebrates violence.

But how? He summarizes his thesis: “Jesus’ death isn’t necessary because God has to have innocent blood to solve the guilt equation. Redemptive violence is our equation. Jesus didn’t volunteer to get into God’s justice machine. God volunteered to get into ours.” (xi) How does this save us? “[B]ecause is death exemplifies specific kind of sin we are all implicated in and we all need saving from, and acts to overcome it.” (xi)

My immediate question after reading this was: doesn’t that limit the atonement (or his work on the cross, however we might understand it) to the undoing of that particular sin, namely our proclivity for scapegoating?

Contemporary theories of atonement have to have an answer to the following questions.

1. Why did Christ have to die? John E. Smith’s working out of the atonement fails to answer this satisfactorily. Christ came to initiate the Beloved community. But it is not clear from his argument (maybe I’ll be more specific some other time) why he had to die to accomplish this? His whole ministry was already an instance of unconditional love.

2. How is Christ’s death saving? For Heim, it exposes violence. It makes it more difficult to hide the victims. It would be interesting to compare this with the feminist case. Feminists like Brock Nakashima and Parker argue that it’s precisely Jesus’ wiling acceptance of suffering that glorifies suffering, thus encouraging victims to suffer in silence and tell no tales to the police (about abusive husbands for example).

3. How does a theory of atonement draw together all aspects of Christ’s ministry: life, death and resurrection? In most theories of atonement, including penal substitution, resurrection plays no part (if anyone knows better, please let me know!)

4. A question that I am not sure needs to be answered by atonement theory as such, but which many think it must, is this: how does this particular understanding of what Christ did for us on the cross effectively change us? Must atonement theories merge with salvation theories? Must they include a subjective element, or can they simply describe what has been accomplished extra nos in Christ?

5. Finally, a question about contemporary experience. Isn’t the preaching of the cross supposed to be folly? A stumbling block? Aren’t all these contemporary reworkings of the doctrine simply attempts to make it more digestible? Perhaps, as postliberals counsel, we should read human experience in light of the cross, rather than the cross in light of human experience. Of course, this is putting it too simplistically: can we really expect to understand the cross in the first place without making some sort of connection with human experience? I guess it’s a question of degree and the hermeneutical spiral.

I hope to be able to follow up with more discussion of Heim’s book, as I read through it.