Edgework

In this essay we continue to identify the building blocks that will inform our reflections about the atonement.

3. The Bible is Best Read Christocentrically: That is to say that the Bible should not be read as a “flat book,” as though any and every biblical text is of equal worth in God’s revelatory process. The entire book of Hebrews in the New Testament makes the point that Jesus is the “exact representation” of God. It affirms that Christ is superior to all the priests and prophets spoken about in the Old Testament and that his covenant is better than the covenant God made with his people of old. This means that any Old Testament texts that do not line up with the life and teachings of Jesus must be regarded as “incomplete” and not representing God’s final revelation.

This way of reading the Bible has been one of the distinguishing characteristics of Anabaptists hermeneutics for nearly 500 years. And it is quickly becoming the consensus of many contemporary Christian thinkers and writers. That is not to suggest that the Old Testament should be left behind, as Marcion recommended in the second century. But it does mean that we must be careful not to come to dogmatic conclusions about how and why God draws people to himself based on the Old Testament narrative alone.

With respect to the question of atonement, this means that we should be open to surprising and non-conventional insights gleaned from the entire Jesus event. The Jewish establishment of Jesus’ day could not comprehend how Jesus fit into their understanding of how God saves, and Jesus’ followers made some startling and novel claims about how the Jesus event saves us from our sins.

4. God is Nonviolent – Not an Angry Tribal Deity out for Vengence: A casual reading of the biblical story line in the Old Testament has led many to assume that the God of Israel, YAHWEH, is not much different than the gods of the nations around them. Such a God is concerned only about the welfare of a particular tribe and is ready to use violence against all who stand in his way. And, furthermore, he demands blood on the floor if he is disobeyed or dishonored in any way. But if we are committed to a Christocentric approach to understanding the biblical narrative and believe that Jesus is a more complete revelation of God than portrayed in the Old Testament, we are led to the conclusion that God is nonviolent.

This conclusion is especially obvious when we take note of how Jesus read the Scriptures of his day. When quoting Old Testament texts, Jesus drew forward those strands of the text that portray God as nonviolent, ready to forgive and open to being reconciled with all who seek him. That means Jesus also left behind those texts that portray God as violent. The question remains as to what we should do with those texts that appear to portray God as violent. One way to deal with them is to realize that God allowed his children to tell the story and sometimes they told it through the grid of the cultural context in which they found themselves. In other words, sometimes they justified their actions by putting words into God’s mouth that were never actually spoken. Another way is to think of these earlier portrayals of God in the context of progressive revelation; that is to say God accommodated himself to where his people were at and so prescribed actions not really consistent with his character. Some have called this the concessive will of God – God conceding to the demands of his people even against his better judgment. Whatever one does with the texts in the Old Testament that portray God as being violent, they must give way to the nonviolence of God as portrayed in Jesus Christ.

Understanding God as being nonviolent will have a direct impact on how we view biblical teachings about atonement. If we are dealing with an angry, tribal deity who demands vengeance, atonement will inevitably focus on finding a way of appeasing this God. Forgiveness and reconciliation will only come at great cost. But if God is nonviolent, rich in mercy and ready to forgive, the story of atonement will take on a different tone and be understood in entirely different categories of thought.

5. There Will Always be Left-over Texts: No matter what interpretive paradigm we use to read the New Testament, there will always be “left-over” or “outlier” texts that don’t fit into the pattern of thought we are proposing. That is true because the biblical text is always in dialogue with itself and doesn’t present a totally uniform perspective. All of us have “outlier” texts in our back pockets. Either we ignore them because they don’t fit into our paradigm or we contort them in some way to make them fit, even if that means doing violence to those texts themselves.

That raises the question of how we determine the “preferred” texts which we will employ to develop our understandings. One way is to simply adopt those of one’s particular church community or ones which we personally prefer. However it would be better to determine our list of “preferred” texts the way Jesus and Paul did; that is, to prefer those texts that portray God as non-violent. And in the case of those texts that depict Jesus supposedly supporting the vision of a retributive God, we should draw on the overall narrative of Jesus to be the arbiter of which texts to give preference and which to leave behind.

For too long we have privileged the biblical passages that speak of God’s retribution, vengeance, wrath and punishment and subordinated those texts that portray God’s restorative justice, love for enemies, extravagant forgiveness, and mercy. I will be up front by saying I will privilege those texts that proclaim God’s desire for peace, nonviolence and love and leave other texts as outliers.