3. THE BIBLICAL THEME OF ‘REDEMPTION’
Introductory note
Supporters of an atonement mentality have often used scripture to back their case. I want here to make a critical assessment of the scriptural sources so adduced. This critical assessment is based on contemporary exegesis.
In a following study, I will construct an alternative to the atonement model, which is the fruit of sound biblical interpretation. But it is important here to look at some of the textual evidence and just see what atonement theorists are alleging, and that it is not really found in the texts.
After an introductory note, I will look at two issues from the Old Testament and two issues from the New Testament.
There are many different traditions in the scriptures. We are now accustomed to live with a certain pluralism of many different visions, theologies, approaches, and so on, that can be found there. Some of those traditions are mutually contradictory. You cannot get it altogether, like many different versions of a general harmonious approach. There are some areas in the scriptures that say something that other areas flatly contradict. There is a dialectic between the two, a balance between the two. You have to discern which one is the real intent of the whole burden of the tradition at large. It’s important to know who put what in the Old Testament, and why, and who said it wasn’t right.
There are some texts, and even some traditions of texts, that actually would support an atonement mentality. The advocates of that mentality have ‘proof-texted’ their case from them, picked up texts hither and yon, and packaged them all up and said: “There it is ..it’s in the scriptures”. However, if you study the scriptures more critically, you find a number of texts that are there intentionally to refute those positions, and if you get the dialectic or balance between the two, you get the real burden of the scriptural message. That is the intention of this reflection.
Old Testament
Deuteronomic versus Priestly tradition
In the Old Testament, there are two traditions. One is called the Deuteronomic tradition, the other is called the Priestly tradition. This reflection is an attempt to present the riches of the Deuteronomic tradition.
This tradition gives us the so-called ‘narrative’ or ‘historical’ books of the OT. The Deuteronomic tradition, as it is called, is pre-exilic. It’s probably 8th century or 7th century. The priestly tradition is post-exilic, and is really a variant from that Deuteronomic approach. It is much closer to atonement thinking than the Deuteronomists ever were.
In the Deuteronomic or the main-line tradition of the narrative material in OT, the whole topic is a love affair. It is a love-affair of God with Israel, God’s People. At the same time there is a sub-plot, which is a love-affair of Israel with other gods. Now that plot/sub-plot connection gives rise to a question which is the whole heart of the matter of the narrative tradition – “How can God continue to love Israel, after Israel has done the dirty on God and fallen in love with other gods?” The problem is the legitimacy of God’s continuing to love a people that doesn’t love God. It’s a beautiful question when you think about it. And it is not a question of does God continue to love Israel, because everybody knows that God does. The problem for the writers is why, and how could God continue to love like that, and the real revelation in the D tradition is that God’s original love for God’s people was called ‘Hesed.
Now ‘Hesed is a rather difficult word to translate. It is often translated as “mercy”. That is not a very good translation, or a very adequate one anyway. Hesed originally referred to the kind of love you can have in the family. It implies kinship-love. It implies bonding as physically close as kinship. So “mercy” isn’t quite saying it fully. ‘Hesed is coming out of the nature of the case and the tightness of the bonds of kinship. It is that kind of love.
Now, if God’s original love for Israel was ‘hesed, what the revelation says is that ‘hesed demands that God be faithful to ‘hesed. It implies a ‘fidelity’, and it implies that it will not be withdrawn, no matter what the beloved might do or not do.
This is a beautiful appreciation of what love is all about. Real love takes the form of mercy and grace, if you could even hyphenate that phrase mercy-and-grace. It is more than mercy. It is the graciousness of mercy. There is no hatred, no anger in it, and there’s no unforgiven-ness in it. There’s a knowledge that continuity will happen, no matter what.
The Hebrew language uses the word emet, which means faithfulness, fidelity, truth, the continuing reality of – something like that – to express that dimension of ‘hesed that is the faithfulness inherent in ‘hesed. God’s love is “the emet of ‘hesed”. God is always faithful, no matter what Israel does. And that would include idolatry, it would include faithlessness, it would include public community sin and everything else. The “emet of ‘hesed” is too big for all of that to be withdrawn. And I think that is a most lovely revelation, frankly.
In the Septuagint (LXX), which is the Greek translation of these Hebrew Scripture texts, obviously the writers are pushing their luck in Greek to capture what is nearly uncapturable in another language, and they come up with made-up words. For example, the word for “mercy” in Greek is eleos – “merciful”, and the writer in the LXX put polueleos to mean “manifoldly merciful”, to try and capture a bit of it, but it doesn’t really quite say it as powerfully as the Hebrew. Similarly, with alethinos that is from aletheia, which is the Greek word for “truth”. But if you pull it apart in Greek, it means “non-darkness”. Lethe is “darkness” in Greek. If you put “a” in front of it, you negate “darkness”. It’s a darkness remover. There is a kind of permanent “shining upon” that is part of God’s love, and that includes God’s permanent willingness to forgive. I can almost say that for this God it is a fairly minor event. It is as if God would say: “What the hell is all this fuss about forgiveness? I mean, that’s an easy job. I love you bigger than that.” That’s the kind of revelation that starts to come through. We often translate, in English Bibles, the words ‘hesed w emet as “mercy and fidelity” or “truth”. I think the “and” is misplaced. The “faithfulness” is the quality of the ‘hesed, the emet of the ‘hesed, the fidelity of God’s love, and it’s because of that, that God always is on side, no matter what.
This is the heart of the Deuteronomist (D) tradition. It is really the core of the whole message of Hebrew narrative. It is the fundamental revelation of the Bible.
Now, with the Priestly (P) tradition, things are not quite the same. This tradition is post-exilic, and that means the people have come back from Babylon. Their main agenda is to rebuild the Temple and get it going again. Now, to do that, you need people called priests, and you need them to do something, namely to conduct sacrifices in the Temple. The emphasis of the priestly theology is very different from the Deuteronomist tradition. It always says that the people have to do something for God, before God will continue God’s relationship with the people. In other words, you have to earn it, and you’ve got to earn it by something you do, and only when you do it, and do it right, will God pick up the continuing relationship with you. That assumes that the relationship is broken, which the Deuteronomist tradition never did.
The Priestly tradition is the less persuasive of the two traditions. I say “less persuasive” because it is obviously anthropomorphic. It comes out of an assumption about the way humans relate, rather than out of a revelation about the way God relates. It’s pushing God into our models, rather than telling us about God’s models, and that’s a very, very different procedure.
There was always a tension in the later narrative accounts of the bible, between those two traditions – the D tradition and the P tradition – and you never get a speculative resolution of that tension. But you do get one in practice, and you get it particularly in the Psalter, in the psalms. And the resolution-in-practice is in favour of the D tradition. It’s rediscovering God all along – that “God’s saving love endures forever”. Do you remember those psalms, whose every verse ends up with the refrain: “God’s love endures forever”? That’s exactly what it’s saying. It’s the emet of ‘hesed. It’s nothing that we do.
The Psalms also say that we “shelter under Gods wings”, and that “righteousness and justice are the foundations of God’s throne”. It’s interesting, in the psalms, that “righteousness and justice” start coming through, and these really are ways of expressing what the emet of ‘hesed is all about. God would not be “honest to God”, to use a modern expression, if God was not like that – God would not be just to a divine kind of justice, if God did not continue in that ‘hesed in emet with us. It becomes almost the beginnings of an awareness of what the divine attributes really are all about.
Once again, we could switch from the Hebrew to the Greek of the LXX translation. There ‘hesed is usually translated in terms of eleos, which means “merciful” in Greek. But there is a kind of rider to it, or a balancing term – and it’s not “faithfulness” this time, but it’s “goodness”. That God is good. You might say, “Well, that’s a fairly trite statement” – but not for these writers and these psalmists. When the LXX translated “good” in Hebrew into Greek, they used a very interesting word, viz. chrestos. Well, when you get a writer like St. Luke, he picks that up powerfully, and he actually says in one text, that we have to be “chrestos like the christos”. It’s really revealing a certain kind of God, if I could say so. I think that’s what these texts are really all about.
That is the core of what is disclosed. Everything else is almost like a series of tangents off that one. You either believe that or you don’t. If you believe it, it’s a kind of gift of grace. And if you don’t believe it, it’s probably, not that you didn’t get the gift of grace, but because there are certain human blockages to it, and your own experiences of life haven’t been quite near enough to that, to really make it credible. Hans Spieckermann has called it “God’s Steadfast Love”.
I think “steadfast”is a very good expression of it basically. It’s too steadfast to be worried by disaffection or sin or something like that. However, that’s not the message we’ve given the people – we’ve given the people the message that they can control God’s reactions by what they do. That is complete rubbish, when you think about it. We can’t affect God by our sins.
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Later Prophetic versus early Prophetic tradition
Let us now look at the later or great prophetic tradition, vis-à- vis some of the questions raised by the quite early prophets.
In the early prophetic times, in the 8th century, Amos constantly was saying: “God will destroy the people that used to be God’s people. God’s had you. You’ve been too bad.”And from that point, as you get into the major prophets, especially the post-exilic ones, the question comes up that has to be thought about: “If we believe that God is the God of Deuteronomy, would God really do that?”And the question becomes quite simply: “doom or love?” “What’s in the future for us with God?”
That is really where the great prophets zoom in, and they zoom in very much in favour of love. We can look briefly at Hosea, Jeremiah and 2nd Isaiah.
Hosea is really an extraordinary collection of prophecies in this regard. He describes God’s relationship with Israel in terms of a marriage. There’s a power and a beauty in his writing that you would be hard to match in any literature. Hosea basically says that God could not withdraw God’s love. God would be inwardly torn apart if God even thought of doing that. And it’s not possible for God to do it. You might say: “But God can do all things!”, but Hosea says: “No, God can’t do that one. It isn’t possible for God.” It’s not just saying that God in fact has decided not to. He is actually claiming that God could not do it. I think this is an addition to the earlier revelation of faith – that the love is therefore not just “not extinguished”, but it is “not extinguishable”, and if that dawns on you, it will change your entire perspective on everything.
One beautiful way of putting that was that Hosea has three children. All of his children were given very interesting names. The first child, a son, was called Jezreel – “God sows”. The second, a daughter, was called Lo-Ra’hamim, and the third, a son, was called Lo-‘Ami.
Ra-'hamim is the word in Hebrew for “tender, merciful”, but, once again, it is a tenderness of a special type. It is a very felt, sensitive kind of understanding and compassion. Re’hem, the root of it, means, in Hebrew, both the heart of a father and the womb of a mother. And if you put those two notions together, Ra’hamim is the adjective from that. That’s why it’s so hard to get one word for it. But, if you were trying, it would be in the dimension of sensitivity, understanding – the Italians would say simpatico – and it would be closer than any English word.
Hosea was told by Yahweh to call this child of his Lo-Rahamim (Unloved) (1.6) ( Lo in Hebrew means ‘not’). This child is the one who is not the recipient of Ra’hamim. And yet at the same time it is the child of Hosea, and although it is really saying “not my child”, but it actually is my child. There’s a kind of internal paradox in the whole thing. You might think this is not a recipient of mercy, but in fact it is.
And it is the same with Lo-‘Ami (No people of mine). Am in Hebrew is ‘The People’. The ‘i’ at the end makes it ‘My People’. If you put Lo in front of it, you have ‘not my people’.
But ‘not my people’ is my people, because it is my child. Yahweh says to Lo-‘Ami: “I will say to No people of mine you are my people.”(2.23)
You might think the logic pointed in the direction of ‘not my people’, but it is my people all right. It is an extraordinary reflection on the unremovableness of the given love of God. Later in the story, after Hosea had lured back his own unfaithful bride, the one who was Unloved, he call her his loved-one again. Yahweh too says: “I will love Unloved”, whom he later called “Beloved”.
Hosea has much poetry of this kind, like: “Israel’s love for God is like the morning cloud or the early dew that goes away, but God’s love for Israel is as sure as the dawn or the showers.”(6.3) It is a beautiful piece of expression, and he plays with the whole notion, and says that if God ever was angry with the people, God would have to repent of the anger, because it would be wrong for God to feel like that. Hosea has taken the whole repentance theme out of the human world and put it into God’s world.
And so God shouldn’t do that sort of thing. It would be sinful and wrong divinely for God even to think about it, and God starts saying to the people: “How could I give you up? I can’t do it!”(11.8) And that, quite literally, is the point. God can’t do it. And in a marvellous passage, Hosea says: This is because “God is God, not man”.(11.9) That’s the way we read it, but actually the Hebrew expression ‘man’ there is ish, which means ‘masculine man’, or if you like ‘business man’. It’s not just saying: “God is God, not human”. It’s saying: “God is God, and God doesn’t behave the way business men behave”, which means entering into contracts and deals and conditional clauses.
There’s an absolute givenness here.
And on the basis of that, Hosea goes on and says that the relationship between God and the people is like a betrothal, and he says: “Well, it always was, but this is a new kind of betrothal”. It is a betrothal in righteousness and justice, which are the derivatives of emet and ‘hesed. And it’s not the righteousness and justice that Israel practises. It’s the kind that God practises. So that the whole mystery is from betrayal to betrothal, not from our point of view, but from God’s point of view. It was always betrothal all along, and it includes in this new betrothal a promise, that it will never be otherwise. That’s the emet of ‘hesed once again, as the prophet re-affirms it.
So, what Hosea is saying is that the relationship with God, even in a people that has done the wrong thing by God, is not a blind relationship. It’s not a no-relationship of obedience, but it’s a relationship, that Hosea calls, that of a “listening heart” (the do’ath of the Lord!) Do’ath means ‘knowledge’. It’s actually the word for ‘sexual intercourse’ in Hebrew. It’s that kind of intimate, experiential knowledge of God from the inside of God. It’s a beautiful expression, when you think about it.
Hosea is not slow in saying things fairly graphically and fairly fully in that way. But it’s really a re-affirmation of that side of the tradition.
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Jeremiah continues what Hosea was saying, and he goes beyond saying ‘a new betrothal’. He says it’s a new covenant. “Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people... I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind” (31: 33,34)
Covenant is much more than a contract. It’s a new bonding in the nature of the case between God and the people, and the result of that new bonding is, in the words of Ezekiel: “I will put in you a new heart, not like the heart of stone that you used to have, but a heart of flesh.”(11.19) And it’s because of that, that you can have this listening heart, this experience of God. And, with the new kind of heart, God and the people can be bonded heart to heart, and the new heart in the people is a heart of ‘hesed and emet at the same time.
Jeremiah raises the questio, – I think mostly because of his own life experience – that, even given all of this new covenant and new heart and the rest of it, could people still suffer? And could bad things still happen to good Jews? He knows they could, but he doesn’t quite know why. But he leaves it there, as an as yet unanswered question.
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2nd Isaiah is the name we give to an important set of prophecies. We shall stay with them here, since they are often adduced by atonement theorists as foundation for their case.
In the collected prophecies of 2nd Isaiah – what we are talking about is in our bibles from chapter 40 to chapter 55 of Isaiah – these were not written or spoken by the author of the first 39 chapters. It has a totally different character, and a totally different style. It should be in a separate book. That’s why we largely call it – the 2nd Isaiah. Some of the most beautiful passages in that 2nd Isaiah are four songs, or four hymns, and they are called the Songs of the Servant of Yahweh, sometimes called the suffering servant of Yahweh. After the fourth song there comes chapter 54 with the promise of God to the woman, and the woman is Israel – really Mother Zion.
Now this is a collection of oracles. They were given at Babylon, while the Exile was still on, and the Jews were under Persian domination, and that means in 6th century BCE. Now the leader or ruler of Babylon at the time was Cyrus. I don’t think Cyrus had any profound religious conversion, or anything like that, but he was a good politician, and like a good politician he favoured minority groups. So, he decided to let them, as deportees, return to their own country, and, when they got back to their own country, to gather resources together and rebuild their Temple again. And when they built their temple again, they could finally dedicate it again and then get around to building the city walls and setting up shop for the future.
I think it’s important to read the Songs of the Servant of Yahweh, and the subsequent chapter 54, in the context of that return from Babylon under Cyrus. Often those texts are read in a Christian sense, as if the prophet had Jesus in mind from the start. He had never heard of him.
Now who is the Servant of Yahweh? It has always been a little bit tricky to answer that question, because the Servant clearly is an individual, and yet the servant has the dimensions of a corporate personality, which includes a whole lot of people together. A number of different people could be the Servant, as far as the text goes, but the original obvious servant is Cyrus. So, instead of piously thinking it has to be Jesus, we need to accept that the Servant is Cyrus, a pagan ruler, who didn’t have any faith.
And Cyrus, I think, is the principle of a new beginning for the people in a new and positive history. And they reflected that it’s always been a bit like that in Jewish history. “Every time we get into a mess,” they thought, “God gives us a new leader – sometimes from one of our own, sometimes not – and it will probably keep on being like that,” so that the prophet imagines a model of a servant like that, that emerges whenever required. And in the prophet’s mind, this emerging person includes all of Israel at the time, so that, right now, the Remnant that’s left over after the Exile, and is going back to rebuild the temple, is like the Servant of Yahweh, and they will be the beginning of whatever future Israel has, back in its own land.
So, in his poem, song, hymn, whatever, he comes up with the figure of the servant that stands for all of those people, and he develops the figure in a purely literary kind of a way. Now, it’s very interesting that this servant in the poetry runs into a difficult period of time; he runs into defamation, distress, persecution, torture even – and finally death. And at the same time, if you read the text, God seems, through the servant’s strange life, to cause positive things to happen for the whole people. So that good pious Catholics, reading it today, say: “Ha! Paschal Mystery! – through death to resurrection.” It’s not that clear! It’s just a simple elementary statement that Jewish life is a bit like that.
And then the question comes: How do we read this? What’s the meaning of the fact that our leaders, who take us into the new period of history, really go through bad times – they get persecuted – they even get killed – and yet good seems to come out of it all. How do we put that together? How do we interpret it?
Here is where the difficulties start to come and you have to be careful about the accuracy of the text.
There are two voices speaking in the song in response to that question. One is the voice of a group that calls itself “we” like a choir. And the other is the voice of God. And they don’t add up. They are not meant to. One is the contrast background for the other.
Now the group interprets the situation this way. It sees the servant as the substitute for themselves. The group feels that they should be chastised by God – they should atone for, and expiate their faults and their sins, but this person, the Servant, is going to take their place, and substitute for them, and be chastised for them. “He will be pierced for our faults, he will be crushed for our sins.” This is the classic atonement line.
Now he can do so effectively, because he is sinless himself – because he has always done God’s will – and “many will profit by his suffering.”
That’s not something that God demands, but it does seem to be a fact. And it does seem to be that it was unique to this servant, because it was never written about in kings or prophets of the past that someone could actually be substituted for another’s guilt, and God would go along with that – and that’s the voice of the group.
This is at the end of the 52nd chapter and in most of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. [It is one of the chosen readings for Good Friday afternoon liturgy.]
Commentators
Now, some commentators say that the God of love, the ‘hesed God, freely decided to accept the offering of the Servant’s substitutive deed. They say that doesn’t get beyond preliminary reflections or imagination in the 2nd Isaiah author, and the whole thing hasn’t been grounded much – it’s a hunch. I don’t think they’ve reflected on the fact that it would be highly unethical to demand that one person should be killed for the sins of another person, but that’s beyond the level of reflection of the text.
The idea actually was never picked up again in the OT. It may come up in a very minor sort of way in the Machabee literature. In the 2nd Book of Machabees, we have the seven brothers, and others with them, seemingly able to end the persecution of the whole people through their sufferings, but it’s not a very strong link. In the 4th book of Machabees, which is apocryphal literature, the land is purified by the stoic control of emotions exercised by victims of persecutions. This is close to the Greek-Roman ideal of the ‘noble death’. Again the connections are not strong.
Beyond 2nd Isaiah, the position of that vocal group in the song doesn’t seem to reappear in Jewish theology. It seems to be a bit of a ring-in, if you could say so, and that’s why other commentators, I think, have what appeals to me as a much better approach.
The other commentators say that the group that is talking like this, about substitution, is actually a pagan group. And it is a pagan notion, not an authentic Jewish notion. Probably the pagans concerned come from Babylon, and this idea was picked up by some Jews when they were in exile in Babylon. That would mean that the end of chapter 52 and all of chapter 53 are like an implicit quotation, and with an omission of the quotation marks when it was written. This is paganism talking, not authentic Jewish faith, and then, when you get to chapter 54, about the promise to the woman, the woman being a word for Israel, this is the conscious refutation by the prophet, of the pagan position about substitution, that has been just before.
Let us get look at 54th chapter, because I think it is such positive thing. The 54th chapter says there was never a change in God’s attitude to Israel. The love was always there. It was like the true love of a true husband for his wife. And the man’s wife is due to be cast out. “Yes, for a brief moment I did perhaps seem to abandon you”,(v.7) but not really – “now with great ‘hesed I will gather you in.(v.8) For one small moment I might have seemed to you to hide my face from you (or to be sorry for you), but now, with great everlasting ‘hesed, I have compassion on you, your restorer.”
This is a covenant of salvation, not an act of compassion. It’s like the original and eternal covenant of God with creation, celebrated by Noah after the flood. It’s a lovely thing. LXX here calls God Ileos, gracious, in an obvious make-up from Eleos.
Well, if you read it that way, you think the whole text starts to make considerably more sense. An unfortunate substitutional reading of this text has coloured the interpretation, and made it look like an atonement.
But it’s a relatively new achievement of scripture scholarship to say that. The first reference I found to this interpretation was in 1993 in a book, “Le Christ est mort pour tous”, by a French author, Pierre Ternant .What he was saying is that this whole atonement mentality, that we’ve been practising in our devotions, is paganism, and that the sources of it in Isaiah are actually pagan sources, which have been put in Isaiah in order to be refuted. We have read it, as if it was the thing that God was telling us to do, which it was not. That simply pulls the carpet right out from under any appeal to Isaiah, as a support for the atonement mentality.
I think this is a very good position. Père Boismard, who died in March 2004, was the old man of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. He wrote a review of Ternant’s book and he said: “I agree absolutely and without reserve with the position taken in this book.” And he went on and threw in a few other ideas on the same lines himself. And he said: “We have got to get past this thinking. This is pure paganism!” (P.Ternant, Le Christ est mort ‘pour tous’. Du serviteur Israel au serviteur Jésus, Cerf, Paris, 1993. Reviewed by M.E.Boismard, Revue Biblique, 1996, 616-618)
In saying that, I have to express my own chagrin about the liturgy of Good Friday afternoon. This liturgy gives us exactly the pagan text and without the refutation, and almost hangs it on people, who often come to Church only on Good Friday afternoon, and they just don’t know any better. Can you see the grief I have here? It is worth the effort to pull it apart and just realize the non-foundation of this mentality.
If you start thinking about what would be the pagan group that was coming up with this, it could be nearly anyone. There was a lot of this thinking among the Greeks. It’s in Aeschylus; it’s in Euripides; it’s right through the heroic poets. It’s in the Greek literature like Aesop, Hesiod and others, and it’s in the Hittite sources. It’s in the whole pharmakos scape-goating themes. I think it’s nearly archetypal, and nearly every group is going to come up with that atonement substitution motif, unless they have a revelation that would contradict it. The glory of Israel is that it had the revelation which contradicts it, and the terrible part about Christian devotional tradition is that it has picked up the paganism, without the refutation.
If you really studied the alleged background of the atonement approach in Isaiah you would find that it’s not there. I don’t think this has been said far and wide enough yet. To think that God would require that Jesus had to substitute for us, in order to make the atonement that we couldn’t do, is actually paganism.
I think Anselm got hooked by too innocent a reading of the sources, and, of course, having put it together, in that incredible piece of reparation-logic that he came up with, it stuck, and it’s there until this present day in our mentality.
What I have been trying to lead to, was an examination of some of the texts that are classically adduced by those who want to push the atonement thing, and the texts do not vindicate it. In fact, it shows you, if you pull the texts apart, that they’ve largely missed the whole point, even in the texts that they would like to use strongly. I think that it’s quite educational to see that. This is not an emotional reactive position that we are in, to drop atonement. It is a very reasoned, worked out position, that there was never any advocacy of atonement there from the start. It’s extraordinary, when you think about it, but it would change, if you had a community that had seen all this together and celebrated Good Friday accordingly – it would be fascinating.
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New Testament
I would now like to spend a little bit of time on some of the New Testament work in the same vein, because once again I think there is a beautiful tradition of hopeful love that is non-demanding. In the New Testament we can see that we don’t have to atone to God, and there is no notion of Jesus having to be a substitution for us sinners. I think a lot of New Testament texts have been wrongly adduced in favour of atonement.
Before we get onto the texts, which are mainly in Paul, just a preliminary note that might be the whole point actually. A massive amount of work that has been done in the last fifteen years or so on a new vision of the historical Jesus. Jesus lived and Jesus died, or was killed or however you put it. But what’s the story? Why did he die? We need to know this in historical terms, rather than in textual interpretation afterwards.
In Jesus’ time, the Roman Imperial system, the Roman Empire, was the equivalent of a trans-national corporation, probably the only real one, and it was a totalitarian system, and its economic ambitions had literally gone wild. It was going to run the whole known world. It had colonized most of it anyway. And just before Jesus came along, it had colonized Palestine, including Galilee. And what the Romans did, when they came to all these places, including Galilee, was that they wrecked the local economy, so that the people had no ways and means of continuing their own culture, and had to be dependent on the Romans for survival.
Now the effect of that is to make the local people to live below the poverty line. They lived below what we’d call the poverty line today, and below what they would have called the poverty line, in their own time as far as I can see. So you get dispossessed, de-cultured, injured, abused little people, and this is where Jesus comes in. Jesus is not only accidentally born as one of this mob, but he embraces the cause of these dispossessed marginalized people and he says to them: “You are still worthwhile, and your God is still with you, and your God still loves you.” That is the extraordinary context of his ministry.
Well, obviously a message like that was effective. We have plenty of evidence for that. People started to gather around Jesus and feel loved. And this represents a potential challenge to the Roman management. When I say ‘management’, I would also like to include some of the Jewish leadership, who were literally collaborators with the Romans, and probably for reasons that, in conscience, they thought were pretty good reasons. But they were there, and they saw that Jesus was creating a stir, and they thought: “This is no good, so let’s put him down”. So what you get is a political assassination of someone who stood up, in the name of justice, for these dispossessed little people. That is the historical record.
The answer to the question “Who killed Jesus?” is the big system, and they killed him because of what he was doing with and for the little people whom he loved. The little people didn’t kill him. The big system killed him, because he loved the little people. This is basically the point. So that, if we were to put ourselves imaginatively into the interaction with Jesus, we would realize that we are not the continuation of the big system that killed Jesus, not by any stretch of the imagination. We are the continuation of the ordinary, little people, the ones Jesus stood up for, and, because of his fidelity, because he wouldn’t back off his standing up for them, and he was politically assassinated.
So he got done in for us, because he loved us. In that sense I think Paul is right when he says: “He loved me and delivered himself for me” – me, and all the other little people, that were getting put under the heel of the big systems.
So, I would say it is important historically to realize that there is no case for saying that Jesus ever had an atonement mentality. That’s imagination. Jesus did not have an ‘atonement mentality’ and he did not ask us to have one. The atonement mentality is coming out of all that millennium of reflection, that went back and interpreted Jesus in its own paradigm. It is simply not true that Jesus wandered around as a child in the holy family, thinking that he was here on earth to atone for our sins. It is simply not true historically that he ever thought that he would have to die on the cross and be crucified in order to save us from Hell. We have said this, but there is historically no foundation whatever for this. Jesus got done in, because he made a political option, and the management didn’t like it and never did. The problem today is not to tell people to repent of their sins, and thank Jesus for suffering to atone for our sins. The problem today is to say to people: “Are you ready to make a political option for which you could get crucified?” Is that what the imitation of Christ is all about? It’s a totally different slant and perception of the data of the historical life of Jesus.
Actually, the whole mystery is about two things. It’s about justice and fidelity when you boil it down. It’s fidelity to the cause of justice. Well, this is the Deuteronomist theology. This is the emet of ‘hesed. This the real theology of Hosea, Jeremiah, and II Isaiah, coming good in Jesus, not through the false filter, if I could so call it, of the pagan lens, that has become so dominant in later Christian readings. But that is what I think it’s about, and where it’s about.
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Paul versus a post-Pauline interpretation
There are many texts in Paul where it is said that Jesus died for us, or even for our sins. There are references in Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians and Titus. These texts occur at random in Paul, but the problem is the little word “for”. He died for us.1
Most serious commentators in the Catholic tradition, over the years, would have said that Jesus did not suffer the anger of God, but that he willingly took on the crucifixion in order to atone for our sins. I don’t think this is right, and the reason I don’t think it’s right is that in no way is Jesus, according to Paul, a substitute for us. When Paul says “he died for us”, there are two possible Greek words he could write for “for”. One is the Greek word huper, and the other is the Greek word anti. If Paul wanted to say Jesus died as a substitute for us, he would have written anti. Paul never wrote anti. In all of those texts, Paul wrote huper, which means Jesus died out of love for us, not in our place as a substitute for us. However, the niceties of the English language in particular are not nice enough to capture the difference, and it simply writes “for us”, and, of course, if people already have an atonement paradigm in their minds, they are going to read it as a substitute.
When the atonement people refer to the Isaian text and these texts of Paul, they think they have an absolute case, but they don’t.
The atonement approach would make sense for Greek and Roman readers, who have grown up in that sort of culture. Their literature is full of it. But this Greco-Roman culture cannot ever capture the mystery of Jesus’ death, and the depth of his love for the little people of Galilee and Judea. This is a marvelous example of the transition from the Jewish world of the real Jesus – the real covenant and the real bible – into the Greek European and Roman world. And, whereas you’ve got to try and make the transition, because that’s evangelization, the chance of complete success in capturing the full riches of the mystery is very low. I think we’ve got to develop some sort of Jewish feeling for it all, before we can really get it.
There are other texts in Paul that are worth mentioning, where the English translation of the word reconciliation, reconciliation of all things in Christ, and phrases like that, comes up. The word that Paul uses in his Greek, I would not be happy to translate as ‘reconciliation’. I am really pushed to the wall in trying to come up with a better English word. The Greek is katallassein. kata = according; allassein = bringing together things in their otherness. If you write ‘reconciliation’, you are going to hear it in the atonement sense. If you write ‘togethering it all’ in its beautiful differences, it’s clean of that. I think Paul was conscious of that and Paul knew his Greek.
I think Paul put it very well when he chose katallassein. I think it’s a creation paradigm, not a redemption paradigm word. Paul never had an atonement mentality. His whole focus was on the creator, who holds all things in being all the time, not on a God, who had to be appeased. His God creates and respects difference and otherness. To try to make everyone the same is violent. Paul’s God, with utter gentleness, loves and accepts all creatures in their very otherness. God wants all creatures to live together, accepting and respecting each other’s differences.
That’s what I think is largely wrong with the whole concept of reconciliation, whether you talk about it in the aboriginal sense, or whether you talk about it in the intra-Church sense of rituals of reconciliation. Rites of reconciliation are essentially communitarian re-gatherings of people, and re-includings of people. They are not sorting things out individually, and paying off to God the debts or punishments due.
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Mark versus the Greek-Roman culture.
There is one more text that I think does deserve a bit of comment. It’s the only text in the Gospel literature that really is pertinent to the atonement theme or used by it. It’s in Mark, and it really shows up the big difference between Mark and the Greco-Roman culture that is around Mark, I think in Rome, where at least the latter part of his writing probably would have occurred. What I am trying to say here is that the basic text is Mark 10.45b. I think the text is genuinely Mark all right. I’m not arguing about that. I’m pretty sure it’s not an original saying of the historical Jesus. It’s a make-up of Mark. What Mark has heard from the tradition is that Jesus said: “I did not come to be served but to serve.” Now that could well be a Jesus historical statement. It is certainly way back in the ancient tradition. And Mark adds to it a kind of interpretative expansion-clause of his own. “I did not come to be served but to serve and to give my life as ransom for the many” as the English runs. I think that last bit is Mark’s own interpretation of what Jesus was on about. However the English is terrible in “to give my life as ransom for the many”. “To give” is actually a right translation, but what is translated as “my life” should be translated from the Greek as “my psyche”. That’s a very profound statement, when you think about it - not to give my time, my activity, but to give my very psyche – psychen in the Greek – my whole selfhood as, not ransom (lutron in Greek, kofer in Hebrew) – the word I would prefer is ‘assurance’ – and ‘for many’ is really for the ‘oi polloi in Greek – the rabbim in Hebrew – in other words for the ‘mob’ – for the nameless multitude out there – this is not a pitch for interpersonal relationships, or one-on-one stuff, – this is large, unlimited multitudes – the mob.
Well, if you are prepared to give up the interests of your own individual psyche for the assurance of the large crowd out there, that’s a pretty big ask, and that’s Mark’s interpretation of what Jesus was saying, when Jesus said: “I did not come to be served but to serve.” I think this is the strongest statement in all Mark’s gospel, and it’s the closest he ever got to a theology of ministry – and this theology of ministry is an enormous ask.
Now there’s a little catch in this, if you hear what that translation is suggesting. It’s in the direction of “I love you, for you”, not that “I substitute for you in atonement”.
However, the Greek in Mark does use the preposition “anti” not “huper” for “for”, but it needs to be read in the outreach sense, not the substitutional sense. Why?
A little after Mark, there were some communities that owed their origin to St. Paul û Paul would be already dead by then – who read Mark’s text in the sense of substitution, and there was a reaction in the Christian community to that reading of Mark’s text. The reaction comes in 1st Timothy in the 2nd chapter, where it semi-quotes that phrase of Mark’s and puts in huper, where Mark had written anti – in other words, the writer sets the interpretation correctly I think. That is the comment of Boismard. Unfortunately, the substitutional reading of Mark has allowed that reading to enter the tradition and dominate it.
So really, if people appeal to the Markan text, and say “Anyway, in St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus said that he came to substitute for us for the atonement of a multitude of human beings”, you have to tell them that the text doesn’t actually support that view. What it does support is the idea that Jesus, consciously in his adult life, was able to forego advantages to himself as an individual psyche, for the sake of giving assurance and support and solidarity to the mob out there. I think that’s an inclusive at-one-ment model, not a substitutive atonement model.
It’s very hard to put the differences in English, actually. Atonement is like paying real money for something, and the other notion, at-one-ment, is like achieving something priceless, but at the ‘price’ of a love that is poured out for the people. We are using ‘price’ there metaphorically. It’s like my earlier comment that the whole trouble with all this material is taking metaphors too literally. Then you get yourself into a mess you can’t get out of.
It may be that in some Hellenistic cults lutron had to do with the manumission of slaves. Or perhaps with the ransom of captives or prisoners. The superstition was that if money were not paid, there would be misfortunes from hidden sources, especially disease. The act of paying the lytron was a ritual act. It may be that these understandings coloured the reading of the Markan text.
Wherever in the later tradition, the atonement mentality started to emerge and develop, it didn’t come out of a well-understood reading of scripture, and therefore it is resting on doubtful foundations. And that’s fundamentally why we can’t accept it.
The substance of this approach to the biblical texts was known 50 years ago, but it hasn’t got through yet to the Christian public. And it hasn’t got through, because, when the chips are down, those people pushing atonement are not going to be influenced by the texts, even the ones they use.
1‘In the phrases we use about the meaning of Christ’s death, it is the word ‘for’ that carries all the weight. Paul says simply, ‘While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ Rm 5,8, and quoting the earliest creed of the mother church in Jerusalem, he writes: ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures’ I Cor 15,3. These little phrases, expressing Christ’s dynamic, proactive love for us, express how christians spontaneously think of the value of Christ’s death: Christ is for us precisely in our weakness and mortality; Christ is for us although (because?) we are sinners; Christ is for us as we resist him. The word ‘for’ tells us that Christ’s regard for us is an impulsive, creative, recreative, generous self-gift that has no bounds – he ‘empties himself’ – to be with and for those who deserve little. ...’The Son of God loved me and delivered himself for me’ Gal 2,20. ‘Christ Jesus has made me his own’ Phil 3,12.’ Cf. J.McDade, supra.