The Nonviolent Atonement, Second Edition / Edition 2 available in Paperback
The Nonviolent Atonement, Second Edition / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0802864376
- ISBN-13:
- 9780802864376
- Pub. Date:
- 01/26/2011
- Publisher:
- Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
- ISBN-10:
- 0802864376
- ISBN-13:
- 9780802864376
- Pub. Date:
- 01/26/2011
- Publisher:
- Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
The Nonviolent Atonement, Second Edition / Edition 2
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802864376 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2011 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition,New Edition |
| Pages: | 362 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE NONVIOLENT ATONEMENT
By J. Denny Weaver
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 J. Denny WeaverAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6437-6
Chapter One
Introduction
Sharp debates about the death of Jesus sparked by feminist and womanist theologians remain on the cutting edge of discussions of Christology and atonement — what classic language calls the person and work of Christ — that churned throughout the last century and continue unabated in the twenty-first century. The catalog of every major publisher of theology, it seems, features at least one book on the topic. The revised and expanded edition of the book in hand gives testimony to the continuing interest in the conversation. Perhaps most revealing as a bellwether of interest in atonement was the crossing of the academic conversation into the popular media when Time did a cover story on atonement debates in 2004.
Between the searches for the historical Jesus at either end of the twentieth century, frequently pointed debates on atonement were carried on under a variety of nomenclatures, between adherents and theological descendents of medieval theologians Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109) and Peter Abelard (1079-1142). The tenor of the conversation changed markedly when women, African Americans, and others from the so-called contextual theologies joined the fray, along with adherents of the theories of social philosopher René Girard. Except perhaps for the sixteenth-century debates about the characteristics of Christ with respect to his presence within and outside of the sacrament, we may well be in the midst of the most important sustained conversation about the person and work of Christ since early church debates eventuated in the fourth- and fifth century formulas from Nicea and Chalcedon, which became the benchmark of christological thought since that time. Thus, in spite of the new feeling brought to the discussion by women's voices and new perspectives, this book on atonement is not about a new debate. On the contrary, it joins a very long-running, vigorous conversation. At the same time, it makes a bold claim as it joins the conversation, namely, that it brings some new arguments to the long discussion and charts a new route through much explored territory. Specifically, it charts a path of nonviolent atonement through territory strewn with images and assumptions of violence.
Although the roots of modern atonement arguments always pass through Anselm on their way back to the early church, it has preoccupied Protestants more than Catholics. Since Catholic belief accords believers immediate access to the saving grace of Christ in the sacraments, Catholicism has not sensed the same need as Protestants to guarantee access to God's grace via a correct doctrine of atonement.
But, whatever their persuasion, for those who thought about atonement and staked out a position for much of the past millennium, the prevailing choice was for Anselm or another version of satisfaction atonement, with Abelard's moral theory as the minority alternative. In the last half of the twentieth century, the so-called classic theory, given renewed visibility in the modern era by Gustav Aulén's Christus Victor, has achieved renewed visibility as an alternative to both Anselm and Abelard.
Atonement theology starts with violence, namely, the killing of Jesus. The commonplace assumption is that something good happened, namely, the salvation of sinners, when or because Jesus was killed. It follows that the doctrine of atonement then explains how and why Christians believe that the death of Jesus — the killing of Jesus — resulted in the salvation of sinful humankind.
In much of the world generally and in the United States in particular, the prevailing assumption behind the criminal justice system is that to "do justice" means to punish criminal perpetrators appropriately. "Appropriately" means that the more serious the offense, the greater the penalty (punishment) to be imposed, with death as the ultimate penalty for the most serious crimes. There is a pervasive use of violence in the criminal justice system when it operates on this belief that justice is accomplished by inflicting punishment. Called retributive justice, this system assumes that doing justice consists of administering quid pro quo violence — an evil deed involving some level of violence on one side, balanced by an equivalent violence of punishment on the other. The level of violence in the punishment corresponds to the level of violence in the criminal act.
Satisfaction atonement assumes that the sin of humankind against God has earned the penalty of death but that Jesus satisfied the offended honor of God on their behalf or took the place of sinful humankind and bore their punishment or satisfied the required penalty on their behalf. Sin was atoned for because it was punished — punished vicariously through the death of Jesus, which saved sinful humankind from the punishment of death that they deserved — or because the voluntary death of Jesus paid or satisfied a debt to God's honor that sinful humans had no way of paying themselves. That is, sinful humankind can enjoy salvation because Jesus was killed in their place, satisfying the requirement of divine justice on their behalf. While the discussion of satisfaction atonement involves much more than this exceedingly brief account, this description is sufficient to portray how satisfaction atonement, which assumes that God's justice requires compensatory violence or punishment for evil deeds committed, can seem self-evident in the context of contemporary understandings of retributive justice in North American as well as worldwide system of criminal justice.
The link between satisfaction atonement and systems of retributive justice cannot be denied. Timothy Gorringe's God's Just Vengeance provides a thorough analysis of satisfaction atonement's foundation in assumptions of retributive violence as well as an extended discussion of the mutual interrelations between theories of satisfaction atonement and understandings of punishment and criminal justice in the western world since the time of Anselm.
In recent years, all theories of atonement, and above all Anselm's satisfaction atonement motif, have come under critique from a number of quarters. One cluster of challenges comes from writers influenced by Mennonite and peace church impulses. Following the direction of Gustav Aulén, already more than thirty years ago Mennonite Gordon Kaufman developed a demythologized revisioning of the classic image that avoided the compensatory violence of satisfaction atonement. Using different methodology and a much different approach to the history of doctrine, Mennonite John Howard Yoder's Preface to Theology opened the door to an alternative, free church perspective on the classic issues of Christology and atonement. Neither Kaufman nor Yoder was as specific about the assumption of violence in satisfaction atonement as has been my ongoing work in that area, which has followed Yoder's lead. That work culminates with the book in hand.
A different kind of challenge to satisfaction atonement comes from a Catholic writer who works out of the theory of mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism developed by René Girard. As an alternative to the assumption that God orchestrates evil that punishes Jesus for the sins of humankind, Raymund Schwager developed a dramatistic understanding of the New Testament's depiction of Jesus, which shows that punishment is what sinful humanity does to itself through rejection of the reign of God. Anthony Bartlett and S. Mark Heim have articulated more recent challenges to or major reworkings of atonement theology from a Girardian perspective.
Other recent challenges to satisfaction atonement have come from theologians who articulate what are sometimes called contextual theologies. Among such theologies, this book deals with the interrelated triumvirate of black, feminist, and womanist theologies. In God of the Oppressed, James H. Cone, the founder of the black theology movement, pointed out that the dominant Anselmian doctrine posed atonement in terms of an abstract theory that lacked ethical dimensions in the historical arena. Consequently, it allowed white people to claim salvation while accommodating and advocating the violence of racism and slavery.
Some of the most well-known and explicit feminist challenges are Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker's essay in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse and Rita Nakashima Brock's analysis of atonement in Journeys by Heart. Delores Williams's argument in Sisters in the Wilderness presented a womanist critique of satisfaction atonement. Each of these writers depicts classic atonement doctrine as images of divine child abuse or divine surrogacy and as models of Jesus' work that encourage women to submit passively to abuse.
Black, feminist, and womanist theologies have brought new questions to the atonement discussions in recent years. Each of these theologies is sensitive to earlier theological efforts to justify violence or oppression of women and people of color by appeal to the suffering of Jesus or the submission of Jesus to suffering required by a divine mandate. Consequently, black and feminist and womanist voices have challenged any understanding of atonement that presumes salvation or reconciliation to God that would understand the killing of Jesus as an act required in order to satisfy divine justice. The sharpest challenges would eliminate the ideas of atonement and redemptive suffering entirely from Christian theology.
Putting the discussions about atonement from the contextual theologies in the same conversation with my nonviolent theology was the culmination of a number of years of encounters and reflection. As I discovered these several contextual critiques over a period of years, their notes played familiar melodies. For some years, I had been thinking about issues of violence and atonement from the pacifist perspective of the Mennonite tradition to which I choose to belong. I had concluded that Anselmian atonement was an abstract legal transaction that enabled the Christian believers of Christendom to claim salvation via the death of Christ while actively accommodating the violence of the sword. With that insight already in mind, encountering the critique of Anselm in Cone's God of the Oppressed was startling. Where I had been arguing that the abstract legal formula allowed accommodation of the sword, Cone was arguing that it had accommodated chattel slavery and racism. Rapidly I saw that critique of Anselm was an agenda item that extended well beyond the pacifist perspective from which I had been working. Going on to discover similar and parallel as well as additional arguments in feminist and womanist theologies widened the theological picture even more.
These discoveries were both exciting and challenging. For one thing, they provided additional reasons why Anselm's atonement motif was inadequate and problematic. More significantly, by extending the discussion of atonement and violence beyond the pacifist context, they brought to the fore a new perspective on traditional theology, in particular the classic formulas of Christology and atonement.
By being aware of and articulating their own contexts, black, feminist, and womanist theologies shined a bright light on the fact that the received theology of Christendom in general and satisfaction atonement in particular also have a context. In the case of atonement theology, it became evident that the dominant tradition of Anselmian atonement was not general theology, not a universally recognizable, uncontestable foundation of common truth that all right thinking Christians were bound to accept. Rather, Anselm's atonement doctrine was just as much a particular formulation that reflected a particular context as are any of the theological expressions from the so-called contextual theologies.
"Postmodernity" is the current terminology of choice for describing the recognition that each theology reflects a particular context and the abandonment of the idea of a universally recognizable and independently verifiable foundation of truth. While postmodernity does not necessarily mean abandonment of the idea of universal truth or universally true religion, it does mean abandoning the idea that such truth will be readily apparent and thus accepted by anyone of right mind. Thus in postmodern perspective, Anselm's satisfaction atonement theology emerges as a theology that reflected a particular context just as surely as does James Cone's black theology or Delores Williams's womanist theology. It becomes clear that the atonement debate is not, then, about truth (such as Anselm) on the one side and deviants from the truth (the critics of Anselm) on the other. Rather the discussion concerns how the several theologies, whether Anselmian or womanist, reflect Christian sources such as the Bible and the story of Jesus, and whether some of these contextual theologies reflect and restate more of the meaning of those sources better than others. The results articulated in the pages that follow present an understanding of atonement that is firmly anchored in biblical material but that does not pass through the previously presumed-to-be-general atonement theology of Anselm of Canterbury. Black, feminist, and womanist writers make similar claims.
Encountering the array of critiques from contexts different from my own also presented an important challenge to my work, namely, whether the understanding of narrative Christus Victor that I was formulating could respond to the sets of problems raised by the writings of black and feminist and womanist theologians. The challenge was twofold. On the one hand, since Christian faith confesses that God's reign encompasses every person, an understanding of the work of Christ had to make sense to black and feminist and womanist theologians. Stated in terms reflecting postmodernity, did each context have its own atonement theology, or was there a way to talk about the work of Jesus Christ so that Christians in different particular contexts could understand the death of Jesus as an event with universal significance? At the same time, any reconstruction of atonement had to respect the particularity of these contextual theologies and not merely claim to incorporate and co-opt pieces of them into someone else's supposedly wider and more general understanding. This book presents the results of the efforts to develop an understanding of atonement that made sense in its own right as a statement about the universal significance of Jesus Christ but that also answered questions raised by the contextual theologies.
I have called the resulting model of the life and work of Christ narrative Christus Victor. While narrative Christus Victor displays continuity with classic Christus Victor, it differs from the classic view in many important ways, and it deals with a number of issues not usually included in the discussion of atonement. The working assumption in development of this model is that the rejection of violence, whether the direct violence of the sword or the systemic violence of racism or sexism, should be visible in expressions of Christology and atonement. Developing an understanding shaped by nonviolence then lays bare the extent to which satisfaction atonement is founded on violent assumptions. Thus proposing narrative Christus Victor as a nonviolent atonement motif also poses a fundamental challenge to and ultimately a rejection of satisfaction atonement.
Since violence covers a multitude of sins and issues, examining biblical and historical material from a "nonviolent perspective" requires definitions for both violence and nonviolence. I am using "violence" to mean harm or damage, a definition given more specificity by Glen Stassen and Michael Westmoreland-White. They describe two dimensions of violence: "(1) destruction to a victim and (2) by overpowering means. Violence is destruction to a victim by means that overpower the victim's consent." This definition obviously includes killing — in war, in murder, and in capital punishment. Violence as harm or damage includes physical harm or injury to bodily integrity. It incorporates a range of acts and conditions that include damage to a person's dignity or self-esteem. Abuse comes in psychological and sociological as well as physical forms: parents who belittle a child and thus nurture a person without self-worth, teachers who brand a child a failure and destroy confidence to learn, a husband who continually puts down his wife, and more. Killing is not the sole instance of violence but one of its more extreme forms. The system of chattel slavery that existed in colonial America and in the United States for two and a half centuries was most certainly violence. But the continuation of racist practices today under other names is also violence. Social practices which proscribe set roles for women and limit their opportunities are examples of violence. Social structures that impose poverty are violent. Such forms as racism, sexism, and poverty are frequently referred to as systemic violence. It is necessary to keep all these forms of violence in mind, from direct violence of bodily injury and killing through psychological abuse and the multiple forms of systemic violence. Each of these forms of violence appears at some point in the discussion of atonement images to follow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE NONVIOLENT ATONEMENT by J. Denny Weaver Copyright © 2011 by J. Denny Weaver. 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
Contents
Preface....................xiPreface to the Second Edition....................xiv
1. Introduction....................1
2. Narrative Christus Victor: The Revisioning of Atonement....................13
3. Narrative Christus Victor: Some Comparisons and Its Demise....................87
4. Black Theology on Atonement....................129
5. Feminist Theology on Atonement....................151
6. Womanist Theology on Atonement....................191
7. Conversation with Anselm and His Defenders and Detractors....................219
8. Conclusion....................321
Works Cited....................326
Index....................338