Cooperative Salvation

A Brethren View of Atonement

Kathryn S. Eisenbise

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625642271
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877538
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Why did Jesus die? What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins? Christian theology has been wrestling with these questions for centuries, and theologians have proposed lots of different answers and explanations in the form of theories of atonement. But most of these theories fall short when confronted by a contemporary, postmodern worldview. Many of these models come out of orthodox (rather than Free Church) traditions, so they also lack the distinctive elements that characterize Brethren ways of understanding God and the world. The Church of the Brethren is well known for its acts of service and discipleship in the nonviolent model of Jesus, but it has not produced much constructive theology. Cooperative Salvation attempts to remedy this situation by proposing a constructive Brethren model of atonement. It analyzes the diverse atonement models proposed throughout the Christian tradition, noting where they prove inadequate. To address the shortcomings of other models, this work draws on important claims of historical Anabaptist and Brethren theology while also incorporating ideas from feminist, liberation, and process theology in order to construct an understanding of atonement that contributes a contemporary Brethren voice to the centuries-long discussion of atonement.

chapter 1

Atonement and Brethren Theology

“Once, when Jesus was praying alone, with only the disciples near him, he asked them, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ They answered, ‘John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered, ‘The Messiah of God.’”

—Luke 9:18–20

What does it mean that Jesus is the Messiah? And if he was the specially chosen son of God, why did he die—and why did he die such a brutal and humiliating death? The first Christians were sure that they had experienced something very special, and perhaps even something of God in the person of Jesus, yet he was executed by the state as a criminal. From that moment on, theologians have been trying to explain this tension, and most of their explanations have had something to do with salvation—suggesting that somehow Jesus’ death on the cross achieves salvation for humanity.

However, not all theologians went along with this explanation, among them Hermann S. Reimarus. Reimaus was an eighteenth-century German theologian who completely rejected the linking of Jesus’ execution and human salvation. In a secret manuscript that was only published after his death, Reimarus argued that what the apostles wrote about Jesus (which eventually developed into popular Christian doctrine) was completely different from what Jesus actually said and did and thought about himself.1 According to Reimarus, Jesus and his disciples viewed him as the kind of messiah the Jews were expecting—a new king who would set up a temporal kingdom that redeemed all of Israel, and they believed this right up to the moment of his death.2 Only after his death did the disciples change their view of Jesus from a temporal redeemer of the people of Israel to a suffering spiritual savior for all of humankind, and the evangelists wrote their gospels from this new perspective. Reimarus writes, “Since they intended to present in the narrative their altered doctrine, they must have omitted zealously the things that led them to their earlier conclusions and must have written into the narrative in some detail the things from which their present doctrine is drawn.”3 In other words, the disciples invented from whole cloth the story of Jesus as a suffering savior who accomplishes spiritual salvation for all through his death on the cross. According to Reimarus, this belief was completely foreign to Jesus’ own way of thinking. Like Jesus, the disciples had viewed him as an earthly king chosen by God to restore the kingdom of Israel. But the disciples “invented another doctrine concerning his intention, namely, of his becoming a suffering spiritual savior of men, only when their hopes had been disappointed after his death, and that they afterwards composed the narrative of his words and deeds. Consequently, this story and this doctrine are unfounded and false to this extent.”4 And so Reimarus completely rejected the understanding that Jesus died for the sins of all humanity as a story invented by the disciples to hide their disappointment and embarrassment that Jesus turned out not to be the king specially chosen by God, chalking it up to one of the ironies of history that this fabricated story eventually became the heart of Christian orthodoxy.

Fascinating (and compelling) as Reimarus’ argument is, his view has certainly been held in the minority throughout centuries of Christian theology. The overwhelming majority of theologians and lay believers have affirmed that there is some sort of connection between Jesus’ death and human salvation. Affirmations about who Jesus was (christological questions) and how he effects our salvation (soteriological questions) form the core of Christian belief. For centuries, theologians have been struggling to conceive and explain how God reconciles humanity to Godself through the life and death of Jesus, and they have proposed a multitude of different models and theories of atonement. Before we analyze these different theories, a bit of explanation about the concept of atonement will be helpful.

Atonement has several different meanings, but they all involve relationships and the righting of those relationships. Usually the word “atonement” is ascribed to William Tyndale,5 an English scholar who was the first to translate the Bible directly from its original Hebrew and Greek into English. The story goes that Tyndale was working at translating the New Testament when he came across the concept we now call atonement, but that word didn’t yet exist in the English language. So Tyndale made it up, and he did so by pushing together the words of its definition: at-one-ment. Simply put, atonement is the act or event that puts two parties back into the state of being at one with one another.

At the level of everyday conversation, atonement just means the action that repairs a broken relationship. An excellent example of this definition plays out in the movie Atonement, which was nominated for numerous Academy Awards in 2008. In the movie, a young girl accuses her older sister’s lover of a crime he did not commit, for which he suffers horrible consequences. The story follows the girl as she grows up and tries desperately to repair her relationship with her sister and atone for the terrible deed she has committed. While not everyone may commit quite such a horrific misdeed, the need to right a wrong and repair a relationship is surely a common human experience. In this sense, atonement at the interpersonal level is surely a familiar concept.

Atonement, in the religious sense, carries the same idea but applies it to the relationship between humanity and God or the gods. Many of the world’s religions have some concept of atonement—a ritual that makes amends for whatever the people have done to make the gods angry. The most common of these rituals is sacrifice, whether of humans, animals, crops, or similar valuables. Judaism, from biblical times through the Third Temple period, had an elaborate sacrificial system. A brief glance through Lev 1–7 reveals many instructions for how to make sacrifices, but it also shows that God is gracious and merciful because God provides a means by which the people’s sins can be forgiven.6 Thus, the overriding theological purpose of these sacrifices is to restore the people’s relationship with this gracious and merciful God, but as the rabbi at B’Nai Abraham Zion pointed out, the purpose of such sacrifice was penance, not payment. Sacrifices repair this relationship because they express the Israelites’ remorse for sin and their desire to be at one with God again.

As we move from a description of atonement in interpersonal relationships to human and divine relationships, the definition of atonement becomes more specific. In the religious definition, atonement involves particular rituals or actions. When we move to a specifically Christian definition of atonement, there is only one action that matters: the crucifixion of Christ. Many Christians have viewed Jesus as the sacrifice that repairs the relationship between God and humanity, but they have differed in their understanding of how that sacrifice atones for all of humanity. How exactly Jesus’ sacrifice repairs the human-divine relationship and achieves atonement has been the subject of many subsequent theories of atonement, which we will analyze in detail in the following chapter.

But before we move to a discussion of those theories, something must be said in regards to Brethren theology, for this book sets out to construct a particularly Brethren view of atonement and salvation. The Church of the Brethren is a unique blend of the ideas of sixteenth-century Anabaptism and seventeenth-century Radical Pietism. Only the briefest of sketches is necessary here, however, for there are already many fine books that detail the history and theology of these movements.7

The major theories of atonement were already developed by the time of the Protestant Reformation that spawned both Anabaptism and Radical Pietism, but this period of reform brought questions of salvation (whether by works of the church or through grace by faith) to the forefront in a new and different way. The Anabaptist movement developed during the early years of the Protestant Reformation, and while the major contention between these radical Reformers and the magisterial Reformers was the issue of religious freedom from the state (as manifested in the debate over infant baptism), their understandings of salvation also differed. Anabaptists generally affirmed the doctrinal positions of the earlier radical Reformers, but the difference lay in the Anabaptist insistence upon linking faith and practice.

The telling of the Anabaptist story often begins with the baptisms of a group of radicals in Zürich, Switzerland. Until 1525, these radicals had been followers of Ulrich Zwingli and supporters of his reform movement in Zürich. However, they became frustrated by what they considered Zwingli’s slow pace of reform. T...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Brethren Theology Series Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Atonement and Brethren Theology
• Chapter 2: Traditional Models of Atonement
• Chapter 3: Contemporary Models of Atonement
• Chapter 4: Contemporary Anabaptist Models of Atonement
• Chapter 5: Cooperative Salvation: A Constructive Brethren Model of Atonement
• Bibliography