Jesus' Life, Death, and Atonement Theology

Jesus is, for us Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God.

In the judgement of the majority of mainline scholars, atonement theology does not go back to Jesus himself. We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose. To use recent analogies, the deaths of Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. were the consequence of what they were doing, bu not their purpose. And like them Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences.

In it's first century setting, the statement "Jesus is the sacrifice for sin" had a quite different meaning. The "home" of this language, the framework within which it  makes sense, it he sacrificial system centered int he temple in Jerusalem. According to temple theology, certain kinds of sins and impurities could be dealt with only through sacrifice int he temple. Temple theology thus claimed an institutional monopoly on the forgiveness of sins; and because the forgiveness of sins was a prerequisite for entry into the presence of God, temple theology also claimed an institutional monopoly on access to God.

In this setting, to affirm "Jesus is the sacrifice for sin" was to deny the temple's claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subverted the sacrificial system. It meant: God in Jesus has already provided the sacrifice and has thus taken care of whatever you think separates you from God; you have access to God apart from the temple and its system of sacrifice. It is a metaphor for radical grace, of amazing grace.

Thus "Jesus died for our sins" was originally a subversive metaphor, not a literal description of either God's purpose or Jesus' vocation. It was a metaphorical proclamation of radical grace; and properly understood it, it still is. it is therefore ironic to realize that he religion that formed around Jesus would within four hundred years begin to claim for itself an institutional monopoly on grace and access to God.

Because the sacrificial metaphor has often been taken quite literally, we in the church have often domesticated the death of Jesus--by speaking of it as the foreordained will of God, as something that had to happen,a s a dying for the sins of the world. But it ant he other purposive ways of seeing the death of Jesus are post-Easter retrospective providential interpretations. They matter, they're important, and rightly understood, they continue to be a way of proclaiming the gospel. but they should not be allowed to eclipse the historical reason for his execution.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 92-95

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Eugene England - A Non-Metaphysical Atonement

It is clear that long before Christ had actually performed the central acts of the Atonement—the suffering in Gethsemane, the death on the cross, the resurrection—men were able to be affected by those acts through the prophetic knowledge that God was willing to perform them in the future. What this means is that the mechanics of the mission itself did not occur in time as a necessary precursor to their effect on men, as some theories of the Atonement would require; Christ’s mission was not to straighten out some metaphysical warp in the universe that Adam’s taking of the fruit had created. The effects of the Atonement were not metaphysical but moral and spiritual: they reach men living at any time and place through each man’s knowledge of the spirit and events of the Atonement.

-Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - Unsatisfactory Theories of Atonement

The question “Why is man’s salvation dependent on Christ and the events surrounding his death?” is the most central and the most difficult question in Christian theology. The answers (and there are many) are, as i have said, the chief scandal of Christianity to the non-believer. Attempts to define logical theories of the Atonement based on New Testament scriptures have been largely contradictory and ultimately futile—mainly because the New Testament is not a book of theology, a logical treatise, but rather gives us the reactions, the varied emotional responses, of men to the Atonement as they experienced it and tried to find images for their joy. Some men clearly felt released from the powers of evil and darkness which they believed, much more literally than any of us today, were all about them. Some believed that their souls had been bought from the devil. Some felt that Christ had taken their place in suffering the just and necessary punishment under the law for their sins. The explanation i have tried to develop, based largely on Book of Mormon scriptures, is at significant variance with most of these theories, especially on one major point: The redemptive effect of the Atonement depends on how an individual man responds to it rather than on some independent effect on the universe or God, which theories such as the ransom theory, the substitution theory, the satisfaction theory, etc., all tend to imply. of course, the rich reality of the Atonement lies beyond any theory or explanation, including the one I am suggesting here, and some men bring themselves into redeeming relationship with God from within the framework of each of these theories as they somehow reach through to that rich reality. But the need for powerful personal response and for a release from the immobilizing demands of justice within man seem to me crucial and best served by an explanation different from the traditional theories.

Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - On the "Demands of Justice"

Christ is the unique manifestation in human experience of the fulness of that unconditional love from God which Paul chose to represent with the Greek term agape.  As Paul expressed it, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Christ's sacrificial love was not conditional upon our qualities, our repentance, anything; he expressed his love to us while we were yet in our sins--not completing the process of forgiveness, which depends on our response, but initiating it in a free act of mercy. This is a kind of love quite independent from the notion of justice. There is no quid-pro-quo about it.  It is entirely unbalanced, unmerited, unrelated to the specific worthiness of the object (except in that each man has intrinsic worth through his eternal existence and God-like potential), and that is precisely why it is redemptive. It takes a risk, without calculation, on the possibility that man can realize his infinite worth. It gets directly at that barrier in man, his sense of justice, which makes him incapable of having unconditional love for himself--unable to respond positively to his own potential, because he is unable to forgive himself, unable to be at peace with himself until  he has somehow "made up" in suffering for his sins, something he is utterly incapable of doing.  The demands of justice that Amulek is talking about, which must be overpowered, are from man's own sense of justice, not some abstract eternal principle but our own demands on ourselves, demands which rightly bring us into estrangement with ourselves (as we gain new knowledge of right but do not live up to it) and thus begin the process of growth through repentance, but which cannot complete that process.  an awareness of the true meaning and source of that last sacrifice and its intent has the power, as Amulek says, "to bring about the bowels of mercy, which overpowereth justice, and bringeth about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance."

Eugene England - No Greater Need

We have no greater need than that there be a force of healing in all our public and inner strife: that there be some source of forgiveness and change for the oppressor as well as help for the oppressed; that there be something large enough in love to reach past the wrongs we each have done and can never fully make restitution for; that there be hope in the possibility that any man can be renewed by specific means to a life of greater justice and mercy toward others. But for most men the claim that such a possibility truly exists is scandalous.

Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer: The Gift of the Atonement"

It is nonsense to say that someone has a testimony apart from their actively and directly experiencing the power of the Atonement...Testimonies do not refer to objects or creeds.  They refer only to a living experience of what solicits their witness.  Testimonies are no accidental by-product of God's grace.  Rather, they are its indispensable embodiment....

To have a testimony of the Book of Mormon can only mean that through it one has experienced the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  The same follows for Joseph Smith, President Monson, tithing, the word of wisdom, the Church as an institution, etc.  To have a testimony of these things is to have experienced the Atonement in connection with them--nothing more, nothing less.  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of Joseph smith than Joseph Smith?  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of the Book of Mormon than Mormon?  We may be justified in making certain inferences about Joseph Smith, President Monson, or the Book of Mormon based on our experience of God's saving grace in connection with the, but this is not the same thing as having a testimony that refers directly to them.

In each instance, the message and the messenger are only as effective as they are transparent.  To claim otherwise is to claim for them something that they would not claim for themselves.  To claim otherwise is to exchange a testimony for a sign.  The moment when any person, object, doctrine, or principle detaches itself from the task of occasioning an experience of Christ's atonement is the moment when that thing becomes a sign, a dead limb splintered from the tree of life.  If adultery is a desire for sex without the demands of genuine intimacy, then the trouble with adultery is that it substitutes the sign of love for love itself.  In this sense, Joseph Smith was right to claim that every sign-seeker is undoubtedly an adulterer.  To want a testimony grounded in signs is to want the idea of a thing without the responsibility of submitting to the difficulty of the thing itself.  It is to want "a form of godliness" while "denying the power thereof" (2 Tim. 3:5).  Such is the perpetual temptation of religion.

In Mormonism, Christ's work of atonement is generally seenas operating on two related but distinct planes.  I propose that as a basic schema, we should see it as working on at least three planes.  Traditionally, Christ's atonement (1) gathers up and reunites human bodies with human spirits through the resurrection, and (2) reunites or reconciles human beings with God.  This is sound Biblical doctrine.  But in light of Joseph Smith's revelations, it seems essential to see the atonement as being at work on at least one additional plane: Christ catalyzes not only the reunion of bodies with spirits and humans with God but, additionally, he gathers and seals husbands to wives and parents to children.  Christ's work will not end until the whole human family has been gathered together in "one."

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 3-4

If the whole mission of Christ and His atonement is to enable change, to render repentance and personal transformation possible, to empower and sanctify, then what are we to say about the billions who have lived in obliviousness to such power and grace?  The question is not how can they be rescued from damnation, but how can the be elevated or ennobled, given their inability to participate in all that His grace makes possible?

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 95

While suffering may indeed be a soul-making process (some psychological research indicates this to be true), it is not inflicted for this “greater good.” Perhaps it is not that God allows our hearts to broken, but, in many cases, He simply cannot prevent it. But because of the love He has and the at-one-ment He seeks with us, His own heart is broken and yearns to heal both ours and His. Atonement is about unity, unity is about love, and love is about vulnerability.

Walker Wright, Mourn With Those Who Mourn: The Weeping God and Me

I sometimes call Centering Prayer "boot camp in Gethsemane," for it practices over and over, thought by thought, the basic gesture of Jesus' night of struggle in the garden: "Not my will be done, Oh Lord, but thine."

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24

To have an endless empathy, [Christ] would have to know a terror and abandonment and hopelessness beyond human conceiving, such that not mortal tongue could say, you don't know what I have known, you haven't been where I have been.  Exactly how this would be possible, who can say, but that is what He would have to experience.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 28

But the reconciliation that Jesus offers is not as distant from reconciling ourselves to the mixture of pain and joy in the world as we may at first think. Nailed to a cross, in the midst of his execution, he said "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lk. 23:34). He reconciled himself to his executioners though they had not repented of what they had done, though he had received no recompense for his suffering at their hands. He found the joy of reconciliation while yet in pain.

Jesus' reconciliation to his enemies did not require either their repentance or his heavenly reward. It happened in the midst of his suffering. That infinite, divine reconciliation ought to be our model of the reconciliation for which we aim both now and in the future. If we have taken Jesus' name on ourselves, we owe it to him and to our Christian covenant to identify ourselves with him to learn to be reconciled as he was, not after the fact of suffering but in it.

That does not mean allowing criminals to go free, refusing to hold them accountable for their crimes. It means, though, not allowing the need for justice to overcome the demand for reconciliation. Justice is an appropriate part of reconciliation, but we cannot refuse reconciliation because we are not yet satisfied that justice has been done. If vengeance is the Lord's and not ours (Dt. 32:5), then our demand for justice cannot be confused with a demand for vengeance. And when it is not, then it is compatible with reconciliation.

The Christian message is that reconciliation is possible, both now and, ultimately, in the presence of God. Jesus taught us that reconciliation does not mean the end of all pain, but the reconciliation of our pain with our love for others. That is certainly true in this life. Perhaps it is also true in the next. The promise is that families as narrow as a couple or as wide as the human race can be reconciled in their pain.

James Faulconer, "Reconciliation in Suffering," Patheos Blog