Love, Violence, and the Cross

How the Nonviolent God Saves us through the Cross of Christ

Gregory Anderson Love

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608990429
  9781498212281
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890782
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Église chrétienne

Does God use violence to redeem us? What is the relationship between divine love and violence in regard to the saving significance of the cross of Christ? In Love, Violence, and the Cross, Gregory Love dialogues with two responses to this question, while presenting a third alternative in which Jesus's death is simultaneously a crime and an element of God's saving actions. Through familiar stories in history, literature, and film, Love presents five constructive models that cumulatively affirm God's saving act in the person and work of Christ while letting go the myth of redemptive violence. They affirm redemption, but one with a different shape: Instead of exacting the absolute punishment, God redeems by "making good" God's promise to humanity to secure human life. Love argues that God is nonviolent, while retaining the core idea presented in the New Testament witnesses: that reconciliation occurs in the work of Christ, and that the cross plays a role in that divine work.

part one

Penal Substitution

The Atonement Theory Most Prevalent in North American Popular Christian Piety

1

Jesus the Reconciler of Divine Justice and Mercy

Penal Substitution

The theory of atonement with which most Christians in North America are familiar is one that answers two cravings of the human heart: A longing for justice upon perpetrators of violence, and ironically, a plea for mercy—that our sins of violence and omission can somehow be forgiven.

An offshoot of Anselm’s eleventh-century theory of satisfaction,1 the theory of penal substitution was developed by medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and solidified with the rise of the nation state and its rule of law in the sixteenth century. Reformation theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin were influenced by these prevailing concepts of law. To help us understand this model, we shall follow two guides who provide well-thought-out justifications for it: Charles Hodge (1797–1878), a professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and defining shaper of American Presbyterianism; and John R. W. Stott (b. 1921), a prolific and influential Anglican and Evangelical scholar and evangelist.

We begin, however, with stories of the human condition, for it is to this which atonement responds: two from recent movies, and one from a historic instance. Each story sheds light on how we humans offend, punish, and are wronged, and how we try to resolve those inter-human ruptures. They are stories and responses to which we will return again and again throughout this book.

Unforgiven

Deep at night in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, in 1880, it is raining hard.2 The man with the knife tells his partner to “hold her.” He cuts her face, again and again and again. “Do you think it’s funny?”

Finally, Skinny, the owner of the saloon, gets him off her with a gun to his head. He wants to shoot them both.

Rousted out of bed, the sheriff, Little Bill, finally arrives. “She gonna die?”

Alice, the leader of the women, says, “She’s gonna live . . . She didn’t steal nothing. She didn’t even touch his pecker . . . All she done when she seen he had a teensy little pecker is give a giggle. That’s all . . . You should hang them, Little Bill.”

Alice, Little Bill, and Skinny go downstairs, where the men are tied to a post. Little Bill tells the deputy, “Go over to the office and get the bullwhip.”

Alice interjects, “A whipping? That’s all they get after what they done?”

“A whipping ain’t no little thing, Alice.”

“But what they done, they should get more than . . .”

“Alice, shut up!” Skinny turns. “Little Bill, a whipping ain’t gonna settle this.”

“No?”

“This here’s a lawful contract between me and Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut whore.”

Thinking of Skinny’s damaged financial investment, Little Bill turns to the two men. “You boys off the Bar-T. You got your own string of ponies?” They do. “Guess you just as soon not have a trial, no fuss, huh? All right. You did the cutting. Come the thaw, you bring in five ponies and you give them over to Skinny. And you bring in two . . .”

His deputy brings him the bullwhip. “Maybe we don’t need this whip now.”

Alice again interjects. “You ain’t even gonna whip them?”

“Well, I fined them instead, Alice.”

“For what they done, Skinny gets some ponies, and that’s it? That ain’t fair, Little Bill. That ain’t fair!”

The next morning, the women are in Alice’s room. “I got eighty-five dollars,” says one. They are pulling together their savings to see if they can hire someone to execute the two men who cut up Delilah.

“I don’t know . . . If Delilah doesn’t care one way or another, what are we getting so riled up about?” says another.

Alice responds, gritting her teeth. “Just because we let them smelly fools ride us like horses don’t mean we gotta let’em brand us like horses! Maybe we ain’t nothing but whores, but by God, we ain’t horses!”

After a pause, another says, “I got $112.”

When the word of a thousand-dollar reward reaches William Munny at his hardscrabble farm, he thinks of his children, living in poverty, and sets off toward Big Whiskey. He collects his old friend Ned Logan on the way. That night, they talk around the campfire. (Later in the movie, it becomes clear that Will, a thief and expert killer, has killed women and children, a U.S. Marshall, “and just about everything that walks or crawls at one time or another.”)

Will refers to his encounter with Sally, Ned’s wife. “She knew me back then. She knew what a no-good-son-of-a-bitch I was. She just ain’t allowing I’ve changed. She don’t realize I ain’t like that no more. I ain’t the same, Ned. Claudia (his deceased wife), she straightened me up. Cleared me of drinking whiskey and all. Just cause we’re going on this killing don’t mean I’m gonna go back to being the way I was. I just need the money. Get a new start for them youngsters . . .”

“Ned, you remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? I think about him now and again. He didn’t do anything to deserve to get shot. At least nothing I could remember when I sobered up.”

The next evening in Big Whiskey, William gets kicked and beaten to near-death by Little Bill. The women find an abandoned shack outside of town for the men. In the midst of a three-day delirium, Will awakens briefly from a nightmare and talks to Ned. “Claudia . . . Is that you, Ned? I seen ‘em, Ned. I seen the Angel of Death. I’ve seen the river, Ned. He’s got snake eyes.”

“Who’s got snake eyes?”

“It’s the Angel of Death. Oh, Ned, I’m scared of dying.”

Late in the movie, after shooting both men, Will is speaking with the young man who was the third partner. “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”

“Well, I guess they had it coming,” says the young man.

“We all have it coming, kid.”

25th Hour

His father is driving him to the state prison in upstate New York to begin his seven-year term.3 Montgomery Brogan, face beat-up to disfigure himself so he is less likely to be abused in prison, looks out the passenger window. He knows he deserves it. He was greedy, he waited too long to stop drug-dealing. Not for the money; he didn’t grow up poor. For what he called “the sway.”

“It’s gonna be okay, Monty,” his father says softly.

Daydreaming, he sees the faces of all those he cursed, smiling back, friendly toward him. He tries to reach out to them through the window.

“Give me the word, and I’ll take a left turn. Take the GW Bridge and go west. Get you stitched up somewhere and keep going. Find a nice little town.”

“They’ll take your bar.”

His father dismisses this.

“They’ll find me, sooner or later.”

“You go, and never come home. They won’t find you. We’ll keep driving. Head out to the middle of nowhere . . . The desert’s for starting over.”

Monty imagines them in the desert in the West. His father leaves. He gets a job in a bar. He pays cash. He makes himself a home out there. He works hard. He gets papers, a driver’s license. He takes the name “James.”

“You forget your old life,” his father says, still talking. “You make a new life for yourself, and you live it. You live your life the way it should have been.”

Monty daydreams again. After a few years, he imagines Naturelle, his beloved, coming to join him there. He is loved; he loves her. New Year’s Eve, a baby in her tummy, “a New Year,” they say as they look at one another.

He gives his family what they need. He has children, grandchildren, there in that town in the West. When they get old, they sit the family down and tell them the truth.

Monty wakes from the daydream as his dad has finally become quiet. They continue on the Palisades Parkway, heading north to Albany.

Najma

Najma speaks in a cautious monotone, eyes dull, like a captive. Don Belt writes of the story this sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl told him.4

“Two weeks ago, at one in the morning, five men, maybe six, burst through the door of the family’s ...

Table of contents

• Love, Violence, and the Cross
• Introduction
• Part 1: Penal Substitution
• Part 2: Beyond Penal Substitution
• Part 3: Traditions and Alternatives
• Postlude: The Center Holds
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Author and Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index