Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: We find ourselves now halfway through this series, And we have tackled some big ideas together, but I think also, hopefully, it has been a lot of fun. We started 2 weeks ago with our Core ideas and images of God. I actually posted a video to our YouTube channel this week expanding on a bit of that conversation. I had the chance to respond to a question that was sent in by someone in community, and I thought, hey. This is a good question.
Let's just put a video together for everyone. So check that out if you have time this week. Then last week, we talked about the bible itself and some of the ideas that surround how we read scripture. We use words like infallible or inerrant or inspired, and we have terms like god breathed that the scriptures themselves give us to use. But what does that all of that mean for us?
Well, historically, The bible has always been held by Christians to be without error in revealing salvation to us. It has only been in the last 100 years or so that things like the age of the earth or technical historical details of the bible Have really also crept into the conversation of inerrancy. Even as far back as Augustine, Who lived and wrote around the turn of 5th century, Christians were wrestling with the form and the genres of the scripture. Augustine argues at one point that to take the Bible literally is not just to naively read what the words say. It is instead to wrestle with what they mean.
What do they intend, and what are they trying to communicate to us? And he writes in one particularly poignant letter. I'll read you a longer quote here, but he writes this. Whenever I hear a brother Christian talk in such a way as to show that he is ignorant of scientific matters and confuses one thing with another. I listen with patience to his theories, And I think it no harm to him that he does not know the true facts about material things, provided he holds no beliefs unworthy of you, oh lord, who are creator of all.
But the danger lies in thinking that such knowledge is part and parcel of what he must believe in order to save his soul and in presuming to make abstinent declarations about things of which he knows nothing. Now specifically, he's talking here about astronomy and Christians making silly claims about the stars based on scripture that were just objectively wrong. But, essentially, what he says is, first, don't embarrass yourselves. And second, and note this line, the danger lies in thinking that Such knowledge is part and parcel of what must man believe to be saved. That's from the late 300.
And, essentially, it is what we see reflected in the doctrine of inerrancy comes from the 2nd radical council, which says, Scripture is to be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error regarding salvation. In other words, Don't get caught up in debating astronomy and flat earth and the age of the universe. Focus on what scripture actually cares about, which is pointing us to Jesus. So, yes, scripture uses myth and parable. Scripture can provide contextual commentary.
Scripture can offer opinion and perspective, but it never fails to faithfully lead us to Jesus. That's what we mean when we talk about inspire. And I think this framework for reading the bible opens us up to A lot of wisdom and fascination and study and opportunity to learn and from and also be shaped by the scriptures. Today, we talk about what Jesus reveals about god in the cross. And that is a big conversation.
So first, let's pray. God who gives god's self away, who comes to us to find us, to save us, to bring us back home. Thank you for the gift of scripture, for those who wrote, For those who recognize the beauty in these writings, for those who preserved and passed down and handed on to us Faithfully the story that leads us to Jesus. Right? We trust today that even in the complexity of understanding ancient texts, The heart of your story of love has always been protected, and that in Jesus, We encounter in scripture the one who will lead us back home to you.
Might we study and wrestle Take seriously the work of understanding, but might we always come back to the Christ who reveals divine love in human history? May that be our object of worship, and may your love through us be the product of that focus. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Today is about the cross, And so we need to talk about defining our terms and the invention of the word, and then we can talk about some of our theories of atonement.
But let's start by defining some terms. This week, we were all sitting around the dinner table at our house, and I had made some pasta, Some delicious rigatoni with ricotta and spinach that my son did not appreciate at all, but you might. He was having a bowl of boring spaghetti on the side because that's his thing. But my daughter, who is usually a fantastic eater, had finished her pasta and was giving us the more sign. You know this one?
So I got up, and I dutifully prepared some more pasta. I placed it in front of her to which she immediately pushed it away. I don't know why, but my kids cannot countenance the presence of food that is not specifically what they have asked for. It must remain At least an arm's length away at all times, whatever. So stuffing my hurt feelings down, I asked, well, what do you want?
And she said, yellow. And that was a bit of a conundrum. Her pasta was in a purple dish, and it was not at all outside the realm of reasonable Full conjecture that what she wanted was indeed more pasta, but this time in a yellow bowl. Turns out that was not it. We had lemons sitting on the counter within view.
A little unorthodox, but she does like sucking on a lemon from time to time. And to be honest, it's kind of fun to watch, So I tried that. Still no luck. So feeling frustrated, she climbed down out of her chair, grabbed my pinky finger as she does. I think she's learned she can leverage a little more pain by grabbing that finger to take me where I wanna go.
But she led me to the kitchen directly to a small pantry on the side of the room, Beckoned for me to open the door and immediately, with a huge smile, swiped what she had been wanting all along off the shelf. And so turning Holding a cup of Jell O, she squealed, yellow. Now it was too far to back out at this point. So she got her Jell O, And we all lived happily after, and now we know what yellow means. But the reason I bring this up is because often, I think when we dive into some of these heavy theological conversations.
We have our terms confused. It's like last week when we talked about scripture. We can yell each other about inerrancy all day, but sometimes we're simply talking about very different concepts of what that word means to us. Same thing with atonement. Now that said, atonement is at the center of Christianity.
It is no less than the most important idea in the Christian faith, But historically, it is also one of the most broadly defined. So today, we're gonna look at the major atonement theories. And depending on the segment of Christianity your experience is rooted in, you may have never thought about atonement in terms of theory. But the reason that we use that term is because the only shared agreed upon Consistent aspect of atonement the church with a capital c has ever held to is this, that in the life, Death and resurrection of Jesus, we are made at one with God. That's what atonement means, And importantly, that is all that atonement means.
How we are made at one with god Through the cross is the stuff of theological theory. That we are made at one with God through the cross is the stuff of Christian faith, And that's important to get right from the get go. Because if we all have different ideas about how we get there in our minds when we talk about this word, We are all thinking about a very specific thing in the pantry rather than the pantry itself. It can be tough to have Honest conversations about what we think or we believe or how we give voice to the heart of our faith. Now one of the things you might be realizing by now in this series is that it's okay to have very specific about ideas about god.
I have a lot of those. In fact, I spend a lot of time thinking about these things. Thank you, by the way, for gifting me the time and the ability to do just that, but it's also incredibly important not to confuse our specifics with Christianity itself. The historical orthodox ideas of the faith are incredibly important, but also, I believe, divinely spacious. See, there is room.
There has to be room within the Christian faith for you, As the apostle Paul says, to continue to work out your salvation. You and I will grow and change and Shift over time, sometimes we will turn in completely new directions over the course of our lives, but there is room for all of that here. You are not a heretic, and you are not a bad person, and you are not any less loved by god just because you leave old language behind where you embrace new ways of approaching the divine. Atonement is big By design, so that there is room for all of us to wonder. Okay.
Where does the word come from? Well, atonement is a made up word, as all words are, I guess, at some point, but it was coined by William Tyndale who died in 15/36. Now Tyndale was one of the first to translate the bible into English, and his was what became the basis for the King James. But in his work, he was trying to find a word to Explain this Jewish idea of Yom Kippur from the Hebrew scriptures. Literally, that is something like the day of covering, But he came up with at onement or the moment of being made at one with god.
Now is that a good translation of Yom Kippur? That's complicated. The Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, thought it Primarily had to do with a day of prayer, and the Latin translation called the Vulgate thought it was focused on a day of cleansing. Jewish scholars today still wrestle with how to translate the idea into English. But I think the consensus would be that atonement is not a bad attempt, But it's also maybe incomplete.
The major critique from Jewish scholars, as I understand it, would be that at one ment Can suggest a sort of meeting of the minds, a sort of like reconciliation a bit, where the structure of Leviticus 16, where the Hebrew term comes from, Suggest that this covering, whatever that means, is the unilateral action on behalf of God. So we don't meet God in the middle. We enact the ritual, and it is god that does the at wanting. Regardless, whether that atonement is a good translation in Leviticus Over time is a word that primarily became associated with the Christian veneration of the cross. Christians saw parallels between what the Jewish people believed was happening on the day of Kippur with what we saw happening on the cross.
And so at 1 mince made the jump across the testaments. Now ultimately, debates about the Hebrew Scriptures aside, I think atonement is a fantastic word to describe what we trust as Christians, particularly when we hold it As graciously and open handed as it has been historically, we are made at one with God through Jesus. I love that. Still, that does lead to questions about how we think that at one mint is happening, and that's where our theories come in. And we'll talk about 6 of the most influential today.
We're gonna try to take them in somewhat chronological order, but that means we're gonna start at the beginning with what is often called ransom theory. Now this one is taken almost directly from the words of Jesus himself. He says in Mark 10 That the son of man came to give his life as a ransom for many. And so the idea here is that Satan has us all trapped in sin. We can't find our way out, and so god uses Jesus as a bargaining chip to get us back.
God says, I'll give you my son, and I get my people. Satan says deal except right after the contract is signed, Jesus is resurrected through the power of the spirit, leaving Satan holding the bag. It's a divine double cross. Not today, devil. And maybe you can see why this theory didn't have a huge shelf life in history.
First of all, god seems a little tricksy here, which is kinda weird, but also, does god really need to negotiate with a devil? I mean, that kinda defeats the whole point of being god, doesn't it? So things develop. Next, We get what is called recapitulation theory, and this one comes from a guy named Irenaeus who lived in the 2nd century. It really keys in on some of Paul's language.
First in Romans 5/12, sin entered the world through 1 man. And then 1st Corinthians 15/22, for as in Adam all die, so in Christ, all are made alive. And this is what I like to explain as the tech support theory of atonement. If it's not working, you turn it off and you turn it back on. It's advice as old as time.
Just Start over again. That's what Irenaeus sees happening in Jesus. Humans have messed things up, But there is now one who lives perfectly even unto death, and that faithfulness resets the human story, and we are now part of the reboot. Thing is, that really doesn't tell the whole story, and so we kept thinking. Next came Christus Victor.
This one is actually pretty similar to Irenaeus's ideas, except it has a very big focus on Jesus' death and even more importantly, his resurrection. This theory came about a couple centuries later in the Christian story when groups of Christians were being persecuted and in martyred. And the question was, like, is any of this really worth it? Some of us are dying. Is do we wanna stick with this?
And the answer that came back was absolutely, because Jesus is the one who is victorious even in death. In fact, he conquers death and comes out the other side. So no longer are we fearful of death, No longer are we fighting for ourselves. No longer do we strive to defend or protect our own interests because we see that in Christ, Sacrifice is the way to overcome the world. Christ victory, our victory is in self giving love.
And so for about the 1st 1000 years of the church, these three ideas in different ways dominated the conversation surrounding the for us. But around the turn of 1st millennium, a new question began to work its way into our theories. Theologians started to think concertedly about the nature of god. And one of the flaws In these earlier theories was that each of them has god overcoming something. So God has to overcome a devil or god has to overcome sin or god has to overcome death.
But, again, if god is god, that doesn't really make sense. And what could possibly stop god from doing whatever god wants? And so 2 different directions develop around the same time. The first comes from a guy named Peter Abelard, who is born in 10/79 CE. We call his theory moral influence.
Now sometimes, this will be denigrated as Jesus was a good teacher who taught us in good directions. That is not what Abelard taught. Abelard realized way back from ransom theory that there is a sense in which humanity is trapped in this sort of dead end spiral. And we keep making mistakes, and we can't right ourselves, and we can't find our way out. But it's not the devil god has to make a deal with.
It's Us, god has to fix. And so moral influence is not the idea that Jesus was just a great moral teacher, It's that Jesus is the divine moral example, the one who was able to open our eyes to a world that we could not Possibly even imagine on our own. Human morality, says Abelard, is not sufficient to save us, And so god demonstrates divine love in history in the person of Jesus, And that influence is so great that it breaks our chains. It enables us to trust in goodness we could never accomplish for ourselves. We are saved by the faithful influence of Jesus.
Now the other direction developed around the same time It's the one that a lot of us who have a background in evangelical expressions of Christianity may be the most familiar with, and these are the substitutionary models. And there are a few strains here, so we'll talk about them all together. The direction is started by Anselm of Cantaburian, who died in 1109 of the common era. And Ensoom doesn't actually use the term substitution. He uses the term satisfaction, but his big innovation is that it's not the devil God has to contend with.
It's not even us, really. It is god's self. Because God is offended by sin, And god's honor needs to be satisfied. Now if that language sounds weird, that's because that comes very much from feudal European life. Fact, that's exactly how Anselm pictures god, like a literal lord or a baron who is offended by the peasants who sully his personage.
And so Ensign wonders about this. How could a peasant ever make their mistakes up to a lord and ultimately decides they can't? Which is why we need a god man, a divine human person, a Jesus, who can satisfy god's stained honor. Now later, this would become substitutionary atonement. Jesus takes our place to bear the weight and the consequence of sin when no one else can.
And then even later in the reformation period, Around the 1500, it becomes penal substitutionary atonement. Jesus takes our place to bear the penalty of sin that god demands. And for a lot of people who have primarily been exposed to evangelical expressions of Christianity, that last one is perhaps, For some of us here today, the only way we have ever heard atonement articulated clearly, on the cross, Jesus appeases the demands of an angry god. The technical word for this is propitiation. However, this is where we find ourselves chasing our tail a little bit.
Because if you remember, The main reason that this family of theories developed was because theologians like Anselm and Abelard Realize that god being god, god didn't need to overcome any obstacles. God doesn't negotiate with devils. God doesn't need to defeat death. God can do as god pleases. I mean, that's sort of the whole point of being god.
Yet, In expressions of penal substitutionary atonement, you will hear things like, well, god didn't want to kill god's son, but god had to In order to satisfy justice, or you might hear god cannot forgive unless there is a sacrifice. The problem, of course, is that as soon as you say god cannot, it doesn't matter what comes after that. You have now created a new, larger, more powerful god that sits above god and gives god rules that god has to follow. Not only that, you also at least run the risk of making it sound like Jesus and god are at odds with each other in the cross. Rather than the perfect loving community we know of as god working in partnership through the cross.
And when you pit Jesus and the father against each other, you are never going to be representative of a god who is divine communal love by nature. Now it's important to understand where penal substitutionary atonement comes from historically. The earlier expressions of substitutionary atonement make a lot of sense to me. Jesus takes our place in bearing the weight and the consequence of our Sin, we see exactly what our violence looks like when we look at the cross. That is, I think, a very important way that the bible does speak of atonement.
But in the reformation period, along with a lot of change religiously, you also have a profound political shift that is happening inside. The church is breaking away from the pope and divine fiat leadership. That's the reformation. But at the same time, Europe is also breaking away from monarchical divine fiat leadership. And so all across Europe, Nations are replacing kings and queens with modern nation states.
And as soon as you do that, You have to figure out how you're gonna set rules for society, because previously, the rules were whatever the king said. But now you get legal frameworks that are developing, where everyone is expected to play by the same rules, at least in theory. It doesn't always work that way. But that becomes our theological lens during this period as well. We really start to imagine god and sin and salvation through the lens of a courtroom, because those are now essential to society in a way they haven't been before.
And that can be a fine metaphor for thinking about god, but like all metaphors, it breaks when it is stretched too far. And so in the 19th century, there was a Swedish theologian named PP Waldenstrom, one of the early voices in the covenant tradition, who looked at these frameworks and said, I'm not sure this works. Because the way that it's articulated, the only thing that is changing in the cross is god. God was mad about sin, and now god is not. And so Waldenstrom's big contribution was about saying that whatever is happening on the cross can't be about changing god's attitude toward us.
God is love. Remember always. The cross must be about changing something in us. And this is where we get our final theory of the atonement for today, which is scapegoat theory best articulated by Rene Girard. This perspective says that god has always been able to forgive.
That was never the issue. God is god. But that god has gifted humanity with certain rituals and practices so that we might know that we are forgiven, Practices that we would eventually be able to leave behind. And you can see this thinking developing already in the songs and the prophets. Look at Psalm 51.
You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it. You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. Or Hosea six six where god says through the prophet, for I desire mercy, not sacrifice, acknowledgement rather than burnt offering. Or maybe even Hebrews 10 where the writer summarizes the teaching of Jesus and says, therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said, Sacrifice an offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me. Here I am.
I have come to do your will. He sets aside the 1st to establish the 2nd. In other words, this Cultic practice of sacrifice that was always for us, not for god, is now set aside for the true purpose, which is living the way that Christ has demonstrated and established for us to follow. So god has given us sacrifice To contain our violence and let us know that we're forgiven, a way to put our sins on something else so that we can feel better about ourselves. But if we're honest, we should also know that we have done this in our relationships too, and we've done this in our conflicts, and we do this when we ingroup and we outgroup in the ways that we define our selves over and against those who are not like us.
We scapegoat others, and Jesus lays it all bare for us. See, every time we scapegoat another, every time we try to blame someone else for our mistakes, we look for ways to justify that. And Since no one else is perfect, we often succeed in that. But on the cross, with Jesus, Where religious leaders conspire and political figures sanctify violence and even friends and disciples desert and run away, We finally see our scapegoating for what it is, and we have nowhere to turn to justify this. The cross didn't change god's mind about us.
It opens our eyes to finally see god revealed in the self giving love of Jesus, and it shows us all the ways that we have mistreated, scapegoated, put our violence onto another. Theologian, Jennifer Garcia Beshaw, she says it this way, the Jesus who saved women from society's shaming Was himself publicly shamed, stripped naked, and despised. And the Jesus who healed sick and disabled bodies now becomes disabled himself. The Jesus who identified with the poor and the oppressed dies the death reserved for the lowest of criminals. The Jesus who changed outsiders Into insiders is now pushed to the very edges of humanity ridiculed by strangers.
He becomes the scapegoat To end all scapegoats, exposing the truth that could end human blame and violence once and for all, And I love that. Because of Jesus, we no longer need to blame anyone. Because whatever our theories of the atonement do for us to be true, we must point us back to each other with more love and compassion and kindness, More of the grace of Jesus in our bones, because if not, then we should abandon them to history, and we should find better ways of talking about this. Atonement is not just a theological idea. It is an imagination of god that shapes us into people who live and look and act like Jesus.
And the frustrating beauty of the cross is that for all of our thinking, It all remains theory because the only thing that can transcend that is when our trust in the at one ment makes us more like the Jesus we follow. What we trust in as Christians is not our ability to explain god's love. It is instead to believe in the goodness of a god that comes to save us, To free us, to forgive us, to heal us, to reinvent us, to slowly enable us to know ourselves, The same way that the god who is love knows us right now. And that is what we mean when we talk about atonement even though we trust it beyond our ability to explain it. Now that doesn't mean we don't do our best to try.
And so for 2000 years now, we have continued to refine and expand and challenge our ways of thinking, and that process It's not the antithesis of faith. It is the ongoing work of believing. The ways that we test and we challenge, We find new images and metaphors, and we measure them against their ability to draw us closer into the likeness of Jesus. If your pictures of the cross do not make you more kind, more loving, more Jesus like, There are better options to talk. Let's pray.
God who gives god's self away, who comes to us to love us, to find us, to heal us, to help us start over, To look at all of these images of the ways that the church have wrestled with the beauty of the at one ment, might we Find something profound in each of them. Ways to imagine your work beyond the scope of what we are able to articulate. Ways that lead us to the profound trust in the Jesus who gives himself away so that we might know ourselves as loved. God, may our images of atonement the only ones that shape us into better, Stronger, kinder, more graceful, courageous people who follow in the way of Jesus, who invite outsiders in, who give ourselves away, who have beliefs that turn into actions in the world and contribute to this kingdom you invite us to participate in. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.