Kindle Notes & Highlights
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April 28 - April 30, 2024
“What it [the world] needs,” said Karl Barth, “is not to be confirmed and strengthened by another variation of its own way, but to be pointed beyond it in unambiguous practice.” The church exists (he continues), in obedience to and imitation of Jesus, “to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to its [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise . . . The true community of Jesus Christ does not rest in itself . . . It exists as it actively reaches beyond itself into the world.”459
“Every church a peace church” is not merely an Anabaptist slogan; it is the christocentric, messianic, death-and-resurrection reality to which Paul and Luke bear witness. It is an essential and non-negotiable aspect of life in the new covenant, the new covenant of peace.
The purpose of Jesus’ death was to effect, or give birth to, the new covenant, the covenant of peace; that is, to create a new-covenant community of Spirit-filled disciples of Jesus who would fulfill the inseparable covenantal requirements of faithfulness to God and love for others through participation in the death of Jesus, expressed in such practices as faithful witness and suffering (cruciform faith), hospitality to the weak and servant-love for all (cruciform love), and peacemaking (cruciform hope).
Jeremiah and Ezekiel: that it would create a liberated, restored, forgiven, sanctified, covenantally faithful, empowered, missional, peace-filled, and permanent people of God.
which include (a) cruciform witness and suffering, (b) cruciform hospitality to the weak, and (c) cruciform service, rather than domination, to all. (Hence we referred to these as passion prediction-summonses.) These practices of faithfulness toward God (a) and love toward others (b and c) provide the structure of chapters 4 and 5.
we suggested that “Paul’s most innovative and important contribution to the theology of the new covenant” may well be the claim that “the ‘new spirit’ that comes to dwell in the people is the Spirit of the crucified Messiah; it is, therefore, the cruciform Spirit, the spirit of cruciformity.”
For Luke, the practices of peace included several kinds of activity: evangelizing, liberating/welcoming the poor and oppressed, and healing and exorcizing; forgiving enemies and others, reconciling, and refraining
Yes, the cross provides forgiveness; yes, the cross provides liberation; yes, it offers an example of self-giving love; and so on. The cross does all these things because it is God’s mysterious way of bringing about the multi-dimensional new covenant that was supposed to consist of these very realities.
I have been arguing that the New Testament writers are far less interested in the mechanics of atonement than they are in the results of atonement. In fact, I would suggest that the mechanics are largely a mystery and will always be precisely that. To some, my claim that the new-covenant
the how—of atonement will suggest that it is insufficient as a model because it only claims that the cross effected atonement, not how it did so, when in fact the how—or at least the why—is the purpose of a theory or model of the atonement.
In a profound way, then, Jesus was the incarnation of the new covenant, culminating in his new-covenant-effecting death. By virtue of his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit, now we can both benefit from and participate in Jesus’ death and the new-covenant life it brings about.
When we participate in Jesus’ faithful and loving death by the power of the Spirit, we both benefit from and embody Jesus’ covenant-fulfilling love for God and neighbor.
It is rather the nature of God’s relationship with humanity, and the nature of the relationship God desires with people and among people, that causes participation to make sense. God has created human beings to be in intimate fellowship—a relationship of loyalty and love—with their creator and with one another; the death of Jesus does not just make that relationship with God and others possible; it makes it actual, real. To do so, that death must be something more than a substitution, representation, declaration, victory, or example that does not directly involve the intended beneficiaries.
like it or even to imitate it, but to participate in it—but only because this cross, in light of the resurrection, is life-giving.462 In connection with the marriage metaphor, furthermore, we should perhaps also think of the cross as creating not just a couple but a paradoxical, supra-human set of relationships in which one bridegroom (Christ) can be the faithful spouse of many brides, all of whom are siblings to one another. The Christian tradition has generally referred to this reality in terms of the one bride of Christ, namely the church as a whole.463
but that God would create a people, a community, that would experience this new covenant together while also giving corporate witness to the new covenant, and to the God who made it, in the public arena.
These are not be understood as restrictive but as open-ended and generative practices that can and must take specific forms in particular times and situations.
Theologically, it is critical that Christians who embrace the claims of the New Testament about the identity of this community recognize its Jewishness and therefore its continuity with Israel, with Israel’s covenants and promises, and with Israel’s Scriptures. The new covenant means the fulfillment of the original, valid, enduring covenantal obligations.
a Roman crucifixion that Christians confess to be the divine “medicine for the world” (crux est mundi medicina, a saying of the ancient church). Here the gospel images of “cup” and “baptism” and walking in the “Way” overlap with the Pauline images of dying with Christ.
Its purpose, so to speak, is to transport people out of the trials and tribulations of this world through mystical experience(s), an interiority focused on the self or the god/God within, or an eschatological (“heavenly”) orientation that pays scant if any attention to social ills.
But a spirituality associated with the death of the Messiah can never be any of these things. It is inherently a this-worldly spirituality, a missional and even a political spirituality.
His 1979 inaugural lecture at Princeton was entitled the “The This-Worldliness of the New Testament.” In that address, which has since been published, Meyer acknowledges that the term “this-worldliness” is awkward.468 He insists on its use, however, in deliberate opposition to the term “otherworldliness” and all attempts to understand Christian faith as flight from this world.
All has become irreversibly this-worldly, because the transcendence and authority of God himself now underscore and authorize that this-worldliness. And there is something on the stage of history that was not there before: a community that calls itself by the name of the crucified Messiah. It is one that can say now with integrity that it has been brought into being not by a flight into another world or by visions of things yet to be, but by its experience of life and by God’s confirmation of the same.470
This definition, though useful, may be too general. Another proposal is “a transformative relationship with God,” with emphasis less on experience and more on transformation.
“Spirit-enabled, this-worldly, transformative participation in the life-giving death of the Messiah such that the cross is not only the source, but also the shape, of our life in the new covenant.”
if spirituality is our theology embodied in daily life, then politics is our spirituality embodied in the public square. It is our public life together, our corporate way of being in the world and thus also our corporate practices and witness.
That is, we are a politic before we have a politics. Our primary political activity is to be the church, the new-covenant community shaped by the cross: to worship God truly and to live out the demands of the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus.
In other words, the death of Jesus means, for his followers, the death of every form of nationalism.
Thus, as Raymond Brown said, “the tables are turned; and Pilate, not Jesus, is the one who is really on trial,” for his question about truth is “in reality a decision for falsehood.”483
Instead of the kind of cruciform hospitality and service seen in Jesus’ death and expected by Jesus of his disciples, possessors of political power—at least to the degree that their power is Rome-like—are more likely to practice exclusion and oppression, seeking to be served rather than to serve, even if they frequently do so in the name of serving the greater good.
But this must be a good they seek in cruciform mode. Their lives should be a living presence and voice that reflect the cross of the crucified Messiah.
484 Yet this witness may be costly, Wright says, because although the world needs structures of power, “power corrupts and the church must bear witness against that corruption, by critique, by non-collaboration, by witness, and if need be by martyrdom.”485
the door leading to the implication that there was something less than complete, less than perfect, less than messianic, and less than incarnate (divine) about the way Jesus lived and died.
“in the cross of Christ war has already been abolished . . . The world has already been saved from war. The question is how Christians can and should live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished.”
The death of Christ should not be seen as the expression of divine anger or even wrath, but as the expression of divine love. It is the gift of God’s Son and, at least in some sense, the gift of God’s own self: “God was in Christ . . .” (2 Cor 5:19; MJG).
Beneficiaries of the new covenant who receive this gift are also participants in it. The recipients of the gift become like the gift and the giver. This line of thinking leads us naturally to the question of participation and theosis, for theosis is the consequence of a divine act of giving and self-giving that manifests the very character of God and draws people into it.
As noted above, the new-covenant model emphasizes Jesus’ death as an act of divine, self-giving love. It is not an act of violence but of love, a love that generates a covenant community of faithfulness, love, and nonviolence.
peace, and the church as the continuation of that work.502 Derek Flood, from another perspective, interprets sin fundamentally as sickness and the cross as Christ’s act of healing.
that incorporates the best aspects of other theories: “The Son became as we are so that he might, on our behalf, make peace with God.”504 For Spence, this reconciliation “has to do with God, with one another and with all of creation.”505
The death of Jesus is not an isolated act but part of an entire way of being in the world. The new covenant is not merely an end in itself, but part of a larger divine plan, which is why the new-covenant community is inherently a missional community, with justice and reconciliation integral to its identity. Moreover, as we have indicated at various points, shalom means peace or reconciliation, but also wholeness, and it includes justice. For this reason the new-covenant model of the atonement can certainly be interpreted to include both restorative justice and healing, in addition to
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book: that by participating in the work of God we actually participate in the very life of God, in the story of God.
“I and my enemy are united, through no merit or work of my own, in a new humanity that forbids henceforth my ever taking his life in my hands.”
In an initial way, people die and rise with Christ in the unified act of faith-and-baptism.513 In an ongoing way, believers implicitly or explicitly reaffirm their own death and resurrection with Christ when they are in the presence of others who are being baptized. Thus even to witness a baptism is to be invited, once again, to participate in the atonement and to be renewed in the baptismal vows of cruciform faithfulness, love, and hopeful peacemaking.
To “take communion,” or to “receive,” then, is not merely to ingest elements made by human hands, and not only to take in the body and blood of the Lord, but also to be marked by the sign of the cross.
It is, therefore, to offer our individual bodies as well as our corporate, ecclesial body in loving, covenantal service to the one who offered his body and blood for us. Worship in general, and specifically participation in the Eucharist, is the church’s alternative to the world’s liturgy of domination and violence.
It is an invitation to make the sign of the cross (whether literally or not) the way to leave the assembly, just as it is, for many Christians, the way to enter it.516
Atonement in this model is about the creation of a liberated, forgiven, Spirit-infused, and transformed people, the people of the new covenant.
It is therefore also a kind of politics, a way of being in the world but not of the world that is shaped by the truth-telling (faithful), hospitable, others-serving, shalom-making death of the Messiah on a Roman cross.
The incarnation, Christians assert, means that Jesus of Nazareth, fully God and fully human, reveals both true divinity and true humanity.
The polyvalent cross is not only the source, but also the shape, of salvation; it is the means of, and the pattern for, becoming most fully human, most fully Christlike, most fully Godlike. The cross is remembered, celebrated, and performed as the work of Christ but also, ultimately, as the work of God and now, by the power of the Spirit, the ongoing work of the church. All of this is so because, and only because, God has raised to life the crucified Jesus. Now death—his—has become the means of birth—ours, both individually and corporately.
