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n altern ative view of atonem ent

How does Jesus savehv W illiam C lacher

W H E N I W A S B O R N 60 yearsago.debates abouthow Christ saves us tended to divide Protestants who thoughtabout such matters at all into conservatives who defended someform of substitutionary atonement theory and liberals who weremo re apt to accept a kind of m o ral intluence theory. Both thoseapproaches were about 90 years old. In the years since, newaccounts of Christ's salvific work have been introduced or rein-iroduced. and the debates have generally grown angrier, at leastfrom the liberal side.Those who defended substitutionary atone-ment were always ready to dis-miss their opponents as heretics:now some of their opponentscomplain that a focus on substiluiio nary ato neme nt leads tiviolence against women and tuchild abuse.

Christians seem more divid-ed on these matters than ever.Looking back to the history oltheology lo f ind yet anotheiappro ach certainly will not mag-ically solve the problem, but areco nsideratio n of the physical o r mystical theory o f how Christsaves us might c o ntribute in a small way to mo re fruitful andcivil co nversation.

Sho rtly after HK). Anselm (Italian by birth. French by edu-cation, appointed as archbishop of Canterbury) wrote a classicversion of substitulionary atonement. He used the imagery ofthe feudal system of his time, in which vassals owed debts ofho no r to tbeir lords. We humans. Anselm said, owe everythingto o ur Lo rd and Creato r . When we sin, diso bey and therebydisho no r Go d, we fail to render what is pro perly Go d"s due. Asthe very fo undation of justice. Go d cannot s imply o verlo o k o urshortcomings . Mo reover, since we owe Go d everything by wayof obedience, once we have fallen behind in our account wehave no way of ever catching up.

Nevertheless, such is Go d's love that G o d will not simply aban -don us (at least no t all of us) to the co nsequences of our sins:"Thisdebt was so great that, while none but man must solve the debt.no ne but God was able to do it; so that he who do es it must be bothGod and man." Christ's suffering pays off what human beings oweto Go d's hono r, and we are thereby rectinciled to Go d.That we owe God more honor than we can give provides oneimage for what gets substituted in Christ's death. K arl Barth no tes

a range of alternative themes: forensic (we are guilty of a crimand Christ takes the punishment), financial (we are indebted tGod, and Christ pays our debt) and cultic (Christ makes a sacrfice on o ur behalO- For vario us cultural reaso ns. suspect, the oest themes (honor and sacrifice) prove to have more depth thathe more modem ones (payment of a debt, punishment for crime). But in all these alternatives, the understanding ol atonement has the same stiucture. Human beings owe something tGod that we cannot pay. Christ pays it on our behalf Thus Gtremains both perfectly just (insising o n a penalty) and perfectly loving (paying the penalty himselQ. ireat many Christians wo uldefine such a substitutio narv vieof the atonement as simply partwhat orthodox Christians believeWithin a century of Anselmtime, however. Peter Abelard waraising a moral objection to thidea of substitutio nary ato ne

ment. "How cruel and wicked seems." he wrote, "that anyonshould demand the blood of an innocent person as the price foanything . . . still less that Go d sho uld consider the death of hson so ag reeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whoworld " If an innocent Christ suffers, why should a loving Gofeel good about that or count it to our credit?In our time Rita Nakashima Brock has denounced a"divine child abuse" the notion that God the Father welcomethe death of Go d the Son as payment. A wom anist theo log iaonce famously spoke of the "blood and weird stuff involved isuch an account. British theologian Timothy Gorringe argue

that those who believe in substitutionary atiinemenl tend tsupport nastier prison systems.Such contemporary concerns make the issues more vivibut many of the underlying issues have not changed sincAbelard vo iced his o bjectio ns . We have beco me m o re aware o

William C. Placher wh o died in December taught theology for many years Waba.sh College in hidiurui. He was a hnglime contribulor to tCHRISTIAN CESWRY and tiiiiiior of several books including N arrat ives a Vulnerable God an d Tl ie I r iu ne Go d: An Essay in Po s l li t icrT h e o l o g y . T his article is published with the permission and assistance officials at Wabash College.

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how often women are asked by their pastors to put up withabuse from their husbands and how often Jesus' willingness tosuffer abuse on the cross is offered as a model of suffering tosuch victims. There does seem to be something weird abou thow the torture of an innocent person could make things morejust rather than less so.

The Presbyterian theologian Shirley Guthrie used to tellabout a child who. having heard substitutionary atonementexplained, burst ou t. "1 love Jesus. But 1 hate G od." Not analtogether u nreasonab le respon se, it might seem, to an accountin which Christ's grace saves us from God's unblinking justice.John Calvin, often identified with subs titutionary ato nem ent ,protested that God had loved us since before creation and didnot need to be led toward loving us by the events of HolyWeek. But too often that is how the story makes it sound.Abelard did not only offer criticism: he had an a lternativeaccount to p ropose. Christ's love, he said, so inspires usby its unique ex ample that "in teaching us by word andexamp le even u nto dea th, he has more fully bound us to himselfby love; with the result that ou r hearts should be enkindled bysuch a gift of divinegrace,and true charity should not now shrinkfrom enduring anything for him."This is the mo ral influence the -ory: in healing, teaching, suffering and dying, Christ so showsGod's love for us as to inspire us to love God and neighbor theway we should have all along.

Such optimism about human change, alas, makes the m oralinfluence theory open to something like empirical refutation.Anselm claims that Christ's suffering works a change in God.This is hard to disprove But according to Abe lard's m oralinfluence theory, Christ's suffering is supposed to work achangedram atically in us. We should then be able to lookat ourselves and judge.I do not find the results of such introspection encouraging.As I understand it, Abelard and those who agree with him needto argue that Christ's suffering has inspired Christians to shiftfrom failure to success in our efforts to love God and neighboras we ought. I do not see us getting dramatically better.Nor is Ab elard entirely free of the problem of valorizing suf-fering, for which Anselm so often gets blamed. In Ab elar d's the-ory too, after all, the m ost perfect being shows his perfection bysuffering. The audience benefiting from that suffering is differ-ent it now inspires us rather than satisfying God but, fromthe standpoint of many critics, that may m ake matters w orse.In a little book called ChristusVictor ritpublished in 1931.

the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen offered a third explana-tion of how Christ saves usnot a new theory but the recoveryof a very old one. Aulen argued that for first tho usan d y ears ofChri.stian history, until the time of Anselm, the dominant viewwas that by sinning we humans have fallen under the control ofthe devil. Christ frees us by defeating Satan in battle, therebysecuring our freedom. Aulen found this theme especiallyprominent in the Greek fathers and then again in Luther.Tlie Christus Victor pattern seems more objective than themoral influence theoryit is not just that we are inspired todo something but that God has already done something onour behalf.An d the risk of God the Father be com ing the vil-

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lain of the piecea risk always on the edge of the substittionary ato nem ent accoun ts disappears. Satan is the baguy here, holding us entrapped until Christ accomplishes ouliberation. In the one image every student seems to remember fro

Christus Victor Aulen contends that God does not use violenbut rather cunning. Summarizing the thinking of fourth-eentutheologian Gregory of Nyssa, Aulen pictures how Satan saChrist as human and consumed him, thereby also swallowindivinity and taking more than his due entitlement, so that abets were off. "As a fish swallows the bait on the fish-hook, so thdevil swallows his prey, and is thereby taken captive by thGodhead, hidden under the human nature."Anseim, who knew about the Christus Victor model, haalready doubted whether, if we are not to imagine God as vilent, we should imagine God as deceitful trickster either. H

We should learn from Calvin Christ saves u s by t h e w h ocourse o fh is o b e d i e n c e .also wondered whether Satan could exercise legitimate controver creatu res like us, mad e in Go d's image. The ChristVictor aeeount gives us a wonderfully dramatic Siar Warskinof narrative, but Aulen himself while defending it, worried th"its mythological dress, its naive simplicity, its grotesque reaism" may "awaken disgust." At the very least, its interpreteneed to specify whether its battle imagery refers to metaphorical, spiritual battle (in which ease Christus Victtheory turns into something like moral influence theory) or ahonest-to-goodness swordfight battle (in which case the quetions about mythological imagery become very pressinindeed). Paren ts who have tried to explain the religious signicance of the battle scenes in the film versions of C, S. LewisNarnia books may have faced the same puzzles.

The past 25 years have seen the emergence o a fouraccount of how Christ saves us.This approach, based on twork of the French literary critic and philosopher ReGirard, has spread widely and by now is probably more inlluentthan Auln's. Bom in France in 1923, Girard came to the US .study literature, received his Ph.D. from Indiana University aspent most of his career at Stanford. His vision for explaining asorts of things within the framework of a few key insights rivathat of Marx and Freud in sheer scope. In titling one of his booThings Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Girard wn't exaggerating the scope of his theory. Other key works of hinclude The Scapegoat Violence and the Sacred and /See SatFall Like fjghtning.

Human beings, Girard explains, are inevitably competitiin what we desire. I may initially just vaguely want a place come into out of the rain, something to eat. someone to holBut then I want that particular eave, meal or sexual partnbecause you wanted it firstit was your choice that made

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really valuable to me. In the stories and rituals studied byanthropologists, in the texts of literature and in everyday expe-rience, Girard keeps seeing mimetie violence: our imilalion(mimesis) of others' desires leads to violence when we try totake what we want only because they wanted it first.We come together in communities, Girard says, because wewanl to imitate each other, but our imitation leads to violencewhen we want to steal from and kill each other. Communities'reasons for lorming thus cttntain the seeds of their own de struc-

tion. Societies find a solution to this conundrum. Girardexplains, in the practice of scapegoating. Faced with the prospectof a war of all against iill. humans reformulate the conllict into awar (tf nearly all against a fewagainst the Jews or the commu-nists or the gays or the feminists or the Mexican immigrants.Some relatively small group (maybe even an individual) is madethe source of all our problems. If we could just get rid of them,the problems would go away. (If this seems an exaggeration ofscapegoating. watch Lou Dobbs some night on CNN.)Picking on scapegoats reduces the problem to manageablepropiirtions. Everyone does not have to hate everyone eise; wecan all unite in hating the scapegoats. From the inside, this

activity doesn't look like picking on scapegoats; those involvedill the practice think that they are simply understanding thoworld as it is. So. to use G irar d's m ost vivid literary exam ple,the members of the chorus in Oedipus Rex do not think ofthemselves as picking on a clubfooted outsider (Oedipus) asihc source of their problem s. They trulythink that his evil deeds have caused theplague that afflicts their city. Girardtraces this pattern of scapegoating fromprimitive myths to literary classics toexamples from popular culture.The artifacts of one particular culture,

however, radically break with this pat-tern. TTic Bible keeps telling us thatscapegoats arc innocent: Cain was wrongto kill Abel: Joseph's bro thers should nothave sold Joseph into slavery; Christ wasinnocent. Whereas every other culturetells stories about how some small groupof tnitsiders nearly did us in, the Bibleover and over again shows us that thevictims arc innoce nt. When enough peo-ple understand that pattern, the worldwill change: The cultural order canno tsurvive such a revelation. Once the basicmechanism is revealed, the scapegoatmechanism, that expulsion of violenceby violence, is rendered useless by therev elat ion .. . . The kingdom of God is athand {The Scapegoat).Ciirard invites a powerful hope. Hebegan his research as an agnostic andconverted to Catholicism part waythrou gh. This provides him. fairly or n ot.with more credibility than those who arcChristian from birth. He captures some-

thing right about that fellowship with outsiders which lay sonear the center of Jesus ministry as reco unte d in the Go spelsAnd in a culture like ours in which the loudest Christian voices sometimes seem identified with militarism and even the justification O torture, he unambiguously separates Christiafaith from violence.Little wonder that many Christian theologians have recently been publishing books inspired by Girard: from the brillianBritish Roman Catholic James Alison Raising Abel) to th

Mennnnitc J. Denny Weaver T he Nonviolent Atoneme nt)from Roman Catholic author and speaker Gil Bailie ViolencUnveiled) to Andover Newton theology professor S, MarHeim Saved from Sacrifice).The c urrent rate of publicatioruns to at least several books a vcar.

I wish 1thought the Girardian approach works. But a theological solution needs to deal with the problem that wereally have. Girard's solution lies mostly in a realizationwe realize that scapeg oats are innocent, and once we have realized that, we cannot keep scapegoating them. The ability tstand u p, yell 'Let's go beat up all the Xs and get any kind ofollowing requires both speakers and hearers who can. at leasat some level, convince themselves that those Xs really are bapeople whose deeds are the source of the problems afflictinthe rest of us. Unde rstanding the B ible, according to Girardmakes it impossible to keep convincing oneself of that, an

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hence impossible to scapegoat. And that makes the world amuch better place.Girard argues persuasively that many people who read theBible do not un derstand it properly, and he also makes th e casethat the sheer desperation of those who want to keep scapegoat-ing will lead them to turn to ever more extreme measures asIheir case gets stretched thinner. Still, the problem with Gira rd'stheory is that after 2.0()0 years of Christian teaching, we are atthe end of a period that saw the Ho locaust, the Chinese Cultural

Revolution, Christian missionaries' participation in the Rwandagenocide, and the ongoing division among most Christian com-munities over how to treat homosexuals (I am nol claiming thatthese issues are morally equivalent). If Girard's theory is right,we should have seen at least a little diminishment in the practiceof scapegoating by now.My problemand I suspect it is also the problem of manyothersis the one described by Paul so long ago : "I can willwhat is right, but I canno t do it. For I do not do th e good I want,but the evil I do nol want is what I do" (Rom. 7:18b-19).Helping me to realize my faults is therefore in itself no cure. Iunderstand that when despised outsiders are over there an d

people overhere are speaking of them hurtfuUy and with con-tempt, then f ought to move from here lo there. But it is muchmore comfortable over here, and the people here are oftenbetter looking and rather consistently more successful. Manydays, I would rather stay put.What do I need? I need a good cattle prod to get me moving.I need forgiveness for my past failures. And I need hope that Ican continue to be forgiven. Just realizing a past pattern of mis-takes is not enough . If some of you are just better human beingsthan I am and d o not need these things, then all1can sayis,Godbless you But I think I know what1need if1am to be saved. Andin Girard's account of Jesus, Jesus does nol quite have it.

What follows does not involve pulling some rabbit outof a hat to solve the problem of soteriology. If 1 amcorrect in thinking 1 that adhere nts of substitution-ary atonement and moral influence theories of atonement areincreasingly at odds, and 2) that serious p roblems haveemerged with both Christus Victor and Girardian models, thenit is worth considering what new direction our soteriologicaireflections might take, even if one can only point very tenta-tively toward a different path.Two general theological principles guide my thoughts here.The first comes from my teacher HansW Frei: in theology, doc-

trines should illuminate and clarify stories rather than storiesillustrating do etrines. That is, what is most basic to Christianfaith is not. for exam ple, any soteriologicai theory or even doc -trines about the truine God or the two-natured person ofChrist but rather the stories of God's covenant work withIsrael and then the birth, life, death and resurrection of JesusChrist. We figure out and affirm the doc trines necessary tomake sense of those stories (holding them tight if they reallyare necessary), but the stories come first.My second principle com es from Calvin: "Christ saves us bythe whole course of his obedience." I think this principle needsdefense these days on two fronts. First, too much theology has

focused exclusively on the cross or (at most) on b irth, cross aresurrection. Calvin's own Geneva Catechism jumps rathremarkably from Christ's birth to his death "because nothingsaid [in intervening matters] about what properly belongsthe substance of our redemption." In this it only follows tpattern of the classical creeds. But any account of what Chrhas done for us that leaves out his teaching, his preaching, hhealing and the rest his ministry is not faithful to the witnessthe New Testament and does not meet the needs of contemprary Christians.

On the other hand. Christ's obedience led even to death.really-nice-guy Jesus, eloquent in speech, uncontroversial message, purpo se-driven in ministry but somehow tragicamisunderstood by those in power and therefore executed interrible mistake , is not the Jesus in whom 1believe. In scriptand in the Jesus who speaks most to my condition, I find owho spoke truth to power, who at least suspected from early that his road would lead to his death, and who understood thsomehow (I would leave many paths open beyond that "somhow") his death would be not the failure of his life but tachievement of his goal.In short, both Jesus' life and his death matter to our salvtion, and we should not rest content with one without tother.That said, we can take a step behind Auln's project, foeven earlier than the C hristus Victor motif came what J. N. Kelly called the physical, or mystical, theory of redemptioalready remarkably developed in the work of the church's firgreat postbiblical theologian, Irenaeus of Lyons. Drawing Paul's account of Christ as the second Adam and Lukgenealogy, with its implication that Christ "recapitulated himself all the dispersed people dating back to AdamIrenaeus concluded that "because of his measureless love

Christ "became what we are in order to enable us to becomwhat he is."This last phrase may be the single most re pea tone in early Christian thought. "There is one grand themwhich . . . provides the clue lo the fathers' un derstanding of twork of Christ," Kelly concluded after a lifetime of researc"This is none other than the ancient idea of recapitulatiowhich Irenaeus derived from St. Paul, and which envisagChrist as the representative of the entire raee."Similar ideas appear in the writings of nearly all the Greefathers. Indeed, in all the debates about Christ's full humantydoes Christ have a human soul? a human will? humaemotions?the clinching argument is always that becau

Christ saves what is human by uniting il with divinity, any paof Christ which does not fully share in humanity will not saved. In Gregory of Nazianzus's famous phrase, "That whihe has not assumed He has not healed."To say that Christ saves our humanity by uniting it widivinity is not to say that his saving work is accomplished at thmoment of the incarnation. At that point, after all, the bounaries of that work remained far from clear. Were gentiles alsaved? What about the despised and the condemned? The liof such questions could be long extended. Only when Goincarnate has weleomed sinners into his table fellowship, curethose who suffered, died the death assigned the blasphemi

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and seditious, even gone into the realm of those who haverejected Ciod and exist in a hell of utter isolation (I pick up atthe end a theme most eloquently presented in our time by HansUrs von B althasar) only when this God incarn ate has beenraised ean we glimpse the expansiveness of God's work of sal-vation. It is only the crucified On e who can save us all.The physical, or mystical, account of the atonement canindeed make room for elem ents of oth er pictures. The Christwho becomes what we are so that we might become what he iscan also teach us about God. manifest self-sacrificial love,defeat on our behnlf forces of evil and show us the innocenceof many whom society condemns. But the process begins whenhe conjoins our sinful humanity with divinity.

ne of the problems involved in this theory of theatonement is that accepting it supposedly involvesbuying into Platonic philosophy, and Christian the-ology should always be reluctant to tie our faith to onephilosophical position. Plato famously taught that there areparticular objects and universal forms or ideas. Particularsget defined by their p articip ation in the forms. Thu s, torinstance, there is an e terna l, unchanging idea of justice, andthere are lots of particular l wsbut a law is just only tothe extent that it participates in the idea of justiee. In thedebates of the Middle Ages, realis ts ' argued that universalforms ha ve a real existence eternal justice is really outthere some where whereas nom inalis ts believed that/ .s-licf is only a name we humans use to classify laws we want toput in the same category.

For Christ to unite our humanity with divinity, the argu-ment goes, there has to be a humanity that we all share. Butthat means that Platonism in its realist form has to be true ifwe are to be saved, and again, the history of theology sug-gests the dangers of tying our faith to any particular philos-ophy.But I do not think this argument follows, either historieally orconceptually. In the fourth century Athanasius talked abo ut howa whole town can be transformed if a famous person becom es itsciti/ en. Similarly, he said, how different it isto be a human being if the Creator of thewhole universe has also become one likeus in all things except sin. The Americanthet)logian Jonathan Edwards w a s at leastin some moods, a radical nominalist whothought that there was no single right wayto divide up the universeGod could do ithowever God wanted. If for the purposesof our salvation God wanted to think of a llhuman beings as a single unit, Edwardssaw no reason why not. But neitherAthanasius nor Edwards believed in thephilosophical view that universals havereal existence (or, if Athanasius did. hewas not using it to make this argument),liiere are many ways, in short, to think ofhumanity as sufficiently one whole thatChrist could transform it.

Eastern Orthodox theologians have often taught thhuman beings arc deified in the process of salvation. Westertheologians, whethe r Catholic or Protestant, are often nervouabout such language and criticize a soteriology that claimthat he became like us so that we might become like himbecause it implies a process of deification. 1 am not sure thdeification is such a bad theological concept, but in any case do not believe that a physical theory of salvation requires iThere may be good reason, for instance, to hold that Chriwas divine by nature while the rest of us are united to Goonly by adoption. doption rather than deification woutherefore be the standard soteriological word. The core idecould remain. We join God's family, we become citizens oGod's city, our humanity becomes one with God's divinity these eould all be, as the Presbyterian Confession of 1^67 sain a different connec tion, expressions of a truth whicremains beyond the reach of all theory in the depths of Godlove.

The autho r of Hebrews put it like this: For the one whsanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father.Tiierefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters every respect Because he himself was tested by what he sufered, he is able to help those who are being tested. As Pawrote to the Ro man s. Just as one m an's trespass led tt) codem nation for all, so one m an's act of righteousness leads justification and life for all. Christ becam e like us so that wmight become like him.By golly, he has done it; he has solved the problem of sotriology would be a ridiculously inapp ropria te respon se to thessay. So would any instinct to throw away all discussions other soterioiogical theories. My proposal is modest: How wunderstand the atonement seems an increasingly contentiotopic within Christian theology. Among theories old. new anrevived that have received a good bit of discussion lately,think the physical or mystical account has been unfairly nelected, and I would hope that organizers of conferences anpanels as well as theologians smarter than I am might devomore attention to it.