Here is the second part of a series started a few weeks back on atonement with implications on the legal system, and especially our penal system…..
Beginning before the era of Constantine (early 4th century), but intensified during and since, the early church emphasis on becoming ‘Christlike’ based upon Christ’s atonement shifted to becoming merely ‘Christian’, and abstraction of or even legal fiction based upon physical sacraments performed (Baptism and Eucharist in the Catholic Tradition) or an intellectual change of beliefs (Justification by Faith in the Protestant tradition). It allowed people to become ‘Christian’ without really having to change anything about their lives, lifestyles or political commitments/actions/realities, not least without having to become ‘Christlike’.
There are several factors that emerged in the Church since the fourth century to buttress a movement away from understanding the work of Christ as above all a call to the ethical/political/lifestyle ‘imitation of Christ’, a change of behaviour so drastic Jesus called it denial/death of self (Matt. 16:24 and passim), and Paul dubbed it clothing oneself with the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 13:14 and passim).
First, the onset of rationalism in the history of the church demanded wrestling the various images into coherent ‘dogma’ that often put at arms length the necessary change needed in one’s personal behaviour, in favour of change only in one’s personal/religious rituals or belief.
Second, there was change in conception of law away from an emphasis upon upright relationships maintained and restored, to one of retributive/punitive justice. Just deserts and punishment maintained and restored, became the primary thrust of law in the course of Christian thinking rather than an understanding of a callto forgiveness and repentance. The dominat image of God became, and remains in Western Christianity, the Sentencing Judge.
Third, the central preoccupation of law gradually came to do with guilt needing expiation throughpunishment, rather than grace as undeserved gift. The setting for the jewel called law was grace not guilt, biblically. Guilt is hardly a New Testament category. But in Constantinian and post-Constantinian Christianity guilt became the dominant setting for law necessitating expiation or satisfaction for the wrong or sin committed.
[...] PART 3 [...]
[...] PART 3 [...]