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April 28 - April 30, 2024
To put it a bit differently, I would suggest that most interpretations of the atonement concentrate on the penultimate rather than the ultimate purpose of Jesus’ death. This ultimate purpose is captured in texts like the following
Moreover, this people will not simply believe in the atonement and the one who died, they will eat and drink it, they will be baptized into it/him, they will be drawn to him and into it. That is, they will so identify with the crucified savior that words like “embrace” and “participation,” more than “belief” or even “acceptance,” best describe the proper response to this death. (Even the words “belief” and “believe” take on this more robust sense of complete identification.)
But it is the result (a healthy child) that is most important, and it is the child, not the delivery process, that ultimately defines the word “birth.”4
“By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection, you [God] gave birth to your church, delivered us from slavery to sin and death, and made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit.”5 This liturgical tradition for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper has it right, and it serves as a rather perceptive, if unintended, summary of the thesis of the present work.
It overcomes the inherent rift in many interpretations of the atonement between the benefits of Jesus’ death and the practices of participatory discipleship that his death both enables and demands. I contend throughout the book that in the New Testament the death of Jesus is not only the source, but also the shape, of salvation. It therefore also determines the shape of the community—the community of the new covenant—that benefits from and participates in Jesus’ saving death.
The greatest form of hope in the Bible is for a new creation in which violence, suffering, tears, and death will be no more.
I will claim that the New Testament is much more concerned about what Jesus’ death does for and to humanity than how it does it.
Life in this new covenant is life in the Spirit of the resurrected Lord that is shaped by the faithful, loving, peacemaking (and therefore hope-making) death of the same crucified Jesus.
A standard answer is three—Christus Victor, satisfaction (often associated with sacrifice and/or punishment), and moral influence—though some prefer to separate sacrifice from satisfaction and call it a separate model, yielding four basic models or, by omitting moral influence from the list of true models, retaining three.13
He argues that Scripture tells us that God has “one overarching purpose: to communicate the terms, and the reality, of the new covenant.”
“the climax to a covenantal drama.”25
These facts alone, it would seem, justify a theory—or a model, which is the language I prefer37—of the atonement that we could call “effecting the new covenant,” “birthing the new covenant,” or simply “new-covenant.”
For Grimsrud, because God is the covenant God who is always ready to save and always merciful, the cross is therefore not necessary for salvation; it is not a soteriological event: “the Bible’s portrayal of salvation actually does not focus on Jesus’s death as the basis for reconciliation of humanity with God.”
the under-achieving character of these models means that, on the whole, they focus on the penultimate rather than the ultimate purpose(s) of Jesus’ death.50 In the new-covenant model I am proposing, the purpose (and actual effect) of Jesus’ death is all of the above and more, but that effect is best expressed, not in the rather narrow terms of the traditional models, but in more comprehensive and integrative terms like transformation, participation, and renewal or re-creation.
In a way not unlike the kingdom of God, the new covenant is both now and not yet. When Christians realize this, and when they keep their appropriate connections to the Scriptures and people of Israel in mind, they will think and speak of their life in the new covenant joyfully but also humbly and self-critically, not arrogantly or triumphalistically.
can summarize these in nine adjectives: liberated, restored, forgiven, sanctified, covenantally faithful, empowered, missional, peace-filled, and permanent.
Nonetheless, the key elements of the vision of Jeremiah and Ezekiel will remain, even if reshaped. We will address these elements in later chapters, not one by one but—like the new-covenant vision itself—holistically.
It may be more than coincidental that Luke has two Samaritan “heroes” in his gospel: one who displays the horizontal grace of love (the “Good Samaritan”; Luke 10:30–37) and one who evidences the vertical grace of grateful faith (a leper; Luke 17:11–19).
Since the love of God (i.e., human love for God) in the Bible means both loyalty/obedience and intimacy/communion, we may use the word “faithfulness” to connote these senses in one word.
To become more Christlike will be simultaneously to become more Godlike and more human. The new covenant will therefore mean a new humanity and a new creation; the image of God will be restored, not just in individuals, but in a people. The question, of course, is, what does all of this have to do with Jesus’ death?
We will note (1) the way in which the cross gives birth to the new covenant, as well as the various aspects of it (as discussed in chapter 1) effected by Jesus’ death. We will also focus on (2) the nature of participation in that salvific and paradigmatic death as an integrated life of cross-shaped vertical and horizontal love, for according to the New Testament the signature of the living, resurrected Jesus on the life of his followers is the cross on which he died.
Its christological claim is linked to a summons to discipleship. This is in fact the case in all four of the passion predictions in Mark (of which 10:45 is part of the third) and therefore in all of the Synoptic Gospels, since Matthew and Luke take them up. Jesus calls his disciples to a life of “taking up their cross” (Mark 8:34 and parallels in Matthew and Luke) that is analogous to his own death and can therefore be termed “cruciform existence” or “cruciformity.”
Jesus’ blood seals a new covenant, and in doing so establishes a new community . . . [T]hrough Christ’s death a new people of God is created.”
The Son of God did what he did in life and in death because that is what it means to be the Son of God. Thus, discipleship is not merely following the Son of God who accidentally or arbitrarily died, but following the one who has died because that is the fullest manifestation of the self-giving and reconciling nature of the Son of God, and thus of God himself.
To be the new covenant people is truly a new experience of knowing, loving, participating in, and being like God.
We would be wrong, however, to conclude that the covenant about which Jesus speaks in Matthew is reducible to the forgiveness of sins in some narrow (i.e., “vertical” only) sense. Rather, receiving God’s forgiveness is part of existence as a community of salt and light (5:13–16) that is called and empowered to practice forgiveness (5:21–24; 18:15–20) and its associated virtues, such as deeds of mercy and compassion (9:13 and 12:7, citing Hos 6:692) like those of their Master (9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 18:33; 20:34). These practices result in part from the reality that the covenant established by
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According to the prophetic tradition, the new covenant includes the forgiveness of sins; it is highly likely, then, that Luke’s account implies forgiveness and thus an atoning death, especially in light of the word of forgiveness from the cross in 23:34.
Jesus here interprets his death as an event enabling a new covenantal loyalty, a gift creating a new covenantal community (cf. also Acts 20:28). His self-sacrifice is a means of benefaction for the community of his followers.”97
But forgiveness is only part of the larger purpose of God in the Messiah’s suffering and death; the larger purpose is to create a new people who will both be and bear universal witness to the new covenant—which is really a (re)new(ed) covenant—that means salvation for all.99 This is, in part, why Luke is relatively un-preoccupied with the “mechanics” of atonement.100
and for Luke (as for Isaiah), this would include the fact of the servant’s suffering and his exaltation, plus the various interpretive comments about these events in Isaiah.
In other words, the story of the eunuch’s conversion represents the effectiveness of the word about Jesus’ suffering and death in extending the mission of God—and thus the covenant people of God—to Ethiopians and to eunuchs, to Gentiles and to the marginalized.108 This does not require an explanation of how Jesus’ death works but only a witness to the fact that it does work—and it works with this particular, unexpected result.109
The Lukan Paul’s emphasis, in context, is on the effect of this death, the creation of the church. God has created something and charged humans with its oversight and care. It is not the duty of church leaders to debate the intricacies of atonement theory, says Paul/Luke, but to protect the church that now belongs to God from “savage wolves” (Acts 20:
The death and resurrection of Jesus that effects the resurrection of Israel means also for Luke the inclusion of the Gentiles, as the Spirit is poured out on people of all nations, creating a restored and unified people that the new-covenant prophets barely imagined.113 The Spirit enables the apostles and others to live communally and hospitably, welcome Jews and Gentiles alike, preach the good news and prophesy, forgive sins, forgive enemies, heal, suffer faithfully for the good news, and generally continue the activity and mission of Jesus.
It is by dying that Jesus reveals the love of God, and when this love evokes faith, it brings people into the relationship with God that is true life (3:16).117
“You shall be holy for I am holy.”128 Imitatio Dei has become imitatio Christi, which, because Jesus is the Word and self-revelation of God (1:1–18), is ultimately imitatio Dei.
he makes it clear that the disciples can do nothing on their own power but will have the indwelling presence of Jesus in the person of the Spirit/Advocate (14:17–20, 26, 28).130 The nature of this relationship is further disclosed in chapter 15, in which Jesus speaks of a reciprocal residency between himself and his disciples: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me” (15:4).
We are moving beyond imitation toward theosis: becoming like God by participating in the life of God.
“Jesus does not make intense communion among disciples an end in itself; it exists that God might be made known.”132 By their missional love, the disciples will bear witness to the sort of God revealed in Jesus, above all in his death: a God who loves “the world,” that is, all of humanity.133
Jesus shares this final meal as a symbol of his love for and commitment to all of his friends, even the one who would soon betray him (Judas) and the one who would soon deny him (Peter).
In other words, Jesus himself did not limit his love to friends who were true friends. He laid down his life for friends (15:14–15) who were, like Peter and Judas, deniers and betrayers—for enemies, in other words.
the death of Jesus will create a community of committed friends of Jesus who indwell him and are indwelt by him/his Spirit. Within this relationship they will participate in his death in four ways: receiving his forgiveness, fulfilling the obligations of a covenant relationship by continuing his self-giving love for others, experiencing hatred and persecution similar to that which caused his death, and extending God’s mission to the world. That is, as a community of atonement they are a covenantal, cruciform, charismatic, missional community.
the reality that the death of Jesus effected the promised new covenant and thereby created the community of the new covenant. Those who embrace this life-giving death begin a journey of participation in it that will be marked especially by peaceful practices of faithfulness and love—the two dimensions of the covenant—empowered by the Spirit.
Deidun argues that the new covenant, promised by Jeremiah and Ezekiel and fulfilled by God through Christ in the giving of the Spirit, is the center of Paul’s theology. Paul’s morality, he argues, “was coloured from the very beginning by his interpretation”
it is (1) “not a sequence of private meals but an experience of solidarity or fellowship (koinōnia)” with both Christ and one another; (2) an “event of memory,” meaning not recollection but present appropriation and participation; (3) “an act of proclamation—a parabolic sermon”; and (4) a “foretaste of the future messianic banquet.”141 To these four we may now add the following: the Lord’s Supper for Paul is also (5) a microcosm of the new-covenant life effected by the cross.
This horizontal failure is likely grounded in the vertical failure. The Lord’s Supper at Corinth looks like a symposium offered by, to, and with any other first-century deity, performed in a context where inclusivity of deities (Tuesday, Serapis; Wednesday, Asclepius; and so on) and exclusivity of humans (honored peers, yes; their lowly slaves, no) are the norms. That is not the way of the Lord and banquet host who was crucified on a cross.
Ironically, the Corinthians have rendered the Lord’s Supper null and void by making its exclusive (i.e. vertical) dimension inclusive, and its inclusive (i.e. horizontal) dimension exclusive.
Paul assumes the inseparability of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and he assumes the inseparability of the vertical and the horizontal in the atonement.
Therein lies the kind of problem that Paul addresses; ethics is not a separate category! Ethics is atonement in action, not as a supplement, but as constitutive of atonement itself. The horizontal is not the result of atonement, it is one of the principal components of atonement.
The prophetic promises that God will bring about a new covenant (and thus a new people), and also bring about a new creation, are both being fulfilled in and through Christ, inaugurated by his death and resurrection.
Our commission from God is that we as a community are called to embody the righteousness of God in the world—to incarnate it, if you will—in such a way that the message of reconciliation is made visible in our midst.
