In one Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, the little boy Calvin sleds down a snowy slope with his friend Hobbes, a tiger, while conducting a discussion about sin:
Calvin: I'm getting nervous about Christmas.
Hobbes: You're worried you haven't been good?
Calvin: That's just the question. It's all relative. What's Santa's definition? How good do you have
to be to qualify as good? I haven't killed anybody. That's good, right? I haven't committed any
felonies. I didn't start any wars...Wouldn't you say that's pretty good? Wouldn't you say I should
get lots of presents?
Hobbes: But maybe good is more than the absence of bad.
Calvin: See, that's what worries me. (quoted in Rutledge, 180)
We are all like Calvin. However we may feel about our own personal behavior, we worry about whether 'bad' might somehow be more than just falling short of the mark. This whole series of posts is about how Christ's completed work addresses all the bad 'out there' in the world and 'in here,' in ourselves, and changes the whole world.
I mentioned in the first post of this series that two books about Christ's completed work have been constant companions: Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion and Peter Leithart's Delivered from the Elements of the World. Both are long-gestating, career-spanning books for their authors:
Rutledge writes:
"When someone asks me how long I have been working on this book, I usually say that I started it when, after twenty-one years, I retired from parish ministry - in other words, about eighteen years ago. In the truest sense, though, it has been the work of a lifetime. When I was about thirteen - that would be 1950 - I was already beginning to wonder what it meant to say that Jesus died for the sin of the world." (xv)
Leithart writes:
"I have described Delivered from the Elements of the World as my Big Red Book About Everything..." (17)
Both write about the public impact of the cross, whether Jesus meant to show the world something on the cross, or if he meant to accomplish something, and if so, what? They also write about what it means when the church fails to convey this. They worry about the cross being ignored or reduced to one meaning apart from many.
Their work speaks to temptations to avoid the cross, and also to overemphasize aspects of the cross. Rutledge writes:
"Most churchgoing people are "Jews" on Sunday morning and "Greeks" the rest of the time. Religious people want visionary experiences and spiritual uplift; secular people want proofs, arguments, demonstrations, philosophy, science. The striking fact is that neither one of these groups wants to hear about the cross." (86)
Rutledge here depicts the ways in both the world and in the church that we avoid the cross. Peter Leithart writes about a certain temptation to think about the cross, but in unhelpful ways:
"We are tempted to flinch at the last moment. We are tempted to retreat from the ambiguities of history into an atonement theory whose mechanism works regardless of whether Torah had ever been given, one that does not depend on the events of Jesus' life or the faithful witness of the founding, firstfruits generation. We are tempted to conclude that Jesus' death and resurrection might effect salvation without the church, with all its failures and imperfections..." (Delivered, 173)
Leithart and Rutledge depict two opposing temptations: one, to avoid the cross entirely, the second, to think a lot about the cross, but in one particular way.
This assumes there are many ways to think about the cross. The Christian tradition has never picked one particular understanding of atonement, which is the word for how God makes things right in Christ.
Traditionally, there are three theories of the atonement: penal substitution, Christus victor, and the moral influence theory. Rutledge covers eight "biblical motifs:" the passover/exodus, blood sacrifice, ransom and redemption, the great assize, the apocalyptic war, the descent into hell, the substitution, and recapitulation.
The apocalyptic war motif and the substitution motif become particularly important to contemporary discussions because one emphasizes sin and salvation as a collective and the other as an individual matter. The trouble becomes keeping them together.
Rutledge describes the substitutionary motif:
"Sin is a responsible guilt for which atonement must be made. It follows that the crucifixion is understood as a sacrifice for sin." (181)
This is well summed up by the hymn Amazing Grace, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me/I once was lost but now am found/was blind but now I see." The emphasis is on the sinner's guilt and on the loving substitutionary sacrifice made for the sinner. This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil in here, in my own human soul, because it shows that God has forensically removed all my impurities, washing them in Christ's blood.
The weakness of this model is when it becomes too much of a free-floating theory. In the context of the Bible, the substitutionary atonement conveys God's loving agency: "I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. In the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." (Gal. 2:20) However, when the impersonal tone of theorizing is used, it can sound like this: "...sin has to be punished because it deserves to be, because impartial justice requires due penalty, just as it demands reward for virtue." (Robert Dabney, quoted in Rutledge, 496) Now, sin does deserve to be punished. But when the content is no longer embedded in Scripture, but transplanted into a theory, really important things get lost in translation. In this impersonal mode, God can come off angry, the punishment arbitrary, the suffering masochistic. It's plenty of justice and not enough love. Solid biblical motifs, when they are couched in theory language, can prove bewildering. Another weakness is its individualism. When it is the only model at work, "the single individual with his solitary guilt looms over the conceptual landscape, leaving no space for the drama of the cosmic struggle..." (Rutledge, 506)
The cosmic struggle is the Apocalyptic War motif. Rutledge writes:
"Sin is an alien power that must be driven from the field. All human beings are enslaved by this power (Rom. 3:9; John 8:34) and must be liberated by a greater power. The crucifixion is therefore understood to be Christ's victory of the Powers of Sin and Death, commonly called Christus Victor." (181)
This is a helpful motif for those who are overwhelmed by all the sin and evil out there, in the world. All the corruption, racism, structural evil, genocide that is institutional and complex. It tells us that Christ has won a decisive victory over these satanic powers and principalities which rule this world.
The weakness of this model is that it can seem to take place at a cosmic remove, way above our heads. It runs the risk of taking place at such a vast level that it doesn't touch on my individual life at all. Couched in theory language, this motif can lose its tone of prophetic hope, coming off naive instead as it describes a victory that doesn't seem to have made a dent in the world's corruption. It can have the effect of claiming 'all people are saved' without adequately sounding the depths of the Auschwitz's, Rwanda's or other sites of unspeakable cruelty. It's plenty of love and not enough justice. It can work out ethically where one group is more a 'victim' and another group a 'perpetrator' in a way that one group seems more innocent and another group more guilty. In other words, it can sometimes run more on a steam of class warfare than it does on a biblical anthropology. It can seem to give some people a pass. But as Gerhard Forde writes, "Christ's work is and remains always an act in which we are involved and implicated." (quoted in Rutledge 391)
Both these theories let us off the hook to the extent that they become just a math equation we puzzle over rather than a mystery we are caught up in: "God is just. Sin happened. God had to punish it.", etc. When we think of these holy matters as one theory or another, we exonerate ourselves from being personally involved in what is happening at the cross. As I heard one theologian say in an interview, "we are not saved by believing in 'justification by faith.' We are not saved by some theory. We are saved by Jesus Christ."
Meeting Jesus in Scripture is enriched by keeping all the motifs we find and dwelling upon them. Different motifs add to the extraordinary riches, grace, and wisdom of God.
The Letter to Hebrews refers to the apocalyptic war motif in Hebrews 2:14-15:
"Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery" (Hebrews 2:14-15, ESV)
Then, the author refers to the substitutionary motif in the following verses:
"Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted" (Hebrews 2:17-18 (ESV)
Rutledge writes about how the two motifs complement one another:
"First, the apocalyptic drama is the nonnegotiable context for the substitution model and all the others as well. It is the thought-world from which the entire new Testament was written. The incarnate Son arrived not in neutral territory, but in a realm occupied by an Enemy power. Second, the way in which Christ became the apocalyptic victor was through the substitution." (531)
They complement each other in our own Christian lives. The substitutionary motif provides us personal, daily renewal within the larger apocalyptic war motif in which we prayerfully serve our city, country, and world together and with Christ. We find a satisfying, loving, victorious Christ in both. Christ heals us in here so that we can unite with him to serve out there.
Melito of Sardis, an early Christian bishop who died circa 190 A.D. combined at least five motifs in an Easter sermon:
"The Lord...suffered for the sake of him who suffered, and was bound for the sake of him who was imprisoned, and was judged for the sake of the condemned, and was buried for the sake of the buried. So come, all families of human beings who are defiled by sins, and receive remission of sins. For I am your remission, I am the Passover of salvation. I am the Lamb sacrificed for your sake. I am your ransom. I am your life. I am your Resurrection. I am your light. I am your salvation. I am your King. I lead you toward the heights of heaven. I will show you the eternal Father. I will raise you up with my right hand." (quoted in Rutledge, 479)
The challenge, particularly to predominantly white churches, is to draw upon our scriptural resources to address Christ's victory over structural sin. This is articulated well by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
"There was a time when the Church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are." (quoted in Cody Cook, The Second Adam)
To the white churches that tended to look at sin and salvation primarily through the lens of their own personal behavior, King might be echoing the words of Hobbes from the comic strip: "...maybe good is more than the absence of bad."
As all motifs can be misused, we can also misuse the substitutionary motif. Seeing it as a mere theory, we are comforted that Christ saves us just as we are, but we are also tempted to believe that Christ wants us to stay just as we are. It is all very convenient for us. Among my hopes with this series is for us to see how Christ's complete work does something to the world as a whole so that, seeing this, we can be galvanized to become the kind of church Martin Luther King, Jr. yearned to see while writing from his jail cell.
It would be extraordinary to do some recovery here, because Christ can give us a far more wonderful word about who we are as a church than we can give ourselves. How can we recover the many meanings of Christ's completed work so that we can benefit in our minds from God's full gift again? I want to say two more things about this. First, while the various motifs and theories about atonement tend to focus solely on Christ's death, Peter Leithart enlarges the focus to incorporate other aspects of Christ's work that are unfortunately often ignored in these same theories, such as the larger history of Israel in the Old Testament, Jesus' life, his resurrection, his ascension, the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost, the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the formation of the Christian church. Freed from having to fit all human history within the three-hour time span of Christ's death, Leithart can stay rooted in salvation history and is less tempted to spin theory. We might also think of it this way. We often say to people, "summarize it for me," "give me the gist of what happened," or "tell me the highlights." We need to resist this temptation when it comes to the saving work of Christ. We need to resist the urge to compress and summarize, and settle in for something more trenchant and ultimately more satisfying. The old slave spiritual puts it best: "were you there when they crucified my Lord?" We want to realize that the answer to that question is, "yes." We want to cultivate a rich, silent meditation upon the cross, and the role it plays in Christ's completed work.
Second, this is why the motif of recapitulation is particularly satisfying. It means "gathering up." It is a motif which, by definition, gathers up all the motifs, helping us to see the ways that all things are summed by Christ in his completed work. By definition, recapitulation resists becoming a typical neat theory, because it describes a tried and true pattern for reading Scripture: it's all about Jesus. He is the alpha and the omega. He is the new Adam, the new Moses, the new David, the new Jeremiah, the new Israel. He is the Passover lamb. He is the temple. He is the priest. He reenacts, rewrites, recapitulates the whole Bible, even all of human history. In many ways, it is the ultimate motif, because it includes the others. Every motif doubles as a recapitulation. For the next nine posts, we'll focus on symbols, people, and events that Christ gathers up in his completed work. We'll focus particularly on the Gospel of Matthew, in which Matthew seems particularly intent on showing us that Jesus is a New Israel.
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