Christ Our Victim: Nonviolent Atonement

In Friday’s post, we looked at the atonement perspective known as substitutionary atonement. We saw how it carried on with St. Anselm’s innovations in the doctrine, and pushed them further. It’s a perspective that focused on God’s justice, the seriousness of the problem of sin, and the great lengths God would go to resolve that problem. And it spread quickly through the Christian West, becoming not only the default perspective, but practically the only perspective in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology. But, despite its popularity, it has some serious weaknesses: It misrepresents God’s justice as something in conflict with God’s love, rather than fully united with it; it paints God more as a blood-thirsty tyrant bent on punishment than the loving Father revealed in Jesus’ teachings; it misunderstands Second Temple Judaism and the nature and function of sacrifice in the Old Testament; and, it minimizes Paul’s theology of salvation, which is based in the idea of participation, not substitution. More to the point, it tells us that an infinite, all-loving, all-powerful God is unable to forgive without restitution, something which we finite, wishy-washy, and weak humans are commanded to do. In light of these weaknesses and in the aftermath of the Second World War, an alternative emerged in the last half of the twentieth century, called the nonviolent atonement. The name does not mean that the cross was not violent, but rather that this perspective understands that the atonement embodies and embraces a commitment and demonstration of the principle of nonviolence.

The catalyst for a significant shift in Christian atonement theology came in the form of the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. There had always been a kind of Christian, nonviolent ‘minority report’ about God, politics and violence, that monks and nuns, and Mennonites and Quakers had held to for centuries. But, after two devastating World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the midst of the Cold War and its global proxy wars and grim specter of nuclear annihilation and Mutually Assured Destruction, people were increasingly fed up with violence and wondered if there was a better way. And, many Christians who had only ever been exposed to the satisfaction and substitution understandings of the cross, where our salvation is effected by a divinely sanctioned act of violence, wondered whether their faith might even be part of the problem instead of part of the solution. The stories we tell and value about ourselves and the world have a tremendous impact on how we view the world and our sense of right and wrong. If God sanctions the murder of Jesus for our benefit, might that lead us to think it’s okay to harm others for whatever our idea of ‘the greater good’ might be? (Of interest, while correlation is not the same thing as causation, I think it has to give us pause that studies have demonstrated a correlation in North American society between belief in substitutionary atonement and the approval of torture.)

These Christians dove into their Scriptures, and especially the Gospels. What they encountered when they looked at the Gospel with this new set of questions, was not a kind of “left-wing agenda,” or the glib, milquetoast sentimentality of classic nineteenth-century liberal theology, but Jesus himself, a Jesus who said it is the meek, the humble, those who mourn who are blessed, who proclaimed that neither sin nor holiness are just about outward acts but rather about the disposition of heart underlying them, who commanded those who follow him not to strike back when attacked but to turn the other cheek, and if pressed to walk one mile to walk two instead. They encountered the Jesus who, when tempted in the wilderness, refused to demand what was rightfully his and refused to do the right thing the wrong way, who, during his arrest, healed the man whom Peter had attacked; and, who forgave those who crucified him. As the first Epistle of Peter puts it: “When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly” (1 Peter 2.23). For Jesus — for the God Jesus reveals — one wrong cannot be made right by another. One unjust act cannot create justice out of injustice. Surely this vision of justice must influence how we understand what happened on the Cross.

For me, the most helpful text that provides a window into what a nonviolent atonement might look like is one I reflected on just a few weeks ago: the Parable of the Vineyard. In this story, a landowner builds and tends to a beautiful vineyard and leases it out to tenants, who then not only refuse to return the share they owe him, but attack those he sends to collect it. It culminates with the landowner sending his son and heir; but they end up murdering him. If we translate this story into the realm of salvation history, we get something like this: God has created a beautiful and abundant world and placed humanity in it to tend to it and work it. In return, humanity is to offer back our gratitude in the form of the good fruit of good and holy lives, lived in faithful, reciprocal relationships to God, each other, and the world. But, instead of doing this, we have instead born bad fruit and broken relationships. God sent prophets to try to right the ship, but not only did we not respond to their message, but we also rejected and attacked them. Finally, God sent the Son, to show us again how to live faithfully, and to speak truth to power, only to have him rejected, attacked, and killed. But God raised him from the dead, vindicating him, revealing that his way is the true way, and the ways of human violence and finger-pointing don’t work. So in the story Jesus tells, the Son’s death is not God’s action to solve the problem of sin, but is instead humanity’s greatest act of rejection and rebellion against God. It is God taking upon Godself the worst abuse and rejection — the worst sin — humanity can offer, an act of solidarity with all of the victims of the ways of this world. His death is a sacrifice, but it is not one one offered up by God to God, but by sinful humanity falsely in God’s name. But this is not the end of the story; for the one abused and rejected is vindicated in the Resurrection.

This story is closely connected to what Rene Girard has called ‘mimetic violence,’ whose best-known manifestation is the scapegoat mechanism. It functions, as we see in Jesus’ story, as an ‘all against one’ mechanism. Rather than deal with their own issues and conflicts, a group comes together and projects their anger and violence onto one person or group — normally one whose only true ‘crime’ is being different. The act of violence they enact upon this ‘other’ is cathartic and eases the tension for a time, but because nothing has really been resolved, tension inevitably builds again and a new scapegoat is needed. Really, it’s the human tendency to obtain or maintain the good things in life — security, belonging, and so on — at someone’s expense; to build them on the backs of victims. In some ways, big or small, we all have the instinct to participate in this kind of mechanism, whether it’s in a childhood friend group, office gossip, or a team bonding. But when this mechanism plays out in higher stakes situations, the results are far worse than hurt feelings and impaired friendships. Things can quickly snowball out of control through entire societies. The most horrific example of the scapegoat mechanism in history was, of course, the Holocaust. But we see the same kinds of fear-based hatreds play out all the time in politics: “Immigrants are stealing our jobs!” “Women who wear head coverings are hiding something!” “Teachers want to turn our kids trans!” These are just some contemporary manifestations of the same impulses that crucified Jesus: “He threatened to destroy the Temple!” “He undermines our authority!” “If we release him instead of Barabbas, there’ll be a riot!” “We thought he’d be the one to free Israel! But he failed us!” Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him! The people — all of the people, all of their various parties and groups who were normally at each other’s throats — united against Jesus, put all their pent up anger and violence on him. (Luke even includes an amazing throw away line that speaks to this point: “On this day” — the day of Jesus’ Jewish and Roman trials — “Herod and Pilate became friends; before this they had been enemies.“) So, in the Gospels, Jesus is sent to the cross through a collusion of powerful spiritual, political, economic, and social forces: the envy, threatened privilege, and financial interest of the religious leaders and the Temple, the obsessive desire for order and personal security of the Roman leaders, and finally the disappointed hope turned to anger of the masses.

These kinds of forces are powerful and systemic, they are the kinds of things the Scriptures have in mind when they talk about the “Principalities and Powers,” these quasi-personal evil forces that hold sway in the world. I like to think of them as social, political, economic, and spiritual contagions or poisons that seep through cultures and relationships, that entangle us in complicated webs that seem impossible to get out of. And while they are complicated, they almost always boil down to the most basic psychological impulses: things like envy, jealousy, privilege, disappointment, and essentially these are all themselves manifestations of fear. (As it happens, this is why Politics of Fear are so powerful and so successful.)

But, as natural as this all-against-one mentality seems to be for us as a species, it doesn’t work. It’s a false logic that leaves the real problems unaddressed. The scapegoat mechanism is like a pressure release valve on an old boiler: it keeps the system from exploding but does nothing to address the pressures and stresses that are putting the system at risk in the first place. In the nonviolent atonement perspective, this is the all-important role of the Resurrection of Jesus: It revealed once and for all that the messages we get from Society, the Principalities and Powers, that cause us to break faith with one another are lies, both ineffective and dangerous.

How then does all this fit into our summary table?

First, far from the complaints about the vapidness of the previous century’s liberalism, it’s clear that nonviolent atonement represents a robust theology of the cross and salvation. This is particularly impressive, since it emerged largely as a way of criticizing substitutionary atonement, and often movements designed primarily to tear down what is struggle to build something better in its place. (Think of postmodernism here, which makes a lot of great points about modernity’s problems but leaves one with a feeling of “But now what?”)

Second, nonviolent atonement is very biblical, finding its entire ethos in the Scriptures, and especially the Gospels. But this is a bit tricky, because at the same time, it involves a lot of zooming out, interpretation and contextualization, so this biblical basis is less ‘proof-textable’ than some of the other approaches. And many of the proof texts it may use are the very same as those used for penal substitution, just interpreted differently.

Third, it does not marginalize any of the four major elements of ‘the Christ event’; the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus are all important in Christ’s saving work, and the work would be incomplete without any of them. We’ve seen throughout the series that in many of the historical perspectives, one or more of these fall off the map, so to speak, so nonviolent atonement wins points here.

Fourth, it nicely balances the objective and subjective aspects of atonement theology, recognizing both the once-and-for-all nature of what Jesus did and our need to appropriate it for ourselves and live it out.

And fifth, it looks a lot like the ancient Christus Victor perspective: While it often shifts the language into that of contemporary sociology and psychology, it’s even still able to talk meaningfully in the ancient spiritual language of ‘Principalities and Powers’. But, it’s a Christus Victor model that avoids the sillier extremes that led that model to be rejected by medieval scholars in the West.

In other words, this is a strong atonement theology and demands to be taken seriously. In some ways, it picks up on the strengths of all of the major atonement motifs: the sense of Christ offering humanity a second chance from Recapitulation theology, the synergy of the incarnation, teaching, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Christus Victor, the emphasis on Christ’s teachings from the Moral Influence corrective, and the personal responsibility of the Satisfaction and Substitutionary Atonement theories.

And yet, as strong as it is, I always find myself a little unsatisfied with the nonviolent atonement approach. It sometimes feels a little too clever for its own good. And while it’s very much rooted in the Bible, it doesn’t feel Biblical sometimes. I think that’s probably because it shifts the language so much away from that of the Scriptures, interpreting it and translating it into more contemporary ideas. Its language doesn’t capture the imagination as viscerally as images like the Passover lamb, a bridegroom, or a substitutionary sacrifice do.

In conclusion, the nonviolent atonement offers not only a needed critique of substitutionary atonement, but also a strong and holistic perspective of its own. It’s an image of a loving God who humbly sends the Son to earth only to be rejected and, ironically, sacrificed in the name of law and order, comfort and security, but who is also then vindicated, unmasking the lies that exist behind them all, thereby allowing all of us who follow his ways to see them as they are and not be taken in.

In the next post, I’ll offer my final thoughts and conclusions about the ideas of the series and the atonement in general.