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ICJS Scripture Forum, 2003-2004
Session #7

Scripture Forum
Session #7
Goucher College
May 7, 2004

Introduction to the discussion:

   This session of the Scripture Forum was devoted to a continuation of the discussion of Christian metaphors of atonement. The discussion was led by Kelly Denton-Borhaug.

   Kelly began with a summary of the previous discus-sion, which included definitions from various theological dictionaries and a list of key questions to consider in studying Christian understandings of atonement and what's at stake in these theologies. She reminded those present that, while atonement is at the hub of Christian theology and doctrine, it is nevertheless a complex and profuse theology that has never been systematized. The standard methodology used to study theologies of atonement is to map them through the use of typol-ogies.
   One theologian has created a typology of the typol-ogies in order to show what stands behind them. This typology includes three elements:

• a list
• a sorting through the elements according to objective and subjective poles; examples of objective and subjective poles:
• objective: the change occurs in God; subjective: the change occurs in human beings
• objective: the change occurs in heaven, beyond this life; subjective: the change occurs in this world, in this life
• objective: emphasizes justice; subjective: emphasizes compassion and forgiveness
• objective: the change that occurs is a once-for-all change; subjective: the change is part of a process
• (We never got to #3.)

The discussion begins:

• Question: Does justice in atonement theologies involve a debt that is due and must be paid?
• Response: All atonement metaphors try to
  get around a tension that is always present between justice and compassion-salvation-
  union-completion-healing in the face of sin and brokenness. Some metaphors focus more on the objective elements (in this case, justice) and others on the subjective elements (in this case, compassion). Objective theologians question
  what happens to the cost of justice; subjective theologians ask, "Where is the mercy?"
• A Jewish participant pointed out that the tension between justice and compassion is part of the structure of Jewish liturgy: On Rosh ha-Shanah the focus is on justice, and on Yom Kippur, ten days later, the focus is on mercy/compassion.
• Another Jewish participant discussed this tension as being present in Judaism in another way as well. It is said that the month of Elul, the month before Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, is a good time for soul-searching and repentance. Some would question why this is so: Since God is unchanging, why should one period of time be better for repentance than any other? Answer: God doesn't change, but human beings change. Human beings are not wired to be able to repent all the time, so they need a time when then can be reminded to repent.
• This way of thinking was identified as a swing toward the subjective pole.
• Observation: It seems that the truth claims on the objective pole are (more) quantifiable, while those on the subjective pole cannot be quantified but must be defined contextually.
• Question regarding the objective pole: God needs to express His wrath towards humanity. After that happens, God is reoriented toward humanity. But what happens if God doesn't express His wrath? Is there a need for change only at the level of God so that only God changes?
• Response: In those questions there is a mixing of the metaphors. That's the problem with atonement theologies: Everybody mixes the metaphors.
• Question: Is there something in Christians -- for example, in the understanding of incarnational theology -- that makes it impossible to separate the metaphors?
• Response: No one metaphor can stand alone to solve all the problems and satisfy all the demands of atonement theology. All the metaphors correct each other.
• A Christian participant suggested that another part of the problem is that the metaphors in atonement theologies also have to be hooked to a specific historical event and a specific historical person.



• Question from a Jewish participant: When people say, "Jesus died for me," does that refer to past sins or to sins that will be committed in the future?
• Response: It refers to both, depending on the Christian.



• It was mentioned that a lot of Christians are abandoning atonement theology.
• One participant sees this trend as a problem because abandoning this theology removes Christians from a conversation in our tradition
  that has to do with how we define ourselves.
• Another participant suggested that what is happening is not so much an abandonment of atonement theology as an abandonment of the traditional ways of talking about atonement --
  a shifting away from certain metaphors to new metaphors, e.g., talking about atonement in
  terms of a "hero" theology.
• Question: How do you attach the hero to atonement?
• Response: You don't. Christians don't think that way. They don't think about whether there is sin or not. They simply say that Jesus does good things in bad situations.
• People who like Gibson's film think of this kind of thing as "Jesus did something I could never do."
• This kind of thinking is connected to the Greek notion of "noble death" and the notion of penal substitution: Jesus takes on what was meant for me. We don't articulate this much now, but it's all still there.
• Question: Do we not talk about it anymore, or do we need new language to talk about it?
• Response: No, to both questions.
• One participant began to speak of a theology involving scapegoating, in which there is a sense of dislocation, a feeling that something needs to be put in order, and the problems are laid on a sacrificial figure who is afterwards transformed
  into a hero figure.
• Response: This, again, is a mixing of metaphors -- substitution blended with sacrifice and the hero.

The discussion turns to the notion of atonement in the form of sacrifice (and gradually becomes less focused):

• The key question is, "How do we address the reality of the sin-stain-blot?" The boundaries between purity and pollution have become unclear. How does the sacrifice deal with this problem?
• Question: Is there a claim here that God needs the sacrifice?
• A question that came up in the most recent ses-sion of the Congregational Project was raised: Sacrifice is an antiquated and barbaric notion. Why should some element of sacrifice be an ongoing part of Judaism?
• Response from a Jewish participant: A lot of the rituals in contemporary Judaism were seen by the sages who established them as a transformation of the Temple ritual. Jews may have lost an aware-ness of this element, but the notion of Temple ritual is still operative. For example, In Pirque Avot, Simon the Righteous says that Torah, avodah, and acts of kindness are the three pillars of the world without which the world cannot exist. "Avodah" is often translated as "worship," but what it actually refers to is "Temple service."
• Mopping up the stain has to happen among humans. Life -- i.e., blood -- has to clean up
  the stain.
• Mention was made of a situation that has arisen out of the achievements of modern science and technology that poses a significant ethical dilem-ma: People are having children so that the cells of the younger child can be sacrificed to heal illness
  -- the sin-blot-stain -- in an older child.
• A Jewish participant brought up the fact that among the ancient Israelites, the practice of sacrifice was not carried out only for the purpose of removing a stain. Sacrifices were also part of worship; they were the structure through which the people talked to God.



• At this point the conversation moved to a dis-cussion that was also part of the Congregational Project, namely the connection between Passover and the sacrifice of the first-born son. The ques-tion was asked: When you think of the Passover sacrifice, what is it?
• Immediate response from a Jewish participant: There is no connection between Passover and
  the sacrifice of the first-born son.
• Response: Exodus 13:8 says that there is ("You shall tell your child on that day, 'It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.'").
• First respondent: Before you start to enjoy some-thing, you give something back to God. Any connection between Passover and the sacrifice
  of the first-born son is late and happened only because everything had to be connected to the exodus.
• Response from a different Jewish participant: God saved the first born of Israel, so they are owed to God. Rather than sacrifice them, a metaphorical substitution is made.
• But God's simply making the demand is scandalous. The community would say that "other people did that (i.e., sacrificed their children), but we found a way to get around it."
• The Reformed tradition says that God does not need anything from humans.
• Reaction: Statements like that don't come from the biblical tradition but from the Greek philosoph-ical tradition, which ignores the way the Old Testament operates.
• Jewish participant: The prophets say that we do not sacrifice to meet God's needs. Sacrifice is a construct to communicate with God.
• The prophets were not issuing a call to do away with the sacrificial system; they were calling for
  a balance between sacrifice and ethical behavior [e.g., Amos 5:22, 24: "If you offer Me burnt offerings -- or your meal offerings -- I will not accept them; I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings. . . . But let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream."]
• The sacrificial metaphor is the most ancient and incomprehensible, but it's also extremely visceral.
• It's also unsophisticated, which is why it's in-comprehensible. Sacrifice cannot be viewed as theurgic: You can't go out and do anything you want just because you gave God a bull.
• But there is an insight intrinsic to sacrifice that we can't give up without losing something precious.
• You have to mop up the blood to clean up the stain.
• So you kill in order to give life.
• A Jewish participant speaks to his congregants about sacrifice by suggesting that they imagine giving up -- sacrificing -- something really impor-tant to them, for example, their Audis. Sacrifice is a very powerful thing; it makes people feel close to God, and it overcomes the boundary that's been created between God and the people.
• People try to do good, but because of the stain justice is always proximate. But you keep trying.
  It costs something very dear to pursue goodness; it doesn't have to be life.
• Jon Levenson, author of The Death and Resurrec-tion of the Beloved Son, would say that it is a fundamental misreading of the Old Testament to say that the requirement to sacrifice the first-born son does not lay claim to the people.
• Response: The thrust of the Tanakh is to move people away from that.
• (Discussion returns to the notion mentioned earlier that there is an insight intrinsic to sacrifice.) The question is asked: What is the nature of the cost?
• Response: Ultimate submission. You see this at
  a bris. Parents -- oftentimes people who rarely submit their personal needs to their tradition -- hand their son over to a strange man who is literally going to take a knife to the baby. When the ceremony is over, people feel very close to God.
• Question or statement: That's what lies at the heart of the sacrifice of the first-born.
• Parents also truly sacrifice when they realize that their child has to be let go to live his or her own life.
• Questions regarding literal sacrifice: These are frightening notions that are also destructive. How can they bring people closer to God? Why would God demand such a thing? Why do we not critique such notions?
• We need to pay more attention to the revulsion people feel when we want to press this issue. This notion is abhorrent and ethically suspect. In our post-Shoah, post-everything world it is wrong to see sacrifice as submission. Sin has everything to do with how we understand sacrifice, so we need to rethink the metaphors we use to describe sin. Rather than talk of sin as a stain or blot, we should talk of sin as missing the mark -- which
  is also a biblical understanding.
• By domesticating sacrifice, something is lost. It would be good if we could retain the good insights that come from the notion of sacrifice, while get-ting rid of the pathologies. But we can't really do that, so maybe we need to sacrifice sacrifice.
• There is an area of taboo, a moving into a for-bidden zone, in the notion of sacrifice -- the idea that killing someone is not only permissible but it's the thing that is supposed to happen.
• The power of Gibson's film seems to be that it takes people into that area of taboo. Note, for example, that it is sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys who keep going back to see the film over and over again.
• The tradition says to submit to God to do some-thing that is morally and ethically wrong. In its own context, sacrifice was important, but the dynamic between me and God is not that relationship. This is a repulsive way to think.
• The ritual performance of the Mass suggests that there is something in us that wants to kill God over and over again. [N.B. The emphasis in the Mass is no longer on sacrifice but on table fellowship.]
• We need to critique submission as the highest form of communion with God. If we were to shift the notion of sin, what would the metaphor of sacrifice look like?
• Judaism has already done that (i.e., shifted the notion of sin). By thinking of sin in terms of missing the mark, sacrifice becomes making an apology to the person against whom one has sinned, making financial restitution, or giving money to charity.
• The kind of sacrifice that is necessary is to contribute to building a better world, the moral and ethical world that God wants. Bathing in the blood of Jesus distracts us from paying attention to the justice and mercy needed in the world.
• We also need to shift the category of sin from an individual to a communal concern.
• When thinking about sacrifice in biblical narratives, we tend to concentrate on Abraham and Isaac, but there are actual sacrifices of women in the
  Old Testament, e.g., Jephthah's daughter.
• Phyllis Trible (Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of the Biblical Narratives) has texts where God did not intervene; it's always the daughters.
• Who is it who is asked to submit? Women.
• One critique of the patriarchal system is that it always saves its sons.

At this point, by mutual consent, the discussion moved on to metaphors of satisfaction and penal substitution:

• Throughout the first thousand years of Christianity (until the time of Anselm), theologies of ransom predominated: Human beings are in sway to the devil and they have to be redeemed.
• In the 11th-12th cents. Anselm (Cur Deus Homo) shifted the emphasis away from the devil to the idea of satisfaction.
• Anselm's theology is based in part on the socio-political reality of his time, namely the feudal system: It was the word of the lord of the manor that established justice. God is viewed in the same terms as the lord of the manor.
• Satisfaction was a legal term. The re-establishment of justice in society was accomplished by making certain arrange-ments. Satisfaction was not obtained by making an eye-for-an-eye equal exchange.
• Sin is the cosmic rift between God's justice and humanity. Justice has been impaired and must be repaired in order to heal the rift in the cosmos.
• In Anselm's theology, the members of the Trinity have a conversation to decide what to do about sin and the rift in the cosmos. Obviously, sinful humanity cannot repair the rift it made. Neither can God alone heal the rift. What is needed is the God-man who can stand between both worlds, and who, being without sin, can make "satisfaction for sin." So Jesus offers himself in place of sinful humanity, and the rift in the cosmos is repaired.
• (A brief explanation of Anselm's atonement theology from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Revised Edition, edited by F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone:
  Sin, being an infinite offense against God, required a satisfaction equally infinite. As no finite being, man or angel, could offer such satisfaction, it was neces-sary that an infinite being, viz. God Himself, should take the place of man and, by His death, make complete satisfaction to Divine Justice. Hence the death of Christ was not a ransom paid to the devil but a debt paid to the Father.)


• The notion of penal substitution begins to flower around the time of the Reformation. This theology, too, mirrors the legal system of its time, in which territories are governed by princes and laws have been established.
• The notion of satisfaction begins to morph into a tit-for-tat justice based on law.
• In this theology, the wrath of God becomes very important. God's wrath has to be ap-peased, and people have to bear the consequences of their sin and pay with
  their lives.
• If sentence were actually to be carried out, however, humanity would be wiped out.
• So the sentence that should be laid on sinful humanity is instead laid on Jesus, who is without sin. People no longer have to suffer the punishment for their sins.
• Despite criticisms of this theology, penal substitu-tion has been the dominant metaphor in Christian liturgy and hymnody since the time of the Reformation.



• Question from a Jewish participant: What does this call on me to do?
• Response: Since you owe your life to Jesus, you should live in gratitude and not sin anymore.
• In evangelical Christian circles, what you have to do is believe, and believing is a real task.
• Objection: The emphasis on Jesus' being without sin estranges him from humanity.
• Response in Lutheran terms: Jesus has a "pre-lapsarian" (before the fall) human identity, which would make him different from all of us, with our "post-lapsarian" human identities. According to Luther, God intended us to be without sin, but we chose to sin. The point of the narrative of the temptation in the wilderness is to show that Jesus did not choose to sin, and so was sinless.
• It was suggested that the emphasis on Jesus' being without sin not only estranges him from humanity, it estranges him especially from his Jewish humanity. In Jesus' honor-shame culture, his behavior towards his family would have brought dishonor on them, so it is difficult to contend that Jesus, as a Jewish male living in that society, was without sin. [N.B. In Mediterranean culture then as now, sin has nothing to do with an internalized sense of guilt (see, for example, Krister's Sten-dahl's essay, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspec-tive Conscience of the West"). It has everything to do with things other people see one doing that bring either honor or shame on the person or on his family.]
• When Christians constructed a theology of Jesus as sacrifice, Jesus had to be without blemish in the same way the animal to be sacrificed had to be without blemish. If he were not without sin,
  the theology wouldn't work.
• Another way of explaining Jesus' sinlessness is to say that he remained faithful to the will of God.
• Response: That assumes that Jesus had to die.
• Response to the response: In Anselm's theology, Jesus has a much higher place as part of the decision-making process among the members of the Trinity. What Jesus did human beings could not do.
• Mention was made of the fact that Anselm's theology is not grounded on either reality or biblical texts. He was a philosopher, and his theology is a philosophical system.
• Mention was also made of the emphasis on ob-jective polarities in the theologies that were discussed.

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