Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross

Contemporary Images of the Atonement

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781441206275
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Because many modern Christians can offer a reasonable explanation of the meaning of Jesus' death on the cross, they find it hard to understand the confusion displayed by the disciples after the events in the last pages of the Gospels. But if Paul were alive today, he would find it inexplicable that we modern believers are not scandalized by the cross. Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross introduces pastors, church leaders, students, and lay readers to the need for contextualized atonement theology, offering creative examples of how the cross can be proclaimed today in culturally relevant and transformative ways. It makes helpful suggestions on how this vision for a culturally relevant message might be developed. The impressive list of contributors includes writings from C. S. Lewis, Rowan Williams, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Brian McLaren, and many more who are actively working out just how to make this life-transforming proclamation.

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Contextualizing the Scandal of the Cross

MARK D. BAKER

Since many Christians today can easily offer an explanation of the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross, they find it hard to understand the bewilderment and confusion of the two disciples described at the end of Luke’s Gospel on their way to Emmaus. They had understood Jesus’s ministry in terms borrowed from expectation of a liberator like Moses;1 hence, they had no interpretive tools for making sense of his execution at the hands of the Romans. Paul, however, would likely find it quite understandable that the disciples were confused and find it harder to understand that the cross does not scandalize us. In 1 Corinthians 1:18–25, the apostle outlines a perspective on the cross that many of us have learned to overlook. Here he testifies to the lunacy of the cross for first-century Romans, matched by its ignominious character among the Jewish people.2

The Christian proclamation of a crucified malefactor was moronic to persons weaned on a love of learning, virtuousness, and aesthetic pleasure. The Messiah, like Moses before him, should evidence the power of God in ways that legitimate his status and augur deliverance from the tyranny and oppressiveness of imperial subjugation. In that context the cross has the appearance of absurdity, not of “good news.” The message of the cross calls for a worldview shift of colossal proportions because it subverts conventional, taken-for-granted ways of thinking and knowing.

Joel Green and I wrote Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts with the conviction that the most common contemporary explanation of the atonement, penal satisfaction, has in some contexts muted the scandal of the cross, in other settings inappropriately scandalized people, and in still other circumstances made the saving significance of the cross and resurrection incomprehensible.3 Unfortunately, many see penal satisfaction as the sole way of proclaiming the saving significance of the cross. We argued that an important first step in recovering the scandal of the cross is to recognize the diversity of atonement images used both in the New Testament and in the teaching and preaching of the church since the first century. We sought not just to display that diversity, however, but also to ask what we can learn from the New Testament and church history that can guide us in our articulation of the atonement in diverse contexts today.

We are thankful that many have found the book liberating and illuminating and have told us how it has helped them to experience the challenge and good news of the scandalous cross of Jesus Christ. We are also grateful for the conversation the book has generated. Although much of that has centered on biblical and theological issues, the question of articulation has also been prominent. In fact, many have repeatedly intimated to us that they had given up on preaching the atonement but have found in our work renewed challenge and resources for reflecting anew on the saving significance of the cross. Others have said something like this: “You have led me to think quite differently about the atonement, but now how do I preach about the atonement?” Or, “Great material, but can you give me a five-minute explanation that I can use in evangelism?” This new volume, Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross, is my response to those questions. It presents examples of people in concrete settings using images and stories to communicate the saving significance of the cross and resurrection.

In this introductory chapter I first aim to summarize some key points from Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, including guidelines for contextualization. Then I discuss why this book offers alternatives to the penal satisfaction theory of the atonement through responding to some critiques of Recovering the Scandal, and through explaining how I imagine this book being helpful to people with different atonement theologies. Finally, I give a brief explanation of the format of the book and how the presentations in the book relate to each other and the project we sketched in Recovering the Scandal.

NEW TESTAMENT ATONEMENT TEACHING: AN OVERVIEW

Constructive and missional aims drove our survey of New Testament atonement teaching in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross. We did not seek simply to report what Luke, Paul, or John stated about the atonement, but also to observe their theological and missiological concerns in order to communicate better the saving significance of the cross and resurrection in our own time and contexts.

The New Testament contains a rich diversity of atonement teaching and imagery. Indeed, the contextual rootedness of the New Testament is perhaps nowhere on display more than in its atonement theology. Drawing on the language and thought patterns of Israel’s religion and life experiences within the larger Greco-Roman world, these writers struggled to make sense of Jesus’s crucifixion. Within the pages of the New Testament, the saving significance of the death of Jesus is represented chiefly (though not exclusively) via five constellations of images. Each set of imagery is borrowed from significant spheres of public life in ancient Palestine and the larger Greco-Roman world: the court of law (for justification), commercial dealings (redemption), personal relationships (reconciliation, whether among individuals or groups), worship (sacrifice), and the battleground (triumph over evil).

Why does the New Testament enlist so many images for its atonement theology? First, because language for the atonement is metaphorical, and given the nature of metaphor, it is difficult to imagine that one soteriological model could express all that one may truly say about the saving significance of Jesus’s death. Hence, even if Christians have always spoken with one voice in their general affirmation of Jesus as our Savior, already in the New Testament, and certainly since, readers have understood this affirmation in various ways.

A second reason for the plurality of New Testament images for the atonement is pastoral. In what language one construes the efficacy of Jesus’s death is dependent in part on the needs one hopes to address. Chris Tuckett has similarly observed, “Very different models and categories are used to describe the ‘lost’ condition of the human race prior to Christ. . . . Different descriptions of the human situation inevitably lead to different explanations of how this has been altered by the work of Christ.”4 If people are lost, they need to be found. If they are oppressed by hostile powers, they need to be delivered. If they exist in a state of enmity, they need to be reconciled. And so on.

Third, the early Christians used a plurality of metaphors to draw out the salvific significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection because of wider cultural considerations. If hearers in ever-expanding cultural circles are to grasp the message of salvation, then leaders must articulate that message in culture-specific ways.

Thus, a central and fundamental guideline we learn from the New Testament authors is the importance of using a variety of images to proclaim the scandal of the cross: different contexts require different images.

Just as highlighting the distinctness of individual writings and metaphors provides us valuable guidance, so too looking at common themes of the whole provides theological guidelines as we work to articulate the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection in new contexts. In Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, then, we attempted to derive orientation points from the New Testament as landmarks for constructive work in atonement theology. Although they leave plenty of room for creative theological reflection, these four guidelines also provide crucial points of orientation in our reflection.

The first of these turns the spotlight on the human predicament. One may articulate “lostness” in a variety of ways—blindness, deafness, hard-heartedness, slavery to an evil power, enmity, and so on—but one of the constants in the equation of biblical thinking about the atonement is the acute need of the human community. Humanity lacks the wherewithal to save itself and needs help (salvation, redemption, deliverance, and so on) from the outside, from God.

A second coordinate is the necessity of human response that flows out of the gracious act of God. The salvific work of God has not yet run its full course, but the lives of God’s people must already begin to reflect the new reality (new creation) to which God is moving history. We are saved from bad things, it is true, but we are also saved for something. Atonement theology in the New Testament does not simply hold tightly to the work of Christ; it also opens wide its arms to embrace and guide the lives of Christians. Believers—having been redeemed, reconciled, delivered, bought, justified, and so on—are now released and empowered to reflect in their lives the quality of life exemplified by their Savior. This life is modeled after the cross and has service as its basic orientation. We must not separate atonement theology from ethics.

Between the human predicament and the imperative of human response is the divine drama, the ultimate manifestation of God’s love. This is the third coordinate: God, acting on the basis of his covenant love, on his own initiative, was at work in the cross of Christ for human salvation. The New Testament portrays Gol-gotha along two story lines—one with God as (acting) subject, the other with Jesus as (acting) subject. It will not do, therefore, to characterize the atonement as God’s punishment falling on Christ (God as subject, Christ as object) or as Christ’s appeasement or persuasion of God (Christ as subject, God as object). At the same time, however paradoxical it may seem, what happened on the cross for our atonement was, according to the New Testament, a consequence of God’s initiative, a demonstration of divine love. As Paul summarizes, employing one model among many possibilities, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19 KJV). Again, “God proves [displays] his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8 NRSV).

Fourth, and as a corollary to the three previous themes, New Testament atonement theology accords privilege to no one group over another. What happened on the cross was of universal significance—in the language of the day, for Jew and Gentile, for slave and free, for male and female (Gal. 3:28). The cross was the expression of God’s grace for all, for all persons as well as for all creation. Atonement theology thus repudiates ancient and modern attempts to segregate people away from the gracious invitation of God, to possess as one’s own the gift of God available to all humanity, and even to presume that the work of God in Christ is focused only on humanity, without regard for the whole cosmos.

We can also gain missiological guidelines from the New Testament authors for the task of articulating the atonement. First, we must avoid the temptation to simply read their words and metaphors into our world. Rather, we must seek to use words and metaphors that communicate similar content in our setting; we must follow their example of drawing on images from the everyday experience of people’s lives. For instance, in many parts of the world today, if one wants to use the metaphor of sacrifice to communicate the atonement, one would first have to explain how a first-century Jew might understand sacrifice. Yet even having the information about sacrifices does not mean the metaphor would fully communicate to or connect with people for whom sacrifices are totally foreign. In contrast, however, a tribal society that still uses sacrifices today might readily understand the sacrificial metaphor as the biblical materials develop it.

If we would be faithful to Scripture, we too must continuously seek out metaphors, new and old, that speak effectively and specifically to our various worlds. Yet, if we would follow in the path of the New Testament writers, the metaphors we deploy would be at home in our settings, but never too comfortable here. Those writers sought, and urge us to seek, not only to be understood by people and social systems around us, but also to shape them. Moreover, we would not eschew earlier models or the reality to which they point, but would carry on our constructive work fully in conversation with and under the guidance of the Scriptures of Israel and the church, and of apostolic testimony.

A HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL OVERVIEW OF ATONEMENT TEACHING

Although in many Christian circles a penal satisfaction theory of the atonement is understood to be the explanation of how the cross provides salvation, even a brief historical look at atonement thinking points to a different reality. First, there have been a number of different explanations of the atonement. Second, the satisfaction view of the atonement was not a common explanation of the atonement during the first thousand years of church history.5 Just as our reading of the New Testament invited us to consider using various images to communicate the scandal of the cross, so a broad look at church history leads us in a similar direction, or at least gives us permission to explore alternative explanations.

Let me briefly sketch three main streams of atonement thinking: conflict-victory (or Christus Victor), penal satisfaction, and moral influence. Each of the three has numerous variations, and some approaches to the atonement do not fit neatly into one of these three categories. But for the purposes of this summary, I will paint with a broad brush.6

CONFLICT-VICTORY

The conflict-victory motif of the atonement describes the cross and resurrection as a conflict between God and the powers of evil, death, or the devil. This was the most common view of the atonement during the first millennium of the church. It remains the predominant atonement teaching in the Eastern church. Gustaf Aulén’s work in the mid-twentieth century contributed to a resurgence of interest in this current of thinking.7 Although some versions of the Christus Victor model have been critiqued for portraying God as using trickery to snare Satan, with Jesus as the bait, many other versions of Christus Victor, both contemporary and from the patristic era, avoid this sort of detailed speculation and develop theologically sound images of liberation, rescue, or defeat/victory.8

The image of the cross as a victory over the powers of evil and the metaphor of ransom or redemption are explicitly developed in the New Testament.9 This stream of atonement thinking does well at following the guidelines listed above, which we developed from the New Testament. The conflict-victory motif is able to communicate clearly the acute need of humanity for liberation from enslavement to sin and the powers of evil, at both a corporate and personal level, and it does so without presenting Christ’s victory in a way that privileges certain persons or groups over others. Jesus’s life of obedience, and not just at the moment of crucifixion, is integral to many forms of this motif; those presentations lend themselves to reflection on the ethical implications of Jesus’s saving activity since the way he lived his life is an integral part of his saving work. There is no hint of Christ appeasing God the Father, nor of the Father punishing the Son. Indeed, Origen (ca. 185–254), an early proponent of this view, strongly dismisses the notion that Jesus Christ was supplying a ransom payment to God the Father.

PENAL SATISFACTION

As commonly understood, the satisfaction theory of the atonement states that sin prevents humans from being in relationship to God because God is holy. Since God is just, he cannot s...