Getting the Atonement Right or Wrong: Reflections on Recent Models and Concerns
Even though the concern over how religious belief potentially induces violence toward others on the one hand or passivity in the face of it on the other has been a part of theological discourse for several decades. The events of the past decades have only served to raise this concern even more. When the intentional bombing of the World Trade Center forever shaped airport and national security, it also served as a specter of the violence that religious devotion can produce. Though Christians could potentially write the event off as instigated by a different religious community, the more recent revelations of abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and suppressed from public view has made the issue of abuse and violence an issue Christians cannot sidestep. Lest Protestants think they can dismiss sexual abuse as solely a Catholic problem, consider the fact that the reports of abuse and moral failures among their own prominent pastors and influential figures have been disclosed in periodic doses rather than one large cache. If all the moral failings of prominent Protestant leaders of the last several decades had been disclosed in one fell swoop, the damage in public consciousness would likely be similar. Even though people operating within various religious traditions might want to quibble about which religion or which particular tradition should take the fault for these various examples of violence and abuse, these events—along with many others like them—have set the stage to encourage a more thoroughgoing conversation about which Christian doctrines encourage violence on the one hand and passivity in the face of it on the other.
Recent Atonement Models
The atonement has been one such doctrine that has been revisited in light of the concerns about justifying violence and weakening resistance to it. Though many authors have continued to uphold the breadth of the tradition’s reflections on the atonement,¹ others have found issue with certain atonement theologies, most often penal substitution and satisfaction theories. Both of these theories require the Messiah’s death in order for God to bestow forgiveness on humans. In the case of penal substitution, the Messiah takes on the punishment that God inflicts on sinful humanity. For satisfaction theory, the Messiah performs a work in excess of the required obedience in order to make a compensatory offering to pay the debt that humanity cannot.
The issues raised by critics of satisfaction and penal substitution, at least as they relate to issues of violence and passivity, have tended to run in two directions. The first asks about the nature of the God who would require his Son’s death to secure atonement for human beings. This requirement of a death for atonement has been criticized as a “violent” portrait of the divine who operates from the restrictive confines of retributive justice.² Many such critics have wondered why humans seem capable of forgiving without imposing punishment but God is not. The second line of critique has asked about the Son’s submission and acceptance of his death. If Christ is the moral ideal for Christian behavior and if he willingly consents to the violence that befalls him, what kind of moral model does this offer those who suffer from domestic abuse? Does this not suggest that suffering violence has some kind of redemptive value? If so, then it is argued that adherents to such a theology of atonement would likely remain passive in the face of abuse rather than resist it.³
In light of these concerns, some theologians have reached for other models of the atonement. One such model is the scapegoat theory of atonement. This approach to the atonement was first advanced by René Girard and has been championed by others since.⁴ To summarize, Girard believes that sacrifice and scapegoating originated as a way for human communities to expunge their social problems and create peace. By blaming social unrest on purportedly guilty culprits, social groups are able to retain cohesion. Once the scapegoat is eliminated, the community returns to peace. When peace is regained, the whole scenario becomes religiously and culturally generative. Taboos are created in order to safeguard the community from falling into unrest, and rituals are created to remember the saving efficacy of the sacrificial victim. This saving efficacy is attributed to divine power and the ensuing stories birth the mythology of the ancient world. For Girard, human culture has been founded upon the misconceived notion that sacrificing the “deserving” party maintains social cohesion.
While Girard’s theory is far-reaching and attempts to explain the origins of human culture, the Christ event is wholly distinct in his view. Like other victims throughout history, Christ is innocent. The Romans and the Jewish elites collude against him and put him on the cross in order to keep their social fabric together. While the Romans and the Jewish leaders say Jesus must die, the Gospels offer a contrasting view. Jesus is an innocent victim, and the Gospels make that clear for all to see. Moreover, the resurrection three days later proves that God vindicated Jesus of the charges raised against him. God was thus on the side of the victim.
How then does Christ save? For Girard, the Christ event reveals the lie at the heart of human culture—namely, that they need victims in order to maintain social order—and frees it from “the illusion of a violent God.”⁵ In the cross, God reveals that he does not need sacrificial victims. As a result, Girard avers that the Gospels do not establish Christ as a sacrifice for atonement. I write this with the caveat that his later work became more open to the use of “sacrifice” to speak of Christ’s death so long as it is not understood as needed in the way that one finds it required in penal substitution or satisfaction theory. Christ’s death is sacrifice only in the sense of being a willing offering in order to expose the lies of the world and to show that God does not require the sacrifice of innocent victims. It thus opposes such thinking.
Girard’s scapegoat theory has gained traction in recent decades, especially among writers cautious about sanctioning human violence. Still, one question deserves to be answered and that is whether the biblical evidence does permit one to draw such conclusions. While I have sketched a larger response to Girard in Bloodless Atonement, I will provide a short overview of one of the arguments here.⁶
The Atonement and the Last Supper
Girard essentially turns the Gospels into the hermeneutical key that interprets the rest of Scripture and human culture more broadly. As a result, the main question hinges upon how the Gospel writers understand the saving efficacy of the cross. On the one hand, Girard and others are correct to note that the Gospels present Christ as innocent of the charges leveled against him. Those conspiring against Jesus do so because “They hated me without reason” (John 15:25, NIV).
At the same time, I reject his contention that the Gospels do not depict Jesus as an atoning sacrifice. In the Synoptics, the Last Supper accounts provide the richest reflection on Jesus’ death and how it would benefit his disciples.
For our purposes, I will focus on Matthew’s account with a brief comparison with Mark’s. Like Mark, Matthew depicts the Last Supper as a Passover meal, and Jesus similarly uses some of the elements of the Passover meal as a symbolic depiction of his imminent death. Here is Matthew’s account:
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom” (Matt. 26:26-29, NIV).
A couple of things are important for understanding this passage’s connection with atonement theology. The first is that sacrificial allusions are present throughout the account. Most significantly, the words “my blood of the covenant (τὸ αἷμά μου τῆς διαθήκης)” comprise an allusion to an event that was momentous in the history of Israel, namely, the ratification of the Sinai Covenant. In Exodus 24:8 Moses sprinkles blood on the Israelites in order to enact the covenant with the Lord: “Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant (τὸ αἷμα τῆς διαθήκης) that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words’” (NIV). In the context of Jesus’ statements over the wine, these words identify his death as the moment by which God’s relationship with his people would be reconstituted. The covenant would be remade. In addition to this, the fact that this “blood of the covenant” would be “poured out (ἐκχυννόμενον)” is important. This is the language used in the Old Testament to speak of how blood was offered in sacrifices (Lev. 4:7, 18, 25, 30, and 34). As a result, the contention of Girard’s early work that the Gospels fail to depict Christ’s death as a sacrifice does not bear up with the evidence. This episode is draped in the trappings and allusions of sacrifice.
The second thing is that Matthew has added a unique phrase that one does not find in the parallel account in Mark. If the majority view is correct that Mark was written first and Matthew used Mark as a source, then we get an insight into the theological distinctives and insights that Matthew wanted to convey to his audience. Compare the differences in Greek, which have been underlined below:
Mark 14:24 καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ αἷμά μου τῆς διαθήκης τὸ ἐκχυννόμενον ὑπὲρ πολλῶν.
Matthew 26:28 τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν τὸ αἷμά μου τῆς διαθήκης τὸ περὶ πολλῶν ἐκχυννόμενον εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν.
The main difference I want to emphasize is the final phrase in Matthew 26:28 (εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν), which is rendered by the NIV as “for the forgiveness of sins.” This Matthean addition does several things. First, it alludes to Jeremiah’s new covenant promise which promised the forgiveness of sins (Jer. 31:31-34). The covenantal language of the Last Supper and the introduction of forgiveness makes the conceptual connection with Jeremiah’s new covenant even more probable. In light of this, I think we can conclude that Matthew’s Last Supper connection with Jeremiah is intentional. Furthermore, it establishes Jesus’ death as the moment when Jeremiah’s promise of the new covenant is fulfilled.
Second, this prepositional phrase is a purpose phrase. As such it depicts the purpose of the blood of the covenant and thereby Jesus’ death, and this is essential. With this purpose phrase, Christ’s death accomplishes a state purpose, namely, securing the forgiveness of sins. Thus, contrary to those like Girard who want to see Jesus’ death as the undoing of sacrifice or some kind of system of atonement, Matthew’s Gospel underscores the need for such an approach to the cross. It is not that Matthew’s Last Supper account provides a full-orbed atonement theology. We can wish it said more, and I think we need to turn to the rest of the Gospel to get a picture of the broader implications, which I attempt to do in Bloodless Atonement. Nevertheless, I do think the Last Supper accounts have elements that we cannot dismiss from our soteriology, namely, Christ’s death is the means by which forgiveness and release from sins happen. As a result, we cannot say that forgiveness is indiscriminately available without the need for atonement. Matthew’s rendering of the Last Supper means the cross is not just the revelation of the forgiveness that God has always made available; it is the means by which such forgiveness is actualized and effected.
Conclusion
Some have countered with the argument that this makes God subservient to justice and therefore limits God’s freedom to extend forgiveness freely. The rebuttal to this draws from the answer one can provide to the old saw of the Euthyphro Dialogue. While I do agree that accounts of the atonement, such as the one I put forth in Bloodless Atonement require some form of retributive justice, I do not think that this means God is somehow restricted by an external standard of justice. Justice is not a standard above or outside God. It is a standard within and inherent to God’s very nature. As such he cannot do otherwise. There is no cosmic policeman making sure God follows the rules. Since his nature is justice, his nature is the standard, and he cannot do other than act justly. As a result, God must give sin its rightful due, which is precisely what Paul says happens in Christ’s death (Rom. 8:3). If sin does not get its rightful due, then one can question whether God is just, and that is problematic for a different set of reasons, most notably because the distinction between good and evil becomes inconsequential. While some critics will still say that the judgment of sin inherent in a penal substitutionary understanding of the cross is “violent” since it inflicts pain on an innocent third party, such criticisms require a very unorthodox Trinitarianism where the Son has not already chosen to vanquish sin through being “slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). Atonement, I believe, is the act of the Triune God accomplished not by scapegoating a punishment or a debt onto a third party but as a result of the divine choice to assume that on his people’s behalf.
Others might be concerned that understanding Christ’s death on the cross in this way still encourages passivity in the face of violence. I agree that this might be a potential liability, but I question whether the solution is revising our understanding of the atonement. If we have good biblical reasons to hold a doctrine, should we reject it simply because some people have misapplied it? I think misapplication could happen for a good many doctrines, even for those that have been revised to circumvent the negative misapplication of some Christian teachings. In other places, I have contended that a more thoroughgoing pastoral theology that guides people in a variety of contexts—especially in situations like domestic abuse—is needed to prevent such misapplications from happening.⁷ Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, have held to strong penal substitutionary views of the atonement and also put safeguards in place to ensure that people did not think all suffering was redemptive or required of a disciple of Christ. Furthermore, the way he spent the final years of his life resisting the violence perpetrated by the Nazi regime indicates that atonement theologies like penal substitution do not necessitate passivity in the face of oppression. Thus, I think there are other means by which we can safeguard the church from misapplications of “redemptive suffering” and believe we should first and foremost seek to frame our theology in faithfulness to the biblical texts.
Notes:
See for example Joshua M. McNall, The Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ’s Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019) and Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 208-210.
Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole r. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), 4; J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 204; and Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225.
Girard’s view of the atonement can be found in René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987) and René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001).
René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 216.
See Benjamin J. Burkholder, Bloodless Atonement?: A Theological and Exegetical Study of the Last Supper Sayings, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017).
Benjamin J. Burkholder, “Violence, Atonement, and Retributive Justice: Bonhoeffer as a Test Case,” Modern Theology 33, 3 (2017): 395-413.