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False Choices on the Atonement Date 2009/6/28 9:50:00 | Topic: Theology, Research ...

False Choices on the Atonement Robert Hart http://anglicancontinuum.blogspot.com/ June 28, 2009 The following are offered as statement of undeniable fact. 1. The Church has always taught and known from Scripture that Christ's offering of himself was the kippor (atonement) typified by the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, as foretold most clearly in the Suffering Servant passage (Isaiah 52:13-53:12), and by his title Lamb of God. 2. The Church has always taught and known from Scripture that Christ's offering of himself was forensic, because God's Law is perfect justice. Therefore, our salvation required a sacrificial victim (as it proved to be, the self-offering from love). 3. The Church has always taught and known from Scripture that Christ's offering of himself was a ransom to free those held hostage to sin and death. 4. The Church has always taught and known from Scripture that Christ's offering of himself was the victory, as Christus Victor; and that it is one act with his resurrection. In modern times, theological writers have set points 1 and 2 against points 3 and 4. In this scenario points 1 and 2 are attributed to St. Anselm and considered to be uniquely western, whereas points 3 and 4 are considered to be uniquely eastern. Furthermore, in this modern scenario that reinvents history, Anselm is believed to have written that God was infuriated with us until Jesus pacified the Father's rage. In even worse misrepresentations of Anselm, God is said to have taken pleasure, in the modern sense of the word, from his Son's crucifixion. Of course, these last two ideas are expressed with most certain conviction by those who, apparently, do not know Anselm from Popeye the Sailor Man. His writing very clearly sets forth the Atonement as the will of the whole Trinity (for God had one will), and therefore Christ's self-offering as the manifestation of the love of God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost (as St.Paul taught, Rom.5:8). The images of God the Father as a raging tyrant pacified or pleased (in the modern sense of the word) by his Son's agonies, has never been western theology at all, and was never taught by Anselm. Use of Biblical language that is metaphorical, such as "wrath," does not change this fact. Having read the Bible over and over since I was 14 (and I am now, in 2009, 51), and having studied for well over three decades the teaching of the Church, east and west from Antiquity forward, it is obvious to me that all four points are true, and that the people who insist that we must choose between either 1 and 2 or 3 and 4, suffer from deficiency of logic or from blind spots in their knowledge of the Bible. Also, the same people, on both sides, suffer from apparent gaps in their Patristic literacy, knowing only the works that present either one view or the other. Such is a weak knowledge of the ancient writers. Those who make us choose between these Biblical revelations, known and taught by the Church, require that we limit our appreciation, and even our understanding, of the fullness of God's word to man. If we know only Christus Victor, and not the Lamb of God, then we know nothing of our own sinfulness from which we were saved by God's mercy. If we know only the Suffering Servant who bears the righteous requirement of the Law for us, and not the victorious Christ also, we cannot look ahead to the Day when the saints will be glorified as partakers of the Divine Nature by grace. Why must we choose? Why must we neglect our full heritage for only half the story? Is it to keep division alive and well? Is it to maintain enmity in the household of God, treating bitterness as a sacred thing, to be guarded at all costs against the threat of unity, and the danger of healing? Is it to defend bad theses written by young scholars who, having reached an advanced age and reputation, cannot admit that the young men they were can be corrected by the old men they have become? Or, is it just Satanic, an effort to make sure nobody can preach the whole Gospel with power and conviction? Frankly it is one reason I remain a convinced Anglican. I can embrace it all, and I refuse the false choice that would require me to throw half the Gospel away. ---Robert Hart is Priest in Charge of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and a contributing editor of Touchstone, A Journal of Mere Christianity.