The Cross: God’s Peace Work. Part 5.

Previous posts in this series…

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 6

This article is proving to be a long and challenging one. Below we will see certain well known and respectable people, but also maybe a surprising stance on the issue of punishment within the penal system. Below is a commentary on the previous article:

Commentary.

On the surface of it, perhaps the most remarkable fact about Christian understandings of the atonement is the dominance of the satisfaction theory in Western Christendom.

Taken from Northey’s novel “Chrysalis Crucible”, the character Hans agonizes:

“My conclusion from simple observation is that Evangelicals routinely practice an under-your-breath ideologised footnote theology’ that reads repeatedly, ‘Except our enemies,’ when quoting John 3:16 and all similar New Testament ethical teachings. How could Billy Graham tell the North Vietnamese that God loves them when he fully blessed his own country in displaying the exact opposite feeling – hatred unto death? Ho could he do this when he was still praying with the President for victory in the War, when he apparently willed the utter inversion of the Gospel regarding treatment of neighbour, enemy, and Creation?” (Northey, 2007, p.397).

The short answer to Hans’ question is: because the satisfaction theory of the atonement. There is an enormous punitive dynamic in this doctrine that permits Christians of course through “legally constituted authorities”, i.e. the state, to destroy its enemies to which Judeo-Christian revelation says the opposite. A theologian writes, after his conclusion that the univocal New Testament ethic is nonviolence equally for church and state: “One reason that the world finds the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism, violence, and idolatry (Hays, 1996, p. 343).

Columnist Matt Millar wrote ironically of Evangelicals’ take on John 3:16, the all-time most quoted Bible verse by Evangelicals, “For God so loved the world that he temporarily died to save it from itself. But none of that really matters because most people will be tortured for eternity anyways.”

This was not the understanding in Eastern Orthodoxy, which Matt Miller unwittingly points to – Alexandre Kalomiros wrote in ‘The River of Fire’:

“Some Protestants consider death not as a punishment but as something natural. But, is not God the creator of all natural things? So in both cases, God – for them – is the real cause of death.

And this is true not only for the death of the body. It is equally true for the death of the soul. Do not Western theologians consider hell, the eternal spriritual death of man, as a punishment from God? And do they not consider the devil as a minister of God for the eternal punishment of men in hell?

The “God” of the West is an offended and angry God, full of wrath for the disobedience of men, who desires in His destructive passion to torment all humanity unto eternity for their sins, unless He receives an infinite satisfaction for His offended pride.

What is the Western dogma of salvation? Did not God kill God in order to satisfy His pride, which the Westerners euphemistically call justice? And is it not by this infinite satisfaction that He designs to accept the salvation of some of us?

What is salvation for Western theology? Is it not salvation from the wrath of God?

Do you see, that Western theology teaches that our real danger and our real enemy is our Creator and God? Salvation, for Westerners, is to be saved from the hands of God! (Kalomiros, 1980, pp. 4-5).

The protagonist, Andy in ‘Chrysalis Crucible’, muses about..

“… what it would mean to be the son of a feudal lord in some ancient time who fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a serf. The lord of the manor would finally approach the daughter’s father at the repeated bidding of his son. “My son would have your daughter’s hand in marriage.” he would declare, and proceed with an announcement of all the arrangements to be made.

He imagined if, when the father presented this to his daughter, she refused the son’s intentions.

“But you must understand,” the lord of the manor would declare to the father, with his son present, “my son does love her greatly, and has a marvelous plan for her life that he cannot wait to unfold for her. But,” his tone would turn menacing, “if she refuses my son’s hand, then hear this: After a fixed time, which I forwith decree as two months, if your daughter will not have my son’s hand in marriage, then we have together agreed that she shall be subject to the most object tortures and mutilations for three days, after which she shall be fully dismembered and thrown to the wild dogs.”

Then the lord and the son would withdraw to await the daughter’s decision.

Could it be truly said that the son ever loved the daughter if he would contemplate retributive vengeance for not taking his hand in marriage? Could it ever be said that God truly loves us if He was perfectly prepared to exact everlasting conscious punishment upon us for failure to make a decision for Christ? “Once to die, and after this judgment.” Could such love and haterd abide together in the same bosom? Did God love the whole world – except those, of course, He consigned to hell, whom he “loved” with a pure hatred? (Northey, 2007, pp. 552 and 553).”

In the belief that God would give God’s enemies “Ultimate Hell” according to the satisfaction theory of the atonement, it was only a small step for Christians to authorize the state, and to participate in the state’s giving, its enemies penultimate hell in the death penalty (with many forms of exquisite punishment and torture), and in war.

The exegetical problems of the satisfaction theory/penal substitution view of the atonement may be summarized under four considerations:

1. God is set as object, not agent, of reconciliation. But God did not break with humanity; humanity broke with God according to 2Cor. 5:18-20. God is not an angry deity like a feudal lord needing appeasement by expiation. Humanity, not God, needs reconciliation. The central text ids the picture of God the Father in the Prodigal Son story (Luke 15:11ff.), endlessly yearning for reconciliation with his son – a picture of us “all, like sheep who have gone astray” (Isa. 53:6).

2. There is hardly mention in the New Testament of humanity’s guilt. The texts speak rather of humanity’s separation from God. Likewise, in the Old Testament, “atonement” had to do with restoration of a broken relationship with God, not with guilt requiring punishment. “The central concern of the Anselmian theory of guilt and its removal would appear to find inspiration more in Western concepts of justice and punishment than it does in the Bible and its world of thought (Driver, 1986, p. 58).

3. Redemption is not, as in Anselm, freedom from indebtedness and punishment, rather, it is liberation from the former Master, sin, to freedom under the new Master, Jesus (Gal. 5:1). It is a change of lordship, not decree of punishment that is in view.

4. “I often wonder why when the Old Testament and the Gospels see atonement through the perspective of becoming clean from ritual uncleanness; when it is filled with so much about both becoming unclean and being an unclean person contaminating the community and the land, and with an elaborate system of atoning and cleansing administered by the priesthood: that now that the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world comes, it is suddenly understood in a narrow forensic sense? That does not make sense to me. Anselm in a newly Norman world of power and control creates a contractual system of atonement, moving away from the relationship oriented feudal one. The concept becomes more abstract and contractual from the 15th to the 18th centuries by the rapidly increasing influence of the emerging burgher class with its economic and utilitarian interests. The classical school of criminology emerges with a forensic rational choice theory (choice by the individual and reason to deter) and Kant’s a-historical concept that punishment rights a metaphysical imbalance. It is about time that the atonement theory is looked at in its historical context, and that we return to a biblical understanding of atonement, atonement as an historical cleansing. And what does it mean to say that ‘It is finished’? It means: No more executions are needed for satisfaction to be satisfied (Prison Chaplain Henk Smidstra. British Columbia, 23/2/3007).