From owner-fiatlvx@cmns.think.com Tue Jun 11 13:02:32 1996 Received: from nova.unix.portal.com (nova.unix.portal.com [156.151.1.101]) by jobe.shell.portal.com (8.6.11/8.6.5) with ESMTP id NAA28797 for ; Tue, 11 Jun 1996 13:02:31 -0700 Received: from Cmns.Think.COM.Think.COM (Cmns.Think.COM [131.239.2.100]) by nova.unix.portal.com (8.6.11/8.6.5) with SMTP id NAA03407 for ; Tue, 11 Jun 1996 13:02:27 -0700 Received: by Cmns.Think.COM.Think.COM (4.1/Ultrix2.4-C) id AA11840; Tue, 11 Jun 96 15:51:08 EDT Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 15:50:49 -0400 From: FrJohn3@aol.com Message-Id: <960611155048_554079172@emout12.mail.aol.com> To: fiatlvx@cmns.think.com, fiatlvx-digest@cmns.think.com Subject: Re: Fiat_LVX_Digest V06 #5 Sender: owner-fiatlvx@cmns.think.com Precedence: bulk Reply-To: fiatlvx@cmns.think.com Status: RO > I am also asking myself how the doctrine of >vicarious atonement ( I.E. Christ died for your sake) enter the Christian >tradition. Elias (and all), Your question of where "Jesus died for your sins" comes into it is a good one. I go into this at length in my dissertation-in-progress _The Gifts of God: The Re-Mythologization of the Eucharist_. I'll be quoting from it here, and I'll try to keep it short. :-) The earliest understanding of atonement was just Jesus waking people up to the fact that the social and religious stratification of society was not God's idea, and that God loved and accepted even the most "unclean" of people and valued them equally with the religious elite (Jesus seems to suggest that God even likes the poor in spirit more than the pompous, but then Jesus liked hyperbole). Thus, the earliest theory of atonement was the radical egalitarianism modeled by Jesus that said that the common people were already at one with God and that it was the powerful and the elite that needed reconciliation (or to be "toppled from their thrones.") But since the imperialization of Christianity, there have been basically two theories of the atonement that really caught on: 1) the Divinization or Christus Victor tradition and 2) the Sacrificial or Penal theory. The Christus Victor is the earlier and still the theory embraced by Eastern orthodoxy. It arose out of the persecutions experienced by the early church. As their persecutions increased and Christ's return was delayed, the church began looking backwards at the story of Christ for their inspiration and encouragement. This they found in the Resurrection. Later to be termed the "Christus Victor" theory of the atonement, this tradition aided the early church by asserting that "suffering is a prelude to triumph and is in itself an illusion." [Brown/Parker in Brown/Bohn 5] In this tradition, Jesus is painted as "the conquering hero," recalling the Jews' anticipation of a militant messiah, but transporting the drama of the conflict to a more cosmic scale. Jesus sets himself up as bait for Satan, who "seeks to devour human beings." {Brown/Parker 5] When Jesus dies and is swallowed by death, he has craftily gained access to Satan's stronghold, the underworld. There, on his home turf, Satan is confronted with the messiah in all "his" glory, and is utterly overwhelmed and his power broken forever. In the West the Christus Victor theory of the atonement was supplanted by the "Satisfaction" theory, which was most definitively articulated by St. Anselm. According to Brown and Parker, the Satisfaction theory states that, "Because of sin, humanity owed a debt to God which it could not pay. Only by the death of God's own Son could God receive satisfaction... God's demand that sin be punished is fulfilled by the suffering of the innocent Jesus... God is portrayed as the one who cannot reconcile "himself" to the world becaues "he" has been royally offended by sin, so offended that no human being can do anything to overcome "his" sense of offense. Like Lear, God remains estranged from the children God loves because God's honor must be preserved... It is to free God that the Son submits to death, sacrificing himslef...out of overwhelming love for the two alienated parties: God and the human family." [Brown+Parker 7-8] Sometimes known as the "penal" theory of atonement, this view emphasizes the crucifixion and Christ's death as the crucial event in salvation history, rather than the resurrection. Far less abstract, this theology would have been much more easily grasped and assimilated by pagan converts in the "barbaric" West for whom animal sacrifice was a more familiar context to understand the Eucharist than neo-Platonism. As you might guess, I prefer the Eastern view. I think the absurdity of the sacrificial view of atonement would be much clearer if we weren't culturally conditioned to accept it as default reality. The question to ask about this, the "penal" theory of atonement is this: how can a God, who in Jesus told us that we were never to exact vengeance, that we were to forgive each other perpetually without retribution, demand of us behavior that God "himself" is unwilling or unable to perform? If God's sense of honor has been so offended by human sin God cannot stand to be in relationship with us, why can God not simply forgive as we are instructed to do, rather than mandating that some "innocent and spotless victim" bear the brunt of "his" resivoir of wrath? The ability of humans to do this when God will not or cannot logically casts humanity as God's moral superior. This is of course absurd! I hope I have not stepped on any toes. I bought the "penal" line for a long time, but I now see it as an oppressive theology, and inauthentic in light of Jesus' teaching. It might have some salvific content for men, who need to be taught to sacrifice, but not for women or oppressed people, for whom a theology of sacrifice is just another controlling agent to keep them under the thumbs of European men. IMHO, of course. Hope this wasn't too long! Fr. John R. Mabry (a white European male who is learning a lot about what it means to be the "Community of God.")