Atonement Theories

Summenary Ep. 7 Robert Jenson on the doctrine of the atonement…By a “doctrine of atonement” we conventionally understand an account of why Jesus’ death on a Cross is important to us, and specifically for our relation to God. Notoriously, “atonement” is a deliberate coinage - though an old one, documented to 1513 - meaning the act of putting things at one, particularly where a previous unity has been broken. The word in its theological use thus presumes that what happened at Jesus’ death was a reunion between God and us - which seems a biblically sound assumption. A doctrine of atonement is then an attempt to say how Jesus’ crucifixion does that. It is a commonplace to observe that there is no dogma of atonement. Although, in Christology there is dogma established at all seven ecumenical councils, no council - or pope or other plausibly ecumenical authority - has ever laid down a dogma of atonement. If you deny that Christ is “of one being with the Father,” or that the Son and Jesus are but one hypostasis, you are formally a heretic. But you can deny any offered construal of how the atonement works, or all of them together, or even deny that any construal is possible, and be a perfectly orthodox believer. To be sure, if you simply deny that Jesus’ death does in fact somehow reunite us with God, you are no Christian at all, but that is a different sort of deficiency…So my first endeavor will be to present my diagnosis. Very early, Christian theology of the Cross made two paired errors - which are of a piece with wider error. The Bible makes sense of the Cross by narratively and rhetorically locating it in the total history the Bible tells, and by conceptualizing the linkage. The twin errors I am about to discuss did their damage in concert by together cutting out the event of the Cross from its location in the biblical story.The one error cuts the Cross off from its future in the Resurrection - without which, in the Bible’s general view of reality, a crucifixion would be anything but beneficial. The pattern of the primal kerygma of atonement is displayed in Luke’s presentation of the first Christian sermon: This Jesus you put to death by the hands of sinful men, but God raised him up; and therefore return to God, life in his Spirit, etc., are open to you. But this is not the pattern of our inherited post-biblical theories - indeed, so much is this the case that when theologians steeped in one of the inherited theories encounter this primal biblical doctrine outside the Bible, they sometimes do not recognize it.The other mistake was to sever the Cross from its past in the canonical history of Israel. Without its specific location in Israel’s adventure with God the crucifixion of this one provincial celebrity, on suspicion of religio-political conspiracy, would hardly have been noteworthy amid the thousands of such Roman executions, even if he had thereafter “appeared to many.” Nevertheless the inherited theories discuss the Crucifixion in essential abstraction from Israel’s history. It is not surprising that they prove in the long run unconvincing. I will discuss these two ancient theological disasters in the order just laid out. First then, the separation of atonement and Resurrection. In one way or another the historically inherited theories of atonement presume that the action of atonement is finished when Jesus dies, so that the Resurrection then accomplishes something else, if indeed often no more than to repair collateral damage done by the Crucifixion. Anselm’s doctrine is perhaps the most notorious in its ability to do without the Resurrection. Anselm is, of course, regularly denounced on other grounds. Before proceeding to my own critique, fairness compels me to come to his defense. Many of those who attack - or affirm - “the Anselmian theory of atonement” do not seem to have read his text. Anselm does not say that Jesus’ death satisfies God’s wrath, or that God punishes Jesus instead of us. Quite to the contrary, Anselm presents Jesus’ death as God’s rescue of creatures who are on a self-destructive path, which God accomplishes by averting a regime of punishment and instituting instead a regime of repair.Nevertheless, Anselm’s doctrine does have a fatal flaw: the Resurrection is not integral to the achieving of this result. Both in Anselm himself and in the bowdlerizations of Anselm which are presented as “the” doctrine of atonement, God and humanity are reconciled when Jesus dies; the Resurrection simply tidies up. It is very likely that Anselm himself as a devoted reader of Scripture and as a bishop a regular celebrant of Eucharist simply assumed that nothing theological interesting works without the Resurrection; however his theory does not incorporate this.To grasp the second founding error, we should remember that aforementioned exegetical commonplace: that the Gospels’ own interpretation of the Cross consists for the most part in embedding it in the Old Testament narrative. As is well known, hardly a detail of the Gospels’ passion-narratives fails to invoke some Old Testament text or event. And Pauline and Johannine theology explained the meaning of the Cross with Old Testament concepts, used in their original sacrificial and eschatological force.But post-apostolic Christian theology quickly isolated the Cross from its biblical embedding in Old Testament discourse at the dogmatic level, if not in preaching or always in the liturgy.NOTE: If you want to read along in this series on Robert Jenson’s A Theology in Outline, you can find the PDF of next week’s reading below: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com