A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology

by Scot McKnight

Divided by Faith,

The Beatitudes, however, are not a virtue list: they are a list of the kinds of people in the society Jesus maps for his listeners.

the work of God in Jesus and through the kingdom is to include the marginalized, to render judgment on the powerful,5 and to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the center) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights.

The mission of Jesus is healing justice, the ending of disease, dislocation, and oppression.

Any discussion of atonement apart from discussion of the kingdom fails to do justice to the biblical framing of God's redemptive work in this world.

Jesus’ kingdom vision and atonement are related; separating them is an act of violence. When the many theories of atonement miss this theme, they are missing the telic vision of what atonement is designed to accomplish. Atonement creates the kingdom of God.

I contend that a Christian theory of atonement must begin with how Jesus understands the kingdom.

where we begin shapes where we end up. If you begin with wrath, you get an atonement that tells the story of wrath being pacified.

perichoresis as the “reciprocal interiority” of the persons of the Trinity.3 Perichoresis seeks to articulate both what God is like and how the various persons of the Trinity relate to one another,

in the Trinity, person-hood and relation-to-other are not separated as they are in us.”

Atonement finally concerns union with God and, simultaneously, communion with one another as its mirror among God's created beings.

The work of the Spirit, the apostle Paul tells us, is the ongoing redemptive transformation of the community of Christians into the glorious Eikon of Jesus Christ himself.

humans are created as Eikons, cracked in their present Eikonic struggle, shaped into Christ-like Eikons as they follow Jesus, and destined to be conformed to Christ in union with God and communion with others in eternity.

To be an Eikon is to be a missional being—one designed to love God, self, and others and to represent God by participating in God's rule in this world.

To be an Eikon means to be in relationship.

The atonement is designed by God to restore cracked Eikons into glory-producing Eikons by participation in the perfect Eikon, Jesus Christ, who redeems the cosmos.

“Sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature.”

“Sin may be defined as the personal act of turning away from God and His will. It is the transgression of God's law, yet the act is ultimately not against the law but against His person.”

sin is “any agential [acts and dispositions] evil for which some person (or group of persons) is to blame. In short, sin is culpable shalom-breaking.” And, “shalom is God's design for creation and redemption; sin is blamable human vandalism of these great realities and therefore an affront to their architect and builder.”

atonement theories that focus exclusively on sins against others fall short of a full biblical perspective on atonement, just as those that focus exclusively on God will fall short in equal measure. It won’t do to get one relationship right and not the others.

“the universal failure to achieve our human destiny,” expresses our point exactingly.

“In the Bible ‘sin’ does not mean something moral, but it denotes man's need of redemption, the state of the ‘natural man,’ seen in the light of his divine destiny.”

sin in the Bible is the choice to “go it alone,” to be “free” in the sense of independence, to achieve (like God) absolute freedom.

eternity is so corporate that individuals simply are unrecognized,

Atonement is the work of God to create and ready his people for just these things: union with God and communion with others in a place of perfection, with a society of justice and peace and above all worship of the Lamb of God on the throne.

biblical language of eternity does not justify passivity on earth;

G. B. Caird's famous statement: “Metaphor is a lens; it is as though the speaker were saying, ‘Look through this and see what I have seen, something you would never have noticed without the lens!’”

“Most simply, a metaphor is seeing one thing as something else, pretending ‘this’ is ‘that’ because we do not know how to think or talk about ‘this,’ so we use ‘that’ as a way of saying something about it.”

we can say this: a metaphor of atonement is a set of lenses through which we describe God's acts of resolving sin and of bringing humans back home in their relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the world.

Then the Whisper Put on Flesh.

Missing the Mark,

“God became what we are so that we might become what He is.”

God identifies with us in the incarnation. Without identification, without incarnation, there is no atonement.

We are not being fair to the Pauline texts on the cross if we narrow them simply and woodenly to resolution of my sin problem. The cross addresses our sin problem—“our” in the sense of yours and mine and the Western world's and the Eastern world's and the northern and southern hemispheres’ problems. It addresses the world's captivity by evil.

Jesus dies “with us”—entering into our evil and our sin and our suffering to subvert it and create a new way; Jesus dies “instead of us”—he enters into our sin, our wrath, and our death; and Jesus dies “for us”—his death forgives our sin, “declares us right,” absorbs the wrath of God against us, and creates new life where there was once only death.

atonement cannot be restricted to saving individuals. When it is, it destroys the fabric of the biblical story. That fabric is the community of faith, and atonement is designed to create that community.

In this one act at Pentecost (1) the people of God, in God's act of justifying and making his judgment clear, receive the power of the Holy Spirit to create a community wherein the will of God can be done, and (2) that new community creation is at the same time a judgment on the unjust rulers of this world.

“God doesn’t give people the Holy Spirit,” Tom Wright says, “in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland.” No, he says, the point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow Jesus to take into all the world the news that he is Lord, that he has won the victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up, and that we are to help make it happen.8

Fourth, the Spirit who empowers the saints is the Spirit that makes them a fellowshipping body—

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free— and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor. 12:4-13)

Through the forgiveness of sins the gospel breaks through the compulsive acts of sinners which are the enemies of life, cutting sinners loose from sin, and creating the possibility of “conversion,” a turn to life. Through the justification of sinners, the gospel brings men and women who are closed in upon themselves into the open love of God. Through rebirth from the Spirit, it brings people who have been subject to death into touch with the eternal source of life, setting them in the closer framework of the rebirth of human community and against the wider horizon of the rebirth of the cosmos.9

the justified community of faith is living now in light of a future finality through union with Christ.

“Justification” is thus the declaration of God, the just judge, that someone is (a) in the right, that their sins are forgiven, and (b) a true member of the covenant family, the people belonging to Abraham [The term justification] doesn’t describe how people get in to God's forgiven family; it declares that they are in.4

Jimmy Dunn, wrote so eloquently about this Lutheran discovery: The insight granted to Luther has remained at the heart of Protestant Christian thought. ‘Justification by faith’ is a sharp sword which punctures all inflated thoughts of self-importance. It is a sharp knife which cuts away all reliance on human effort, on human cleverness. It is a sharp spade which undermines any attempt to build our own protective barriers or control our own destiny. It cuts through all human pretence, all human self-assurance, all human boasting. God accepts not the important, or the activist, or the clever, or the powerful as such. It is the sinner he accepts. That is an insight which has been applied over and over again in Christian critique of false religiosity and political systems. It is an insight which must never be lost from the gospel…. There is more to it, of course.10

Matthew and Luke clearly present the temptations of Jesus as the reliving of Israel's wanderings in the wilderness so that Jesus is a second Israel (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13), and the apostle Paul sketches the notion that Jesus is the second Adam (Rom. 5:12-21), and the writer of Hebrews clearly says that Jesus had to be made like us in every way so that he, as the greatest of all high priests, could ransom us from our condition (Heb. 2:14-18).

For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and men, by His relationship to both, to bring both to friendship and concord, and present man to God, while He revealed God to man For it behooved Him who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man; who had been drawn by sin into bondage, but was held by death, so that sin should be destroyed by man, and man should go forth from death.7 (emphasis added)

he became a “sacrifice of atonement” (eis to hilaskesthai) for the sins of humans. Which means that Jesus died for them, with them, and instead of them: their death became his so that his life might become theirs.

atonement is something done not only by God for us but also something we do with God for others.

This central question springs from a desire to go out into the community rather than an overwhelming drive to have the community come to the local church.

all forms of helping are framed by the redemptive purposes of God.