Edgework

Just as I was getting ready to wrap up this series on atonement I came across the reflections of a contemporary Franciscan Friar, Richard Rohr. I learned from him that the Franciscan Order, established by Francis of Assisi in 1209, has always held a “minority” position within Roman Catholicism on the question of atonement. In large part this is due to the diligent work of one of its early theologians, John Dun Scotus (1266-1308).

Rohr summarizes Scotus’ views about experiencing salvation in a short phrase in one of his daily devotional readings as “Letting go of the illusion of our separation from God in order to experience our inherent union.” Rohr notes that such thinking emerges from the cosmic hymns found in Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:3-24 and John 1:1-18.

I will let Richard Rohr speak for himself in the following lengthy quote from his book, Eager to Love (183-187).

For the sake of simplicity and brevity here, let me say that the common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus “died for our sins” – either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury [1033-1109] and has often been called “the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written”). Scotus agreed with neither of these readings. He was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, blood sacrifice, or necessary satisfaction, but by the cosmic hymns of Colossians and Ephesians…

Christian people have paid a huge price for what theologians after Anselm called “substitutionary atonement theory”: the idea that, before God could love his creation, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for a sin-drenched humanity. Please think about the impossible, shackled, and even petty God that such a theory implies and presents. Christ is not the first idea in the mind of God, as Scotus taught, but a mere problem solver after the sad fact of our radical unworthiness…

We have had enough trouble helping people to love, trust, and like God to begin with, without creating even further obstacles. Except for striking fear in the hearts of those we sought to convert, substitutionary atonement theories did not help our evangelization of the world. It made Christianity seem mercantile and mythological to many sincere people. The Eternal God was presented as driving a very hard bargain, as though he were just like many people we don’t like. As if God could need payment, and even a very violent transaction, to be able to love and forgive his own children – a message that those with an angry, distant, absent, or abusive father were already far too programmed to believe…

Scotus, however, insisted on the absolute and perfect freedom of God to love and forgive as God chooses, which is the core meaning of grace. Such a God could not be bound by some supposedly offended justice. For Scotus, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world could not be a mere reaction to human sinfulness, but in fact the exact, free, and proactive work of God from the very beginning. We were “chosen in Christ before the world was made,” as Paul says in Ephesians (1: 4). Sin or problems could not be the motive for divine incarnation, but only perfect love! The Christ Mystery was the very blueprint of reality from the very start (John 1: 1)…

It is no wonder that Christianity did not produce more mystics and saints over the centuries. Unconsciously, and often consciously, many people did not trust or even like this Father God, much less want to be in union with him. He had to be paid in blood to love us and to care for his own creation, which seems rather petty and punitive, and we ended up with both an incoherent message and universe. Paul told us that “love takes no offense” (1 Corinthians 13: 5), but apparently God was the big exception to this rule. Jesus tells us to love unconditionally, but God apparently does not.

This just will not work for the soul or mature spirituality. Basically when you lose the understanding of God’s perfect and absolute freedom and eagerness to love, which Scotus insisted on, humanity is relegated to the world of counting! Everything has to be measured, accounted for, doled out, earned, and paid back. That is the effect on the psyche of any notion of heroic sacrifice or necessary atonement. It is also why Jesus said Temple religion had to go, including all of its attempts at the “buying and selling” of divine favor (John 2: 13-22). In that scenario, God has to be placated and defused; and reparation has to be paid to a moody, angry, and very distant deity. This is no longer the message Jesus came to bring.

This wrongheaded worldview has tragically influenced much of our entire spirituality for the last millennium, and is still implied in most of the Catholic Eucharistic prayers. It gave lay Catholics and most clergy (including Protestant ones) an impossible and utterly false notion of grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness – which are, in fact, at the heart of our message. The best short summary I can give of how Scotus tried to change the equation is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. Christ was Plan A for Scotus, the hologram of the whole, the Alpha – and therefore also the Omega – Point of cosmic history.

It is interesting to note that a goodly number of Catholic and Protestant contemporary thinkers are turning to this time-tested Franciscan perspective to understand more fully the nature and import of the entire Jesus event. For me, this new discovery has opened up a large window for continued reflection on atonement theology in the future.