« February 2008 | Main | August 2008 »
May 23, 2008
Soteriology
Soteriology is a branch of theology dealing with salvation, what Jesus accomplished by his life, death and resurrection. It is central to the Christian message. In the church today, the issue is well settled. For Christians on the left, Christ's death is explained either as a demonstration of self-giving love, or as martyrdom for their (the leftist's) political cause. For the left, Christianity is primarily a social and political movement.
On the more numerous center and right, Jesus died for our sins, to pay for our sins, to suffer the punishment due to us for our sins. Most denominations emphasize the grace of God in this self-giving sacrifice but some fundamentalists emphasize the depravity of mankind which necessitated the sacrifice.
I. An Alternate Explanation
In my old church, the month before I moved to Florida, I was asked to give the short message preparing for communion. What better thing to talk about than remembering what Christ accomplished? So I gave a short message about Christ's death and resurrection. The result was dead silence and no interest from the congregation, but later in the month at a men's meeting the Pastor and the senior elder prayed that I would not be led astray by too much scholarship or confused about the Christian message by my academic interest in the Bible.
What I had done was to offer an alternate explanation of why Christ died. First I looked at the creation story in Genesis 1 (verses 26-30):
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness;
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."
So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
I regard the creation accounts in Genesis first and foremost as theology, and from this passage I conclude that God has created a kind of four-tier world, with God at the top, then humans exercising dominion over animals and plants, then animals over plants, using plants for food (verse 30). [There are myriad sermons about humans being in the image of God. Biblically "image of God" relates to the exercise of dominion.]
In the passage not a whole lot is said about God being at the top of the hierarchy. It is assumed. But if anybody misses that point, we get the story of Adam and Eve in the immediately following chapters. So God's original plan is for humans to exercise awesome authority, within the constraints of His will.
The story of Adam and Eve introduces the serpent, whom Christians regard as the deceiver, the adversary, the devil. There is a spiritual dimension to reality, and the gospels assume it is populated by evil spirits as well as those of God. Prof. Chuck Kraft's book "I Give You Authority" makes it clear Jesus has authority over spirits, and when we follow Jesus as Lord, we do to.
I hope to do a review of Kraft's book soon in this blog. In any event Kraft's biblical theology shows the spirit dimension is part of the hierarchy God designed, and is lower than and subject to man in the original plan. When man gets outside God's will, the hierarchy fails. Spirits deceive and torment us and the environment is no longer in harmony. The world is a mess and humans are miserable.
The great challenge to God's order, the great challenge in history from God's perspective, is for humans to choose to follow God's plan, to exercise dominion within the constraints of His will. Now you and I might just say, "Okay, we'll go along with God's design." But we and our forefathers have failed so often, so consistently, that the commitment must be tested. A man must be found who will demonstrate that he places God's will above his own even in the greatest trials and deceptions, temptations and torment.
Jesus Christ was that man. His accomplishment was to always place the Father's will above his own, when he was famished after his fast, when he was tempted in the wilderness, when he was betrayed by Judas and abandoned by most of the disciples, when he was falsely accused, when he was tortured by Roman soldiers and when he was crucified. "Not my will but thine," he prayed.
Because Jesus always placed the Father's will above his own, God's original plan and humanity's role in that plan, could be implemented. Jesus was righteous so God was just when He raised him from the dead to eternal life. Jesus now lives and reigns over all things in heaven and over those on earth who acknowledge him as Lord. The day is coming when what is true in heaven will be true throughout the earth. Now we who acknowledge Jesus as Lord are also in harmony with God's design for creation. The Kingdom of God will become the embodiment of God's design for creation.
So from our personal perspective, yes, Jesus died for our sins. We are estranged from God because we do not always put His will above our own. Jesus, through his life and death, enables us to be acceptable to God, and his resurrection both shows the richness of that blessing and makes Jesus a vital force in our lives today.
From the perspective of overall human history, Jesus' life, death and resurrection were a triumph in which a "second Adam" or "final Adam" fulfilled God's plan and intention for His creation. Now, by acknowledging Jesus as Lord of our lives, we all have the opportunity to live in fellowship with God, exercising dominion over creation.
II. A Brief History of Soteriology
When I converted to Christianity in my early 30s, the two ideas of the atonement I describe at the start of this blog entry were all that I was exposed to.
Because I was over 30 (barely), had two university degrees, had a rather independent and studious personality, and wanted to be totally confident in the truth and efficacy of this new faith I was exploring, I resolved to study and understand the Bible and the Christian faith.
I read the New Testament, starting at Matthew 1:1 and to my surprise neither theory of the atonement was directly expressed. What the church, at least the more conservative church which preached the Christ-died-for-your-sins message, presented as the crux of the faith, was somehow hidden or stuck in the back pages. Today with hindsight and experience, I know where to find passages that support the theology. Also, if you're already convinced of the theology, reading the New Testament will not make you change your mind. But but the message wasn't there front and center. Instead Jesus focused on something called the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God. What was going on?
I was very fortunate that Indianapolis has an academically excellent graduate seminary, Christian Theological Seminary (CTS), which allowed lay people such as myself to audit classes for a nominal fee. I enrolled in a series of Bible classes over several years.
One New Testament class specifically addressed soteriology and we studied a book entitled Christus Victor, by Gustaf Aulen. Sadly I no longer have the book because I loaned it to another student who never returned it. It is out of print. So I must speak from memory.
Aulen was a Swedish Lutheran bishop writing in the 1930s. He speaks for himself, not the Lutheran church. His book is essentially an historical study of how Christians explained the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection. Aulen identified three major theories:
- The Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement
This theory was presented in 1099 by Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury, in his book Why God Became Man, (Cur Deus Homo as it was written in Latin). You can still buy Cur Deus Homo from Amazon.com and the book is available on the internet (the copyright expired about 8 centuries ago). It's very short and clearly written. Interestingly it contains no citations to scripture.
Anslem employs various metaphors. There is the idea of debt and satisfaction of debt. What we owe God is to be subject to His will. When we sin, that creates a debt to God, a debt which must be repaid. But it is not enough just to repay. At this point Anslem slides into a metaphor reminiscent of criminal law; in some sense sin injures God so it is not enough to pay the debt. We "must give back even more than we took away because of the injury inflicted."
Sin, even more seriously, dishonors God. This evokes the metaphor of feudalism. Circa 1100 AD western Europe's social and political order was based on feudalism. Society had a strict hierarchy and everyone owed duties to those above them. The king was at the top of the pyramid. In this system honor was the most important commodity. So God was like a feudal king to whom all owed honor and fealty. Our sins impugned God's honor, and when we dishonored God it was a very grave offense.
Anselm then addresses the logical question, God can do whatever He wants so why doesn't He just remit sin by mercy alone? Anselm's response was, sin without punishment means "something inordinate is allowed to pass" and it is "not seemly for God to let pass something inordinate in His kingdom." Hence it was necessary, in order to "pay" for sin, to sacrifice the life of a perfect man.
This made sense to people living in a feudal system, and the theory has great staying power. It makes sense to a lot of people today. The satisfaction theory is sometimes called the objective theory of the atonement because it addresses an objective problem, the grave consequences of sin.
- The Subjective Theory of the Atonement
This theory was espoused by Abelard, a professor of theology at the University of Paris, a decade or two after Anslem. In the middle ages theology was the premier academic area of study and Paris had the greatest of the universities.
Abelard is most famous for his love affair with Heloise. He was a professor in his mid 30s (middle aged by the standard of the day) and she was a precocious 13 year old attending classes at the university, the niece and ward of a prominent local churchman. They became lovers and Heloise gave birth to a son. Her uncle was furious. Without interference they would have lived happily ever after, but the uncle hired ruffians who mutilated Abelard's sex organs. Heloise joined a convent and Abelard became a monk. They corresponded by letter, and those letters are some of the earliest records of romantic love.
Back to theology, Abelard argued Jesus made his self-giving sacrifice to demonstrate his love for us and to motivate us, by example, to love God and our fellow man, and to live sacrificially for others. The purpose of the sacrifice was subjective, to affect our attitudes, values and goals.
- Christus Victor
This is the historical theory which Gustaf Aulen, the author, favored, although nobody in the Lutheran Church agreed with him. Aulen cites various early church fathers and shows that before Anselm the church regarded Christ's death and resurrection as a victory over sin, death, and the devil. Jesus obviously triumphed over sin because he did not sin. Because he was righteous, death had no power over him. And further, they theorized, the devil believed he had triumphed when Jesus was crucified, but then was shocked to realize his utter defeat, when Jesus was resurrected.
To elaborate just a little, the idea is that our sin - and we all sin - gives the devil power and authority over us. In a sense were are all trapped in the devil's realm. Jesus came to change all that. The devil recognized Jesus as God's anointed, and believed if he (the devil) could destroy Jesus' ministry and Jesus himself, then the devil would face no more challenge to his evil rule over this world. Only too late the devil realized, at the time of the resurrection, that because Jesus was utterly righteous the grave, death, could not hold him. Now nothing could stop the resurrected, living Jesus from establishing the reign of God. As more and more people acknowledge Jesus as Lord of their lives, the kingdom of God will continue to expand. The devil was facing ultimate destruction.
III. My Comments on the Three Theories
Anselm.
Pro: The satisfaction theory of the atonement is triumphant in all but the most liberal churches today. The New Testament says Christ died for our sins, and Anselm is regarded as providing the details on why that was necessary and how it works. The theory is so widely accepted that it has become one of the defining concepts of Christianity.
The theory is internally logical, straightforward, and easy to explain.
The theory focuses on Jesus' crucifixion, which is the same focus as the gospels. The gospels devote about half their chapters to Jesus' last week of life.
The theory focuses on how people are saved, rather than big picture topics like history from God's perspective or inaugurating the kingdom of God. Like the T shirt slogan says, "It's all about me."
As you read the New Testament you find verses that seem to support the theory. In Matthew 1:21 the archangel tells Joseph to take Mary as his wife and to name her baby Jesus, "for he will save his people from their sins." [Jesus in Hebrew means savior.] Luke's gospel describes the resurrected Jesus explaining the scriptures to his disciples saying, "... repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations" (24:47). In the gospel of John, John the Baptist sees Jesus coming and says, "Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (1:29).
In Acts, a book on the history of the very early church, several sermons urge listeners to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38, 3:19, 10:43, 13:38, 22:16).
The theory gets its strongest support from Romans chapter 3. Paul says "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (3:23). The remedy for Jews and gentiles is the same, salvation through Jesus Christ, whose death provides atonement (3:25).
Finally in 1 Corinthians 15:3 Paul comes right out and says it, "Christ died for our sins."
So what's not to like about the satisfaction theory?
Con: There are two general groups of issues to explore with the satisfaction theory: theoretical / theological issues, and how well it fits with scripture.
a. Anselm does not cite scripture. He presents his theory as a work of intellectual analysis, explaining why incarnation and blood sacrifice were necessary. Several features of the theory trouble me.
For Anselm, sin is an issue between us and God. It is a matter of our bad conduct causing harm to God, which God then insists must be paid for or somehow compensated for. Biblical complexity is lost. From the New Testament it is true that sin separates us from God, but there is also a sense that sin is a force that entangles and binds us, from which we need to be freed. In addition sin makes us vulnerable to oppression and abuse by the evil one.
By removing the devil from the picture and narrowing the cast of characters to two, sinning mankind and the one high trinitarian God, Anslelm sets the stage for the modern viewpoint that there is no spiritual dimension to everyday reality. Salvation is an objective matter of debt and payment. This is different from the New Testament understanding of reality.
Because our own bad conduct breaches a duty to God and makes Christ's death necessary, the satisfaction theory makes guilt a much more prominent emotion and motivation than was previously the case.
According to Anselm God is inflexible; in a way He is not even sovereign in His own domain. God cannot violate His own rules. He cannot act with mercy and forgiveness, unless an appropriate blood sacrifice is made. This is inconsistent with the Old Testament, where God forgave Abraham, David, and many more, even the nation of Israel after the Babylonian exile. If we accept Anselm, the God of the Old Testament is more merciful, gracious and loving than God as portrayed in the New Testament!
Finally Anselm ignores the resurrection, and focuses exclusively on the crucifixion. The New Testament almost always mentions the two together. The resurrection is the crowning event of Christ's ministry on behalf of mankind.
In fairness to Anselm he was doing what theologians and missionaries do routinely, that is explain the gospel to a local culture which differs from the culture of Judea in the First Century. If missionaries go to a newly discovered tribe in New Guinea or the Amazon, they have to figure out new ways to explain the gospel so that it is understandable to the people. I'm not sure what the word is for that process, I call it contextualizing the gospel.
It's not just missionaries to backward tribes who do this. I remember various books in seminary. One was by a former missionary to Japan, who tried to develop a theology to explain Jesus to a shame-based culture, as distinct from our western guilt-based one. I recall a book that made Christianity acceptable to existentialists, a philosophy that was pervasive in Europe in the mid 20th Century. I also recall a book by Jurgen Moltmann, a German theologian, explaining Christianity to people who accepted the philosophy of Hegel. In the US nobody cares about Hegel but evidently in Germany a great many university-educated people believe that philosopher. Also liberation theology is Christianity for marxists, and so on.
Anselm did a fine job making the gospel plausible to feudal society. My assertion is he succeeded beyond all imagination, and now the satisfaction theory makes it difficult to read the New Testament with understanding.
b. Scriptural issues. Even if Anselm does not cite scripture, supporters today claim the doctrine is based on the Bible. In any event Protestants must test the theory by measuring it against scripture.
The theory is really important, so if it's biblical it should be right up front, explained early and in detail in the first books of the New Testament. It is not. It's just not enough to have one reference in Matthew which seems to have more to do with explaining Jesus' name than describing the purpose of his ministry, or putting the topic off in Luke until near the end of the book, after God raised Jesus from the dead.
John the Baptist's exclamation in John ("Behold the lamb of God...") is a curious statement. In the Old Testament a goat, not a lamb, was sacrificed for sin. In John, Jesus is portrayed as the passover lamb (among many other metaphors). The passover lamb was slaughtered not as a sin offering but in preparation for a ritual feast that signified the solidarity of God's people, and to provide blood for a sign (on the doorpost) so the angel would not kill their firstborn. John was employing an evocative but mixed metaphor that is not about paying for debts or crimes.
Speaking of John the Baptist, both Mark and Luke say he proclaimed "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" Mark 1:5, Luke 3:3. This was separate from any kind of sacrifice, years before the crucifixion.
The New Testament says a lot about sin and forgiveness of sin. If you assume the theory explains what sin is all about, the New Testament supports the theory. But that assumption is hard to hold on to because the New Testament does not use Anselm's words and concepts. Sin is not explained as a breach of duty to God, or as dishonor to God. Neither Christ nor the gospel writers explain Christ's ministry as coming to "pay for" sin. So the theory doesn't hit the biblical bulls eye.
Even in Romans where chapter 3 provides the strongest support for the satisfaction theory, chapters 5 - 8 talk about sin and death "exercising dominion" over humanity. In chapter 5 Paul introduces his idea of Jesus as a second or final Adam, negating the consequences of the Adam's fall. These Pauline concepts are more consistent with the Christus Victor theory than the satisfaction theory.
It is Paul who writes in Galatians 1:4 "... the Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to free us from the present evil age..." and wrote in Colossians 1:13 "He [God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son." I don't claim to fully understand Paul, but he says enough about alternate powers and forces oppressing us that I think his letters are at least as supportive of the Christus Victor theory as the satisfaction theory.
Abelard.
Pro: The subjective theory makes God a nice guy. It avoids the sin-guilt-God of wrath-blood sacrifice complex of ideas that is offensive to civilized folks. Also, there are many New Testament passages which encourage us to live with consideration for others, and to be like Christ.
Con: Almost nothing in the Bible indicates the primary purpose of Christ's death was intended to be emotional or attitudinal.
Another serious problem is this. Logically, Christ's death had to have some underlying purpose. You do not sacrifice your life for no reason other than theater or emotional expression. You have to perceive that your sacrifice in some way, hopefully some important way, benefits the people you love, on whose behalf the sacrifice is made. Abelard doesn't say what it is Christ's death accomplishes, other than demonstrating the emotion of love. Maybe what it accomplishes is payment for sin, in which case Abelard is just a footnote to Anselm's theory. Maybe there's something else going on; I don't know what.
Christus Victor.
Before we get into pros and cons, we need to consider how to "do" theology. I've already committed to the idea that doctrine has to be consistent with and supported by scripture. But there are (at least) two ways to do that. One is to use high level reasoning, like Anselm, working with accepted ideas of the church which are generally biblical. Anselm worked with concepts like the incarnation, the Trinity, and the biblical statement that Christ died for our sins. Perhaps he perceived a flaw in the Christus Victor theory in that it gave too much of a role to the devil. From his broad scope analytical process he developed a new theory which he expressed in metaphors understandable to 12th Century western Europeans.
The Christus Victor theory, on the other hand, sort of grew up out of knowledge of the New Testament and early church traditions. It was neither developed nor expressed systematically. The idea of conflict between two kingdoms, the kingdom of God which Jesus was working to establish, and "this present evil age" which opposed and impeded him, fits very well with Matthew, Mark, Luke-Acts, and Paul's letters. As far as the details, the devil's role, and various logical interconnections, well, they weren't sufficiently developed to satisfy medieval theologians.
I hope the words I use do not confuse the issue; I would say Anselm used a deductive process starting with a few first principles then reasoning to develop the full theory. Christus Victor came from an inductive process, building on numerous biblical passages to infer a general view of what Jesus' ministry was about.
Deductive, systematic theology has reigned supreme in the church from the middle ages pretty much up to the present. When I was in seminary in the 90s students were just beginning to become disenchanted with the requirement of three semesters of Systematics, and Systematic Theology professors were responding with fewer lectures on grand concepts and more on current social and political issues.
In my opinion the prestige of Systematic Theology has diminished because so much has been learned about the Bible in the last century or so that the inductive method of doing theology offers a great deal of promise, even of power if you agree ideas are powerful.
The "Pro" of the Christus Victor theory is that it is more consistent with the New Testament than the other two historical theories. The "Con" is that so much scholarship and insight into the Bible text has developed in recent centuries that the theory could benefit from much updating and modification.
- [I need to offer many Bible verses to show how this theory is grounded in scripture] -
I need a whole additional blog entry to summarize advances in understanding the New Testament, and to round out or update that theory. Speaking generally, if you want to "be saved" - if you want the benefits of Christianity in this world and the next - you need to place God's will above your own (Anselm is right about that), believe Jesus was raised from the dead, that he lives and reigns, acknowledge him as lord of your life, and generally be connected to / affiliated with him.
Posted by rob at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)