Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine, By Vincent Brummer. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company 2005. Pages, 125. Paper, $29.95. ISBN 0-7546-5230-0.
Review of: Brümmer, Vincent. Atonement, Christology and the Trinity. 134 p. Aldershot : Ashgate, 2005
Book Reviews 283
In Atonement, Christology and the Trinity, Vincent Brummer, professor for philosophy of religion at the University of Utrecht, proposes an interpersonal
view of God and Jesus Christ. He contends (chapter one) that the church's ancient doctrines are no longer readily intelligible because of their "Platonic categories," and that they should be re-formulated in existential or personalist categories. His starting point (chapter two) is a theological anthropology that highlights the human aspirations to fulfill one's self, to enter into communion with others, and to become united with God. But (chapter three) these primary desires are frustrated by factors that are inherent in human beings, their societies, and their physical circumstances. This struggle between humanity's deepest longings and its frustrations is the result of our estrangement from God. In order to move toward wholeness, people must open themselves to God's grace. When they do, they find that God is intent on healing the alienation in human life, and, in response to God, men and women can undergo a change of heart and mind that re-orients them toward God, self, and neighbor. This dynamism of divine forgiveness and human repentance constitutes "the matrix of faith" (p. 60) which exists at the heart of Christianity. According to Brummer (chapter seven), because this matrix or movement also operates in Judaism and Islam, it can serve as the common ground for interreligious dialogue among the Abrahamic religions. In Brümmer's judgment (chapter four), the Christian conviction that God extends forgiveness to all people should anchor Christian reflection on God's saving work in Jesus Christ. Indeed, this conviction calls into question theologies that speak of Jesus Christ paying humanity's debt to God, or propitiating God's anger, or becoming the sacrifice that satisfies God. Christians must remember that God "would rather suffer at our hands than to turn his back on us" (p. 78). This soteriological idea leads to a christological one (chapter 5): Jesus Christ is the revealer of God's love for us and also of our most appropriate response to God. Hence, "we are called upon to identify in love with the will of God in the way [Jesus] did and thus to emulate his moral and spiritual perfection within the limits of our own finitude and historical situation" (p. 92). This view of Christ shows (chapter six) that salvation in Jesus Christ is trinitarian;"the creating
and sustaining Father, the revealing Son and the inspiring Spirit are . . . 'three basic types of action' in which [God] manifests his true self in relation to us" (p. 109). Atonement, Christology and the Trinity is a succinct, overarching account of the central doctrines of Christian faith. It is shaped by the claim that "religious beliefs are always existential in the sense that they are directly connected with the ways in which we relate to God, in the actions and attitudes in which we respond to God and to the ways in which God relates to us" (p. 65). This book combines the wisdom of Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Denis (the Areopagite), the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosophical ideas of John Macmurray and P. F. Strawson, and the theologies of John Calvin, Karl Barth, Austen Fairer, Sally McFague, Cornelius Plantinga, and Maurice Wiles. However, it does Book Reviews 284
not delve into the Patristic motifs of Christ's "ransoming" us from Satan and being "victorious over" Satan. Unfortunately, it conflates Anselm's "satisfaction theory" of atonement with Calvin's "theory of penal substitution."
Although the book lacks a discussion of Abelard's sacramental view of salvation, it proposes a soteriology similar to Abelard's: that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection reveal and impart God's grace to the human family. This constructive work shows the resources, challenges, and insights available to theology in heritage of John Calvin. University of Notre Dame
Robert A. Krieg Notre Dame, Indiana Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines: A Commentary.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Vítor Westhelle's The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross Reviewed by Mark W. Thomsen
A Book Worth Discussing: Vítor Westhelle's The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross Mark W. Thomsen Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross. By Vítor Westhelle. Minneapolis: Fortress. 2006. xii and 180 pages. Paper. S22.00.
Currents in Theology and Mission 34 no 4 Ag 2007, p 282-286.
Vítor Westhelle's The Scandalous God might be entitled "Reflections from the Abyss." His text is a series of profound reflections upon life marked by absurdity, pain, suffering, horror, meaninglessness. the experience of chaos, and the abyss. For Westhelle the Cross is the lived reality of hell and darkness. Furthermore, he incisively describes how Christians continually
hide. deny, and decorate the reality of the Cross, the abyss. Westhelle will not allow his readers to escape the Cross. But, he argues, life is not only the abyss. There are also unexpected signs of light and life within the darkness. These surprising events of hope are only to be found in the midst of the abyss when people live out expressions of love in the shadow of the Cross. For Westhelle the theology of the Cross is not a theological articulation of some objective truth. Rather "it is a practice [a journey] of solidarity with the pain of the world, which follows the encounter with Christ Crucified" (p. 112). One does not read Westhelle's text; one meditates, is challenged and blessed.
Westhelle's primary perspective
Theologies of the Cross begin from a variety of experiential and theological perspectives. The most dominant perspective within our Christian communities is rooted in a medieval world in which royalty was to be given due respect. If the laws of the realm were violated—if, for example, a king's deer was illegally killed and eaten by a poverty-ridden family—royalty was offended and the realm dishonored. The "world" had been thrown out of joint by the offense. The balance of justice had to be restored and the king's wrath assuaged. The violator in some way had to pay the price so that royalty's honor might be restored.
This is often called the Anselmian perspective. Mel Gibson's Passion film portrayed in bloody horror the price that had to be paid for human violation of God" s cosmic law. We have sinned; a price had to be paid: we are incapable of paying such a price. However, through the suffering of God's Son God pays the ultimate sacrifice, and by his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53). Martin Luther, although accepting a portion of this medieval tradition, dramatically changed the perspective from which one could see the death of Jesus. Luther found this new radical perspective in the apostle Paul. Faith did not only contemplate the Cross of Jesus as an objective reality, but the believer in faith personally entered the reality of death and resurrection (Rom 6:1-6). One dies to sin and rises to life in the Spirit. We are all sinners. Sin is that which throws the world out of joint. For Luther sin is being centered in self rather than in God. When the axis of life moves from God to our own desires, the world begins to shake. Salvation for Luther takes place when the obsessive self is put to death and God performs a contemporary resurrection.
Through the power of the Spirit we are raised as new creations—people who in trust live with God as the center of life. Luther emphasizes that this work is God's work and is a free gift received in faith. We are right with God—justified—by God's grace through faith. Being a theologian of the Cross, for Luther, is not a quiet, academic study of Jesus crucified. Rather it is experiencing the wrath of God burning through our guilt against our sin. In angst one's pride-filled ego is annihilated in preparation for life centered in God. Westhelle lives, breathes, and thinks in this theological world of Luther. However, he radically transforms the perspective and vocabulary. For Westhelle, as for Luther, the Cross is a contemporary experience.
But for Westhelle it is not limited to an individual experience of death and resurrection. It involves the very death and resurrection of God. Westhelle's primary motif is not found in medieval Europe with Anselm or in the Epistle of Romans with Paul and Luther but in the post-New Testament world of Melito of Sardis (150 A.D). He quotes Melito: "He that hung up the earth in space was Himself hanged up: He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails . . . God put to death!" (p. 2) The death of God, the resurrection of God. This is the perspective of Westhelle. This perspective has its beginning in the Hellenistic Christian Church where assertions
of the deity of Christ were presupposed. This theme—God died and dies and God lives—is central to Westhelle's reflections. Having written his Ph.D. dissertation on G. W. F. Hegel, Westhelle finds Hegel's thoughts helpful. He quotes from Hegel's Christian Religion: Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion: God has died, God is dead: this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that eventhing eternal and true does not exist, that negation itself is found in God. . .. How ever, the process does not halt at this point, rather, a reversal takes place .. . God arises again to life, and thus things are reversed, (p. 70) For Hegel, religious language is true but takes the form of immature pictures rather than the form of mature abstract philosophical categories. Theology said God died and God lives. As a philosopher Hegel changed from this theological imagery to abstract language and described all reality as a cosmic rational system. Der Geist (The Absolute Mind or Spirit). For Hegel this cosmic system was not static but was a vital living organism that progressively moved toward a goal. First there was the Absolute Mind/Spirit, and then this Absolute (God) annihilated itself and died into a world of matter. The Absolute God dies. Transcendent
Spirit becomes immanent in a material process. Nevertheless, the Absolute Spirit lives again and begins to think and become self-conscious of itself through the human process and mind. In human thought the Absolute Spirit that died is lifted and lives again in the human spirit. Westhelle finds the religious thought of Hegel, although not the rationalistic system,
helpful in articulating his own vision of the Cross. For him the phrase "God died" points not just to the Son of God's death on the Cross but also to a cosmic experience and expression of reality, similar to that found in Hegel. Death, suffering, alienation, conflict, and oppression are present realities. They are the manifestation of God's death, the death of everything that is life, love, and truth. Westhelle's reflections are steeped in the pain and suffering of the world. In pain, death, poverty, marginalization. oppression—
and this is what is meant by the Death of God—we experience living in the abyss, in darkness and despair. That is the truth of human existence. Truth-telling points to the abyss and agents of death. Westhelle continually quotes Luther saying a theologian of the Cross calls a thing what it is ! A theology of the Cross calls us to recognize the suffering of the world and the pain of God. We are called to name suffering, death, chaos, and oppression what it is. and we are called to live in solidarity with the pain of God and the world. Luther's understanding of dying and rising, death and resurrection was focused on an individual experience of dying to self and being raised in faith to justification and the life of the Spirit. Westhelle's perspective and vision focus upon a Cosmic Divine Death and Life of which one is a small but significant participant. A theology of the Cross rips away the façade that attempts to hide pain and death and invites one into the abyss where in the darkness there is the possibility of life and light. But there is no possibility of life unless we are first willing to participate in the death of God, the pain of the world. Westhelle uses a Gospel image to express our journey in the aftermath of the darkness and death of the Friday crucifixion, the Abyss. He relates the story of the women walking to the tomb of Jesus on that Sunday morning. They walk in an atmosphere of deep sorrow, expressing their love for Jesus as they go to anoint his body for the last time. It was in performing this act of love to their dead master that they experienced the resurrection, or life and hope. Westhelle sees this as what gives meaning to life — performing acts of love in the shadow of the abyss — and makes light shining in the darkness possible. God died, and God lives. The abyss is reality, but love in the shadow of the abyss makes the return of God possible. This is Westhelle's primary perspective for a theology of the Cross. A cosmic death of divinity and a cosmic resurrection are a reality portrayed in the Cross and resurrection, but, much more, they are a cosmic reality in which we participate. Westhelle on Luther Westhelle writes out of a Lutheran perspective and finds many of his themes and insights in Lutheran texts from the Reformation. He references Luther's profound words "The Cross is our theology." Although using the language and texts of Luther. Westhelle discovers new possibilities for meaning in Luther's texts. He uses these new insights for the purpose of developing his own theology of the Cross. This particularly reflects Westhelle's dialogue with postmodernism, which emphasizes that all language is molded by its cultural-historical context and that in one sense its truth, its relevance, is limited to its own cultural-historical context. However, texts are also remembered and transcribed and therefore become detached from their original intent and context. They float beyond their time and place and are always open to new insights and meanings. This, it appears, is how Westhelle reads the texts of Luther. We have already seen how Luther's death and resurrection themes have been transformed from personal dying and rising with Christ to a Cosmic death and resurrection within the totality of reality, the death and resurrection of God or in Hegelian terms, the death and life of Der Geist. In a similar way Westhelle reinterprets Luther's understanding of the wrath of God in the form of pain and suffering. Luther sees suffering, particularly
spiritual/psychological suffering (inner despair or angst), as the abyss exploding from an encounter with a terrifying God. In the midst of this terrifying encounter one may experience the abandonment of God. God 's wrath experienced in a terrified conscience is God* s annihilating power crushing the personal ego. making possible life in the Spirit. This vision is rooted in Luther's vision of the bondage of the will and irresistible grace. For Luther, human beings are bound in sin eternally, bound in pride-filled self-centeredness, and are incapable of escaping from this ego-centered prison. God alone with irresistible power (grace) can break this bondage—and does so through God's wrath, which through suffering, pain, and a terrifying spiritual abyss destroys one * s egocentricity. It is put to death, annihilated, in order that a resurrection might occur, a faith-life of the Spirit realized. Westhelle recognizes this original spiritual struggle of Luther and is aware of how Luther found answers to his quest for a gracious God in a radically new understanding of righteousness/justice. We receive what is not due to us (p. 40). Steeped in Luther's world and writings Westhelle deals with a floating text that is not necessarily bound to Luther's original form of angst but is still angst, despair, the abyss. He explains Luther's statement of God's "breaking down in order to restore" as the consequence of "speculative strategy about God's way of dispensing salvation" and indicates that Luther at this point was molded by (not free from) his medieval monastic tradition. Luther, or rather the contemporary Lutheran text, does not really intend to say that God annihilates the ego as a means of salvation: what is intended by the text is the prevention of any claims on our part to merit our salvation (p. 54). By avoiding a direct conflict with Luther's
intent Westhelle is able to continue his dialogue with Luther in the context of twenty-first-century reality. For Westhelle that is expressed in the theme God died and God lives. Suffering, pain, and the abyss are realities, and Life (the Resurrection of God) is experienced as love is shared in the shadow of the abyss. Within the new paradigm Luther's experience of angst is today shared in another form by those who experience the death of God. the abandonment
of God, in oppression, marginaliza-tion, hunger, pain, and death. Furthermore, those who recognize the death of God or the reality of the abyss experience the transformation of life, for they are no longer resisting God's grace. In recognizing themselves as abandoned by God and dwelling in the bondage of death they are ready to count on God's grace to lift them up (p. 55). This is the twenty-first-century expression of justification by grace. Westhelle reads another set of Luther texts that deal with the hiddenness of God in a similar way. He recognizes that Luther speaks of a hiddenness of God in the passion of Christ: God is met in the opposite, death or the Cross. However, in The Bondage of the Will Luther speaks of a second hiddenness that is behind the Cross. For Luther this second hiddenness of God arises for faith when confronted by the fact that some persons come to faith by the irresistible power of God and others do not. Why so? It is hidden in the terrifying otherness of God. I have argued in my book Christ Crucified: A 21st Century Missiology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2004. 51-53) that Luther at this point sacrifices radical crucified truth for continuity with Hellenistic rationalism, which Luther claims to fully reject. Westhelle, however, argues that the double sense of hiddenness found in Luther does not represent "alternative options for interpretation" (p. 56) because both are valid. Nevertheless, in claiming their validity he changes the perspective of Luther. Luther's convictions arise out of the experience of being saved by irresistible grace: Westhelle argues that it arises out of our experiences of being abandoned. Within the context of Westhelle's primary paradigm—
God died, God lives—the second hiddenness of God arises out of the abyss when life and meaning are gone. He quotes David Tracy, who sees Luther's affirmation of a second hiddenness as rooted in our experience of God as "frightening, not tender, sometimes even as an impersonal reality—it—of sheer power .. . signified by metaphors ... as abyss, chasm, chaos, horror" (p. 57). Westhelle at this point plays the role of the confessional theologian claiming that floating textual interpretations are not only legitimate but enriching of the tradition. In this case he argues that Luther's own interpretation was based not on a rational argument involving irresistible grace but upon the authority of Scripture. He continues: But it is better to admit there is an inscrutable shadow-side to God than the other options available to us. It would be simply a descriptive statement of our finite experience, and of the very finitude of our reason. But if it is blasphemy,
it is the one of Job. This is the one God is great enough to take.(p. 57). Amazingly, one has to add to Westhelle'sthought that God takes more than the blasphemy of Job. A theology of the Cross affirms that God takes the blasphemy of the death of Christ into God "sown being agonizes over the victimizers and blasphemers as well as the abandoned and even embraces them with love. Only such love has the audacity to say Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. Westhelle has much wisdom to share about the Cross shattering all rationality. Loving one's enemies is the heart of irrationality and the heart of the Cross. Westhelle does not reflect upon this absurdity. Interestingly, instead of love of enemy as the epitome of love he reflects on the love of the dead friend as the epitome of love since the friend can no longer return an exchange of the gift (referencing Kierkegaard). Westhelle as theologian is free to express his theological witness and as most theologians free to deal with confessional texts floating apart from their original context and intent. But it is also legitimate to point out that this does not express what Luther writes in The Bondage of the Will. I prefer to deal with theological texts insofar as possible in their context and intent and state that I believe or think this to be true and this to be not true. In Westhelle's words, simply state what it is. Having read the original text in its own context one is free to say that the tradition must be stretched and reinterpreted for the contemporary context.
Westhelle's text is fascinating to read and contemplate. He writes out of his own experience of the abyss and the experiences of the millions who share participation in the contemporary death of God. His interpretations of Luther's texts that make possible a focus upon the reality of pain, suffering, the abyss, injustice, oppression and tyranny are a gift for which we owe him gratitude. His use of Luther texts to call for truth telling—to call a thing what it is—is profound. His imagery of sharing the fragrance of love with the smells of death is. truly, hope.
The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross. By Vítor Westhelle. Minneapolis: Fortress. 2006. xii and 180 pages. Paper. S22.00.
Currents in Theology and Mission 34 no 4 Ag 2007, p 282-286.
Vítor Westhelle's The Scandalous God might be entitled "Reflections from the Abyss." His text is a series of profound reflections upon life marked by absurdity, pain, suffering, horror, meaninglessness. the experience of chaos, and the abyss. For Westhelle the Cross is the lived reality of hell and darkness. Furthermore, he incisively describes how Christians continually
hide. deny, and decorate the reality of the Cross, the abyss. Westhelle will not allow his readers to escape the Cross. But, he argues, life is not only the abyss. There are also unexpected signs of light and life within the darkness. These surprising events of hope are only to be found in the midst of the abyss when people live out expressions of love in the shadow of the Cross. For Westhelle the theology of the Cross is not a theological articulation of some objective truth. Rather "it is a practice [a journey] of solidarity with the pain of the world, which follows the encounter with Christ Crucified" (p. 112). One does not read Westhelle's text; one meditates, is challenged and blessed.
Westhelle's primary perspective
Theologies of the Cross begin from a variety of experiential and theological perspectives. The most dominant perspective within our Christian communities is rooted in a medieval world in which royalty was to be given due respect. If the laws of the realm were violated—if, for example, a king's deer was illegally killed and eaten by a poverty-ridden family—royalty was offended and the realm dishonored. The "world" had been thrown out of joint by the offense. The balance of justice had to be restored and the king's wrath assuaged. The violator in some way had to pay the price so that royalty's honor might be restored.
This is often called the Anselmian perspective. Mel Gibson's Passion film portrayed in bloody horror the price that had to be paid for human violation of God" s cosmic law. We have sinned; a price had to be paid: we are incapable of paying such a price. However, through the suffering of God's Son God pays the ultimate sacrifice, and by his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53). Martin Luther, although accepting a portion of this medieval tradition, dramatically changed the perspective from which one could see the death of Jesus. Luther found this new radical perspective in the apostle Paul. Faith did not only contemplate the Cross of Jesus as an objective reality, but the believer in faith personally entered the reality of death and resurrection (Rom 6:1-6). One dies to sin and rises to life in the Spirit. We are all sinners. Sin is that which throws the world out of joint. For Luther sin is being centered in self rather than in God. When the axis of life moves from God to our own desires, the world begins to shake. Salvation for Luther takes place when the obsessive self is put to death and God performs a contemporary resurrection.
Through the power of the Spirit we are raised as new creations—people who in trust live with God as the center of life. Luther emphasizes that this work is God's work and is a free gift received in faith. We are right with God—justified—by God's grace through faith. Being a theologian of the Cross, for Luther, is not a quiet, academic study of Jesus crucified. Rather it is experiencing the wrath of God burning through our guilt against our sin. In angst one's pride-filled ego is annihilated in preparation for life centered in God. Westhelle lives, breathes, and thinks in this theological world of Luther. However, he radically transforms the perspective and vocabulary. For Westhelle, as for Luther, the Cross is a contemporary experience.
But for Westhelle it is not limited to an individual experience of death and resurrection. It involves the very death and resurrection of God. Westhelle's primary motif is not found in medieval Europe with Anselm or in the Epistle of Romans with Paul and Luther but in the post-New Testament world of Melito of Sardis (150 A.D). He quotes Melito: "He that hung up the earth in space was Himself hanged up: He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails . . . God put to death!" (p. 2) The death of God, the resurrection of God. This is the perspective of Westhelle. This perspective has its beginning in the Hellenistic Christian Church where assertions
of the deity of Christ were presupposed. This theme—God died and dies and God lives—is central to Westhelle's reflections. Having written his Ph.D. dissertation on G. W. F. Hegel, Westhelle finds Hegel's thoughts helpful. He quotes from Hegel's Christian Religion: Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion: God has died, God is dead: this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that eventhing eternal and true does not exist, that negation itself is found in God. . .. How ever, the process does not halt at this point, rather, a reversal takes place .. . God arises again to life, and thus things are reversed, (p. 70) For Hegel, religious language is true but takes the form of immature pictures rather than the form of mature abstract philosophical categories. Theology said God died and God lives. As a philosopher Hegel changed from this theological imagery to abstract language and described all reality as a cosmic rational system. Der Geist (The Absolute Mind or Spirit). For Hegel this cosmic system was not static but was a vital living organism that progressively moved toward a goal. First there was the Absolute Mind/Spirit, and then this Absolute (God) annihilated itself and died into a world of matter. The Absolute God dies. Transcendent
Spirit becomes immanent in a material process. Nevertheless, the Absolute Spirit lives again and begins to think and become self-conscious of itself through the human process and mind. In human thought the Absolute Spirit that died is lifted and lives again in the human spirit. Westhelle finds the religious thought of Hegel, although not the rationalistic system,
helpful in articulating his own vision of the Cross. For him the phrase "God died" points not just to the Son of God's death on the Cross but also to a cosmic experience and expression of reality, similar to that found in Hegel. Death, suffering, alienation, conflict, and oppression are present realities. They are the manifestation of God's death, the death of everything that is life, love, and truth. Westhelle's reflections are steeped in the pain and suffering of the world. In pain, death, poverty, marginalization. oppression—
and this is what is meant by the Death of God—we experience living in the abyss, in darkness and despair. That is the truth of human existence. Truth-telling points to the abyss and agents of death. Westhelle continually quotes Luther saying a theologian of the Cross calls a thing what it is ! A theology of the Cross calls us to recognize the suffering of the world and the pain of God. We are called to name suffering, death, chaos, and oppression what it is. and we are called to live in solidarity with the pain of God and the world. Luther's understanding of dying and rising, death and resurrection was focused on an individual experience of dying to self and being raised in faith to justification and the life of the Spirit. Westhelle's perspective and vision focus upon a Cosmic Divine Death and Life of which one is a small but significant participant. A theology of the Cross rips away the façade that attempts to hide pain and death and invites one into the abyss where in the darkness there is the possibility of life and light. But there is no possibility of life unless we are first willing to participate in the death of God, the pain of the world. Westhelle uses a Gospel image to express our journey in the aftermath of the darkness and death of the Friday crucifixion, the Abyss. He relates the story of the women walking to the tomb of Jesus on that Sunday morning. They walk in an atmosphere of deep sorrow, expressing their love for Jesus as they go to anoint his body for the last time. It was in performing this act of love to their dead master that they experienced the resurrection, or life and hope. Westhelle sees this as what gives meaning to life — performing acts of love in the shadow of the abyss — and makes light shining in the darkness possible. God died, and God lives. The abyss is reality, but love in the shadow of the abyss makes the return of God possible. This is Westhelle's primary perspective for a theology of the Cross. A cosmic death of divinity and a cosmic resurrection are a reality portrayed in the Cross and resurrection, but, much more, they are a cosmic reality in which we participate. Westhelle on Luther Westhelle writes out of a Lutheran perspective and finds many of his themes and insights in Lutheran texts from the Reformation. He references Luther's profound words "The Cross is our theology." Although using the language and texts of Luther. Westhelle discovers new possibilities for meaning in Luther's texts. He uses these new insights for the purpose of developing his own theology of the Cross. This particularly reflects Westhelle's dialogue with postmodernism, which emphasizes that all language is molded by its cultural-historical context and that in one sense its truth, its relevance, is limited to its own cultural-historical context. However, texts are also remembered and transcribed and therefore become detached from their original intent and context. They float beyond their time and place and are always open to new insights and meanings. This, it appears, is how Westhelle reads the texts of Luther. We have already seen how Luther's death and resurrection themes have been transformed from personal dying and rising with Christ to a Cosmic death and resurrection within the totality of reality, the death and resurrection of God or in Hegelian terms, the death and life of Der Geist. In a similar way Westhelle reinterprets Luther's understanding of the wrath of God in the form of pain and suffering. Luther sees suffering, particularly
spiritual/psychological suffering (inner despair or angst), as the abyss exploding from an encounter with a terrifying God. In the midst of this terrifying encounter one may experience the abandonment of God. God 's wrath experienced in a terrified conscience is God* s annihilating power crushing the personal ego. making possible life in the Spirit. This vision is rooted in Luther's vision of the bondage of the will and irresistible grace. For Luther, human beings are bound in sin eternally, bound in pride-filled self-centeredness, and are incapable of escaping from this ego-centered prison. God alone with irresistible power (grace) can break this bondage—and does so through God's wrath, which through suffering, pain, and a terrifying spiritual abyss destroys one * s egocentricity. It is put to death, annihilated, in order that a resurrection might occur, a faith-life of the Spirit realized. Westhelle recognizes this original spiritual struggle of Luther and is aware of how Luther found answers to his quest for a gracious God in a radically new understanding of righteousness/justice. We receive what is not due to us (p. 40). Steeped in Luther's world and writings Westhelle deals with a floating text that is not necessarily bound to Luther's original form of angst but is still angst, despair, the abyss. He explains Luther's statement of God's "breaking down in order to restore" as the consequence of "speculative strategy about God's way of dispensing salvation" and indicates that Luther at this point was molded by (not free from) his medieval monastic tradition. Luther, or rather the contemporary Lutheran text, does not really intend to say that God annihilates the ego as a means of salvation: what is intended by the text is the prevention of any claims on our part to merit our salvation (p. 54). By avoiding a direct conflict with Luther's
intent Westhelle is able to continue his dialogue with Luther in the context of twenty-first-century reality. For Westhelle that is expressed in the theme God died and God lives. Suffering, pain, and the abyss are realities, and Life (the Resurrection of God) is experienced as love is shared in the shadow of the abyss. Within the new paradigm Luther's experience of angst is today shared in another form by those who experience the death of God. the abandonment
of God, in oppression, marginaliza-tion, hunger, pain, and death. Furthermore, those who recognize the death of God or the reality of the abyss experience the transformation of life, for they are no longer resisting God's grace. In recognizing themselves as abandoned by God and dwelling in the bondage of death they are ready to count on God's grace to lift them up (p. 55). This is the twenty-first-century expression of justification by grace. Westhelle reads another set of Luther texts that deal with the hiddenness of God in a similar way. He recognizes that Luther speaks of a hiddenness of God in the passion of Christ: God is met in the opposite, death or the Cross. However, in The Bondage of the Will Luther speaks of a second hiddenness that is behind the Cross. For Luther this second hiddenness of God arises for faith when confronted by the fact that some persons come to faith by the irresistible power of God and others do not. Why so? It is hidden in the terrifying otherness of God. I have argued in my book Christ Crucified: A 21st Century Missiology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2004. 51-53) that Luther at this point sacrifices radical crucified truth for continuity with Hellenistic rationalism, which Luther claims to fully reject. Westhelle, however, argues that the double sense of hiddenness found in Luther does not represent "alternative options for interpretation" (p. 56) because both are valid. Nevertheless, in claiming their validity he changes the perspective of Luther. Luther's convictions arise out of the experience of being saved by irresistible grace: Westhelle argues that it arises out of our experiences of being abandoned. Within the context of Westhelle's primary paradigm—
God died, God lives—the second hiddenness of God arises out of the abyss when life and meaning are gone. He quotes David Tracy, who sees Luther's affirmation of a second hiddenness as rooted in our experience of God as "frightening, not tender, sometimes even as an impersonal reality—it—of sheer power .. . signified by metaphors ... as abyss, chasm, chaos, horror" (p. 57). Westhelle at this point plays the role of the confessional theologian claiming that floating textual interpretations are not only legitimate but enriching of the tradition. In this case he argues that Luther's own interpretation was based not on a rational argument involving irresistible grace but upon the authority of Scripture. He continues: But it is better to admit there is an inscrutable shadow-side to God than the other options available to us. It would be simply a descriptive statement of our finite experience, and of the very finitude of our reason. But if it is blasphemy,
it is the one of Job. This is the one God is great enough to take.(p. 57). Amazingly, one has to add to Westhelle'sthought that God takes more than the blasphemy of Job. A theology of the Cross affirms that God takes the blasphemy of the death of Christ into God "sown being agonizes over the victimizers and blasphemers as well as the abandoned and even embraces them with love. Only such love has the audacity to say Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. Westhelle has much wisdom to share about the Cross shattering all rationality. Loving one's enemies is the heart of irrationality and the heart of the Cross. Westhelle does not reflect upon this absurdity. Interestingly, instead of love of enemy as the epitome of love he reflects on the love of the dead friend as the epitome of love since the friend can no longer return an exchange of the gift (referencing Kierkegaard). Westhelle as theologian is free to express his theological witness and as most theologians free to deal with confessional texts floating apart from their original context and intent. But it is also legitimate to point out that this does not express what Luther writes in The Bondage of the Will. I prefer to deal with theological texts insofar as possible in their context and intent and state that I believe or think this to be true and this to be not true. In Westhelle's words, simply state what it is. Having read the original text in its own context one is free to say that the tradition must be stretched and reinterpreted for the contemporary context.
Westhelle's text is fascinating to read and contemplate. He writes out of his own experience of the abyss and the experiences of the millions who share participation in the contemporary death of God. His interpretations of Luther's texts that make possible a focus upon the reality of pain, suffering, the abyss, injustice, oppression and tyranny are a gift for which we owe him gratitude. His use of Luther texts to call for truth telling—to call a thing what it is—is profound. His imagery of sharing the fragrance of love with the smells of death is. truly, hope.
Karl Barth's Retrieval of Luther's Substantive Christology by Amy Ellen Marga
Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner: Karl Barth's Retrieval of Luther's Substantive Christology Amy Ellen Marga Luther Seminary
Currents in Theology and Mission 34 no 4 Ag 2007, p 260-270
Despite Karl Barth*s lasting commitment to the Reformed tradition of John Calvin, it is the thought of Martin Luther that casts a long shadow over Barm's theology. As George Hunsinger points out. At certain vital points Barth follows Luther not only, broadly speaking, against Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but also against the main lines of the Lutheran tradition. There are points, in other words, where Barth actually retrieved Luther in order to stand with him not only against modernity, but also against the rest of the Reformation. (George Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids. MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. 2000). 282.) If we refocus the historical lens upon Barth and Luther, they can be seen to stand like bookends on the shelf of the modern age. with Luther standing at the beginning of what historians now call "early moder-nity," and Barth standing at its end.(W. Stacy Johnson, among others, has even suggested that Barth"s theology contains the seeds for postmodern theology. See his The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville. KY: Westminster John Knox. 1997). Barth looked back for the sake of looking forward and in so doing engaged in intense study of Luther. Barth absorbed aspects of Luther's theology that allowed him to articulate Christian theology in deeper and more sophisticated ways over against modernity, which had through the course of the Enlightenment set the criteria for how we know what we know and thus how we articulate the sinner's relationship to Jesus Christ. As Hunsinger has noted. Barth "almost alone among modern theologians" granted "uncompromising precedence to the Reformation over modernity itself." He did not reject modernity, but he "refused to allow secular epistemologie s to set the terms for the validity of the gospel." (Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 293.) Barth"s mature Christology. seen in his Church Dogmatics, vol. IV. published in the early 1950s, has been a central channel into comparisons of his theology with that of Luther. Both Karin Bornkamm and Gerhard Ebeling have demonstrated that Luther and Barth share a Christocentrism in the best sense: clearly this was one thing Barth learned from Luther. Bornkamm has shown how Barth transformed Luther's conception of the offices of Christ as priest and king for the sake of forging a relationship
between Christology and soteriology. (Karin Bornkamm. "Die reformatorische
Lehre vom Amt Christi und ihre Umformung durch Karl Barths." in Luther und Barth. Veröffentlichung der Luther-Akademie Ratzeburg. Vol. 13. ed. Joachim Heubach (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag. 1989). 144. Currents in Theology and Mission 34 4 (August 200 )
Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 261). Ebeling traces the christological impulses that Barth took from Luther, even while Barth formed his own criticisms of the Reformer in the Church Dogmatics.( Gerhard Ebeling. Lutherstudien, vol. 3 (Tubingen: Mohr. 1985). 495-506.) But Barth had already begun retrieving aspects of Luther's Christology almost thirty years earlier. One example of this is a lecture that Barth gave in 1929 in Münster on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." After a decade that included two lecture cycles in dogmatic theology and intense engagement with Roman Catholic theology. Barth dove into the works of Augustine, Calvin, and Luther. The result was a lecture on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" that displays Barth's deepening understanding of Luther's Christology. In this essay I briefly present Luther's Christology from his 1535 Galatians commentary (Luther wrote this commentary in 1531. but it was not published until 1535.) and show how Barth reached back to retrieve this for his own theology despite the drastically different epistemological landscape of the two thinkers brought about by the Enlightenment. Barth reached over Enlightenment notions of rationality and morality to retrieve Luther's substantive Christology, and in so doing he left behind the psychological and historical interpretations of the person and work of Christ by thinkers such as Werner Elert and Karl Holl. Luther's theology provided Barth with the resources to pull Christology out of the grip of Enlightenment understandings of the individual as an autonomous agent and show that reconciliation of the human to God by God and through God alone need not be beholden to modern theories of rationality or morality. Martin Luther's Christology in the Galatians commentary The richness of Martin Luther's Christology
has provided scholars with a wide variety of angles from which to analyze it. Ebeling has tried to capture its expanse under the terminology of a "forensic-antithetical*'
Christology." Finnish scholars such as Tuomo Mannermaa have focused their attention on the aspect of deification in Luther's early work. (See. for example. Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus. Rechtfertigung und Vergottung (Hannover: Lutheran-Verlag-Haus. 1989). Bernhard Lohse. and in more detail Ian Siggins. have approached
Luther ' s Christology from a more inductive angle, ( See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis: Fortress. 1999). and Ian D. Kingston Siggins. Martin Luther's Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 10. See Lohse. Martin Luther's Theology, 220. notes 8. 9. 11. Luther's Small Catechism, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress. 2000), 355.Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 262)laying out the wide span of images that Luther employed, from his appropriation of motifs of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux to his borrowings from medieval piety and the New Testament.10 This variety, however, does not weaken two fundamental commitments visible in all aspects of Luther's Christology: his commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and his commitment to human salvation as the central function and purpose of Christ's person and work. These two commitments are summed up in the Small Catechism: "I believe that Jesus Christ, true God. begotten
of the Father in eternity, and also a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord. He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being.*'11 The first commitment, seen in the words "true God and true human being." points to the ancient christological dogma from the Council of Chalcedon in 451. which established that the one person of Christ is constituted by two natures, divine and human, unconfusedly. unchangeably, indivisibly. and inseparably. The second commitment is to soteriology. seen in the words "He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being." Luther rarely speaks of the person of Christ without referring
to his saving work on our behalf. The name Christ means reconciliation of the sinner to God; Christ is reconciliation. Luther's double commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and to the explicit salvific function of Christ has been called by Hunsinger a "substantive" Christology.12 Christ as very God and very human is the sole agent who initiates and fully completes
the reconciling action that takes place between God and the human. No other component or action is necessary in a substantive
Christology for reconciliation to be "real" for the human individual. An account of the substantive nature of Luther's Christology can be seen in his Galatians commentary, where he writes. For you do not yet have Christ even though you know that He is God and man. You truly have Him only when you believe that this altogether pure and innocent Person has been granted to you b\ the Father as your High Priest and Redeemer,
yes. as your slave. Putting offHis innocence
and holiness and putting on your sinful person. He bore your sin. death, and curse: He became a sacrifice and a curse for you. in order thus to set you free from the curse of the Law. (Luther's Works [hereafter LUT 26:288) When Christ steps before God in our place as the sinner to be punished, he not only initiates but also completes our being made righteous in God's eyes. There is no other process outside of Christ alone that initiates
and completes the justification of sinners. Neither the sanctification of the sinner nor the workings of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life functions the way that Christ's saving work does—a saving work that is embodied in Christ's very person. Christ's person embodies the precedence of God's grace over any "good works" of our own. Luther states. "Christ took the initiative. . . . He did not find a good will or a correct intellect in me. but He Himself took pity on me. ... By a mercy that preceded
my reason, will and intellect. He loved me ... so much that He gave Himself for me" (LU7 26:175). Reconciliation begins with Christ alone. And it is completed in Christ alone: ". . . victory over sin and death, salvation and eternal life . . . come ... by Jesus Christ alone"(p. 138). There is no gradual getting better or gradual transformation in the sinner.
Justification is not completed by a process of sanctification. It is this once-and-for-all sense of Christ's person and actions on our behalf that makes Luther's Christology a substantive Christology. His actions need no enhancement or outside aid and do not continue upon some gradual scale within the human being. What Christ began. Christ fully completes for us. The righteousness that comes to us through Christ's reconciling act is a righteousness
that brings with it its own new life. We are given a life that is not our own. for Christ's own righteousness acts upon us. takes us over. It decenters and destabilizes
the center of our own egos, for it is the righteousness of Christ's person and not of our own person. Luther claims. "I do indeed
live in the flesh, but I do not live on the basis of my own self (LW 26:170-71). When we live in Christ, we are no longer the one who controls this reality in our lives. The presence of the person of Christ 12. Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 284.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 263 displaces ourselves as the center of our lives. We cannot scale this reality in our lives down to a size that we can grasp and thus control, for the righteousness of Christ does not become a quality that inheres within the human being (cf. LW 26:127). nor is it somehow infused into the human to give him or her a new identity as non-sinner. It is a reality that remains distinct from us and greater than ourselves. Indeed, the new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. As Luther states, when we believe the good news that Christ died for us, we "are reckoned as righteous, even though sins, and great ones at that, still remain in us" (LW 26:234). Thus, although Christ starts and finishes our reconciliation with God, we, living in the here and now, do not shed our old sinful ways. We are not rid of our sin. Luther writes, These tu o things are diametrically opposed: that a Christian is righteous and beloved by God, and yet that he is a sinner at the same time. For God cannot deny His own nature. That is. He cannot avoid hating sin and sinners: and He does so by necessity, for otherwise He w ould be unjust and would love sin. (p. 235) This is the heart of Luther's classical doctrine
of the simul iustus et peccato?'. In this life, we live a life of opposites. of being a saint and sinner at the same time. God does not abandon us to the tension of saint and sinner, however. Christ's own presence to the reconciled sinner never ceases. It is an ongoing event. He is our 44'pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night' [Ex. 13:21 ] to keep God from seeing our sin" (p. 232). In that Luther emphasized Christ as the mediator, he was able to express the work of Christ in both the past, what he did as mediator for us on the cross, as well as in the present, what Christ does for us today: The new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. ''Christ Himself is the life that I now live" (p. 167). The mediator comes to us continually.
"Today Christ is still present to some," Luther states, "but to others He is still to come. To believers He is present and has come: to unbelievers He has not yet come" (p. 240). Thus, there is a clearly actualistic element in Luther's Christology that modern theology can draw upon. Christ does not remain in static. Aristotelian categories
but spans the divide between God and human, between past, present, and future,
between action and substance, between
saint and sinner. Luther's Christ is the One who comes, who is coming. The mechanism that binds the reconciled
sinner to Christ is faith. This is a core aspect of Luther's Christology in the Galatians
commentary. "Through faith, the human participates in this saving reality of Christ who is present in the Word. This faith is a union with Christ."13 Luther writes, ... these three things are joined together: faith. Christ and acceptance or imputation. Faith takes hold of Christ and has Him present, enclosing 13. Marc Lienhard. Martin Luthers christologisches Zeugnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1973^ 217.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 264 Him as the ring encloses the gem. And w hoever is found having this faith in the Christ who is grasped in the heart, him God accounts as righteous.
(LW 26:132) This faith is inseparably connected to Christ's personal presence to us and to the destabilized lives that we live as the simul iustus et peccator. Faith is the epistemologica!
underpinning of Luther's understanding
of the "I yet not I" in Christ. "The life I live. I live on the basis of faith," Luther states. "For the time of life that I am living I do indeed live in the flesh, but not on the basis of the flesh and according to the flesh, but in faith, on the basis of faith, and according to faith" (LW 26:170). But this inseparable connection to Christ's personal presence is not depicted as some kind of mystical union with Christ or "spiritual" faculty that then allows the believing human to make inspired statements
about God (LW 26:28-29:287). Although
Christ is present to us through faith, he still remains beyond the reach of natural human reason, in the "cloud of faith" (p. 287). Luther states, "how [Christ] is present —this is beyond our thought: for there is darkness" (p. 130). Thus, it is precisely the concept of faith that maintains the distinction
between Christ and the reconciled sinner.
It maintains the distance between Christ's mediating activities and the natural
activity of our human intellect, which, finally, are still under the control of sin. death, and the devil. As Marc Lienhard puts it. "Christ is a reality "pro nobis' and *in nobis' but he is and remains * extra nos."*14 Christ is in us and for us but remains
as a reality outside of us. And. because Christ remains outside of us. he is beyond our rational and moral control. Thus, faith cannot be understood to be identical with human reason. For Luther, faith is a "mode of cognition" that is not identical to human reason.15 Faith is not the natural human capacity to understand or to comprehend in the way it understands objects
around itself. Luther disputes the "Sophists" on this point, arguing that even though the "natural endowments" of human
reason are capable of mastering physical,
civic, and political matters, the intellect is in fact corrupt and inept in matters of the knowledge of God. A completely other form of "comprehending" is necessary in order for knowledge of God to arise in the human being. When we discuss faith. Luther states, "we are in an altogether different
world—a world that is outside reason"
(LW 26:234). Nonetheless, faith neither destroys reason
nor renders it impotent in its own sphere. Faith is essentially a different kind of rationality,
an "understanding" that moves beyond
reason: it has its source and function in a manner different from natural human reason. Karl Barth and the modern challenges to Christology The Enlightenment s turn to the subject. The period of the Enlightenment brought with it a sustained focus upon the human individual as an independent, rational, and moral agent. The intense scrutiny upon the workings of the human mind and the rise of science in the Enlightenment made it almost
impossible for twentieth-century theologians
to bring together in theological anthropology the incompatible opposites of the "I yet not I." the saint-sinner of Luther ' s theology, or even the Chalcedonian formula of Christ as very God and very man. and still be taken seriously. Further, theologians no longer could claim that hu-14. Lienhard. Martin Luthers chnsto-logisches Zeugnis. 290. 15. See Brian Gerrish. Grace and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon. 1962). 82.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 265 man knowledge of God was a distinct but still true and valid "knowledge." for it does not arise from logical thinking, scientific experiment, and mathematical reasoning. "Faith" as a form of knowledge proved no match for the Enlightenment concept of human rationality. Indeed, the distinction that Luther made between faith and reason was possible because the concept of natural human rationality had not yet been elevated to the normative status that it was in the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment insistence that morality and rationality obey certain rules of logic and science, there was still room for Christ to be an ''effective Subject"' in the rational, moral agent.16 As the effective Subject in humans, Christ imputed his righteousness to us through faith. He was the reference point for rational
thinking and moral decision making in faith. In Luther's theology, Christ was the reference point for every "good work" that came from the human individual, and good w orks were understood as a consequence of the immediacy and activity of Christ within the believing sinner. This immediacy
and activity kept the human rational ego decentered. allowing it to be a moral subject only by virtue of the "I yet not I."' It did not stand on its own two feet. The Enlightenment transformation of the understanding of human rationality hustled Christ the effective Subject out of theories of knowledge. This can be seen clearly in the thought of Descartes. Although
the Christian tradition was no stranger to a sense of inwardness (Augustine
had already found a way to God through a flight inward), it was anchored in the human subject's connection to God—in Luther's case, to the effective and personal presence of Christ in faith. Descartes loosed the inwardness of the human subject from its divine mooring, making it no longer necessary for human reason to operate solely by virtue of reference to the divine presence.
He assigned a power—the power of "self-mastery'"—to human reason that excluded
any possibility of conceiving the human ego as decentered.1" Human reason was unified, and effective in and of itself: no other effective Subject operated within it. The "I yet not I" central to Luther's Christology was lost. Immanuel Kant took Descartes' understanding
of the autonomy of reason one step further, proposing that the very nature of "reason" meant that one behaves in an ethical manner as well.18 He pulled morality
into the orbit of the Enlightenment notion
of reason, endowing the human with an unprecedented sense of moral freedom. This autonomous morality was "accessible and accepted by every moral agent:"19 the human individual him- or herself, without any mediating presence from a divine subject,
had the capacity to act according to one's "good will." The moral nature of humans became rooted in autonomous reasoning,
thus excluding any need or possibility
that an external force or being could work upon the human to make one into a moral being. Charles Taylor has judged Kant " s moral theory to be "a powerful... .revolutionary force in modern civilization. [His idea] seems to offer a prospect of pure self-16. Bengt Hagglund. "Luthers Anthropologie."
in Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 to 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburstag. Vol. 1 (Góttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1983). 74. 17. Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989). 147. 18. See Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Harper Torchbooks. Harper and Row. [1785] 1964). 19. Manfred Kuhn. Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001). 285.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 266 activity, where my action is determined . . . ultimately by my own agency as a formula-tor of rational law."20 Natural reason itself is an instrument that formulates and sets moral principles: it alone obligates humans to do good works. It alone produces righteousness.
The philosophical consensus about human rationality and morality ushered in by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and Descartes was worlds apart from the early modern understanding of the human of Luther's era, where rationality reached its limit in relationship to the divine being and where morality was made possible b\ nothing other than the divine action. Lutheran theology and the "face" of Jesus Christ. While the Enlightenment granted a new autonomy to human reason, it could do so only by limiting reason to the sphere proper to it. namely, the sphere of history. "Reason" could no longer draw credible conclusions about anything that lay outside history and the logical sequence of events that make history. Speaking of Jesus as true God and true man became impossible. Credible speaking of Jesus Christ was restricted
to speaking of Jesus the man. Jesus the historical figure, the divinity of whom could be established only from what we know about his humanity "from below."21 Throughout the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, leading thinkers such as Elert promoted Christologies based solely on Christ's historical appearance, on the "face" of Christ. His physical presence— his 'face'—was the only reality of God that humans needed to see. In the life of Jesus as a purely historical figure, humans have the full, visible, complete face of God directly
and immediately before them. Jesus Christ did not reveal a God behind and beyond himself. His person and work were not considered revelation.22 Because modern Protestantism did not think in terms of the God outside history, the Christology of a Lutheran like Elert did not seek a Christ who mediated between humans and a God who was perceived as an ultimately unknowable metaphysical "Father."
The face and life of the historical Jesus was enough for natural human reason to discover and know God in God's fullness.
This kind of intense focus upon history, and the rather uncritical and naive trust in history and human reason that accompanied
it. was prevalent among Protestant
thinkers of Barth's da\. The substantive Christology of Luther lay buried deep in the layers of history, which makes the fact that Barth retrieved this aspect from Luther all the more remarkable. Barth' s retrieval of a substantive Christology.
Already in Barth's early theology from the decade of the 1920s, before he even considered writing the massive Church Dogmatics (first begun in 1932). he displayed
a keen interest in the theology of the Reformation, but he harbored doubts about the accuracy of his Lutheran contemporaries'
representation of Luther's theology.2"1 The Protestantism of the era. with its strong historicizing and psychologizing tenden-20. Taylor. Sources of the Self. 364. 21. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the nineteenth Centwy 1870-1914. vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale Universitt Press. 1985). 157. 22. Werner Elert. Die Lehre des Luthertums im Abriß (Munich: Beck. 1924). 29. For a similar Lutheran perspecm e. see Paul Althaus. "Theologie und Geschichte. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie." in Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 1 (1923/24): 771. See also Barth's Unterricht in der christliche Religion, vol. 2 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1990). par. 15:22. for his references to Elert and Althaus. (Hereafter Unterricht) 23. Unterricht 15:23: 28:29-30.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 26" cies evident in thinkers like Elert, was completely inadequate for truthful talk of the God of Jesus Christ. After the outbreak of World War I and the profoundly disturbing
involvement of leading Protestant theologians
in justifying the aggression of the German nation, Barth could no longer accept
a doctrine of revelation that read God's actions and intentions directly from the events of history. The Lutheran view that only the humanity of Jesus Christ was a positive and direct revelation of God on the surface of history became unacceptable to him.24 If Jesus Christ was the true Savior, God had to be at work in him. The historical
figure of Jesus of Nazareth needed to be part of something greater than himself. In his preparations for his seminal cycle on dogmatic theology, begun at the University
of Göttingen in 1924, Barth discovered
for himself the ancient Chalcedonian Christology by which Christ was truly God. truly human, unmixed, undivided, uncon-fused, and unseparated.25 What this discovery
did was allow Barth to move his theology beyond the historical, psychological ghetto of modern Christology and closer to that of Luther,26 closer to a substantive Christology
in which Christ's own person and work starts and completes our reconciliation with God.27 Precisely because humans come to know Jesus Christ as both God and man, his saving actions on our behalf are a real and effective reconciliation: That Jesus Christ is this one, the incarnated Logos God. is the absolute decisive presupposition
for his work... . One can not interpret the officium mediatorium, the completion of reconciliation
between God and the human, one will alw ays misinterpret it if one does not previously know who the mediator, who the completer is in this act, who the representative of this officium is. The work of Christ has its very particular character, its very particular qualification, its very particular gradient determined through that which is effective here, through the very union with God which Christ finds himself in.28 Contrary to his Lutheran contemporaries.
Barth established that Christ's work cannot be understood on the basis of the historical figure of Jesus alone. Knowing who Christ is and what Christ does comes only from knowing that he is united to the Father as very God and very human. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." In 1929, five years after his first lectures in Göttingen, Barth pushed even more against psychologized, historicized Christology in a lecture he gave at a theological conference
in Elberfeld. Germany, titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." Using Luther. Barth demonstrated here how a substantive Christology of Jesus Christ the mediator functions as a critique of the Enlightenment
understanding of the human as a rational, moral agent. Barth's targets were soteriologies like that of Holl, whose emphasis on Christianity as a religion of ''conscience'' essentially canceled out any need for a substantive Christology. In an essay on Luther's doctrine of justification, Holl argued against the traditional
substantive Christology of Luther. To Holl. the contradiction between the holy God and the sinful human could not be solved by simply pointing to Christ's person
and work as the mediator between them.29 God meets the sinner with the in-24. Unterricht 15:22. 25. Unterricht 6:169. 193: 28:46. 26. Unterricht 6:169, 193: 28:46. 27. Unterricht 29:75. 28. Unterricht 29:75. See also Bruce McCormack's work on this aspect of Barth's dogmatics in his Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995). 327ff. 29. Karl Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre in Luthers Vorlesung über den Römerbrief mit besonderer Rückblick auf die Frage der H eil s gewissheit in Kirchengeschichte. vol. 1: Luther (Tubingen: Mohr. 1921). 91-130.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 268 tenti on to forgive and transform "the human
into his own image."3U Christ does not represent this intention and therefore does not function as a mediating "third thing" in the meeting of God and the sinner. God's intention can turn into actual forgiveness only when the human's own intentions and actions turn toward the good. Thus. God actually meets not the sinner but rather the human as moral agent who strives to fulfill the Law—as a doer of good works. Reconciliation
of God and the human is therefore not an event where the enmity between God and the sinner is resolved: it is merely a "meeting of good wills." God justifies the one who is already justified.31 The completion
of reconciliation depends, finally, upon the moral fiber of the autonomous individual.
The transformation of the individual
into the imago Dei may or may not take place: justification is the "foundation for a new life." but it is up to the individual to gradually get better.32 Such a moralistic soteriology rejects the central role of Christ as mediator between
God and the sinner. It has no need for a substantive Christology because "sin" is no longer perceived as a devastating ontological force. Sin is a misguided good will, but a good will nevertheless. The human rational agent remains rational and able to make moral decisions, even as a sinner, for rationality contains morality within itself. Sin is merely a discrepancy between rationality and morality whereby sinful actions occur when human moral intentions do not follow reason. To Barth, however, the rational and moral constitution of the autonomous individual
does not help us get better and better. Sin brings the rational, moral agent to his or her knees. Sin is about the rational, moral agent's own struggle against God: it is human resistance to grace, not a description
of intentions. The struggle against this enmity toward God is undertaken by Christ and Christ alone, the Reconciler Spirit. Using Luther's simul iustus et pec cat or. Barth expresses the externality of Christ's work upon us. The human will never cease to acknowledge and confess, in all seriousness, that one's having been justified is utterly not in oneself, and consequently not m one's human unbelief. Indeed, the Christian is simul peccator et Justus and the surmounting of this irreconcilable contradiction does not lie in the Christian .. . but is the action of the Word of God. the action of Christ, w ho is always the One who makes one out to be a sinner, in order to make one (though a sinner) into a righteous [hu]man." Not we but Christ conquers our "radical evil and hate" toward the living God.34 This retrieval of a substantive Christology
had implications for both human reason and human morality. Barth countered
the rationalism in contemporary theories
of justification using the terminology of reason itself. He argued that the only activity that humans can ever really know is our own. Human rationality, therefore, only perpetuates our enmity toward God. Our insistence upon our own limited, self-enclosed rationality, and on controlling everything through our reason, does not bring us knowledge of God's work in Christ. In "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" he writes that reason, "in its unbelief, in its stubbornness, in its meek self-righ-30. Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre. 99. 31. Holl. 97-98. 32. Holl. 98. 33. Holl. 31: Barth. -Der Heilige Geist und das christliche Leben."" in Karl-Barth-Gesamtausgabe.
Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930. Ill (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1994). 495. 34. Barth. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life."" trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville. KY: Westminster/John Knox. 1993). 19.20.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 269 teousness. in which it wishes to remain by itself . . . does not wish to hear of something
radically different from its own workings"
(pp. 19, 20). The exercise of reason does not bring us insight into God's activities:
"What we can make evident to ourselves
is always our own activity. Even when we set this under the prefix of grace, it still remains our own working*' (pp. 24-25). With these claims, Barth locates a '"blind spot" in human rationality that can be filled only by Christ, for it is Christ alone who mediates himself to us through a "continual
giving" of himself into faith, whose righteousness is "established as true in our flesh" (p. 29). In so doing. Barth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner in relation
to God. The rational agent is indeed subject, but a subject whose agency has limits in relation to God's reconciling activity.
It is "I yet not Γ* who comes to know God. Barth further buttresses his argument against the abilities of human reason before God by qualifying the ability oí faith as a mode of cognition, lest it too be swallowed up by the all-encompassing Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Even faith is "hidden
from itself (p. 30: emphasis added). Rational thought cannot not make "faith" into a living knowledge of God. This is the task of the Holy Spirit: "but the two things, the acknowledgement of this contradiction [sin] and the knowledge of its being surmounted,
are not our own business, but are the Holy Spirit's"(p. 31). Here. too. Barth does not allow the human "I" to take control
of one * s own faith. Faith is mediated to the human by God and cannot be swallowed
up by one's sense of self as agent. The destabilizing "I yet not I" remains central to the identity of the believing Christian.
Β arth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner. In his retrieval of a substantive Christology
Barth also challenged the Enlightenment
conception of a reasonable, autonomous morality, and destabilized the human as a moral agent. When Christ is understood as the sole effector of our reconciliation
to God, the individual "person must be left out of consideration" (p. 26: emphasis added). Although human individuals
are indeed agents of actions, any and every good work that we see as being "ours" is canceled out, and the "I yet not I" comes into effect. As Barth states, the work of Christ the Reconciler Spirit must be seen in its fundamental and immutable [unaußiebbar] restriction of ever} thing that is our o\\ η w ork. Wherever the action of humans in themselves, m w hate\ er pretense or form, is made into a condition
of the human's fellowship with God. there the Holy Spirit is forgotten, and there sin is committed in order to overcome sin. (p. 20) Where human morality, the human will or conscience, is seen as the way to mediate the relationship between the sinner and God. the two aspects of reconciliation that need to be held together—justification and sanctification—fall away from each other. Justification turns into a slow, gradual
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern burner 2"0 process by which the sinner thinks he or she could become a nonsinner through the good works that he or she performs (p. 21). Reconciliation then becomes a matter of the "'divine gift and man's creative action combined in one*" (p. 22. quoting Augustine).
The "I yet not I" collapses into the willful human ego, and a substantive Christology
is dissolved. Barth was well aware of the implications
of his modern epistemologica! interpretation
of Luther's substantive Christology. When it is properly understood,
first, as being fully undertaken, begun,
and completed in Christ's person and work as the God-man, and further, as an event that is outside the control of our reasoning skills and moral abilities, the term "Christian" must take on a very particular
meaning. Supposing w e decide to side . .. w ith Luther . .. to proceed with caution when w e use the adjective
"Christian" and to use the word in a way quite other than is the vogue in our victorious modern Christendom. What. then, is meant by such phrases as "Christian" view of the universe. "Christian" morality. "Christian" art? What are "Christian" personalities. "Christian" families. "Christian" groups. "Christian" newspapers. "Christian" societies ... ? Who gives us permission
to us the adjective so profuselv? (pp. 37-38) Concluding remarks What Barth gained from Luther's substantive
Christology was a way to express the work of Christ upon the sinner that overcomes
the human drive to relate to God as beings who are autonomous, reasonable, and good-willed. Luther " s tight unification of Christ's person and work highlights that Christ's action as the God-man and mediator
is something that is started and finished in our lives by Christ alone. In that Luther closely connected the person and work of Christ with the creation of faith as a mode of cognition that is distinct from natural human reason, his Christology limits the capabilities of natural human reason to comprehend and therefore control what God's actions are toward us. To Barth, this meant that when it comes to the God-human relationship, human reason has a distinct blind spot. Taking this blind spot seriously means that Christians, especially Lutherans, maintain a healthy critical distance
to the process by which we weigh matters of moral weight using our everyday
reason and common sense. The "I yet not I" as the foundation for rational thinking
provides us with a critical check upon the way we go about trying to lead lives we would like to call Christian. Sustaining the faith that is beyond the reach of our control requires that Christ continually mediate himself to us as a Subject working within us. Finally, taking Barth's retrieval of Luther' s Christology seriously means bringing
to light the falsity that lies in the concept
of an autonomous "good will" that accompanies modem individuals* sense of self. Morality never arises out of ourselves,
and moral actions always have enfolded
within them some other hidden motive and external influence, whether it be economic, personal, idealistic, or practical.
It is clear in the theologies of both Barth and Luther that the only external factor that can actually make our good actions good is the divine influence, which comes from beyond our ability to rationalize
and control, which is mediated to us in the person of the crucified Christ who continually
works upon us as God's Reconciling
Spirit.
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Currents in Theology and Mission 34 no 4 Ag 2007, p 260-270
Despite Karl Barth*s lasting commitment to the Reformed tradition of John Calvin, it is the thought of Martin Luther that casts a long shadow over Barm's theology. As George Hunsinger points out. At certain vital points Barth follows Luther not only, broadly speaking, against Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but also against the main lines of the Lutheran tradition. There are points, in other words, where Barth actually retrieved Luther in order to stand with him not only against modernity, but also against the rest of the Reformation. (George Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids. MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. 2000). 282.) If we refocus the historical lens upon Barth and Luther, they can be seen to stand like bookends on the shelf of the modern age. with Luther standing at the beginning of what historians now call "early moder-nity," and Barth standing at its end.(W. Stacy Johnson, among others, has even suggested that Barth"s theology contains the seeds for postmodern theology. See his The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology (Louisville. KY: Westminster John Knox. 1997). Barth looked back for the sake of looking forward and in so doing engaged in intense study of Luther. Barth absorbed aspects of Luther's theology that allowed him to articulate Christian theology in deeper and more sophisticated ways over against modernity, which had through the course of the Enlightenment set the criteria for how we know what we know and thus how we articulate the sinner's relationship to Jesus Christ. As Hunsinger has noted. Barth "almost alone among modern theologians" granted "uncompromising precedence to the Reformation over modernity itself." He did not reject modernity, but he "refused to allow secular epistemologie s to set the terms for the validity of the gospel." (Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 293.) Barth"s mature Christology. seen in his Church Dogmatics, vol. IV. published in the early 1950s, has been a central channel into comparisons of his theology with that of Luther. Both Karin Bornkamm and Gerhard Ebeling have demonstrated that Luther and Barth share a Christocentrism in the best sense: clearly this was one thing Barth learned from Luther. Bornkamm has shown how Barth transformed Luther's conception of the offices of Christ as priest and king for the sake of forging a relationship
between Christology and soteriology. (Karin Bornkamm. "Die reformatorische
Lehre vom Amt Christi und ihre Umformung durch Karl Barths." in Luther und Barth. Veröffentlichung der Luther-Akademie Ratzeburg. Vol. 13. ed. Joachim Heubach (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag. 1989). 144. Currents in Theology and Mission 34 4 (August 200 )
Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 261). Ebeling traces the christological impulses that Barth took from Luther, even while Barth formed his own criticisms of the Reformer in the Church Dogmatics.( Gerhard Ebeling. Lutherstudien, vol. 3 (Tubingen: Mohr. 1985). 495-506.) But Barth had already begun retrieving aspects of Luther's Christology almost thirty years earlier. One example of this is a lecture that Barth gave in 1929 in Münster on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." After a decade that included two lecture cycles in dogmatic theology and intense engagement with Roman Catholic theology. Barth dove into the works of Augustine, Calvin, and Luther. The result was a lecture on theology and ethics titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" that displays Barth's deepening understanding of Luther's Christology. In this essay I briefly present Luther's Christology from his 1535 Galatians commentary (Luther wrote this commentary in 1531. but it was not published until 1535.) and show how Barth reached back to retrieve this for his own theology despite the drastically different epistemological landscape of the two thinkers brought about by the Enlightenment. Barth reached over Enlightenment notions of rationality and morality to retrieve Luther's substantive Christology, and in so doing he left behind the psychological and historical interpretations of the person and work of Christ by thinkers such as Werner Elert and Karl Holl. Luther's theology provided Barth with the resources to pull Christology out of the grip of Enlightenment understandings of the individual as an autonomous agent and show that reconciliation of the human to God by God and through God alone need not be beholden to modern theories of rationality or morality. Martin Luther's Christology in the Galatians commentary The richness of Martin Luther's Christology
has provided scholars with a wide variety of angles from which to analyze it. Ebeling has tried to capture its expanse under the terminology of a "forensic-antithetical*'
Christology." Finnish scholars such as Tuomo Mannermaa have focused their attention on the aspect of deification in Luther's early work. (See. for example. Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus. Rechtfertigung und Vergottung (Hannover: Lutheran-Verlag-Haus. 1989). Bernhard Lohse. and in more detail Ian Siggins. have approached
Luther ' s Christology from a more inductive angle, ( See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis: Fortress. 1999). and Ian D. Kingston Siggins. Martin Luther's Doctrine of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 10. See Lohse. Martin Luther's Theology, 220. notes 8. 9. 11. Luther's Small Catechism, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress. 2000), 355.Marga, Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 262)laying out the wide span of images that Luther employed, from his appropriation of motifs of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux to his borrowings from medieval piety and the New Testament.10 This variety, however, does not weaken two fundamental commitments visible in all aspects of Luther's Christology: his commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and his commitment to human salvation as the central function and purpose of Christ's person and work. These two commitments are summed up in the Small Catechism: "I believe that Jesus Christ, true God. begotten
of the Father in eternity, and also a true human being, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord. He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being.*'11 The first commitment, seen in the words "true God and true human being." points to the ancient christological dogma from the Council of Chalcedon in 451. which established that the one person of Christ is constituted by two natures, divine and human, unconfusedly. unchangeably, indivisibly. and inseparably. The second commitment is to soteriology. seen in the words "He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned human being." Luther rarely speaks of the person of Christ without referring
to his saving work on our behalf. The name Christ means reconciliation of the sinner to God; Christ is reconciliation. Luther's double commitment to the Chalcedonian formula and to the explicit salvific function of Christ has been called by Hunsinger a "substantive" Christology.12 Christ as very God and very human is the sole agent who initiates and fully completes
the reconciling action that takes place between God and the human. No other component or action is necessary in a substantive
Christology for reconciliation to be "real" for the human individual. An account of the substantive nature of Luther's Christology can be seen in his Galatians commentary, where he writes. For you do not yet have Christ even though you know that He is God and man. You truly have Him only when you believe that this altogether pure and innocent Person has been granted to you b\ the Father as your High Priest and Redeemer,
yes. as your slave. Putting offHis innocence
and holiness and putting on your sinful person. He bore your sin. death, and curse: He became a sacrifice and a curse for you. in order thus to set you free from the curse of the Law. (Luther's Works [hereafter LUT 26:288) When Christ steps before God in our place as the sinner to be punished, he not only initiates but also completes our being made righteous in God's eyes. There is no other process outside of Christ alone that initiates
and completes the justification of sinners. Neither the sanctification of the sinner nor the workings of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life functions the way that Christ's saving work does—a saving work that is embodied in Christ's very person. Christ's person embodies the precedence of God's grace over any "good works" of our own. Luther states. "Christ took the initiative. . . . He did not find a good will or a correct intellect in me. but He Himself took pity on me. ... By a mercy that preceded
my reason, will and intellect. He loved me ... so much that He gave Himself for me" (LU7 26:175). Reconciliation begins with Christ alone. And it is completed in Christ alone: ". . . victory over sin and death, salvation and eternal life . . . come ... by Jesus Christ alone"(p. 138). There is no gradual getting better or gradual transformation in the sinner.
Justification is not completed by a process of sanctification. It is this once-and-for-all sense of Christ's person and actions on our behalf that makes Luther's Christology a substantive Christology. His actions need no enhancement or outside aid and do not continue upon some gradual scale within the human being. What Christ began. Christ fully completes for us. The righteousness that comes to us through Christ's reconciling act is a righteousness
that brings with it its own new life. We are given a life that is not our own. for Christ's own righteousness acts upon us. takes us over. It decenters and destabilizes
the center of our own egos, for it is the righteousness of Christ's person and not of our own person. Luther claims. "I do indeed
live in the flesh, but I do not live on the basis of my own self (LW 26:170-71). When we live in Christ, we are no longer the one who controls this reality in our lives. The presence of the person of Christ 12. Hunsinger. Disruptive Grace. 284.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 263 displaces ourselves as the center of our lives. We cannot scale this reality in our lives down to a size that we can grasp and thus control, for the righteousness of Christ does not become a quality that inheres within the human being (cf. LW 26:127). nor is it somehow infused into the human to give him or her a new identity as non-sinner. It is a reality that remains distinct from us and greater than ourselves. Indeed, the new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. As Luther states, when we believe the good news that Christ died for us, we "are reckoned as righteous, even though sins, and great ones at that, still remain in us" (LW 26:234). Thus, although Christ starts and finishes our reconciliation with God, we, living in the here and now, do not shed our old sinful ways. We are not rid of our sin. Luther writes, These tu o things are diametrically opposed: that a Christian is righteous and beloved by God, and yet that he is a sinner at the same time. For God cannot deny His own nature. That is. He cannot avoid hating sin and sinners: and He does so by necessity, for otherwise He w ould be unjust and would love sin. (p. 235) This is the heart of Luther's classical doctrine
of the simul iustus et peccato?'. In this life, we live a life of opposites. of being a saint and sinner at the same time. God does not abandon us to the tension of saint and sinner, however. Christ's own presence to the reconciled sinner never ceases. It is an ongoing event. He is our 44'pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night' [Ex. 13:21 ] to keep God from seeing our sin" (p. 232). In that Luther emphasized Christ as the mediator, he was able to express the work of Christ in both the past, what he did as mediator for us on the cross, as well as in the present, what Christ does for us today: The new life in Christ thrusts individuals into an existence of contradictions:
We are now saints while still being sinners. ''Christ Himself is the life that I now live" (p. 167). The mediator comes to us continually.
"Today Christ is still present to some," Luther states, "but to others He is still to come. To believers He is present and has come: to unbelievers He has not yet come" (p. 240). Thus, there is a clearly actualistic element in Luther's Christology that modern theology can draw upon. Christ does not remain in static. Aristotelian categories
but spans the divide between God and human, between past, present, and future,
between action and substance, between
saint and sinner. Luther's Christ is the One who comes, who is coming. The mechanism that binds the reconciled
sinner to Christ is faith. This is a core aspect of Luther's Christology in the Galatians
commentary. "Through faith, the human participates in this saving reality of Christ who is present in the Word. This faith is a union with Christ."13 Luther writes, ... these three things are joined together: faith. Christ and acceptance or imputation. Faith takes hold of Christ and has Him present, enclosing 13. Marc Lienhard. Martin Luthers christologisches Zeugnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1973^ 217.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 264 Him as the ring encloses the gem. And w hoever is found having this faith in the Christ who is grasped in the heart, him God accounts as righteous.
(LW 26:132) This faith is inseparably connected to Christ's personal presence to us and to the destabilized lives that we live as the simul iustus et peccator. Faith is the epistemologica!
underpinning of Luther's understanding
of the "I yet not I" in Christ. "The life I live. I live on the basis of faith," Luther states. "For the time of life that I am living I do indeed live in the flesh, but not on the basis of the flesh and according to the flesh, but in faith, on the basis of faith, and according to faith" (LW 26:170). But this inseparable connection to Christ's personal presence is not depicted as some kind of mystical union with Christ or "spiritual" faculty that then allows the believing human to make inspired statements
about God (LW 26:28-29:287). Although
Christ is present to us through faith, he still remains beyond the reach of natural human reason, in the "cloud of faith" (p. 287). Luther states, "how [Christ] is present —this is beyond our thought: for there is darkness" (p. 130). Thus, it is precisely the concept of faith that maintains the distinction
between Christ and the reconciled sinner.
It maintains the distance between Christ's mediating activities and the natural
activity of our human intellect, which, finally, are still under the control of sin. death, and the devil. As Marc Lienhard puts it. "Christ is a reality "pro nobis' and *in nobis' but he is and remains * extra nos."*14 Christ is in us and for us but remains
as a reality outside of us. And. because Christ remains outside of us. he is beyond our rational and moral control. Thus, faith cannot be understood to be identical with human reason. For Luther, faith is a "mode of cognition" that is not identical to human reason.15 Faith is not the natural human capacity to understand or to comprehend in the way it understands objects
around itself. Luther disputes the "Sophists" on this point, arguing that even though the "natural endowments" of human
reason are capable of mastering physical,
civic, and political matters, the intellect is in fact corrupt and inept in matters of the knowledge of God. A completely other form of "comprehending" is necessary in order for knowledge of God to arise in the human being. When we discuss faith. Luther states, "we are in an altogether different
world—a world that is outside reason"
(LW 26:234). Nonetheless, faith neither destroys reason
nor renders it impotent in its own sphere. Faith is essentially a different kind of rationality,
an "understanding" that moves beyond
reason: it has its source and function in a manner different from natural human reason. Karl Barth and the modern challenges to Christology The Enlightenment s turn to the subject. The period of the Enlightenment brought with it a sustained focus upon the human individual as an independent, rational, and moral agent. The intense scrutiny upon the workings of the human mind and the rise of science in the Enlightenment made it almost
impossible for twentieth-century theologians
to bring together in theological anthropology the incompatible opposites of the "I yet not I." the saint-sinner of Luther ' s theology, or even the Chalcedonian formula of Christ as very God and very man. and still be taken seriously. Further, theologians no longer could claim that hu-14. Lienhard. Martin Luthers chnsto-logisches Zeugnis. 290. 15. See Brian Gerrish. Grace and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon. 1962). 82.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 265 man knowledge of God was a distinct but still true and valid "knowledge." for it does not arise from logical thinking, scientific experiment, and mathematical reasoning. "Faith" as a form of knowledge proved no match for the Enlightenment concept of human rationality. Indeed, the distinction that Luther made between faith and reason was possible because the concept of natural human rationality had not yet been elevated to the normative status that it was in the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment insistence that morality and rationality obey certain rules of logic and science, there was still room for Christ to be an ''effective Subject"' in the rational, moral agent.16 As the effective Subject in humans, Christ imputed his righteousness to us through faith. He was the reference point for rational
thinking and moral decision making in faith. In Luther's theology, Christ was the reference point for every "good work" that came from the human individual, and good w orks were understood as a consequence of the immediacy and activity of Christ within the believing sinner. This immediacy
and activity kept the human rational ego decentered. allowing it to be a moral subject only by virtue of the "I yet not I."' It did not stand on its own two feet. The Enlightenment transformation of the understanding of human rationality hustled Christ the effective Subject out of theories of knowledge. This can be seen clearly in the thought of Descartes. Although
the Christian tradition was no stranger to a sense of inwardness (Augustine
had already found a way to God through a flight inward), it was anchored in the human subject's connection to God—in Luther's case, to the effective and personal presence of Christ in faith. Descartes loosed the inwardness of the human subject from its divine mooring, making it no longer necessary for human reason to operate solely by virtue of reference to the divine presence.
He assigned a power—the power of "self-mastery'"—to human reason that excluded
any possibility of conceiving the human ego as decentered.1" Human reason was unified, and effective in and of itself: no other effective Subject operated within it. The "I yet not I" central to Luther's Christology was lost. Immanuel Kant took Descartes' understanding
of the autonomy of reason one step further, proposing that the very nature of "reason" meant that one behaves in an ethical manner as well.18 He pulled morality
into the orbit of the Enlightenment notion
of reason, endowing the human with an unprecedented sense of moral freedom. This autonomous morality was "accessible and accepted by every moral agent:"19 the human individual him- or herself, without any mediating presence from a divine subject,
had the capacity to act according to one's "good will." The moral nature of humans became rooted in autonomous reasoning,
thus excluding any need or possibility
that an external force or being could work upon the human to make one into a moral being. Charles Taylor has judged Kant " s moral theory to be "a powerful... .revolutionary force in modern civilization. [His idea] seems to offer a prospect of pure self-16. Bengt Hagglund. "Luthers Anthropologie."
in Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 to 1546. Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburstag. Vol. 1 (Góttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1983). 74. 17. Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989). 147. 18. See Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Harper Torchbooks. Harper and Row. [1785] 1964). 19. Manfred Kuhn. Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001). 285.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 266 activity, where my action is determined . . . ultimately by my own agency as a formula-tor of rational law."20 Natural reason itself is an instrument that formulates and sets moral principles: it alone obligates humans to do good works. It alone produces righteousness.
The philosophical consensus about human rationality and morality ushered in by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and Descartes was worlds apart from the early modern understanding of the human of Luther's era, where rationality reached its limit in relationship to the divine being and where morality was made possible b\ nothing other than the divine action. Lutheran theology and the "face" of Jesus Christ. While the Enlightenment granted a new autonomy to human reason, it could do so only by limiting reason to the sphere proper to it. namely, the sphere of history. "Reason" could no longer draw credible conclusions about anything that lay outside history and the logical sequence of events that make history. Speaking of Jesus as true God and true man became impossible. Credible speaking of Jesus Christ was restricted
to speaking of Jesus the man. Jesus the historical figure, the divinity of whom could be established only from what we know about his humanity "from below."21 Throughout the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, leading thinkers such as Elert promoted Christologies based solely on Christ's historical appearance, on the "face" of Christ. His physical presence— his 'face'—was the only reality of God that humans needed to see. In the life of Jesus as a purely historical figure, humans have the full, visible, complete face of God directly
and immediately before them. Jesus Christ did not reveal a God behind and beyond himself. His person and work were not considered revelation.22 Because modern Protestantism did not think in terms of the God outside history, the Christology of a Lutheran like Elert did not seek a Christ who mediated between humans and a God who was perceived as an ultimately unknowable metaphysical "Father."
The face and life of the historical Jesus was enough for natural human reason to discover and know God in God's fullness.
This kind of intense focus upon history, and the rather uncritical and naive trust in history and human reason that accompanied
it. was prevalent among Protestant
thinkers of Barth's da\. The substantive Christology of Luther lay buried deep in the layers of history, which makes the fact that Barth retrieved this aspect from Luther all the more remarkable. Barth' s retrieval of a substantive Christology.
Already in Barth's early theology from the decade of the 1920s, before he even considered writing the massive Church Dogmatics (first begun in 1932). he displayed
a keen interest in the theology of the Reformation, but he harbored doubts about the accuracy of his Lutheran contemporaries'
representation of Luther's theology.2"1 The Protestantism of the era. with its strong historicizing and psychologizing tenden-20. Taylor. Sources of the Self. 364. 21. Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the nineteenth Centwy 1870-1914. vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale Universitt Press. 1985). 157. 22. Werner Elert. Die Lehre des Luthertums im Abriß (Munich: Beck. 1924). 29. For a similar Lutheran perspecm e. see Paul Althaus. "Theologie und Geschichte. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der dialektischen Theologie." in Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 1 (1923/24): 771. See also Barth's Unterricht in der christliche Religion, vol. 2 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1990). par. 15:22. for his references to Elert and Althaus. (Hereafter Unterricht) 23. Unterricht 15:23: 28:29-30.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 26" cies evident in thinkers like Elert, was completely inadequate for truthful talk of the God of Jesus Christ. After the outbreak of World War I and the profoundly disturbing
involvement of leading Protestant theologians
in justifying the aggression of the German nation, Barth could no longer accept
a doctrine of revelation that read God's actions and intentions directly from the events of history. The Lutheran view that only the humanity of Jesus Christ was a positive and direct revelation of God on the surface of history became unacceptable to him.24 If Jesus Christ was the true Savior, God had to be at work in him. The historical
figure of Jesus of Nazareth needed to be part of something greater than himself. In his preparations for his seminal cycle on dogmatic theology, begun at the University
of Göttingen in 1924, Barth discovered
for himself the ancient Chalcedonian Christology by which Christ was truly God. truly human, unmixed, undivided, uncon-fused, and unseparated.25 What this discovery
did was allow Barth to move his theology beyond the historical, psychological ghetto of modern Christology and closer to that of Luther,26 closer to a substantive Christology
in which Christ's own person and work starts and completes our reconciliation with God.27 Precisely because humans come to know Jesus Christ as both God and man, his saving actions on our behalf are a real and effective reconciliation: That Jesus Christ is this one, the incarnated Logos God. is the absolute decisive presupposition
for his work... . One can not interpret the officium mediatorium, the completion of reconciliation
between God and the human, one will alw ays misinterpret it if one does not previously know who the mediator, who the completer is in this act, who the representative of this officium is. The work of Christ has its very particular character, its very particular qualification, its very particular gradient determined through that which is effective here, through the very union with God which Christ finds himself in.28 Contrary to his Lutheran contemporaries.
Barth established that Christ's work cannot be understood on the basis of the historical figure of Jesus alone. Knowing who Christ is and what Christ does comes only from knowing that he is united to the Father as very God and very human. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." In 1929, five years after his first lectures in Göttingen, Barth pushed even more against psychologized, historicized Christology in a lecture he gave at a theological conference
in Elberfeld. Germany, titled "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life." Using Luther. Barth demonstrated here how a substantive Christology of Jesus Christ the mediator functions as a critique of the Enlightenment
understanding of the human as a rational, moral agent. Barth's targets were soteriologies like that of Holl, whose emphasis on Christianity as a religion of ''conscience'' essentially canceled out any need for a substantive Christology. In an essay on Luther's doctrine of justification, Holl argued against the traditional
substantive Christology of Luther. To Holl. the contradiction between the holy God and the sinful human could not be solved by simply pointing to Christ's person
and work as the mediator between them.29 God meets the sinner with the in-24. Unterricht 15:22. 25. Unterricht 6:169. 193: 28:46. 26. Unterricht 6:169, 193: 28:46. 27. Unterricht 29:75. 28. Unterricht 29:75. See also Bruce McCormack's work on this aspect of Barth's dogmatics in his Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995). 327ff. 29. Karl Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre in Luthers Vorlesung über den Römerbrief mit besonderer Rückblick auf die Frage der H eil s gewissheit in Kirchengeschichte. vol. 1: Luther (Tubingen: Mohr. 1921). 91-130.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 268 tenti on to forgive and transform "the human
into his own image."3U Christ does not represent this intention and therefore does not function as a mediating "third thing" in the meeting of God and the sinner. God's intention can turn into actual forgiveness only when the human's own intentions and actions turn toward the good. Thus. God actually meets not the sinner but rather the human as moral agent who strives to fulfill the Law—as a doer of good works. Reconciliation
of God and the human is therefore not an event where the enmity between God and the sinner is resolved: it is merely a "meeting of good wills." God justifies the one who is already justified.31 The completion
of reconciliation depends, finally, upon the moral fiber of the autonomous individual.
The transformation of the individual
into the imago Dei may or may not take place: justification is the "foundation for a new life." but it is up to the individual to gradually get better.32 Such a moralistic soteriology rejects the central role of Christ as mediator between
God and the sinner. It has no need for a substantive Christology because "sin" is no longer perceived as a devastating ontological force. Sin is a misguided good will, but a good will nevertheless. The human rational agent remains rational and able to make moral decisions, even as a sinner, for rationality contains morality within itself. Sin is merely a discrepancy between rationality and morality whereby sinful actions occur when human moral intentions do not follow reason. To Barth, however, the rational and moral constitution of the autonomous individual
does not help us get better and better. Sin brings the rational, moral agent to his or her knees. Sin is about the rational, moral agent's own struggle against God: it is human resistance to grace, not a description
of intentions. The struggle against this enmity toward God is undertaken by Christ and Christ alone, the Reconciler Spirit. Using Luther's simul iustus et pec cat or. Barth expresses the externality of Christ's work upon us. The human will never cease to acknowledge and confess, in all seriousness, that one's having been justified is utterly not in oneself, and consequently not m one's human unbelief. Indeed, the Christian is simul peccator et Justus and the surmounting of this irreconcilable contradiction does not lie in the Christian .. . but is the action of the Word of God. the action of Christ, w ho is always the One who makes one out to be a sinner, in order to make one (though a sinner) into a righteous [hu]man." Not we but Christ conquers our "radical evil and hate" toward the living God.34 This retrieval of a substantive Christology
had implications for both human reason and human morality. Barth countered
the rationalism in contemporary theories
of justification using the terminology of reason itself. He argued that the only activity that humans can ever really know is our own. Human rationality, therefore, only perpetuates our enmity toward God. Our insistence upon our own limited, self-enclosed rationality, and on controlling everything through our reason, does not bring us knowledge of God's work in Christ. In "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life" he writes that reason, "in its unbelief, in its stubbornness, in its meek self-righ-30. Holl. Die Rechtfertigungslehre. 99. 31. Holl. 97-98. 32. Holl. 98. 33. Holl. 31: Barth. -Der Heilige Geist und das christliche Leben."" in Karl-Barth-Gesamtausgabe.
Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1925-1930. Ill (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich. 1994). 495. 34. Barth. "The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life."" trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville. KY: Westminster/John Knox. 1993). 19.20.
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern Sinner 269 teousness. in which it wishes to remain by itself . . . does not wish to hear of something
radically different from its own workings"
(pp. 19, 20). The exercise of reason does not bring us insight into God's activities:
"What we can make evident to ourselves
is always our own activity. Even when we set this under the prefix of grace, it still remains our own working*' (pp. 24-25). With these claims, Barth locates a '"blind spot" in human rationality that can be filled only by Christ, for it is Christ alone who mediates himself to us through a "continual
giving" of himself into faith, whose righteousness is "established as true in our flesh" (p. 29). In so doing. Barth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner in relation
to God. The rational agent is indeed subject, but a subject whose agency has limits in relation to God's reconciling activity.
It is "I yet not Γ* who comes to know God. Barth further buttresses his argument against the abilities of human reason before God by qualifying the ability oí faith as a mode of cognition, lest it too be swallowed up by the all-encompassing Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Even faith is "hidden
from itself (p. 30: emphasis added). Rational thought cannot not make "faith" into a living knowledge of God. This is the task of the Holy Spirit: "but the two things, the acknowledgement of this contradiction [sin] and the knowledge of its being surmounted,
are not our own business, but are the Holy Spirit's"(p. 31). Here. too. Barth does not allow the human "I" to take control
of one * s own faith. Faith is mediated to the human by God and cannot be swallowed
up by one's sense of self as agent. The destabilizing "I yet not I" remains central to the identity of the believing Christian.
Β arth reintroduces
Christ as the effective Subject, so significant to Luther's theology, into an understanding of the modern sinner. In his retrieval of a substantive Christology
Barth also challenged the Enlightenment
conception of a reasonable, autonomous morality, and destabilized the human as a moral agent. When Christ is understood as the sole effector of our reconciliation
to God, the individual "person must be left out of consideration" (p. 26: emphasis added). Although human individuals
are indeed agents of actions, any and every good work that we see as being "ours" is canceled out, and the "I yet not I" comes into effect. As Barth states, the work of Christ the Reconciler Spirit must be seen in its fundamental and immutable [unaußiebbar] restriction of ever} thing that is our o\\ η w ork. Wherever the action of humans in themselves, m w hate\ er pretense or form, is made into a condition
of the human's fellowship with God. there the Holy Spirit is forgotten, and there sin is committed in order to overcome sin. (p. 20) Where human morality, the human will or conscience, is seen as the way to mediate the relationship between the sinner and God. the two aspects of reconciliation that need to be held together—justification and sanctification—fall away from each other. Justification turns into a slow, gradual
Marga Jesus Christ and the Modern burner 2"0 process by which the sinner thinks he or she could become a nonsinner through the good works that he or she performs (p. 21). Reconciliation then becomes a matter of the "'divine gift and man's creative action combined in one*" (p. 22. quoting Augustine).
The "I yet not I" collapses into the willful human ego, and a substantive Christology
is dissolved. Barth was well aware of the implications
of his modern epistemologica! interpretation
of Luther's substantive Christology. When it is properly understood,
first, as being fully undertaken, begun,
and completed in Christ's person and work as the God-man, and further, as an event that is outside the control of our reasoning skills and moral abilities, the term "Christian" must take on a very particular
meaning. Supposing w e decide to side . .. w ith Luther . .. to proceed with caution when w e use the adjective
"Christian" and to use the word in a way quite other than is the vogue in our victorious modern Christendom. What. then, is meant by such phrases as "Christian" view of the universe. "Christian" morality. "Christian" art? What are "Christian" personalities. "Christian" families. "Christian" groups. "Christian" newspapers. "Christian" societies ... ? Who gives us permission
to us the adjective so profuselv? (pp. 37-38) Concluding remarks What Barth gained from Luther's substantive
Christology was a way to express the work of Christ upon the sinner that overcomes
the human drive to relate to God as beings who are autonomous, reasonable, and good-willed. Luther " s tight unification of Christ's person and work highlights that Christ's action as the God-man and mediator
is something that is started and finished in our lives by Christ alone. In that Luther closely connected the person and work of Christ with the creation of faith as a mode of cognition that is distinct from natural human reason, his Christology limits the capabilities of natural human reason to comprehend and therefore control what God's actions are toward us. To Barth, this meant that when it comes to the God-human relationship, human reason has a distinct blind spot. Taking this blind spot seriously means that Christians, especially Lutherans, maintain a healthy critical distance
to the process by which we weigh matters of moral weight using our everyday
reason and common sense. The "I yet not I" as the foundation for rational thinking
provides us with a critical check upon the way we go about trying to lead lives we would like to call Christian. Sustaining the faith that is beyond the reach of our control requires that Christ continually mediate himself to us as a Subject working within us. Finally, taking Barth's retrieval of Luther' s Christology seriously means bringing
to light the falsity that lies in the concept
of an autonomous "good will" that accompanies modem individuals* sense of self. Morality never arises out of ourselves,
and moral actions always have enfolded
within them some other hidden motive and external influence, whether it be economic, personal, idealistic, or practical.
It is clear in the theologies of both Barth and Luther that the only external factor that can actually make our good actions good is the divine influence, which comes from beyond our ability to rationalize
and control, which is mediated to us in the person of the crucified Christ who continually
works upon us as God's Reconciling
Spirit.
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IMAGES OF GOD AND THE IMITATION OF GOD: PROBLEMS WITH ATONEMENT ROBERT J. DALY, S.J.
Theological Studies 68 (2007) IMAGES OF GOD AND THE IMITATION OF GOD: PROBLEMS WITH ATONEMENT ROBERT J. DALY, S.J.
Overly logical applications of some of Paul's metaphors have led to widely accepted atonement theories that, because they project human
legalistic and transactional thinking onto the image of God, have been egregiously contradictory to an authentic trinitarian and incarnational view of sacrifice and atonement The Eastern emphasis
on apophatic theology and theosis coupled with the Western development of and confidence in historical critical analysis suggest ways in which theologians can come to a better understanding of these issues. BAD THEOLOGY LEADS το BAD MORALITY. This statement was the title and the thesis of the first version of this article.1 It was inspired by the pregnant statement of Thomas Aquinas in Contra gentiles: "Error circa creaturas redundant in falsam de Deo scientiam [mistakes about creatures lead to mistaken knowledge about God]."2 Obviously, if this is true, so too is its converse: mistaken knowledge of God leads to errors concerning creatures, or, in the context of the traditional Christian understanding of the imitation of the divine, leads to bad morality. Residues of this thesis will be found throughout the present article, but my focus is now more on ROBERT J. DALY, S.J., emeritus professor of theology at Boston College, received his Dr. theol. from the Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg, Germany. His recent publications include: "Robert Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistie Theology" (2000), "Sacrifice Unveiled or Sacrifice Revisited: Trinitarian and Liturgical
Perspectives" (2003), and "Eucharistie Origins: From the New Testament to the Liturgies of the Golden Age" (2005), all in Theological Studies. A forthcoming
volume, Sacrifice Unveiled, will draw together some 40 years of reflection on an authentically trinitarian view of Christian sacrifice over against common false ideas of it. 1 Delivered at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, July 6-10, 2005, at Schönstatt near Koblenz, Germany. The conference theme was "Mimetic Theory and the Imitation of the Divine." A further development of it under the present title, "Images of God..." was presented to the Boston Theological Society on December 8, 2005. 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 2, chap. 3. The title of this chapter reads: "Quod cognitio creaturarum valet ad destructionem errorum qui sunt circa Deum (That knowledge of creatures helps in the refutation of errors made about God)." 36
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 37
a specification of the first part of that thesis agenda, namely, bad theology, and specifically, bad theology of the atonement. This article also builds on remarks I made at a June 2000 meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, namely that the widespread popular traditional Christian concept of a God who readily condemns many to the ultimate violence, eternity in hell, helps account for the fact that Christians down through the ages have been so ready to accept and inflict violence as a relatively unchallenged part of their practical Christian lives. If God, whose perfection Christians are supposed to imitate—see Matthew 5:48: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (teleiosy—is violent, can we expect Christians to be nonviolent?3 Tragically, I am not referring only to Christians in the past. Many contemporary
Christians, quite possibly even a majority of them, take violence for granted as an integral part of their specifically Christian worldview. For example, although the great majority of people in the United States profess to be Christian, many of the 50 states practice capital punishment. Throughout the so-called Christian West, support for war, even far beyond what is allowed by the just war theory, is widespread and considered to be quite consistent with Christianity. Indeed, many selectively interpret biblical
teaching in such a narrow and radically literal way that they imagine— indeed even long for—the Second Coming of Christ when the select few "will be swept upward in rapture, while Catholics and the rest of the unbelievers are sent the other way."4 For many, the "wrath of God" is not a metaphor; it is a reality that is not merely to be dreaded by sinners, but a reality that the just hope and pray will descend upon those who are not. It would be economical to argue against such views with the syllogistic major: "All Christians believe violence is wrong." But that is unfortunately not true. Even to approximate the truth, one must say something like: "All Christians believe that unnecessary violence is wrong." That, of course, leaves individuals and groups free to define what is necessary as opposed to unnecessary violence. We are back with the presupposition behind the title of this article: behind all justifications that Christians can offer either for violence or for nonviolence lies, at least implicitly, an image of the divine that is, correspondingly, violent or nonviolent. In other words, behind the caesaropapism of the post-Constantinian church, behind the Crusades, behind the Inquisition and the witch-burnings, behind all the wars of religion, behind the great World Wars of 3 See Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Violence and Institution in Christianity," Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 9 (2002) 4-33, at 29-30. 4 Quoted from Paul Wilkes's review of Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in America 192.17 (May 16,2005) 17. The more than 50 million sales of books in the "Left Behind" series now rival translations of the Bible as America's best-selling books.
38 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
the 20th century (waged largely by nominally Christian nations), behind much of the economic, military, and cultural imperialism that characterizes the current pax Americana, to say nothing of the warring factions of the Middle East—behind these and countless other massive deviations from good morality, and inseparably connected with these deviations, lie false and mistaken ideas about God. Serendipitously, while this article was taking shape, I had the privilege of reading in manuscript Mark Heim's recently published Saved from Sacrifice:
A Theology of the Cross.5 I share with Heim the awareness that much of what Christians have traditionally thought of as Christian sacrifice or as atonement theology is, in fact, inauthentically Christian. In that sense, many Christians do indeed need to be "saved from sacrifice." As this article will point out, "sacrifice" and "atonement," while not synonymous, are actually so closely interrelated that problems with atonement generally also end up being problems with sacrifice and vice versa. This article could easily be called: "Saved from Atonement." If one were to divide Christians into those who accept violence or take it for granted as an integral part of authentic Christian life, and those who do not, or into those who locate some violence even in God and in their image of God, and those who do not, I, along with Mark Heim and Stephen Finían (from whom I take the subtitle of this article),6 clearly identify with those who do not. We are not constructing a straw horse, for there are serious and highly respected theologians on the other side of this issue. Hans Boersma, for example, may be one of them.7 As Miroslav Volf has put it: "Those who tend instinctively to reject any notion of violence as unworthy of God better take Boersma's arguments seriously."8 However, Boersma's position is highly nuanced; it may not be fair, as the following quotation suggests, to place him, without qualification, among "those who do": Underlying much of this study has been the appeal to paradox: all acts of hospitality in history share in the limited and conditional character of creation and require, as such, some degree of violence. I have argued that this violence can be redemptive and does not need to detract from the hospitable character of these acts. I have made the case that God's hospitality on the cross implies such redemptive violence, and that human hospitality requires a certain degree of violence as well. I have also maintained that it is only in the eschatological resurrection of Christ, completed on 5 S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006). 6 Stephen Finían, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy about, the Atonement Doctrine (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2005). 7 Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement
Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004). 8 From the dust jacket of Boersma's book.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 39
the last day, that this violence comes to an end and God ushers in his unconditional or absolute hospitality. Only the telos of this resurrection is sufficient justification for all good violence, whether divine or human. If it is true, however, that all human practices of hospitality are in a paradoxical relationship with violence, precisely ultimately to overcome violence, what does this do to our humanity in the eschaton? Will the boundaries of time and space no longer hold at that point? Would that not mean that we cease to be human? And would it not imply that the telos of the resurrection amounts to a negation of the very structures of God's good creation?9 Boersma is laudably ecumenical and nonpolemical in his approach. But it also seems to me that his (not uncritical) fidelity to the Reformed tradition
is the main reason for his apparent inclusion of violence in the divine redemptive process, just as my fidelity to my moderately progressive Roman
Catholic theological tradition may be the main reason for my desire to exclude violence from that process. But if that is so, to what tradition is the Prostestant Heim being faithful? This apparent anomaly suggests that we should try to prescind from where we are coming from and try to argue the issue on its theological merits. So far, this has been the easy part of this article—supporting with rhetorical
affirmation the thesis that bad theology leads to bad morality. The greater challenge is to critically demonstrate that the thesis cannot be easily cancelled out by opposing rhetoric. Some of the traditional Christian understandings—
or, perhaps more accurately, misunderstandings—of the atonement provide rich lodes to support my thesis. For central to common understandings of Christianity is that Christians are called to be followers of Christ and imitators of God. Regardless of whether or not one is a follower of Girardian mimetic theory, we can all see that Christian existence
is mimetic existence. But who/what is the God Christians are to imitate? If God is seen primarily as a "Sacrifice Demander," and Jesus primarily as a "punishment-bearer,"10 this seems, with inevitable logic, to lead to a worldview in which violence is taken for granted. The logical implications of some of the classical Christian atonement theories have Christians imitating a violent God whom they perceive as arbitrary, or impotent, or deceitful: arbitrary, because God chooses to inflict violence and does so in ways that seem unfair, or arbitrary, or make no sense to us; 9 Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross 257 (from his "Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification"). 10 Phrases taken from Finían, Problems with Atonement 120.1 am dependent on Finían not so much for the substance, with which I was already largely in agreement,
but for much of the content and big-picture overview of Christian atonement theories presented in this article. I will indicate this dependence in appropriate places via parenthetical documentation, e.g., (Finían 120).
40 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES impotent, because God sees the violence but cannot prevent it; deceitful, because God claims to put mercy above justice but does not do so. Thus, the "problems" with atonement, and especially the consequences of these problems, are serious and real. They coincide extensively with "problems with sacrifice." This particular take on the issue has been receiving
increasing attention lately, for example, in Heim's Saved from Sacrifice. Aspects of the traditional Christian atonement theories constantly intertwine
and overlap. Similar intertwining and overlapping will inevitably be part of my own exposition. I will, nevertheless, attempt to keep to the following order: (1) the relationship between the Incarnation and atonement
theories; (2) the sometimes stunning differences between the implications
of the metaphors of atonement and authentic Christian teaching about atonement and salvation; (3) the problem of divine violence; (4) sacrifice and cult; (5) the pervasiveness of the legal and the judicial, especially
in the West. INCARNATION AND ATONEMENT THEORIES The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is a central Christian doctrine. It embodies
the hinge event and the essential idea of what is specifically Christian
in revelation. Take away the Incarnation and there is, at least for mainline or trinitarian Christianity, no Christianity left. In contrast, the atonement is not central. It is derivative of the Incarnation.11 Furthermore, since many aspects of atonement theory, specifically as developed in the Western Christian tradition, are flatly incompatible with an authentic Christian understanding of God, it is profoundly mistaken to identify atonement, as commonly understood—see below—as central to Christian doctrine (Finían 120). This insistence that the Incarnation, but not the atonement, is a central Christian doctrine can be further supported by the obvious simple thought experiment of asking what we would have if one or the other doctrine were removed. If one takes away the Incarnation in the broad sense, meaning at least the existence of Jesus, one can hardly explain the existence of Christianity
in any of its forms. And should one take away the Incarnation in the strict sense—God taking on human form in the person of Jesus Christ— 11 "It is incorrect to identify 'Christianity' with atonement, without remainder. Atonement is not an essential doctrine of Christianity but is in fact derivative. The more central doctrine is the Incarnation (see chapter 5) [esp. section 5.1, "The Incarnation Interpreted through Secondary Doctrines"]. The Incarnation need not issue in the mythology of substitutionary atonement. God's participation in human life and God's indwelling of Jesus of Nazareth in particular did not make the Crucifixion inevitable or necessary" (Finían 104).
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 41
one can hardly explain the existence of Christianity in its main trinitarian forms. But if one takes away the atonement, meaning the atonement theories
developed in the Christian West, one still has the vibrant Christianity of the East that, although founded on the same biblical and patristic origins as that of the West, based its theology of salvation, fully trinitarian and fully incarnational, much more on theologies of theosis/divinization rather than on Western-type atonement theories. Stated oversimply and in its most blatant stereotypical form, traditional Western atonement theory includes or is ultimately reducible to: (1) God's honor was damaged by human sin; (2) God demanded a bloody victim— innocent or guilty—to pay for human sin; (3) God was persuaded to alter the divine verdict against humanity when the Son of God offered to endure humanity's punishment; (4) the death of the Son thus functioned as a payoff; salvation was purchased (Finían 1). If this, or this kind of, atonement theory is central to our idea of God and of salvation, we are in deep trouble. In effect, this notion turns God into some combination of a great and fearsome judge, or offended lord, or temperamental spirit. It calls into question God's free will, or justice, or sanity (Finían 97-98). It is incompatible with the central biblical idea of a loving and compassionate God.12 How, then, could such a notion come to be regarded as Christian? Much of the explanation—not necessarily the blame but at least the beginning of an explanation—can be found in the Pauline corpus. For Paul, Christ is simultaneously the final scapegoat, the price of redemption,
the long-promised Messiah, the reason for God's fostering of Abraham's descendants, and the leader who teaches the children to live by God's Spirit (Finían 50). When we ask what is achieved for us through this Christ-Messiah, the answer is: justification, reconciliation, adoption. When we ask further about the processes of achieving these, the answers are, respectively, judicial relief (justification), diplomatic repair (reconciliation),
and familial positioning (adoption). These processes, almost immediately
seen by following generations as transactions (susceptible, as subsequent
developments show, to the residual overlay of archaic magical ideas) are expressed in a rich congeries, even wild range, of metaphors. But they all build upon Paul's cultic, commercial, judicial, social, diplomatic, and familial metaphors. As we proceed, we have to keep reminding ourselves that Paul was not a systematic theologian, at least not in any modern sense of that term. And 12 This is a clear instance of the inevitable circularity or "bias" of my own argument.
For although I can begin to demonstrate that the authentic biblical image of God is that God is loving and compassionate, the reason why this is the position I would choose to demonstrate goes back to my autobiographical faith position.
42 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES we must also try to keep in mind not only the great range of metaphors with which Paul was groping to express something of the mystery of salvation,
but also that he was quite possibly the first to try to do so in this way.13 We must pursue the implications of the way in which he combined, conflated, and rapidly switched between these metaphors. This switching suggests his apparent awareness that no one metaphor or no narrow selection
of them is normative. Pursuing this line of analysis makes us sensitive
to the extent of the deformation that took place when theologians began to select just some of these metaphors and push them to their "theological"
conclusions. For some of these conclusions are at odds not only with each other but also with the central biblical revelation of a loving and merciful God eager to save, rescue, and forgive far beyond what the human mind and imagination often thinks is right and proper—and, significantly, at odds with what Paul himself was groping to express (Finían 34, 62). One can see this deformation already beginning to take place as early as the Pastoral Epistles and the Deuteropauline Letters where fidelity to right doctrine was increasingly seen as the sign of a true Christian (Finían 63-66). Increasingly, an interpretation of Jesus' crucifixion, seen more and more as a transaction, indeed as a cultic, juridical, and even quasi-magical transaction,
became the core message, while the actual teachings of Jesus, which had little, if anything, to do with such an interpretation, "became a secondary
body of information" (Finían 57). It was a devolution, a reduction of atonement theory down to the idea that God deliberately intended Jesus' violent death (Finían 101, agreeing with Walter Wink). Accompanying this devolution was a change in how one would talk about God the Father. Jesus would talk about God not only as "my Father" but also as your Father—as all four Gospels attest.14 But as time went on, that locution shifted increasingly to talking about God as Jesus' Father (Finían 112). There was also a shift away from how Jesus used to speak and teach— which, in his mouth, seemed to be quite remarkably uncultic—and more toward a way of speaking about Jesus as a cultic sacrificial victim, and about his death as a cultic transaction (Finían 113-15). In Christian teaching,
at first in the common patristic tradition, and then increasingly, espe-13 "I find that Paul uses many metaphors as well as the martyr motif and even uses one metaphor to interpret another. The metaphors interpenetrate, yet they can be discerned as discrete building blocks that are differently combined in different passages. Paul has not invested everything in any one metaphor but he has invested everything in the range of metaphors, explaining the death of Christ as a saving event that accomplishes cleansing or freedom-purchase or establishment of a family-
like community" (Finían 55). 14 Finían refers to this way of speaking as "virtually the identifying mark of the dominical tradition" (Finían 112).
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 43 cially in its Western developments, atonement developed into the primary "vehicle for conveying information about salvation and the Incarnation" (Finían 120). However, knowledge and information about the Incarnation does not need to be transmitted solely through the atonement doctrine with its narrow focus on violent crucifixion as the central transactional moment. Put positively, the Incarnation, Jesus' human life—that by which we are in fact saved—was not merely a lengthy prologue to the crucifixion (Finían 123). METAPHOR AND DOCTRINE As already pointed out, many of Paul's metaphors have unacceptable "theo-logical" implications. Does God's favor or forgiveness have to be bought! Does God's anger have to be assuaged by sacrifice! Is God a retribution-seeking, restitution-seeking judge! Is God a dishonored lord whose honor needs to be restored? Atonement theories generally pick and choose among the metaphors, overlook both their range and complexity, and overlook the implications of how Paul would rapidly shift between them. Focusing on some of the implications of these metaphors, atonement theorists would turn them into doctrines. In doing so they would generally neglect Paul's actual teaching of a merciful God. For example, the metaphors
sometimes imply a selfless Messiah over against a God who must be paid off. The metaphors sometimes imply an implacable Father over against a compassionate Son (Finían 39-62). These were the implications of some of Paul's metaphors, rather than what he directly taught or was groping to communicate in those places where, apparently giving up on attempted "theo-logical" exposition, he would break into song (see especially
Rom 11:33-36 and Phil 2:6-11). Excursus: Trinitarian Theology The "over-against" implications of the atonement metaphors, when they are turned into doctrine, logically introduce a tension into the Trinity that is at odds with what was (later, of course) achieved in a mature trinitarian theology. Such inner-trinitarian tension fails to appropriate the insight that, in sending the Son, the Father is actually sending himself. Despite the rhetoric, some of which is embedded in Scripture itself (e.g., Rom 8:32: "He who did not withhold ["spare"—ouk epheisato] his own Son, but gave him up for all of us"), the Father was not doing something to the Son; the Father was giving/offering himself.15 The seeds of many of the theologically 15 See Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Sacrifice Unveiled or Sacrifice Revisited: Trinitarian and Liturgical Perspectives," Theological Studies 64 (2003) 24-42, at 28.
44 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES unacceptable implications of atonement theory were planted relatively early in the patristic age, before the full maturation of trinitarian theology. Some of these unacceptable implications were already being superseded in the theology of the late fourth-century Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great. For example, it was not until the post-fourth-century maturation of patristic
theology that it became even possible to articulate a trinitarian theology
of Christian sacrifice such as the following: First of all, Christian sacrifice is not some thing that we do or give up. It is above all a mutually self-giving and profoundly interpersonal event. It begins not with us but with the self-offering of God the Father in the gift of the Son. It continues in the self-offering "response" of the Son, in his humanity and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Father and for us. And it continues further, and only then does it begin to become Christian sacrifice, when we, in the power of the same Spirit that was in Jesus, begin to be part of that mutually self-giving, mutually self-communicating Father-Son relationship. This, in a nutshell, is the whole story. Everything else is just dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. But, of course, it is only in these details, in the concrete experiences
of life, that the love of God is revealed and becomes real for us. As we now begin to break open these details, we have two challenges: not just to remain faithful to the theology of the Trinity (that took the early Church centuries to unpack), but, equally important, to remain connected to the flesh and blood of our human lives and experiences.16 In other words, Jesus in his teaching seems to have a quite different instinct regarding God and access to God's mercy than does Paul—at least in contrast with the implications of some of Paul's metaphors. A sharply worded paragraph from Finían highlights this striking contrast: Can we account for Paul's pessimism by saying that he is sensitive to the ever-present danger of human pride and sin? Is Paul, perhaps more savvy to human deceptiveness than is Jesus, and never speaks of open and free access to God by the pure in heart because most people will dishonestly convince themselves that they are pure? Undoubtedly, Paul is perceptive on this point, but one can hardly say that he is more perceptive than Jesus, who could sniff out any scent of hypocrisy, or that Jesus' Gospel is the result of naivety. We are dealing with two entirely different instincts about God and access to God. Jesus, with fully adult know-how and lack of illusions, is able to say that a sincere and childlike faith opens the portals of heaven. There really are some truth-hungering, merciful, and "utterly sincere" people, who "will be filled... will receive mercy... will see God" (Matt 5:6-8).17 16 Adapted from my unpublished paper, "Sacrificial Preaching," presented at the August 2005 meeting of the Societas Liturgica in Dresden, Germany. I owe the substance of what is expressed herein to Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J., The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1998). 17 Finían 61. "Utterly sincere" is from Matt 5:8 in J. B. Phillips, The Gospels Translated into Modern English (New York: Macmillan, 1961) 8.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 45 However, to do Paul justice, if we take away the metaphors and look only at Paul's direct teaching and exhortation, we do not see that strong tension between "implacable Father and compassionate Son" (Finían 71). Further, when we attend to all that Paul is attempting to communicate, attend to his teaching and to the implications of his hymns as well as to the implications of all of his metaphors and models, we see that he is expressing not merely transactional ideas in metaphors that are cultic, economic, and legal; he is also expressing spiritually transformative ideas. Notably—to jump ahead a millennium—it is especially the latter, the transformative ideas and implications, that Abelard (due perhaps to his heightened literary
and imaginative sensitivity?) picks up and develops with his emphasis on moral influence (Finían 74-75). Anselm, by contrast (more sensitive to at least some aspects of the "theo-logic"?) focused more on the transactional
aspects of the cultic, economic, and legal metaphors. DIVINE VIOLENCE Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo (1098) has been called "a master text of divine violence."18 Even those who disagree with it recognize
it as perhaps the single most famous and influential postbiblical text on the atonement. Significantly, by the time atonement doctrine has developed
(or devolved) to this point, it is no longer, as many patristic authors had thought, the devil who is the source of violence against humanity, but God the Father (Finían 72). What is laid out, even taken for granted here and in so many of the traditional atonement theories of the Western Church, is an inner-divine "scenario of divine violence restrained by divine mercy, but a mercy that had to be mediated through violence" (Finían 75). Hence the angry, punishing God of Calvin, or the always severe Father and always compassionate Son of Luther, or the schooling of devout Catholics to make reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What all this does, whether
consciously or subconsciously (and at odds with a mature trinitarian theology as I indicated above) is to locate violence and the negotiation of violence within the divine. Present in this whole line of development is the belief, going back at least to Augustine, that all humanity faces damnation. Some of the theories developed the idea that, to save humanity from condemnation, "God preplanned
the killing of the Son from the beginning of time" (Finían 76). Facilitating this development was the fact that, in contrast to much of the East, the idea of apocatastasis (universal salvation) was generally not even discussed in the West. More commonly taken for granted in the West was 18 Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001) 76.
46 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
the idea that God freely chose to save only some, and perhaps only the fortunate few, from damnation (ibid.). And if one did not have the good fortune to hear the gospel and be baptized, one had no chance at all. Nor was it only the churches of the Reformation that subsequently emphasized so strongly the absolute depravity, the universal guilt of humankind. Jansenism, primarily a Roman Catholic phenomenon, was just as earnest in this regard. Saving humankind meant the transfer of divine wrath to the Son. "Faced with such monstrous teachings" (Finían 78), theologians have desperately tried to make sense of it all. But as long as they remained bound within the framework of atonement theories that locate violence within the divine, they could not break out of a pernicious taking-for-granted of violence on all levels of existence, divine and human. Bad theology
led to bad—that is, violent—morality. René Girard, especially in his central major works, challenged the hegemony
of this way of thinking, basically by exposing the violent mechanisms
of sacrificial scapegoating, and by rejecting these mechanisms and the traditional (destruction-of-the-victim) idea of sacrifice as essential to Christianity. However, the theological appropriation of Girard's insights, that is, developing an authentically Christian (i.e., essentially nonviolent) concept of God and atonement) remains a work in progress. Major contributions
in this direction have come from the recently deceased Raymund Schwager, S.J. (d. 2004), especially in his Jesus in the Drama of Salvation19 and Banished from Eden.20 In these works, especially the latter, Schwager not only develops the concept of violence as the primordial sin, that is, seeing original sin as the common human tendency to reach for violent solutions, but also points out the "natural" support for, and indeed the "natural" origin of, this concept in the findings of contemporary bio-sciences.21 19 Raymund Schwager, Jesus im Heilsdrama: Entwurf einer biblischen Erlösungslehre,
Innsbrucker theologische Studien 29 (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1990); ET: Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, trans. James G. Williams and Paul Haddon (New York: Crossroad, 1999). 20 Raymund Schwager, Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation, trans. James G. Williams (London: Gracewing, 2005 = ET of Erbsünde und Heilsdrama: Im Kontext von Evolution, Gentechnologie
und Apokalyptik (Münster: LIT, 1997). See the account of a panel discussion of this book, "Celebrating Raymund Schwager: At the AAR Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, November 2004" in The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion 26 (April 2005) 5-7. 21 Schwager arrives at this insight not by beginning with a traditional theology of original sin, and then asking how contemporary science relates to that theology. Rather, as far as possible, he begins with science itself. For example, he begins specifically with the finding that organisms at all levels, including the human psychic organism, have "memories." What the human organism has in its bio-psychic
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 47
Among the problems still needing adequate theological explanation is that of the residue of magical transactional thinking (see Finían 98) in Christian atonement doctrine (as well as in some popular understandings of the sacraments). Related to this is, for example, the persistence of seeing the crucifixion as a kind of transaction that, ultimately or implicitly, calls into question the free will, or the justice, or the sanity, or the power of a benevolent God.22 Similar to this transactional kind of thinking is the theological inconsistency of making the scapegoating of Jesus (an act of violence) a part of God's eternal plan (Finían 101). Similar also is the readiness to imagine magical power solutions (Hello, Harry Potter!). Is that far from the readiness to believe in miracles? All this seems to connect with the readiness to think of a violent God, or at least of the existence of some violence in God. It contributes both to the widespread human tendency
to look for scapegoats (Finían 116), and to the widespread tendency to take violence for granted in human affairs. Connected with all this seems to be what can be called the absolutization of suffering. The popularity of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ is only a more recent example. In the suffering of Christ there is, undeniably, a transcendent sacredness. But there is no unconditioned absoluteness there in the suffering of Christ. For Christ did not have to suffer. There is no absolute divine necessity there; but there is—viewed from what I would insist is an authentic Christian point of view—absolute divine necessity in the love with which Christ suffered. For ultimately, it is not suffering but love that saves. In other words, as Cynthia Crysdale has observed, suffering and the violence that causes it is a consequence of union with God, not the means to it.23 SACRIFICE AND CULT As Finían points out early in his book, atonement, although not synonymous
with sacrifice, overlaps with it. Problems with atonement generally memory, from that critical evolutionary "moment" that we call hominization, is the memory, encoded in our beings, that, when faced with the choice of spiritual self-transcendence, human beings generally chose to react in the (indeed tried-and-true) basically violent and instinctual ways that characterized the existence of their prehuman forebears. Influenced as he is by Guardian mimetic theory, Schwager suggests that this is a good way for us to begin to understand peccatum originale originatum—the original sin that continues to exist in us. 22 It is a common pastoral strategy, when faced with the need to "explain" evil and suffering, to point to the passion of Christ. That, however, does not solve the problem; it merely transposes it. 23 See Finlan's develoment of this theme on pp. 104-6. He acknowledges his dependence on Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today (New York: Continuum, 1999) passim, but esp. 100.
48 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES also end up being problems with sacrifice (Finían 3). In the end, sacrifice, along with atonement, is commonly perceived as an instance of divine violence. Emphasis on the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ can indeed spare Protestants from the problem their Catholic counterparts have in explaining
how the Sacrifice of the Mass can be, as defined at the Council of Trent, a "true and proper sacrifice."24 But the problem still remains, whether located in a once-for-all past, or also in a continuing liturgical celebration, that the sacrifice of Christ ends up being an act of divine violence that God planned from all eternity. In writing about atonement Paul assumed the existence of, and familiarity
with, already existing cultic patterns. He used several cultic metaphors
and assumed that salvation came from a cultic act (Finían 44, 51). But it is what happened after Paul that causes most of the problems I am attempting to deal with in this article. For, as Christian reflection developed,
the increasing emphasis on and blending together of ideas of penal substitution and the idea of death-as-payment caused sacrifice to become, for many, the dominant image of atonement. This is obvious in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Subsequent patristic theologians then glued together Paul's atonement metaphors into the notion of a sacrificial and redeeming transaction (Finían 65-66). This attachment filled the perceived need. For despite the inroads that the spiritualization of sacrifice had already made and was continuing to make in Greek religious philosophy, in late biblical Judaism, and in early Christianity, Christian antiquity was still a time when sacrifice in the traditional history-of-religions sense of that word, that is, an external cultic act involving the destruction of a victim,25 was generally taken for granted as an essential part of religion. It was still a time when almost everyone assumed that a sacrificial death was required for a mediator
or reconciler to appease God with a unique sacrifice (Finían 70-71). We have to remind ourselves that this necessity for a sacrificial and redeeming
transaction was perceived to be a necessity in God, or a necessity outside of God to which God was bound. Part of the problem is, of course, the apparent scriptural warrant for this necessity (e.g., Lk 24:26: "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer ... ?"). This assumption of the necessity of Christ's suffering resulted in and/or went along with false ideas about God. Such false ideas about God and a consequent false morality are 24 "Verum et proprium sacrificium" (Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum, et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Henricus Denzinger and Adolfus Schön-metzer [Freiburg im Briesgau: Herder, 1967] no. 1751); see also nos. 1743 and 1753: "sacrificium vere propitiatorium [truly an atonement sacrifice]." 25 For a detailed exposition of how damaging this destruction-of-a-victim idea of sacrifice can be when applied to Christian sacrifice, see Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Robert
Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistie Theology," Theological Studies 61 (2000) 239-60.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 49 inevitable if the scapegoating death of Jesus is a necessary, divinely planned, transactional sacrificial event that God brings about like a puppet master manipulating human events. LEGAL AND JUDICIAL THINKING From the outset, judicial metaphors were among the metaphors used to explain the atonement. In the post-Pauline developments, the blending of penal substitution ideas with those of death-as-payment resulted in presenting
redemption as sacrifice-dominant. Then, the summing up of Paul's atonement metaphors into the notion of a sacrificial and redeeming transaction,
and the concomitant increasing emphasis on the logic underlying that atonement transaction, made recourse to legal thinking all the more necessary (Finían 65-66, 98-99). As a result, by the time of Augustine, ransom theory (with its subthemes of rescue, deception, mousetrap, etc.) was being increasingly trumped by legal theory (Finían 70). Then Gregory the Great, in his blending of legal and sacrificial motifs, and in his stressing of the need for a proportionate remedy, locked legal-logical thinking into the core of Western atonement thinking. Characteristic of Western theological
thinking, generally, and even to this day, has been the fundamental importance of law, even on the divine level. The significance of the adjective "Western" in the previous paragraph is central to what I am trying to understand. Here, precisely here, may be the most significant fork in the road where the West went one way, understanding
the Christian mystery of salvation after the model of a legal transaction,
and the East went another way, understanding the Christian mystery
of salvation as theosis, divinization. These characteristically Western developments help explain why Anselm's theory was so powerful and influential. It was a social theory based on the feudal structure of his time. It involved a structural form of vengeance/reparation, all of which had to be governed by "law" (see Finían 70-71). This emphasis on law was consistent with the fundamental psychology
of atonement that I have already mentioned, namely, that it is based on a belief that nothing is free, and on the intuition that ritual establishes order (Finían 80). "Law and order" may not be synonymous, but they are inseparable. As Girard has pointed out, Jesus exposes and repudiates the victimization
mechanism by which atonement has been thought to work. Nevertheless,
the need of human societies for social and other appropriate mechanisms
remains as strong as ever. Take away the legal and the juridical, and one takes away human culture as we know it. We cannot prescind from the legal and juridical ways of thinking by which we live. But to project our human and thus inevitably flawed (at least inevitably finite) juridical
50 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
thinking—or any kind of human-experience-based thinking—onto God, and then to take the resulting image of God as a model both for understanding
God's actions and for us humans to imitate, is simply bad theology;
it leads to bad, and sometimes to very bad, morality. CONCLUSION So, what can we do? Who, or what, can free us from this vicious circle?26 Few indeed are the mystically graced who, like Julian of Norwich, can see through the limitations in the theology of an Anselm and begin to speak with real knowledge and experiential wisdom about her all-loving, all-merciful God.27 The rest of us can only humbly—or at least with attempted humility, since humility is hard to maintain when one is indulging in the Schadenfreude of pointing out how so much previous theology has been wrong—attend to developments in the tradition that seem to point to a more authentically Christian understanding of atonement. The first two such developments that come to mind derive more from the East than from the West: apophatic theology and theosis. Apophatic theology reminds us that all our projections onto God are just that, faulty human projections, and that developing a theology from the implications of such projections can be devastatingly mistaken. Theosis reminds us that our salvation does not come about by any transaction
that can be adequately explained or imagined in human terms; salvation comes about by beginning to become one with the ineffable God. Good theology can proclaim that this "divinization" is what is actually happening to us, but it is at a loss to explain how divinization comes about. On this point, however, we can at least be grateful for a highly significant ecumenical theological convergence among recent Christian writers. Both the atonement critic Stephen Finían and the atonement redefiner Hans Boersma have, apparently quite independently of each other, concluded their books by pointing to iAeas/s/deification as probably the best possible solution to our Christian "problems with atonement." The final chapter subheading of Finlan's book is "5.2 Theosis"; the final section of Boersma's book is "Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification."
28 But then two more thoughts come to mind, and these are gifts that the West can bring to the table. The first is the Western intellectual conviction 26 Notice the similarity to the aporetic cries of Paul: "What then should we say ... Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:7, 24). 27 See Joan M. Nuth, "Two Medieval Soteriologies: Anselm of Canterbury and Julian of Norwich," Theological Studies 53 (1992) 611-^5; Nuth, Wisdom's Daughter:
The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad, 1991). 28 Finían 120-24; Boersma 257-61.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 51
that humans are capable of true knowledge and right thinking. We must not, however, exaggerate this capability. It is in fact related to apophasis on the negative side, because it primarily serves to identify and eliminate what is bad theology. On the positive side, we can cautiously hope that our capacity for right thinking can also begin to point us in the right direction.29 The second gift that the West can bring is its modern development of critical biblical and historical studies. All the faulty theories of atonement that have developed in the Christian tradition have roots in this or that part or aspect of biblical revelation, but not in the whole of it. Modern biblical studies afford access to that whole; they provide an ability, not possible to earlier ages, to contextualize the different parts of that whole. In addition, all of the faulty theories of atonement that have developed subsequent to the Bible can also be contextualized, and thus deabsolutized, by locating them in their historical, intellectual, and cultural situations of origin. To sum up: (1) I have tried to show what bad theology of the atonement is. (2) I have claimed, but largely left it to the imagination of my readers to conclude, how bad theology of the atonement leads to bad morality. (3) And, I humbly admit, I have left largely undeveloped, at least in this article, what good theology of the atonement might be. Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy! 29 In an epoch we call "postmodern," it is countercultural to insist on our ability to attain true knowledge of things, to have assurance that some of the "great stories" can be truer than others, or that we have the ability to cull out at least some truth from a variety of "great stories."
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Overly logical applications of some of Paul's metaphors have led to widely accepted atonement theories that, because they project human
legalistic and transactional thinking onto the image of God, have been egregiously contradictory to an authentic trinitarian and incarnational view of sacrifice and atonement The Eastern emphasis
on apophatic theology and theosis coupled with the Western development of and confidence in historical critical analysis suggest ways in which theologians can come to a better understanding of these issues. BAD THEOLOGY LEADS το BAD MORALITY. This statement was the title and the thesis of the first version of this article.1 It was inspired by the pregnant statement of Thomas Aquinas in Contra gentiles: "Error circa creaturas redundant in falsam de Deo scientiam [mistakes about creatures lead to mistaken knowledge about God]."2 Obviously, if this is true, so too is its converse: mistaken knowledge of God leads to errors concerning creatures, or, in the context of the traditional Christian understanding of the imitation of the divine, leads to bad morality. Residues of this thesis will be found throughout the present article, but my focus is now more on ROBERT J. DALY, S.J., emeritus professor of theology at Boston College, received his Dr. theol. from the Julius Maximilians University in Würzburg, Germany. His recent publications include: "Robert Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistie Theology" (2000), "Sacrifice Unveiled or Sacrifice Revisited: Trinitarian and Liturgical
Perspectives" (2003), and "Eucharistie Origins: From the New Testament to the Liturgies of the Golden Age" (2005), all in Theological Studies. A forthcoming
volume, Sacrifice Unveiled, will draw together some 40 years of reflection on an authentically trinitarian view of Christian sacrifice over against common false ideas of it. 1 Delivered at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, July 6-10, 2005, at Schönstatt near Koblenz, Germany. The conference theme was "Mimetic Theory and the Imitation of the Divine." A further development of it under the present title, "Images of God..." was presented to the Boston Theological Society on December 8, 2005. 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles 2, chap. 3. The title of this chapter reads: "Quod cognitio creaturarum valet ad destructionem errorum qui sunt circa Deum (That knowledge of creatures helps in the refutation of errors made about God)." 36
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 37
a specification of the first part of that thesis agenda, namely, bad theology, and specifically, bad theology of the atonement. This article also builds on remarks I made at a June 2000 meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, namely that the widespread popular traditional Christian concept of a God who readily condemns many to the ultimate violence, eternity in hell, helps account for the fact that Christians down through the ages have been so ready to accept and inflict violence as a relatively unchallenged part of their practical Christian lives. If God, whose perfection Christians are supposed to imitate—see Matthew 5:48: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (teleiosy—is violent, can we expect Christians to be nonviolent?3 Tragically, I am not referring only to Christians in the past. Many contemporary
Christians, quite possibly even a majority of them, take violence for granted as an integral part of their specifically Christian worldview. For example, although the great majority of people in the United States profess to be Christian, many of the 50 states practice capital punishment. Throughout the so-called Christian West, support for war, even far beyond what is allowed by the just war theory, is widespread and considered to be quite consistent with Christianity. Indeed, many selectively interpret biblical
teaching in such a narrow and radically literal way that they imagine— indeed even long for—the Second Coming of Christ when the select few "will be swept upward in rapture, while Catholics and the rest of the unbelievers are sent the other way."4 For many, the "wrath of God" is not a metaphor; it is a reality that is not merely to be dreaded by sinners, but a reality that the just hope and pray will descend upon those who are not. It would be economical to argue against such views with the syllogistic major: "All Christians believe violence is wrong." But that is unfortunately not true. Even to approximate the truth, one must say something like: "All Christians believe that unnecessary violence is wrong." That, of course, leaves individuals and groups free to define what is necessary as opposed to unnecessary violence. We are back with the presupposition behind the title of this article: behind all justifications that Christians can offer either for violence or for nonviolence lies, at least implicitly, an image of the divine that is, correspondingly, violent or nonviolent. In other words, behind the caesaropapism of the post-Constantinian church, behind the Crusades, behind the Inquisition and the witch-burnings, behind all the wars of religion, behind the great World Wars of 3 See Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Violence and Institution in Christianity," Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 9 (2002) 4-33, at 29-30. 4 Quoted from Paul Wilkes's review of Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in America 192.17 (May 16,2005) 17. The more than 50 million sales of books in the "Left Behind" series now rival translations of the Bible as America's best-selling books.
38 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
the 20th century (waged largely by nominally Christian nations), behind much of the economic, military, and cultural imperialism that characterizes the current pax Americana, to say nothing of the warring factions of the Middle East—behind these and countless other massive deviations from good morality, and inseparably connected with these deviations, lie false and mistaken ideas about God. Serendipitously, while this article was taking shape, I had the privilege of reading in manuscript Mark Heim's recently published Saved from Sacrifice:
A Theology of the Cross.5 I share with Heim the awareness that much of what Christians have traditionally thought of as Christian sacrifice or as atonement theology is, in fact, inauthentically Christian. In that sense, many Christians do indeed need to be "saved from sacrifice." As this article will point out, "sacrifice" and "atonement," while not synonymous, are actually so closely interrelated that problems with atonement generally also end up being problems with sacrifice and vice versa. This article could easily be called: "Saved from Atonement." If one were to divide Christians into those who accept violence or take it for granted as an integral part of authentic Christian life, and those who do not, or into those who locate some violence even in God and in their image of God, and those who do not, I, along with Mark Heim and Stephen Finían (from whom I take the subtitle of this article),6 clearly identify with those who do not. We are not constructing a straw horse, for there are serious and highly respected theologians on the other side of this issue. Hans Boersma, for example, may be one of them.7 As Miroslav Volf has put it: "Those who tend instinctively to reject any notion of violence as unworthy of God better take Boersma's arguments seriously."8 However, Boersma's position is highly nuanced; it may not be fair, as the following quotation suggests, to place him, without qualification, among "those who do": Underlying much of this study has been the appeal to paradox: all acts of hospitality in history share in the limited and conditional character of creation and require, as such, some degree of violence. I have argued that this violence can be redemptive and does not need to detract from the hospitable character of these acts. I have made the case that God's hospitality on the cross implies such redemptive violence, and that human hospitality requires a certain degree of violence as well. I have also maintained that it is only in the eschatological resurrection of Christ, completed on 5 S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006). 6 Stephen Finían, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy about, the Atonement Doctrine (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 2005). 7 Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement
Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004). 8 From the dust jacket of Boersma's book.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 39
the last day, that this violence comes to an end and God ushers in his unconditional or absolute hospitality. Only the telos of this resurrection is sufficient justification for all good violence, whether divine or human. If it is true, however, that all human practices of hospitality are in a paradoxical relationship with violence, precisely ultimately to overcome violence, what does this do to our humanity in the eschaton? Will the boundaries of time and space no longer hold at that point? Would that not mean that we cease to be human? And would it not imply that the telos of the resurrection amounts to a negation of the very structures of God's good creation?9 Boersma is laudably ecumenical and nonpolemical in his approach. But it also seems to me that his (not uncritical) fidelity to the Reformed tradition
is the main reason for his apparent inclusion of violence in the divine redemptive process, just as my fidelity to my moderately progressive Roman
Catholic theological tradition may be the main reason for my desire to exclude violence from that process. But if that is so, to what tradition is the Prostestant Heim being faithful? This apparent anomaly suggests that we should try to prescind from where we are coming from and try to argue the issue on its theological merits. So far, this has been the easy part of this article—supporting with rhetorical
affirmation the thesis that bad theology leads to bad morality. The greater challenge is to critically demonstrate that the thesis cannot be easily cancelled out by opposing rhetoric. Some of the traditional Christian understandings—
or, perhaps more accurately, misunderstandings—of the atonement provide rich lodes to support my thesis. For central to common understandings of Christianity is that Christians are called to be followers of Christ and imitators of God. Regardless of whether or not one is a follower of Girardian mimetic theory, we can all see that Christian existence
is mimetic existence. But who/what is the God Christians are to imitate? If God is seen primarily as a "Sacrifice Demander," and Jesus primarily as a "punishment-bearer,"10 this seems, with inevitable logic, to lead to a worldview in which violence is taken for granted. The logical implications of some of the classical Christian atonement theories have Christians imitating a violent God whom they perceive as arbitrary, or impotent, or deceitful: arbitrary, because God chooses to inflict violence and does so in ways that seem unfair, or arbitrary, or make no sense to us; 9 Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross 257 (from his "Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification"). 10 Phrases taken from Finían, Problems with Atonement 120.1 am dependent on Finían not so much for the substance, with which I was already largely in agreement,
but for much of the content and big-picture overview of Christian atonement theories presented in this article. I will indicate this dependence in appropriate places via parenthetical documentation, e.g., (Finían 120).
40 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES impotent, because God sees the violence but cannot prevent it; deceitful, because God claims to put mercy above justice but does not do so. Thus, the "problems" with atonement, and especially the consequences of these problems, are serious and real. They coincide extensively with "problems with sacrifice." This particular take on the issue has been receiving
increasing attention lately, for example, in Heim's Saved from Sacrifice. Aspects of the traditional Christian atonement theories constantly intertwine
and overlap. Similar intertwining and overlapping will inevitably be part of my own exposition. I will, nevertheless, attempt to keep to the following order: (1) the relationship between the Incarnation and atonement
theories; (2) the sometimes stunning differences between the implications
of the metaphors of atonement and authentic Christian teaching about atonement and salvation; (3) the problem of divine violence; (4) sacrifice and cult; (5) the pervasiveness of the legal and the judicial, especially
in the West. INCARNATION AND ATONEMENT THEORIES The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is a central Christian doctrine. It embodies
the hinge event and the essential idea of what is specifically Christian
in revelation. Take away the Incarnation and there is, at least for mainline or trinitarian Christianity, no Christianity left. In contrast, the atonement is not central. It is derivative of the Incarnation.11 Furthermore, since many aspects of atonement theory, specifically as developed in the Western Christian tradition, are flatly incompatible with an authentic Christian understanding of God, it is profoundly mistaken to identify atonement, as commonly understood—see below—as central to Christian doctrine (Finían 120). This insistence that the Incarnation, but not the atonement, is a central Christian doctrine can be further supported by the obvious simple thought experiment of asking what we would have if one or the other doctrine were removed. If one takes away the Incarnation in the broad sense, meaning at least the existence of Jesus, one can hardly explain the existence of Christianity
in any of its forms. And should one take away the Incarnation in the strict sense—God taking on human form in the person of Jesus Christ— 11 "It is incorrect to identify 'Christianity' with atonement, without remainder. Atonement is not an essential doctrine of Christianity but is in fact derivative. The more central doctrine is the Incarnation (see chapter 5) [esp. section 5.1, "The Incarnation Interpreted through Secondary Doctrines"]. The Incarnation need not issue in the mythology of substitutionary atonement. God's participation in human life and God's indwelling of Jesus of Nazareth in particular did not make the Crucifixion inevitable or necessary" (Finían 104).
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 41
one can hardly explain the existence of Christianity in its main trinitarian forms. But if one takes away the atonement, meaning the atonement theories
developed in the Christian West, one still has the vibrant Christianity of the East that, although founded on the same biblical and patristic origins as that of the West, based its theology of salvation, fully trinitarian and fully incarnational, much more on theologies of theosis/divinization rather than on Western-type atonement theories. Stated oversimply and in its most blatant stereotypical form, traditional Western atonement theory includes or is ultimately reducible to: (1) God's honor was damaged by human sin; (2) God demanded a bloody victim— innocent or guilty—to pay for human sin; (3) God was persuaded to alter the divine verdict against humanity when the Son of God offered to endure humanity's punishment; (4) the death of the Son thus functioned as a payoff; salvation was purchased (Finían 1). If this, or this kind of, atonement theory is central to our idea of God and of salvation, we are in deep trouble. In effect, this notion turns God into some combination of a great and fearsome judge, or offended lord, or temperamental spirit. It calls into question God's free will, or justice, or sanity (Finían 97-98). It is incompatible with the central biblical idea of a loving and compassionate God.12 How, then, could such a notion come to be regarded as Christian? Much of the explanation—not necessarily the blame but at least the beginning of an explanation—can be found in the Pauline corpus. For Paul, Christ is simultaneously the final scapegoat, the price of redemption,
the long-promised Messiah, the reason for God's fostering of Abraham's descendants, and the leader who teaches the children to live by God's Spirit (Finían 50). When we ask what is achieved for us through this Christ-Messiah, the answer is: justification, reconciliation, adoption. When we ask further about the processes of achieving these, the answers are, respectively, judicial relief (justification), diplomatic repair (reconciliation),
and familial positioning (adoption). These processes, almost immediately
seen by following generations as transactions (susceptible, as subsequent
developments show, to the residual overlay of archaic magical ideas) are expressed in a rich congeries, even wild range, of metaphors. But they all build upon Paul's cultic, commercial, judicial, social, diplomatic, and familial metaphors. As we proceed, we have to keep reminding ourselves that Paul was not a systematic theologian, at least not in any modern sense of that term. And 12 This is a clear instance of the inevitable circularity or "bias" of my own argument.
For although I can begin to demonstrate that the authentic biblical image of God is that God is loving and compassionate, the reason why this is the position I would choose to demonstrate goes back to my autobiographical faith position.
42 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES we must also try to keep in mind not only the great range of metaphors with which Paul was groping to express something of the mystery of salvation,
but also that he was quite possibly the first to try to do so in this way.13 We must pursue the implications of the way in which he combined, conflated, and rapidly switched between these metaphors. This switching suggests his apparent awareness that no one metaphor or no narrow selection
of them is normative. Pursuing this line of analysis makes us sensitive
to the extent of the deformation that took place when theologians began to select just some of these metaphors and push them to their "theological"
conclusions. For some of these conclusions are at odds not only with each other but also with the central biblical revelation of a loving and merciful God eager to save, rescue, and forgive far beyond what the human mind and imagination often thinks is right and proper—and, significantly, at odds with what Paul himself was groping to express (Finían 34, 62). One can see this deformation already beginning to take place as early as the Pastoral Epistles and the Deuteropauline Letters where fidelity to right doctrine was increasingly seen as the sign of a true Christian (Finían 63-66). Increasingly, an interpretation of Jesus' crucifixion, seen more and more as a transaction, indeed as a cultic, juridical, and even quasi-magical transaction,
became the core message, while the actual teachings of Jesus, which had little, if anything, to do with such an interpretation, "became a secondary
body of information" (Finían 57). It was a devolution, a reduction of atonement theory down to the idea that God deliberately intended Jesus' violent death (Finían 101, agreeing with Walter Wink). Accompanying this devolution was a change in how one would talk about God the Father. Jesus would talk about God not only as "my Father" but also as your Father—as all four Gospels attest.14 But as time went on, that locution shifted increasingly to talking about God as Jesus' Father (Finían 112). There was also a shift away from how Jesus used to speak and teach— which, in his mouth, seemed to be quite remarkably uncultic—and more toward a way of speaking about Jesus as a cultic sacrificial victim, and about his death as a cultic transaction (Finían 113-15). In Christian teaching,
at first in the common patristic tradition, and then increasingly, espe-13 "I find that Paul uses many metaphors as well as the martyr motif and even uses one metaphor to interpret another. The metaphors interpenetrate, yet they can be discerned as discrete building blocks that are differently combined in different passages. Paul has not invested everything in any one metaphor but he has invested everything in the range of metaphors, explaining the death of Christ as a saving event that accomplishes cleansing or freedom-purchase or establishment of a family-
like community" (Finían 55). 14 Finían refers to this way of speaking as "virtually the identifying mark of the dominical tradition" (Finían 112).
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 43 cially in its Western developments, atonement developed into the primary "vehicle for conveying information about salvation and the Incarnation" (Finían 120). However, knowledge and information about the Incarnation does not need to be transmitted solely through the atonement doctrine with its narrow focus on violent crucifixion as the central transactional moment. Put positively, the Incarnation, Jesus' human life—that by which we are in fact saved—was not merely a lengthy prologue to the crucifixion (Finían 123). METAPHOR AND DOCTRINE As already pointed out, many of Paul's metaphors have unacceptable "theo-logical" implications. Does God's favor or forgiveness have to be bought! Does God's anger have to be assuaged by sacrifice! Is God a retribution-seeking, restitution-seeking judge! Is God a dishonored lord whose honor needs to be restored? Atonement theories generally pick and choose among the metaphors, overlook both their range and complexity, and overlook the implications of how Paul would rapidly shift between them. Focusing on some of the implications of these metaphors, atonement theorists would turn them into doctrines. In doing so they would generally neglect Paul's actual teaching of a merciful God. For example, the metaphors
sometimes imply a selfless Messiah over against a God who must be paid off. The metaphors sometimes imply an implacable Father over against a compassionate Son (Finían 39-62). These were the implications of some of Paul's metaphors, rather than what he directly taught or was groping to communicate in those places where, apparently giving up on attempted "theo-logical" exposition, he would break into song (see especially
Rom 11:33-36 and Phil 2:6-11). Excursus: Trinitarian Theology The "over-against" implications of the atonement metaphors, when they are turned into doctrine, logically introduce a tension into the Trinity that is at odds with what was (later, of course) achieved in a mature trinitarian theology. Such inner-trinitarian tension fails to appropriate the insight that, in sending the Son, the Father is actually sending himself. Despite the rhetoric, some of which is embedded in Scripture itself (e.g., Rom 8:32: "He who did not withhold ["spare"—ouk epheisato] his own Son, but gave him up for all of us"), the Father was not doing something to the Son; the Father was giving/offering himself.15 The seeds of many of the theologically 15 See Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Sacrifice Unveiled or Sacrifice Revisited: Trinitarian and Liturgical Perspectives," Theological Studies 64 (2003) 24-42, at 28.
44 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES unacceptable implications of atonement theory were planted relatively early in the patristic age, before the full maturation of trinitarian theology. Some of these unacceptable implications were already being superseded in the theology of the late fourth-century Cappadocians, Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great. For example, it was not until the post-fourth-century maturation of patristic
theology that it became even possible to articulate a trinitarian theology
of Christian sacrifice such as the following: First of all, Christian sacrifice is not some thing that we do or give up. It is above all a mutually self-giving and profoundly interpersonal event. It begins not with us but with the self-offering of God the Father in the gift of the Son. It continues in the self-offering "response" of the Son, in his humanity and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Father and for us. And it continues further, and only then does it begin to become Christian sacrifice, when we, in the power of the same Spirit that was in Jesus, begin to be part of that mutually self-giving, mutually self-communicating Father-Son relationship. This, in a nutshell, is the whole story. Everything else is just dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s. But, of course, it is only in these details, in the concrete experiences
of life, that the love of God is revealed and becomes real for us. As we now begin to break open these details, we have two challenges: not just to remain faithful to the theology of the Trinity (that took the early Church centuries to unpack), but, equally important, to remain connected to the flesh and blood of our human lives and experiences.16 In other words, Jesus in his teaching seems to have a quite different instinct regarding God and access to God's mercy than does Paul—at least in contrast with the implications of some of Paul's metaphors. A sharply worded paragraph from Finían highlights this striking contrast: Can we account for Paul's pessimism by saying that he is sensitive to the ever-present danger of human pride and sin? Is Paul, perhaps more savvy to human deceptiveness than is Jesus, and never speaks of open and free access to God by the pure in heart because most people will dishonestly convince themselves that they are pure? Undoubtedly, Paul is perceptive on this point, but one can hardly say that he is more perceptive than Jesus, who could sniff out any scent of hypocrisy, or that Jesus' Gospel is the result of naivety. We are dealing with two entirely different instincts about God and access to God. Jesus, with fully adult know-how and lack of illusions, is able to say that a sincere and childlike faith opens the portals of heaven. There really are some truth-hungering, merciful, and "utterly sincere" people, who "will be filled... will receive mercy... will see God" (Matt 5:6-8).17 16 Adapted from my unpublished paper, "Sacrificial Preaching," presented at the August 2005 meeting of the Societas Liturgica in Dresden, Germany. I owe the substance of what is expressed herein to Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J., The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1998). 17 Finían 61. "Utterly sincere" is from Matt 5:8 in J. B. Phillips, The Gospels Translated into Modern English (New York: Macmillan, 1961) 8.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 45 However, to do Paul justice, if we take away the metaphors and look only at Paul's direct teaching and exhortation, we do not see that strong tension between "implacable Father and compassionate Son" (Finían 71). Further, when we attend to all that Paul is attempting to communicate, attend to his teaching and to the implications of his hymns as well as to the implications of all of his metaphors and models, we see that he is expressing not merely transactional ideas in metaphors that are cultic, economic, and legal; he is also expressing spiritually transformative ideas. Notably—to jump ahead a millennium—it is especially the latter, the transformative ideas and implications, that Abelard (due perhaps to his heightened literary
and imaginative sensitivity?) picks up and develops with his emphasis on moral influence (Finían 74-75). Anselm, by contrast (more sensitive to at least some aspects of the "theo-logic"?) focused more on the transactional
aspects of the cultic, economic, and legal metaphors. DIVINE VIOLENCE Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo (1098) has been called "a master text of divine violence."18 Even those who disagree with it recognize
it as perhaps the single most famous and influential postbiblical text on the atonement. Significantly, by the time atonement doctrine has developed
(or devolved) to this point, it is no longer, as many patristic authors had thought, the devil who is the source of violence against humanity, but God the Father (Finían 72). What is laid out, even taken for granted here and in so many of the traditional atonement theories of the Western Church, is an inner-divine "scenario of divine violence restrained by divine mercy, but a mercy that had to be mediated through violence" (Finían 75). Hence the angry, punishing God of Calvin, or the always severe Father and always compassionate Son of Luther, or the schooling of devout Catholics to make reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What all this does, whether
consciously or subconsciously (and at odds with a mature trinitarian theology as I indicated above) is to locate violence and the negotiation of violence within the divine. Present in this whole line of development is the belief, going back at least to Augustine, that all humanity faces damnation. Some of the theories developed the idea that, to save humanity from condemnation, "God preplanned
the killing of the Son from the beginning of time" (Finían 76). Facilitating this development was the fact that, in contrast to much of the East, the idea of apocatastasis (universal salvation) was generally not even discussed in the West. More commonly taken for granted in the West was 18 Anthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001) 76.
46 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
the idea that God freely chose to save only some, and perhaps only the fortunate few, from damnation (ibid.). And if one did not have the good fortune to hear the gospel and be baptized, one had no chance at all. Nor was it only the churches of the Reformation that subsequently emphasized so strongly the absolute depravity, the universal guilt of humankind. Jansenism, primarily a Roman Catholic phenomenon, was just as earnest in this regard. Saving humankind meant the transfer of divine wrath to the Son. "Faced with such monstrous teachings" (Finían 78), theologians have desperately tried to make sense of it all. But as long as they remained bound within the framework of atonement theories that locate violence within the divine, they could not break out of a pernicious taking-for-granted of violence on all levels of existence, divine and human. Bad theology
led to bad—that is, violent—morality. René Girard, especially in his central major works, challenged the hegemony
of this way of thinking, basically by exposing the violent mechanisms
of sacrificial scapegoating, and by rejecting these mechanisms and the traditional (destruction-of-the-victim) idea of sacrifice as essential to Christianity. However, the theological appropriation of Girard's insights, that is, developing an authentically Christian (i.e., essentially nonviolent) concept of God and atonement) remains a work in progress. Major contributions
in this direction have come from the recently deceased Raymund Schwager, S.J. (d. 2004), especially in his Jesus in the Drama of Salvation19 and Banished from Eden.20 In these works, especially the latter, Schwager not only develops the concept of violence as the primordial sin, that is, seeing original sin as the common human tendency to reach for violent solutions, but also points out the "natural" support for, and indeed the "natural" origin of, this concept in the findings of contemporary bio-sciences.21 19 Raymund Schwager, Jesus im Heilsdrama: Entwurf einer biblischen Erlösungslehre,
Innsbrucker theologische Studien 29 (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1990); ET: Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, trans. James G. Williams and Paul Haddon (New York: Crossroad, 1999). 20 Raymund Schwager, Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation, trans. James G. Williams (London: Gracewing, 2005 = ET of Erbsünde und Heilsdrama: Im Kontext von Evolution, Gentechnologie
und Apokalyptik (Münster: LIT, 1997). See the account of a panel discussion of this book, "Celebrating Raymund Schwager: At the AAR Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, November 2004" in The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion 26 (April 2005) 5-7. 21 Schwager arrives at this insight not by beginning with a traditional theology of original sin, and then asking how contemporary science relates to that theology. Rather, as far as possible, he begins with science itself. For example, he begins specifically with the finding that organisms at all levels, including the human psychic organism, have "memories." What the human organism has in its bio-psychic
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 47
Among the problems still needing adequate theological explanation is that of the residue of magical transactional thinking (see Finían 98) in Christian atonement doctrine (as well as in some popular understandings of the sacraments). Related to this is, for example, the persistence of seeing the crucifixion as a kind of transaction that, ultimately or implicitly, calls into question the free will, or the justice, or the sanity, or the power of a benevolent God.22 Similar to this transactional kind of thinking is the theological inconsistency of making the scapegoating of Jesus (an act of violence) a part of God's eternal plan (Finían 101). Similar also is the readiness to imagine magical power solutions (Hello, Harry Potter!). Is that far from the readiness to believe in miracles? All this seems to connect with the readiness to think of a violent God, or at least of the existence of some violence in God. It contributes both to the widespread human tendency
to look for scapegoats (Finían 116), and to the widespread tendency to take violence for granted in human affairs. Connected with all this seems to be what can be called the absolutization of suffering. The popularity of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ is only a more recent example. In the suffering of Christ there is, undeniably, a transcendent sacredness. But there is no unconditioned absoluteness there in the suffering of Christ. For Christ did not have to suffer. There is no absolute divine necessity there; but there is—viewed from what I would insist is an authentic Christian point of view—absolute divine necessity in the love with which Christ suffered. For ultimately, it is not suffering but love that saves. In other words, as Cynthia Crysdale has observed, suffering and the violence that causes it is a consequence of union with God, not the means to it.23 SACRIFICE AND CULT As Finían points out early in his book, atonement, although not synonymous
with sacrifice, overlaps with it. Problems with atonement generally memory, from that critical evolutionary "moment" that we call hominization, is the memory, encoded in our beings, that, when faced with the choice of spiritual self-transcendence, human beings generally chose to react in the (indeed tried-and-true) basically violent and instinctual ways that characterized the existence of their prehuman forebears. Influenced as he is by Guardian mimetic theory, Schwager suggests that this is a good way for us to begin to understand peccatum originale originatum—the original sin that continues to exist in us. 22 It is a common pastoral strategy, when faced with the need to "explain" evil and suffering, to point to the passion of Christ. That, however, does not solve the problem; it merely transposes it. 23 See Finlan's develoment of this theme on pp. 104-6. He acknowledges his dependence on Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today (New York: Continuum, 1999) passim, but esp. 100.
48 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES also end up being problems with sacrifice (Finían 3). In the end, sacrifice, along with atonement, is commonly perceived as an instance of divine violence. Emphasis on the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ can indeed spare Protestants from the problem their Catholic counterparts have in explaining
how the Sacrifice of the Mass can be, as defined at the Council of Trent, a "true and proper sacrifice."24 But the problem still remains, whether located in a once-for-all past, or also in a continuing liturgical celebration, that the sacrifice of Christ ends up being an act of divine violence that God planned from all eternity. In writing about atonement Paul assumed the existence of, and familiarity
with, already existing cultic patterns. He used several cultic metaphors
and assumed that salvation came from a cultic act (Finían 44, 51). But it is what happened after Paul that causes most of the problems I am attempting to deal with in this article. For, as Christian reflection developed,
the increasing emphasis on and blending together of ideas of penal substitution and the idea of death-as-payment caused sacrifice to become, for many, the dominant image of atonement. This is obvious in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Subsequent patristic theologians then glued together Paul's atonement metaphors into the notion of a sacrificial and redeeming transaction (Finían 65-66). This attachment filled the perceived need. For despite the inroads that the spiritualization of sacrifice had already made and was continuing to make in Greek religious philosophy, in late biblical Judaism, and in early Christianity, Christian antiquity was still a time when sacrifice in the traditional history-of-religions sense of that word, that is, an external cultic act involving the destruction of a victim,25 was generally taken for granted as an essential part of religion. It was still a time when almost everyone assumed that a sacrificial death was required for a mediator
or reconciler to appease God with a unique sacrifice (Finían 70-71). We have to remind ourselves that this necessity for a sacrificial and redeeming
transaction was perceived to be a necessity in God, or a necessity outside of God to which God was bound. Part of the problem is, of course, the apparent scriptural warrant for this necessity (e.g., Lk 24:26: "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer ... ?"). This assumption of the necessity of Christ's suffering resulted in and/or went along with false ideas about God. Such false ideas about God and a consequent false morality are 24 "Verum et proprium sacrificium" (Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum, et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Henricus Denzinger and Adolfus Schön-metzer [Freiburg im Briesgau: Herder, 1967] no. 1751); see also nos. 1743 and 1753: "sacrificium vere propitiatorium [truly an atonement sacrifice]." 25 For a detailed exposition of how damaging this destruction-of-a-victim idea of sacrifice can be when applied to Christian sacrifice, see Robert J. Daly, S.J., "Robert
Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistie Theology," Theological Studies 61 (2000) 239-60.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 49 inevitable if the scapegoating death of Jesus is a necessary, divinely planned, transactional sacrificial event that God brings about like a puppet master manipulating human events. LEGAL AND JUDICIAL THINKING From the outset, judicial metaphors were among the metaphors used to explain the atonement. In the post-Pauline developments, the blending of penal substitution ideas with those of death-as-payment resulted in presenting
redemption as sacrifice-dominant. Then, the summing up of Paul's atonement metaphors into the notion of a sacrificial and redeeming transaction,
and the concomitant increasing emphasis on the logic underlying that atonement transaction, made recourse to legal thinking all the more necessary (Finían 65-66, 98-99). As a result, by the time of Augustine, ransom theory (with its subthemes of rescue, deception, mousetrap, etc.) was being increasingly trumped by legal theory (Finían 70). Then Gregory the Great, in his blending of legal and sacrificial motifs, and in his stressing of the need for a proportionate remedy, locked legal-logical thinking into the core of Western atonement thinking. Characteristic of Western theological
thinking, generally, and even to this day, has been the fundamental importance of law, even on the divine level. The significance of the adjective "Western" in the previous paragraph is central to what I am trying to understand. Here, precisely here, may be the most significant fork in the road where the West went one way, understanding
the Christian mystery of salvation after the model of a legal transaction,
and the East went another way, understanding the Christian mystery
of salvation as theosis, divinization. These characteristically Western developments help explain why Anselm's theory was so powerful and influential. It was a social theory based on the feudal structure of his time. It involved a structural form of vengeance/reparation, all of which had to be governed by "law" (see Finían 70-71). This emphasis on law was consistent with the fundamental psychology
of atonement that I have already mentioned, namely, that it is based on a belief that nothing is free, and on the intuition that ritual establishes order (Finían 80). "Law and order" may not be synonymous, but they are inseparable. As Girard has pointed out, Jesus exposes and repudiates the victimization
mechanism by which atonement has been thought to work. Nevertheless,
the need of human societies for social and other appropriate mechanisms
remains as strong as ever. Take away the legal and the juridical, and one takes away human culture as we know it. We cannot prescind from the legal and juridical ways of thinking by which we live. But to project our human and thus inevitably flawed (at least inevitably finite) juridical
50 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
thinking—or any kind of human-experience-based thinking—onto God, and then to take the resulting image of God as a model both for understanding
God's actions and for us humans to imitate, is simply bad theology;
it leads to bad, and sometimes to very bad, morality. CONCLUSION So, what can we do? Who, or what, can free us from this vicious circle?26 Few indeed are the mystically graced who, like Julian of Norwich, can see through the limitations in the theology of an Anselm and begin to speak with real knowledge and experiential wisdom about her all-loving, all-merciful God.27 The rest of us can only humbly—or at least with attempted humility, since humility is hard to maintain when one is indulging in the Schadenfreude of pointing out how so much previous theology has been wrong—attend to developments in the tradition that seem to point to a more authentically Christian understanding of atonement. The first two such developments that come to mind derive more from the East than from the West: apophatic theology and theosis. Apophatic theology reminds us that all our projections onto God are just that, faulty human projections, and that developing a theology from the implications of such projections can be devastatingly mistaken. Theosis reminds us that our salvation does not come about by any transaction
that can be adequately explained or imagined in human terms; salvation comes about by beginning to become one with the ineffable God. Good theology can proclaim that this "divinization" is what is actually happening to us, but it is at a loss to explain how divinization comes about. On this point, however, we can at least be grateful for a highly significant ecumenical theological convergence among recent Christian writers. Both the atonement critic Stephen Finían and the atonement redefiner Hans Boersma have, apparently quite independently of each other, concluded their books by pointing to iAeas/s/deification as probably the best possible solution to our Christian "problems with atonement." The final chapter subheading of Finlan's book is "5.2 Theosis"; the final section of Boersma's book is "Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification."
28 But then two more thoughts come to mind, and these are gifts that the West can bring to the table. The first is the Western intellectual conviction 26 Notice the similarity to the aporetic cries of Paul: "What then should we say ... Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:7, 24). 27 See Joan M. Nuth, "Two Medieval Soteriologies: Anselm of Canterbury and Julian of Norwich," Theological Studies 53 (1992) 611-^5; Nuth, Wisdom's Daughter:
The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad, 1991). 28 Finían 120-24; Boersma 257-61.
IMAGES AND IMITATION OF GOD 51
that humans are capable of true knowledge and right thinking. We must not, however, exaggerate this capability. It is in fact related to apophasis on the negative side, because it primarily serves to identify and eliminate what is bad theology. On the positive side, we can cautiously hope that our capacity for right thinking can also begin to point us in the right direction.29 The second gift that the West can bring is its modern development of critical biblical and historical studies. All the faulty theories of atonement that have developed in the Christian tradition have roots in this or that part or aspect of biblical revelation, but not in the whole of it. Modern biblical studies afford access to that whole; they provide an ability, not possible to earlier ages, to contextualize the different parts of that whole. In addition, all of the faulty theories of atonement that have developed subsequent to the Bible can also be contextualized, and thus deabsolutized, by locating them in their historical, intellectual, and cultural situations of origin. To sum up: (1) I have tried to show what bad theology of the atonement is. (2) I have claimed, but largely left it to the imagination of my readers to conclude, how bad theology of the atonement leads to bad morality. (3) And, I humbly admit, I have left largely undeveloped, at least in this article, what good theology of the atonement might be. Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy! 29 In an epoch we call "postmodern," it is countercultural to insist on our ability to attain true knowledge of things, to have assurance that some of the "great stories" can be truer than others, or that we have the ability to cull out at least some truth from a variety of "great stories."
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