Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church
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Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802866424 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 12/29/2011 |
| Pages: | 684 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
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Atonement, Justice, and Peace
The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the ChurchBy Darrin W. Snyder Belousek
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 Darrin W. Snyder BelousekAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6642-4
Chapter One
The Telos and Genesis of This Book
1.1. What This Book Aims to Achieve
Does the cross make sense in terms of retribution? What is the message of the cross concerning economic justice? Concerning capital punishment? The War on Terror? Inter-ethnic/inter-religious conflict? Christian disunity? Before we can address these questions of justice and peace, however, we must first reorient ourselves to the cross of Christ. As the cross is understood by the atonement theology of evangelical Christianity — penal substitution — such questions make little sense because the cross so understood is largely irrelevant to such questions. And the reason for this is that penal substitution sees the cross from an assumed (and unexamined) viewpoint. We will critically examine that assumed view — the "retributive paradigm" — in Chapter 3.
This book, then, is effectively about achieving a change in worldview — or, if you will, a paradigm shift, a "Copernican Revolution" of sorts: rather than seeing the cross in terms of an assumed understanding of justice and peace, we seek to understand justice and peace from the perspective of the cross. We seek, that is, to develop a "cruciform paradigm" for the church's mission of justice-doing and peacemaking (Parts III and IV). The necessary prerequisite to developing that paradigm will be to make a thorough examination of evangelical atonement theology — penal substitution — and the paradigm for understanding justice and peace upon which it is founded (Parts I and II).
Such questions concerning the connection of the message of the cross to practical matters of justice and peace are too seldom addressed by the church for another reason. Within contemporary Christianity there is a yawning gap between two camps — those who are passionate about the gospel of salvation, and those who are passionate about the gospel of justice and peace. This divide is sometimes cast as an opposition between "evangelism" and "mission," or "salvation/faith" and "ethics/works," or "piety" and "activism." These camps, which often coexist on the same Christian college campus or within the same congregation, can have difficulty speaking to and understanding one another, and can even be suspicious of the other's motivations. Each tends to see the other as having shortchanged or distorted the core message and true purpose of the gospel. Indeed, one might characterize this divide in terms of a (supposed) divergence between different gospels. Those that identify the Christian calling with "evangelism" emphasize a "Pauline" gospel that centers on the message of Christ crucified: "Christ died for our sins." Those that identify the Christian calling with "social activism" emphasize a "Jesus" gospel that centers on the good news of the kingdom: "the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news." The tendency of "evangelical" Christians is to "spiritualize" the kingdom, while the tendency among "peace and justice" Christians is to "historicize" the cross. The disconnect between God's salvation through the cross of Christ and Christian action for justice and peace thus goes both ways: those passionate for the message of salvation through Christ crucified can miss (or dismiss) the ethical implications of the cross for doing justice and making peace in the name of Christ, and those passionate for justice and peacemaking for the cause of the kingdom can miss (or dismiss) the distinctive "cruciform" pattern of Christian ethics.
This divide diminishes the witness of the church to the fullness of the gospel. Such a divide need not exist, thankfully. Evangelicals for Social Action and Sojourners have sought to bridge this divide among American evangelicals by taking the position that Christians can and should do both evangelism and mission, have both faith and works, be both pious and activist. The mission statements of both organizations illustrate this "both-and" thinking within evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals for Social Action "emphasizes both the transformation of human lives through personal faith and also the importance of a commitment to social and economic justice as an outgrowth of Christian faith" Sojourners characterizes itself as "a committed group of Christians who work together to live a gospel life that integrates spiritual renewal and social justice." Within worldwide evangelical Christianity, The Lausanne Movement also affirms "that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty."
In my estimation, however, such "both-and" evangelical thinking is lacking an adequate theological bridge joining the two sides of the "both-and." In particular, the affirmation of Christian action for justice and peace is often independent of a biblical theology of the cross — why and how Christ died is disconnected from why and how Christians are called to do justice and make peace in the name of Christ.
The Lausanne Covenant (1974) and the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern (1973) each reflect this inadequacy. Article 5 of The Lausanne Covenant, "Christian Social Responsibility," begins, "We affirm that God is both the Creator and the Judge of all people. We therefore should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of people from every kind of oppression." But no mention is made of God as Redeemer or how God's redemption in Christ through the cross is relevant to the Christian concern for justice, reconciliation, and liberation. The Lausanne Covenant does mention the cross in Article 6, "The Church and Evangelism," stating that "a church which preaches the cross must itself be marked by the cross." Yet beyond the need to demonstrate love and honesty in both personal and institutional dealings, it says nothing concerning how being "marked by the cross" might entail a call for the church to do justice and make peace. The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern does connect being freed from sin (salvation) to doing works of righteousness (ethics), but curiously omits the cross from its proclamation of the gospel: "We proclaim no new gospel, but the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, frees people fromsin so that they might praise God through works of righteousness."
In his book Complete Evangelism, New Testament scholar Pedrito Maynard-Reid develops this "both-and" evangelical thinking: "such a dichotomy [between evangelism and social action] is false and unbiblical ... when one recaptures the biblical worldview, true evangelism is a whole. It involves both personal and social components; both are equally valid without one holding priority over the other." Yet his book also illustrates how the cross can be missing from attempts to join the two sides of the "both-and" within evangelical thinking. While Maynard-Reid places significant emphasis on the resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit as crucial to the gospel mission, the cross is conspicuously absent from the model he develops based on the Luke-Acts narrative. He passes over the cross and atonement theology in two brief paragraphs:
We miss Luke's point, however, if we attempt to impose a theology of atonement upon his work. Luke does not focus on an atonement theology as Paul does — a theology that some think is almost totally centered on the cross. Luke's theology is more wholistic as it treats reconciliation, repentance, and forgiveness.
Maynard-Reid is correct in emphasizing the holistic character of Luke's vision of the gospel; and he is correct to observe that Paul's gospel is centered on the cross. We beg to differ, however, with his narrow assessment of Paul's vision of the gospel. As we will show in Chapters 19 and 27, the Pauline vision is also holistic, concerning a many-dimensional salvation, including reconciliation, repentance, and forgiveness as well as justice and liberation. As we will show in Chapter 30, moreover, the Luke-Acts narrative of Jesus' life-ministry can be read fruitfully from the perspective of Paul's depiction of the peacemaking cross of Jesus in Ephesians 2.
In his book Good News and Good Works, theologian Ron Sider also develops the "both-and" vein of evangelical thinking, but does so with attention to the connection between the cross of Christ and Christian social action. Seeking to embrace "the fullness of God's salvation," Sider combines the three major historic theories of atonement — penal substitution, moral influence, and Christus Victor — into a "messianic model of the atonement" that constitutes (at least in part) the Christian motivation for social action. I agree that the church needs a full-fleshed theology of salvation and a full-orbed vision for social action, with the cross at the center of both.
I do, however, find Sider's own thinking concerning the connection between salvation and social action to be less than adequate. Sider writes, "The messianic model integrates the insights of the moral, substitutionary, and classic views of the atonement." Yet, the theological interrelation between these respective theories is not adequately clarified. Each theory would seem to function independently: one theory (penal substitution) tells us how our sins are forgiven through the cross of Jesus; another theory (moral influence) shows us Jesus, in his teaching and in his cross, as the ethical example we are to follow; and yet another theory (Christus Victor) tells us that the cross has freed us from the devil so as to render us capable of doing what Jesus' example shows us to do. Sider does not examine the presuppositions behind the three theories, moreover, to see whether they make for a coherent model or not; he simply asserts that "the three views complement each other." As we will show in subsequent chapters, the penal substitution theory is based squarely on the logic of retributive justice; yet as we will also argue, Jesus, through both his teaching and his cross, shows us the just ways of God that transcend retribution for the sake of redemption. We thus find a significant tension, if not fundamental incompatibility, between the assumptions of penal substitution and the implications of moral influence and Christus Victor.
As Sider acknowledges, furthermore, penal substitution theory is largely irrelevant to Christian discipleship:
By itself, the substitutionary model largely ignores Christ's example of teaching and proclaiming the kingdom in Galilee, and his victory over the forces of evil during his life and at Easter. If one reduces the Atonement merely to Jesus' death for our sins, one abandons the New Testament understanding of the gospel of the kingdom and severs the connection between the Cross and discipleship. The result is the scandal of professing Christians whose sexual practices, business dealings, and political attitudes are no different from those of non-Christians.
Not surprisingly, then, the three theories in Sider's atonement model do not contribute equally to the Christian motivation for social action: penal substitution is minimized while moral influence and Christus Victor are emphasized. Given the disconnection between penal substitution and Christian discipleship, the rationale for maintaining that theory in an atonement model intended to link salvation and social ethics is unclear.
The gap in contemporary evangelical Christianity — between salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ and Christian action for justice and peace — still needs bridging, therefore. And this book aims to construct that theological bridge on a biblical basis.
1.2. How This Book Began
1.2.1. Capital Punishment and Christian Conviction
It was a personal encounter with the question of the death penalty through the mission work of my local congregation that gave birth to the pondering and searching that eventually resulted in this book. I have not always believed that the practice of capital punishment is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Like most Christians, I had grown up believing, as a default position, that the death penalty was God's will. The death penalty was not much discussed in my home or in my congregation, and there were few occasions for questioning it. The Old Testament commanded the death penalty, and so it was taught — assumed, really — that this is what ought to be done. Occasionally would someone ask, "The Old Testament prescribes the death sentence for adultery, disrespect for parents, breaking the Sabbath, etc., but we do not call for the death penalty for those sins, so why formurder?" To avoid this inconsistency, someone else would make reference to the dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible and say that, while we are no longer under the "dispensation of Moses," which commands the death penalty for many sins but applies only to Israel, we are still under the "dispensation of Noah," which commands the death penalty for murder and applies to all humanity (Gen 9:1-7). That is about as far as my thinking about the matter went until I read — really read — John 8:2-11 and thought to myself, What did Jesus say? After more readings and much reflection on what Jesus did Say — "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone" (John 8:7) — this Gospel story changed my mind and heart, convincing me that human beings have no right to execute a death sentence (see Chapter 24).
Although opposed to the death penalty for this reason, I did not take up an active witness to this gospel conviction until 1999. A capital murder trial was about to begin in our city and one of our pastors challenged our congregation to make a public witness. The Spirit moved me and others in the congregation to respond. Following this trial, an ecumenical coalition organized a Christian response to the increasing use of the death penalty by our local prosecuting attorney, a professing evangelical Christian. We circulated petitions, published opinion essays, did television and newspaper interviews, gave talks in congregations, held prayer vigils at times of capital trials and executions, organized panel discussions, and held prayer services to remember murder victims and their families. We debated with the prosecuting attorney on a Christian satellite TV network and met with him privately to discuss the issue. And after a pro-life Catholic was elected prosecuting attorney but declined to take a public stance on the death penalty, we brought together Christian community leaders to share our concerns with him also.
Globally and nationally, the tide of public opinion has been turning steadily against capital punishment over the past half century, for legal and humanitarian reasons. Why, though, were we opposed to the death penalty on gospel grounds? After all, since the legal establishment of Christianity in the fourth century, the official church and the vast majority of Christians had believed in capital punishment as the divinely ordained way that society should deal with violent offenders. 18 A strong majority of American Christians continue to support the use of the death penalty. What, then, would be our explanation to fellow Christians regarding why we as Christians would protest the death penalty? We could, of course, quote Jesus' ethical exhortations: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone" (John 8:7); or "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you ..."(Matt 5:38-39); or "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matt 26:52). And these seemed (to us) to be reasons enough. Yet we also recognized that Christianity had long ago found various ways of circumventing many things Jesus had taught.
I thus realized that, to be persuasive to fellow Christians, especially those of evangelical conviction, such interpretation of Jesus' ethical teachings needed to be rooted in the distinctive and defining feature of the gospel — the message of Christ crucified. Hence, I became convinced that the deep answer concerning the death penalty must be found in connection with the cross of Jesus Christ. What, though, was the link between atonement theology and criminal justice? Having grown up in Baptist congregations, the only atonement theology to hand was the popular Protestant penal substitution doctrine. In those terms, the best answer I could come up with was this: if God himself had already punished Jesus with death upon the cross in our place to pay for our sins, then what right have we who have been saved by the cross to require that anyone else be put to death for his sins? It surely appeared a coherent answer, one that some evangelical Christians actually do find compelling.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Atonement, Justice, and Peace by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek Copyright © 2012 by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations of Modern Bible Translations xv
I "We Proclaim Christ Crucified" Rethinking the Message of the Cross
1 The Telos and Genesis of This Book 3
2 Interpreting the Cross: Guiding Rules of a Cruciform Hermeneutic 13
3 Questioning Our Normal Thinking: The Retributive Paradigm 24
4 A Biblical Vocabulary for Salvation, Justice, and Peace 59 Coda: The Cross, Atonement, and Nonviolence 68
II "Christ Died for Us" The Cross, Atonement, and Substitution
A Penal Substitution: Historical and Narrative Questions
5 The Penal Substitution Doctrine of Atonement 83
6 The Apostolic Faith Taught by the Early Church 95
7 The Message Proclaimed by the Evangelists and Apostles 109
8 Paul's Story of the Cross 128
9 Jesus' Understanding of His Own Death 141
B Penal Substitution: Exegetical and Theological Questions
10 Sacrificial Atonement — Propitiation and Retribution? 171
11 Forgiveness of Sin: Not without Bloodshed? 192
12 God's Wrath: Requiring Penal Satisfaction? 209
13 The Suffering Servant — a Penal Substitute? 224
14 Jesus — God's Sacrificial Victim? 244
15 "One Died for All": in Our Place? 265
16 "God Was in Christ": Propitiation, Reconciliation, and Trinitarian Theology 292
17 "Crucified with Christ": Substitution, Participation, and Imitation 313
C Antiphon
18 Jesus: God "for Us and for Our Salvation" 331
Coda: Athanasius, On the Incarnation: Penal Substitution? 362
III "Christ Is Our Peace" The Cross, Justice, and Peace
A The Cross and Justice: Redemption beyond Retribution
19 The Pauline Vision: The Justice of God through the Faithfulness of Jesus Christ 369
20 The Foolish Cross, the Upside-Down Kingdom, and the Math of Grace 381
21 Divine Character and Covenant Justice: Forgiving from the First, Redeeming to the Last 396
22 Cosmic Order and Retributive Justice: The Problem of Evil and the "Law of Nature" 434
B Redemptive Justice-Doing: Solidarity with the Poor, Release for the Captives
23 Covenant Justice in the Life of Israel and the Ministry of Jesus: Keeping Faith by Defending the Poor 463
24 Covenant Justice, Capital Punishment, and the Teaching of Jesus: A Death Penalty Moratorium 474
25 Covenant Justice, Capital Punishment, and the Cross of Christ: The Death Penalty Crucified 489
C The Cross and Peace: Reconciliation beyond Hostility
26 "The Things That Make for Peace" — A Story 505
27 The Pauline Vision: God Saves by Making Peace through Jesus Christ 509
28 God Makes Peace in Christ through the Cross 524
29 The Peace of Christ: Destroying Division, Murdering Hostility 542
D Cruciform Peacemaking: Extinguishing Hostility, Transforming Conflict
30 Peacemaking by "Murdering Hostility": The Life-Ministry of Jesus 553
31 Cruciform Realism, Spirituality, and Community 560
32 The Cross of Christ and Inter-Ethnic/Inter-Religious Conflict 573
33 Cruciform Peacemaking within the Church: Justification and Ecumenism 587
IV "Redeemed for Good Works" The Cross and Mission
34 God's Purpose, Christ's Cross, the Church's Mission 607
35 The Christian Commission to Holy Resistance 616
36 Jesus Christ, Paradigm of Mission 630
Index of Modern Authors 643
Index of Subjects 648
Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings 652