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THE ATONEMENT An Essay by tsmong August 2013 Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Thus begins Kafka's novel, The Trial. This is what has happened to Simplicius McMong. He is tried for a crime which he knows nothing about. At the conclusion of the trial the Judge pronounces the verdict: Simplicius McMong, you are deemed to have been found guilty of the offence with which you are charged... As per the evidence collected and witness accounts in this case, the court is satisfied with the evidence and hereby sentence you to death. Simplicius is stunned. Then a bizarre thing happens. The Judge goes to his room and emerges with his Son. He takes out a revolver and kills the Son. He turns to Simplicius and tells him, Simplicius McMong, you're now free. My Son has paid the penalty for you, he died in your stead. Would you, dear reader, not recoil in horror if it were a true story? I've made it up to illustrate the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement: (i) that all have sinned and the wages of sin is death (Rom. 3:23, 6:23), (ii) that God the Judge has his only Son pay the death penalty for our sins to take us off the hook (Rom. 5:8). C. S. Lewis was at pains in trying to make sense of the substitutionary atonement. The one [atonement theory] most people have heard is the one about our being let off because Christ volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did

He not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take "paying the penalty," not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of "footing the bill," then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend. (Mere Christianity. Words within brackets are mine TSM) I'm afraid Lewis's footing the bill-theory does not wash either, for surely the crucifixion of Jesus is more than a business transaction. No matter how you slice it, the atonement bristles with difficulties, if you think about it. In 1 Cor. 1:23 St. Paul concedes that the cross is a skandalon (offence, stumbling block) to the religious Jews and moria (folly) to the philosophical Greeks; but for him it is the power and wisdom of God (a paradox, to say the least). Up till this day the cross remains moria to some and a skandalon to others. The majority of Christians still stick to the penal substitutionary theory, claiming that that's what scripture says and rejection of it tantamounts to rejecting the Christian faith itself. Not so, say a minority of Christian thinkers. John Duns Scotus (1266-1308 AD) and some of today's theological thinkers like J. Denny Weaver, Richard Rohr, and Tony Jones go so far as to say that the death of Jesus is not necessary for the redemption of mankind. J. Denny Weaver has written a book called The Nonviolent Atonement (published in 2001). Nonviolent seems like a contradictory term to use unless the crucifixion is divorced from the meaning of the atonement. Rene Girard sees the cross as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices and a repudiation of violence. Yet violence goes on relentlessly. Many have asked where God was when six million Jews were being liquidated during WWII. The Christian answer is to be found in Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God -- God was there in solidarity with the suffering of the victims. As the Psalmist has written, God is collecting all our tears in a bottle (Ps. 56:8). None of the attempted explanations on how the atonement works is without its difficulties. As with all theology, talk of the atonement is conjecture. Gods truth is ultimately a mystery to which no human being is privy, says Tony Jones, adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. So is explaining how

the atonement works just a game that theologians play? A classic work on the history of atonement ideas is Gustav Aulen's Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main types of the Idea of Atonement. I have not read the book yet, the gist of which can be read online. My take on the atonement I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. -- William Blake For me the three messages of the cross are the following: First, Jesus died on the cross to show us that any being -- be that being human or divine -- who assumes a physical body like ours is subject to suffering and death. Such is the nature of life in this world. In this sense Jesus and the Buddha are on the same page. I think no one has thought harder about the atonement than Dietrich Bonhoeffer did while he was awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison. To his friend Bethge he wrote: God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering..... The Bible directs man to God's powerlessness and suffering: only the suffering God can help. (Letters and Papers from Prison 16 July, 1944.) The question is: How can the suffering God help? Perhaps God helps in the Proustian sense: We are healed of suffering by experiencing it to the full. Etty Hillesum (who died in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis) wrote to God in one of her remarkable prayers: But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. St. Paul asked for divine help to be healed of an affliction three times and the response was: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. (2 Cor. 12:8-9) Karl Barth in his commentary on Romans says that Jesus's greatest achievement (triumph of the cross) is a negative achievement. Not only is it a negative achievement, it is a paradoxical achievement. Faith in the cross sees

hope in despair, strength in weakness, wisdom in foolishness and victory in defeat. Kierkegaard says that an individual in faith relinquishes the understanding and believes against the understanding ( Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Second, the glorious message of the cross is that death does not have the last word death is followed by resurrection. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as existence without the body. There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Uncompounded. If there were not this Unborn... then there would be no deliverance from that which is born, become, made, compounded. But since there is this Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Uncompounded, therefore there is deliverance from that which is born, become, made, compounded. -- (The Buddha) God exists without a body, does He not? The resurrected Christ exists without a body, does He not? Why do believers insist on a physical resurrection? True, Christ appeared to his disciples in bodily form after the resurrection. But that was then. What about now? Isn't Christ here and everywhere today? He, like God, is without a body invisibly omnipresent. Third, for the word atonement The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, has this: Theol. the doctrine concerning the reconciliation of God and humankind, esp. as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Christ. Archaic. Reconciliation; agreement. [150555 AD; from phrase at one in harmony + ment. Whereas in the Old Testament God tells Moses Meet me at the top of Mt. Sinai in the New Testament He tells each of us Meet me at Calvary. What a place to be at one with God! Calvary conjures up some tenebrous and wretched place like what Dante felt in his dream journey in hell: Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God's grace. - (Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 7-9. John Ciardi trans.) Wonder of wonders! What is it about the cross that makes it so appealing and

comforting to millions and millions since first century A.D.? What makes the desert beautiful, says the little prince, is that somewhere it hides a well... What makes the cross beautiful is that somewhere it hides a divine well of living water. ... whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him, Jesus tells the woman at the well, will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (John 4:14).