A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology

by Scot McKnight

should not think here simply of personal salvation, as we know it today, but as the act of God in history to ransom Israel from Rome's might and set them free to be the people of God as they are meant to be. If this vision of Zechariah, or Mary for that matter, has anything to do with atonement—and I can’t see how it cannot have that as its central theme— then atonement is all about creating a society in which God's will is actualized— on planet earth, in the here and now of Mary and Zechariah.

Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26). The Beatitudes are normally misunderstood as a list of virtues. 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. Those who are responding to his kingdom vision are the poor and the hungry, those who weep and those who are despised by the powerful—and those who are not responding are the rich, the well fed, the party-prone, and those who are approved by such powerful folks. No, this is not a virtue list but a sociopolitical statement: 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.

Once again, we return to Mary, to Zechariah, to the inaugural sermon, and to the Beatitudes: Jesus’ mission, his vision of the kingdom, is about restoring the blind, giving limber legs to the lame, wiping the skin of the lepers clean, filling the ears of the deaf with music and sounds, bringing back dead people from the grave, and making sure the poor are taken care of by restoring them to their proper social location. The mission of Jesus is healing justice, the ending of disease, dislocation, and oppression. Beyond those conditions, Jesus announces the creation of a covenanted community where the covenant God's will is lived out for each and every person.

the creation of a community where God's will is done is inherent to the meaning of atonement.

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.

the kingdom is shaped by the “divine necessity” of Jesus’ own death, his resurrection vindication, and his sending of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus is transfigured, Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah speak of Jesus’ “departure,” which translates the Greek word exodus (Luke 9:31). The “exodus” death of Jesus leads his followers to freedom, and that freedom is what the kingdom is all about in Luke.

ecclesial community is noted by the following salient items: interpersonal fellowship with the apostles and one another, and interpersonal fellowship with the Lord in the breaking of bread and with God in prayer.

In other words, we are witnessing just what Jesus had in mind when he announced his ministry in terms of Isaiah 29, 35, and 61, when he blessed special people groups, and when he announced that God's kingdom work would be the creation of a community in which God's will would be actualized. It is a mistake to connect this ecclesial fellowship with Pentecost only; to be sure, this is the work of God's Spirit, but God's Spirit creates the vision Jesus (and Mary and Zechariah) had declared.

The same can be said for Acts 4:32-35. Here we have a society in which God's will is understood in terms like equality, social justice, economic availability to and liability for one another, and fellowship. Jesus’ vision was coming into existence in the growing clutch of Jesus’ followers who were experiencing the empowering graces of Pentecost.

According to LeRon Shults, “The point of the doctrine of perichoresis is that in the Trinity, person-hood and relation-to-other are not separated as they are in us.”4 The Father and the Son and the Spirit retain genuine separable identities while at the same time they are so related to one another that one can’t be known without the other. Relationality, in other words, is inherent to who God is.5

Genuine reality then is relational; genuine atonement is reconciliation.

Union with Christ, being “in Christ,” “abiding in Christ,” living “in the Spirit,” being “conformed” to the image of Christ, “fellowship” with Christ and one another, the “body of Christ” and the “gifts of the Spirit”— these and other metaphors in the Bible are different ways of expressing the absolutely foundational dimension of relationship in the work of God called atonement.

Michael Jinkins expresses this idea as he describes his “course” in theology: “The meaning and shape of our life together as a community of persons is grounded in the inner life of God, the Trinity, and has been revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”6

Most scholars of the meaning of “Eikon” would agree that it refers to humans representing God in this world; humans as Eikons are earth's divine representatives. The expression “image of God” is only found in the Old Testament at Genesis 5:1 and 9:6. Genesis 5:1 rehearses Genesis 1-2 and 9:6 prohibits, rather significantly, murder because humans are Eikons of God.

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. Paul shifts the emphasis of the word Eikon from the ruling-representative human Eikon to the redeemed Eikon because he believes Jesus Christ is the perfect God-Man Eikon.

Let me now sum up the biblical understanding of humans as Eikons of God in four stages: 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.

The astounding element of being an Eikon is not that humans are different from animals and the land and the sky and the stars, but that they, and they alone, are like God somehow.

God's obligations are instructions, like the ones we get in presents, for Eikons on how Eikons best work.

To be an Eikon means, first of all, to be in union with God as Eikons; second, it means to be in communion with other Eikons; and third, it means to participate with God in his creating, his ruling, his speaking, his naming, his ordering, his variety and beauty, his location, his partnering, and his resting, and to oblige God in his obligating of us.

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. To be an Eikon, then, is to be charged with a theocentric and missional life.9 Prior

eternity is the society created by God around Jesus Christ wherein God's people enjoy union with God and communion with one another, in a place where everything works as it did in Eden.

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.

Eikons are liberated, sacrificed for, justified, and reconciled to God, self, others, and the world by one and the same act: the death of Jesus Christ.

Incarnation means identification for the sake of liberation.

To say that Jesus is the second Adam ushers us directly to the importance of union with Christ. If “in” Adam we sin and die, so “in” Christ we become righteous and live.

Now we can understand the cross from Mark's perspective: it is the convergence of evil against the presence of God's saving work to end injustice and sin and to create justice and holiness.

in Mark's Gospel the cross is simultaneously the sick display of injustice and the magic of new creation, both a hideous demonstration of evil and the glorious moment of love. Jesus enters into the world of cracked Eikons who have, each in their own way, worked against God's resolution, and broken the powers of this world through the cross and resurrection.

whatever is said about the cross, it begins with this: on the cross Jesus identifies with us in our suffering, in our pain, and in our death.

If the death of Christ wipes away sin, the resurrection of Christ makes all things new.

Resurrection is about new creation.

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. Nothing makes that more obvious than the gift of the Spirit in Acts 2.

Third, a significant feature of the Pentecostal Spirit is the power to transcend, to break down boundaries, and to expand the people of God.

Fourth, the Spirit who empowers the saints is the Spirit that makes them a fellowshipping body—and here we think of 1 Corinthians 12-14 with Paul's potent image of Christians being body parts who are in need of one another so that the redemptive work of God can be accomplished.