Theology Of Atonement Research Articles

Between Habbakuk and Locke: Pain, Debt, and Economic Subjectivation inParadise Lost

AbstractReaders of Paradise Lost have argued that the epic registers England’s nascent imperialism negatively through its associations of trade with Satan. This essay rethinks Paradise Lost’s relation to empire by tracing its involvement in the making of an early modern subjectivity that is constitutively informed by an awareness of debt, debit, and credit. That profane mode of thought later finds more enthusiastic expression in the early English novels of Daniel Defoe and others, but it begins to take shape in Milton, who derives it from none other than religious sources such as scripture, atonement theology, and nostalgia for purgatory. Despite its voiced misgivings about British commercialism, Paradise Lost thus participates in England’s historical growth from peripheral island to sprawling world empire.

The Atonement in Lukan Theology by John Kimbell

Reviewed by: The Atonement in Lukan Theology by John Kimbell Linda M. Maloney john kimbell, The Atonement in Lukan Theology (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014). Pp. xi + 199. £39.99. It is the obligation of a doctoral dissertation to state and defend a thesis. In The Atonement in Lukan Theology, which John Kimbell wrote under the direction of Thomas R. Schreiner for the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (2009), this duty is fulfilled in workmanlike fashion. K. states as his thesis that “Luke presents the death of [End Page 143] Jesus as an atoning death that brings about the forgiveness of sins” (p. 3) and proceeds through five chapters to leave no text unexamined in his quest to support that thesis. After the introduction, he writes in chap. 2 of “The New Covenant Sacrifice,” concentrating on the disputed Luke 22:19b–20 (“This is my body, which is given for you. . . . This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood”). K. favors the disputed text, which he believes supports his thesis. (This chapter was previously published as “Jesus’ Death in Luke-Acts: The New Covenant Sacrifice,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 16 [2012] 28–48.) There follow two more chapters on specific passages: chap. 3 treats Luke’s account of Jesus’ passion as affirmative of the atonement thesis; chap. 4 deals with the Isaian “Servant Song” and traces all appearances of the attribution of “servant” status to Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. The fifth chapter is a kind of catchall for “Additional Narrative Indicators,” including passages from both Luke and Acts on the need for and nature of salvation, Jesus’ proclamation on sin and forgiveness, what K. characterizes as “historical instances in Acts” and the preaching of the apostles as given there, baptism and baptism “with fire,” and texts about being “delivered into the hands of . . .” and being “hung on a tree.” In a brief conclusion, K. summarizes the findings and asserts that “it seems warranted to conclude that Luke’s theology of atonement is more robust and integral to his narrative than scholars have generally affirmed.” K. is certainly aware that he is in the minority in opting to find a theologia crucis in Luke’s Gospel and Acts rather than, or dominant over, a theologia gloriae; the latter is antithetical to his theological tradition, as he tacitly admits when he continues: “While it may be true that Luke uniquely emphasizes the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus as essential to the salvation of God’s people, it is also true that his narrative highlights the soteriological significance of Jesus’ death.” Echoing his opening, he writes that “Luke presents the death of Jesus as an atonement that provides for the forgiveness of sins, removes God’s wrath against his people, and restores them to fellowship with him” (quotations in this paragraph from p. 161). Thesis defended. There are some weak points in the exposition. For example, K. seems fixated on a one-to-one comparison between Jesus and the Isaianic “Servant,” touching not at all on the collective nature of that figure as posited by many modern scholars (and in fact repeatedly referring to that figure as an “individual”). Similarly, he dismisses in a footnote “the general claim by Joel Green and Mark Baker that ‘[t]he theory of penal substitutionary atonement allows a cultural norm particular to modern Western society, rather than the biblical narrative, to determine God’s nature and actions’” (p. 146 n. 30, quoting their Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000] 169). K. does so “on the basis of the above survey,” but his is a determinedly text-oriented examination that takes almost no account of changing cultural backgrounds. That is not the only instance in which potentially challenging arguments by contemporary scholars are relegated to the footnotes and dismissed without much comment. Kimbell writes at one point that “while Jewish Christians may have followed Mosaic customs through their participation in the temple cult, Luke does not draw attention to this” (really not? in Acts in particular?), “and it would be inconsistent with his narrative...

Recovering the Liturgical Background to Christian Atonement: The Approach of James Alison and Joseph Ratzinger

This essay explores a contemporary approach to Christian atonement theology based on the liturgical background to New Testament understandings of the Cross and Resurrection. This approach offers an important way of critiquing and undermining violently sacrificial understandings of the atonement that place the emphasis for violence on God, such as penal substitutionary theories. The essay outlines this liturgical approach to atonement theology based on the work of Joseph Ratzinger and James Alison, and as it is reflected in the New Testament. A liturgical approach captures the encounter- and event-nature of the atonement as presented in the New Testament, rather than theorizing the atonement into a rigid, rational system. We argue that Alison’s identification of atonement as humans undergoing Jesus’ atoning action as forgiving victim is complemented and deepened by Ratzinger’s Christological perspective that this atoning action involves becoming part of Christ’s sacrificial way of being, on the basis of a divine initiative.

Canonical understanding of the sacrifice of Isaac: The influence of the Jewish tradition

The Aqedah in Jewish tradition is an alleged theology for the sacrifice of Isaac which has an atoning concept and has influenced the atonement theology of the New Testament (NT), but it has not been proved by the NT. The purpose of this article is to investigate all verses in the NT that are alleged to refer to Abraham’s offering of Isaac. The reflections of Genesis 22 in the NT verses do not grant atoning power to the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham’s portrait suggests Christ as the Beloved Son, but the vicarious death of Jesus on the Cross is unrelated to Isaac in Genesis 22. Isaac is the type of Christ only in the preparation of death. Jesus as the Tamid lamb (not as the Paschal lamb) refers to Genesis 22 without granting expiation of sin by Isaac. The resurrection motif as well as the promise-fulfilment scheme referring to Genesis 22 also does not validate the Aqedah. Thus, the NT does not assume the Aqedah.Keywords: Aqedah; sacrifice of Isaac; Genesis 22; canonical interpretation; typology; OT-NT relation, Jewish tradition, Jewish influence on the NT

Voluntarism, Atonement, and Duns Scotus

The two most important concepts in Duns Scotus's (1265/6‐1308) theology of the Atonement are satisfaction and merit. Just what these amount to and how they function in his theory are heavily conditioned by two more general commitments: Scotus's voluntarism, which includes the claim that nearly all of God's relations with the created order are contingent; and his formulation of the Franciscan Thesis, which holds that fixing the sin problem is not the primary purpose of God's Incarnation in Christ and that if Adam hadn't sinned God would have become incarnate anyway. In this essay I will discuss the theoretical background of Scotus's atonement theology—his voluntarism and his version of the Franciscan Thesis—before moving on to discuss his understanding of merit and satisfaction, how these are related, and how they relate to the theoretical background. I will engage some important recent scholarly attempts to position Scotus's Atonement theology as not quite as anti‐Anselmian as history has characterized it, arguing that one of these attributes to Scotus an understanding of merit which cannot be Scotus's in fact, since it entails a restriction on divine freedom that Scotus certainly would reject.

Constance Maynard's Languages of Love

This article chronicles my almost twenty-year academic journey through the archives at Queen Mary University of London UK (QMUL) for the purpose of researching the life of Constance Maynard (1849–1935). Maynard helped to found Westfield College (now QMUL) as a Christian-based college providing women with new university degrees, and she was Mistress of it for thirty-one years. This article begins by reviewing the scholarly literature behind my queer-gender-sex framework for interpreting Maynard's often contradictory narratives in her diaries and autobiography. I then illustrate how these records are disclosures of her tribulations as an educational leader whose atonement theology shaped her life. This study of Maynard's records of her life experiences, especially her religious-secularist language(s) of love, contributes to reinterpretations of gender-sex-power binaries, when most Victorian women were supposed to be sexually pure, subservient, and confined to the home.

Atonement in Theology and Literature

Some theology of atonement and “at-one-ment” has talked in terms of love rather than justice or punishment, and the Oxford philosopher J. R. Lucas said that we need to be led out of our egocentric predicament by love. A study of George Eliot’s Silas Marner , Jane Austen’s Emma , Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment , and Ian McEwen’s Atonement reveals only partial truth in that adage, for human complexity resists being encapsulated in a neat theological formula. C. S. Lewis’s distinction of four kinds of love proves helpful in dealing with our ambiguities.

Economics and Ethics in the Victorian Novel

BLUMBERG, ILANA M. Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 260 pp. $69.95 hardcover. KREISEL, DEANNA K. Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 309 pp. $65.00 hardcover. SIEGEL, DANIEL. Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012. 209 pp. $49.95 hardcover. Despite the significant body of dedicated to economics and the history of the novel, there is still much work to be done exploring the dense interconnections between emerging capitalism and Victorian literature. Each of the three monographs that are the subject of this review offers original and important contributions to this critical terrain. All three explore how literary texts negotiate and narrativize complex ideas about economic structures and relationships. Although their theoretical commitments vary--theological and historicist for Blumberg, structuralist for Siegel, psychoanalytic and narratological for Kreisel--each is committed to practices of historicized interpretation, predicated on the assumption that literature contains, as Kreisel puts it, textual symptoms of its cultural and discursive context (15). Thus close textual readings illuminate how self-sacrifice shifts in the nineteenth century from a dominant cultural value to an ambivalent, morally ambiguous one (Blumberg); how condescension begins to take on its modern connotations as a patronizing power play that asserts rather than relinquishes superiority (Siegel); and how fears about the new capitalist system are embodied in novelistic images of feminized sexuality (Kreisel). In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, liana Blumberg argues that mid-century Victorians were faced with two competing ideologies--the of self-sacrifice enshrined through Christian theology and the ideal of self-interest promoted by the new capitalist order. The novelistic response, Blumberg argues, was a new ethical realism that incorporated self-interest and sacrifice, a negotiated truce between what Herbert Spencer would call a proper altruism and a reasonable (2). In wide-ranging readings of Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward, Blumberg explores how mid-century novelists developed various iterations of an ethic of mutual benefit (18), a practicable ethics that allowed authors to navigate the new economic realities of capitalism without eschewing the basic value of social generosity. For example, Adam Bede rejects unreasonable guilt and suggests that measured personal benefit is justifiable, in a world where others will continue to suffer (28). Looking back towards the first half of the century, Blumberg argues that the sensibility was dominant, promoted not only by Christian sermons and tracts but also bestselling novels and poetry, published eulogies and biographies of great men and women, accounts of war and empire, self-help manuals and housekeeping guides, treatises of political economy, the history of art, and literary criticism (3). Victorian Sacrifice does a particularly admirable job surveying the religious context of the mid-nineteenth century. The ethics of sacrifice were evident both in the dominance of Atonement theology--the emphasis on Christ's sacrifice to save humanity from their sins--and the pervasive, even ubiquitous, emphasis on personal sacrifice in imitation of Christ. As Blumberg makes a point of noting, even nonbelievers of the period were immersed in Christian ideology and often accepted the Christian value of sacrifice. She reads the Victorian ideology of duty, both Christian and secularized, as an extension of the sacrificial ideal, and describes how many of the new humanists adopted a renunciatory imperative (9) that read any taint of egoism as fundamentally incompatible with the social of altruism. …

The Rhetoric of Suffering, Hope, and Redemption in Masters of the Dew: A Rhetorical and Politico-Theological Analysis of Manuel as Peasant-messiah and Redeemer

Jacques Roumain’s 1944 peasant novel, Gouverneurs de la roséé ( Masters of the Dew, 1947) is not only a testament to stunning literary skill but also a masterwork of profound theological and philosophical reflection that articulates a robust humanistic and theo-political response to the problem of evil, suffering, pain, and poverty in the world. The objective of this article is twofold. First, it explores the intersections of the rhetoric of suffering, hope, and redemption in the novel. Second, it analyses Roumain’s creative theological construction of the atonement language and the presentation of Manuel Jean-Joseph as the Christ-figure and peasant-redeemer in the narrative. This article interprets Masters of the Dew’s atonement theology first in the light of René Gerard’s theory of scapegoating as articulated in his 1972 book, La violence et le sacré ( Violence and the Sacred, 1977), and, second, against the backdrop of the biblical story of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. I argue that Roumain intends the death of Manuel to be read as a vicarious atonement for the salvation and reconciliation of the community at Fonds Rouge in the same manner as New Testament writers understood the death of Jesus vicariously as a substitution for the sins and salvation of the world. Against the Girardian framework, I contend that Manuel’s death is depicted as a substitution for the peace of Fonds Rouge villagers and to prevent the cycle of violence from erupting among the peasants.

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

A Postmodern Reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Its Disclosure of a New Image of God and a New Understanding of Salvation

Under a hermeneutics of disclosure that prioritizes a subjective “ready-to-hand” relationship with the biblical text and, concomitantly, the ontological realities of solicitude and the knowing of a priori understanding, this article interprets Rom 1:17 and Gal 3:15–19 utilizing the literary-critical principles of a close reading of the text and consistency building. Paul’s perspective in Rom 1:17 is that the gospel, not the law, discloses God’s justice and its movement, “out of trust into trust,” is interpreted in relation to Gal 3:15–19 and the testament of inheritance that God established with Abraham and his seed, Christ. The law is relegated to a codicil, constituted by angels and added to the testament of inheritance through Moses’ mediation between God and Israel at Sinai. Its function is to raise to consciousness the infection of sin ( hamartia) and to serve as the guide to Christ, the end of the law. Christ, the testamentary heir, fulfilled its conditions by eradicating sin and making the benefits of the testament universally available. Accordingly, the phrase, “out of trust into trust,” implies the movement “from the trust of Abraham into the trust of Christ” and establishes the possibility of actualizing the justice of God and delivering the creation from its corruption. Luther and Calvin’s formulation of a law-oriented gospel, combined with their adoption of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin—that continues to dominate the interpretation of Romans—limited salvation to God’s accreditation of dikaiosynê (usually translated as “righteousness”) to those who receive Christ into their lives. Their theology of atonement, determined by their law-oriented gospel, presupposed a punitive God who was compelled to inflict the punishment of law-transgressing humanity upon God’s Son in order to satisfy God’s law-directed retribution. The result: a gospel of individual salvation without commitment to the actualization of God’s justice.

Living Well and Dying Faithfully: Christian Practices for End-of-Life Care. Edited by JOHN SWINTON and RICHARD PAYNE. Foreword by STANLEY HAUERWAS.

Christians have a postmodern problem with death that is altogether more prosaic than the great mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of our faith. It is that the personal autonomy of our age has spawned the notion that we should be allowed the consumerist choice of the timing and manner of our deaths through voluntary euthanasia, or ‘assisted dying’, as it is sometimes called. This has led notably to two kinds of response. On the one hand, we have the emergence of the Christian apologist for euthanasia, in the shape of the Reverend Professor Paul Badham of University of Wales, Lampeter, whose case is based on the imperative of compassion and a woefully inadequate reading of the Golden Rule, as extrapolated from Matt. 7:12. Meanwhile, Christian polemicists paint themselves into the other corner of theodicy, where they are forced by the pro-euthanasia lobby to justify human suffering and protracted, painful death in the context of atonement theology and the hermeneutics of the cross.

The Portrayal of Peter and Atonement Theology in the Gospel of John

Abstract Three scenes in the Gospel of John, the foot-washing episode (13:2–11), the narrative of the denial prediction (13:33–38), and the account of Peter cutting off the ear of the high priest's servant (18:8–11), characterize Peter as one who resists the idea that Jesus should take up the role of good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. These scenes link with the Gospel's ὑπέρ texts. Their consistent portrayal of Peter forms part of the Gospel's presentation of the significance of Jesus' death.

The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement – Edited by Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker

The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement – Edited by Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker

The Theology of Atonement in Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism Viewed Through Hymnody

Abstract: The last twenty years have seen a resurgence in dialogue between Lutheranism and Eastern Orthodoxy, especially as the dialogue pertains to deification, known as theosis. For Eastern Orthodox Christians, theosis is one way to describe atonement. This paper approaches the theology of atonement through the lens of each tradition's hymnody. Although the images in the hymns are not identical, their themes are similar enough to reinforce the present‐day dialogue between these two traditions.

The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880-1930 David Wright The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930. James Opp. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. 278. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper In 1988, a San Francisco cardiologist, Randolph Byrd, published the results of an experiment in which he asked born-again Christians to pray for people hospitalized in a coronary care unit, comparing them with patients not targeted for prayer. He concluded that those who were prayed for needed fewer drugs and less help breathing. His research on the medical effects of 'intercessory prayer' provoked a firestorm of scientific debate and international media attention, striking, as it did, at the heart of scientific evidence and the nature of healing. This controversial episode in medical science comes to mind when reading James Opp's The Lord for the Body. Throughout the nineteenth century, as medicine began to rise in prominence and marginalize divine explanations for ill-health, disease, and death, devout Christians attempted to show the practical importance of prayer in an increasingly secularized world. One of the attempts to bridge the medical and miraculous was the faith healing movement. [End Page 170] Opp details how faith healing appeared to take off in the 1880s and 1890s in Protestant, anglophone Canada. Adherents varied in their background and religious affiliation, but there were fascinating, if ephemeral, connections to the Salvation Army, Christian Science, and medical sects such as homeopathy and hydropathy. As the author demonstrates, the early practice of faith healing was highly gendered and spatially circumscribed. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, women ministered to other women in private domestic spaces, recounting and framing their spiritual and bodily transformations in healing narratives. The publication of such faith-healing tracts facilitated the development of informal networks in the northeastern United States, networks that ultimately cascaded into Ontario and the Maritimes. The coalescing of groups into the Christian Alliance formalized faith healing as a movement, even if the expressions and practices were diverse and often obscured from public attention. At this time, many 'respectable' members of society were drawn to this apparent attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific advances with traditional beliefs in the power of prayer. By the 1920s, however, the social geography and culture of faith healing had changed dramatically. Prominent evangelists took faith healing on the road, engaging in huge public spectacles of divine invocation, replete with raucous music and mass audience participation. This very public rendering of faith healing in large indoor arenas across North America elicited greater criticism from mainstream clergy than the more private and restrained practices extant a generation earlier. Moreover, the insistence of the later generation of faith healers to forego most types of conventional medical intervention – including vaccination and drugs – would lead, in tragic circumstances, to court cases of negligence for failing to provide the 'necessaries of life.' The new medical surveillance of the state, the author argues, dared not condone the flagrant non-participation of its citizens in the new public health agenda of the twentieth century. The Lord for the Body contributes as much, if not more, to our understanding of the history of health and medicine as it does to our knowledge of ecclesiastical debates about atonement theology and the rise of Protestant denominations such as Pentecostalism. Opp's examination of 'healing narratives' and 'narrative networks' provides a rare, if fleeting, glimpse into domestic health care in the late nineteenth century. He argues that faith healing stood increasingly marginalized as the germ theory of disease moved the cultural understanding of illness from the bedroom into the laboratory, just as medical technologies were shifting birth, death, and surgery into the [End Page 171] formal hospital. New ways of seeing illness and the body introduced new medical truths that could not easily be reconciled with the often mystical tropes of healing narratives or the onstage theatre of divine healers. It is not surprising, then, that the author insists that the ultimate goal of his book is to 'analyse the cultural practice of divine healing within the context of a broader...

The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement – Edited by Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker

The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement – Edited by Derek Tidball, David Hilborn, and Justin Thacker

Towards a relational and trinitarian theology of atonement

A relational understanding of the Trinity does not lead to the abandonment of judicial metaphors for the atonement but provides a context for them. The Trinity places relationships at the heart of the moral order. Relationships involve obligations, and the cross was the triune God’s response of love to humanity’s violation of our relational obligations towards him. Both God’s judgment on sin and God’s salvation from sin are personal acts. A Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s two natures enables us to understand Jesus’ death as the self-substitution of God for humanity and as the representative death of the perfect man, offering himself through the Spirit, on behalf of humanity. Those who are, by the Spirit, in Christ are in restored relationship with God.

The Struggle to Find Life

Abstract In the winter of 2002, the ministers and some of the lay leadership of Judson Memorial Church in New York City read Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker's book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. The book inspired a Lenten preaching and discussion series at Judson on the subject of atonement theology. In response to these Lenten conversations, when Rev. Karen H. Senecal breaks the bread and pours the wine at the communion table instead of reciting the more traditional sacrificial words of institution-“This is my body, broken for you”-she retells the Road to Emmaus story-“Their eyes were opened, and they recognized their friend and leader in the breaking of bread”-as a way to uphold the life affirming aspects of Jesus' ministry. This is an adaptation from sermon “The Struggle to Find Life” which was delivered at Judson Memorial Church by Rev. Karen H. Senecal on March 10, 2002.

Book Review: King, Priest and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement

Book Review: <b>King, Priest and Prophet:</b> A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement