Atonement Metaphors and the Cross
I invite
you, gentle reader, to meditate on the cross of Jesus. I invite you to find in it the most wonderful
defeat.
Let’s start with the apostle Paul,
in 1 Corinthians 15:3: “For what I
received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our
sins according to the scriptures…”
The main
message of the chapter concerns resurrection.
Paul insists that the resurrection of Jesus is essential to the
Christian message. If we don’t affirm
and hope for resurrection, he says, Christianity is pointless. Having admitted that resurrection is the
central concern of the passage, I’m not going to focus on that right now. The Christian gospel clearly predated Paul;
he wrote that he had “passed on” items of doctrine, a tradition. I want to meditate on the first affirmation
of that tradition: Christ died for our
sins. How are we to understand this
fundamental article of Christian belief?
What does it mean that Jesus died “for” me?
This is, as
theology students know, the driving question of atonement theory. The
question is practical as well as theoretical.
For two thousand years Christian evangelists have proclaimed good news
and invited their neighbors to believe in Jesus. Inevitably, when we preach the gospel, we
tell people that Jesus died “for” them.
Just as inevitably, we explain that “for” with some metaphor.
In the
early centuries of the church, a “ransom” metaphor dominated Christian
preaching. In this picture, Jesus “buys”
our freedom from the Devil, who has all sinners in his grasp. The picture is one of exchange, as in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where
the White Witch gives up Edward (who is justly her prisoner) if Aslan will take
his place. The White Witch thinks she
wins, because she kills the lion. But in
fact she doubly loses; Edward goes free and Aslan rises from the dead.
Later, Saint Anselm objected to the
ransom theory, because he thought it unseemly that God should have to pay off
the Devil. Instead, Anselm invented the
“satisfaction” theory. Our sins, Anselm
wrote, are offenses against God. The
picture here is a royal court, where sinners are brought into the presence of a
holy God. Since God is infinitely great,
our sins are infinitely offensive. Because
he was God, Jesus could repair an infinite insult; because he was a man, that
repair could apply to us.
The
centuries after Anselm brought more metaphors/theories. Among many Protestants, the dominant picture
is borrowed from criminal court. In this
“penal substitution” theory, sinners are guilty of crimes against God and
deserve eternal death. But Jesus, the
perfect Son of God pays our “fine” for us.
Other preachers tried out a “moral influence” theory, which pictures us
as followers of Jesus (much like the disciples following Jesus around
Galilee). On this view, Jesus’ death is
part of his life, part of his overall example for us. We are changed, or “saved,” as we become like
him. Another theory, “Christus Victor” in Latin, sees Jesus’
death and resurrection as victory over sin and death.
By calling
the various atonement theories “metaphors,” I already indicate the attitude I
take toward them. Christ’s death for us will always be, I think a
mystery. The various metaphors are
useful if they help individuals commit their lives to Jesus. Evangelists should freely use different pictures
with different audiences. They should
not mistake their favorite metaphor for the honest-to-God precise truth. God only knows precisely what it means that
Jesus died for us.
Having said
that, there has been, nevertheless, an aspect of the Christus Victor theory growing on my mind for decades, since I
first discovered it. Paul wrote (Romans 5:9-11):
Since we have now
been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath
through him! For if, while we were God’s
enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more,
having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in
God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received
reconciliation.
The picture here is a battlefield. God is on one side; we sinners are his
enemy. If you want to imagine Sin,
Death, and the Devil as allies with us, I won’t object. But the key element is that we were God’s enemies.
I call this “peacemaking” atonement
theory. God fought his fight against us by letting us crucify his son. Who killed Jesus? We did,
all of us. We were there, in the cruelty
of the Roman soldiers, in the cowardice of Pilate, in the treachery of Judas,
and in the conspiracy of the Sanhedrin leaders.
Though we killed him, we lost.
Jesus would not stay dead, and he offers reconciliation to his
murderers.
Rejoice with me! We lost.
In our losing, we are made God’s friends.
