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by
N.T. Wright
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October 17, 2016 - August 11, 2017
But by themselves, without paying attention to the larger elements in the picture, they can lead us into a private or even selfish way of seeing things, in which our immediate needs may seem to have been met (our needs for forgiveness in the present and salvation in the future), but without making any difference in the wider world.
According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God’s purposes for the world.
you don’t have to have a theory about why the cross is so powerful before you can be moved and changed, before you can know yourself loved and forgiven, because of Jesus’s death.
The very mention of crucifixion was taboo in polite Roman circles, since it was the lowest form of capital punishment, reserved for slaves and rebels.
against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.
The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.
unless someone in the church—in each Christian gathering, in each generation—is working on deeper understandings of foundational Christian truth, it is perilously easy for individuals and communities to drift away from the life-giving meaning of the gospel itself.
We must not make the overwhelming experience of God’s love revealed in the cross of Jesus an excuse for mere muddle.
There is, in other words, no equivalent in atonement theology of the careful Christological formulations that emerged from the controversies over what could and couldn’t be said and what should and shouldn’t be said about the person of Jesus and the triune God.
Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, was the first one to work out in detail what has come to be known as the “satisfaction” theory of the atonement: God’s honor has been impugned by human sin and must be satisfied.
whatever we mean by “atonement” is directly related to whatever we think about God’s ultimate future, particularly about what happens after death. How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for.
The rejection of purgatory precipitated a fresh emphasis from a new angle on an interpretation of the cross that echoed, but also differed from, that of Anselm.
the doctrine known as “penal substitution” (Jesus bearing punishment in the place of his people), though in itself a much older, indeed biblical and patristic, conception, received a new boost and a new spin from the Reformers’ rejection of purgatory. One
the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking, which are actually screened out by concentrating on the wrong ones.
Atonement (how humans are rescued from their plight and restored to their intended place within the loving and creative purposes of God) must dovetail with eschatology (what God ultimately intends for the world and for humans).
When much European culture in the eighteenth century was embracing Deism and then Epicureanism, a radical split emerged between personal sin, which stopped people going to heaven, and actual evil in the world, including human wrongdoing, violence, war, and so on, but also what has been called “natural evil,” earthquakes, tsunamis, and the rest. “Atonement theologies” then addressed the former (how can our sins be forgiven so we can go to heaven?), while the latter was called the “problem of evil,” to be addressed quite separately from any meaning given to the cross of Jesus by philosophical
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it has been tacitly assumed that the cross has nothing to do with social and political evil.
In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross.
another way in which the cross has been interpreted in connection with “punishment” has been very popular in some quarters. In this view, God hates sinners so much that he is determined to punish them, but Jesus more or less happens to get in the way and take the death blow on their behalf, so they are somehow spared. It would (I think) be difficult to find a work of serious theology in any tradition that puts the matter as baldly as that. Theologians will almost always say, “But of course this was because of God’s love for us.” But at a popular level, in sermons and talks to young people,
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unless Jesus’s death achieved something—something that urgently needed to be done and that couldn’t be done in any other way—then it cannot serve as a moral example.
Lingering jealousy, ancient spite, offense easily taken but less easily averted: this is the constant theme of the world’s first great poem. If you wanted “salvation,” it meant being rescued from that kind of thing.
Crucifixion was one of the central ways in which authorities in the ancient world set out quite deliberately to show subject peoples who was in charge and to break the spirit of any resistance.
Those who crucified people did so because it was the sharpest and nastiest way of asserting their own absolute power and guaranteeing their victim’s absolute degradation.
Part of the point of crucifixion, then, was precisely the lingering, extended process, which added to the horror as well as the pain.
Imagine the Roman soldiers, battle-hardened yet battle-weary, trying to police a small overheated nation with ridiculous beliefs and ambitions, in which sporadic terrorism hinted at an insatiable desire for revolt and independence. We who know about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib should not find it impossible to imagine something of the mind-set of an execution squad outside Jerusalem.
The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely in AD 33, is poised historically in between these two large-scale crucifixions. Nobody in that world would have been able to hear the word “cross” or be reminded of someone dying in that way without feeling instinctively the horror and shame of the whole thing.
The second point of special interest for us is the way in which the Romans sometimes used crucifixion as a way of mocking a victim with social or political pretensions. “You want to be high and lifted up?” they said in effect. “All right, we’ll give you ‘high and lifted up.’”
Augustus’s projected vision of tranquil peace was perched on top of a world of horror and violence. Wrath and arms continued to dominate classical culture.
Since sin, the consequence of idolatry, is what keeps humans in thrall to the nongods of the world, dealing with sin has a more profound effect than simply releasing humans to go to heaven. It releases humans from the grip of the idols, so they can worship the living God and be renewed according to his image.
technical terms is “righteousness,” in Greek dikaiosynē. For many centuries in many traditions, “righteousness” has been understood as the moral status we would have if only we had kept the “works contract” perfectly, and then (by various explanations) as the status we can have by faith because, despite our moral failure, Jesus has taken the punishment and so provided the “righteousness” as a gift (“the righteousness of Christ”).
What the Bible offers is not a “works contract,” but a covenant of vocation.
This lawbreaking is a symptom of a much more serious disease. Morality is important, but it isn’t the whole story. Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry.
The priestly vocation consists of summing up the praises of creation before the Creator; the royal vocation, in turn, means reflecting God’s wisdom and justice into the world. This is a direct outworking of Genesis 1:26–28, where humans are created in the divine image. The book of Revelation picks up this theme exactly where Israel’s scriptures left off. It says—shockingly, of course—that the ancient vocation had been renewed in a new and revolutionary way through the death of the Messiah.
“Idolatry,” of course, covers a lot more than simply the manufacture and adoration of actual physical images. It happens whenever we place anything in the created order above the Creator himself. When humans worship parts of creation or forces within creation, they give away their power to those aspects of the created order, which will then come to rule over them.
“Sin” is not just bad in itself. It is the telltale symptom of a deeper problem, and the biblical story addresses that deeper problem; it includes the “sin” problem but goes much farther. The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—“forces” within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the
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death is the intrinsic result of sin, not simply an arbitrary punishment. When humans fail in their image-bearing vocation, the problem is not just that they face punishment. The problem is that the “powers” seize control, and the Creator’s plan for his creation cannot go ahead as intended.
Three things follow at once. First, the promised land would be the place of life, as opposed to death. This comes out with great emphasis toward the end of Deuteronomy (30:15–20), resonating back all the way to Genesis 3:22–24, where Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden and barred from having access to the Tree of Life.
Second, the land would eventually become the place of divine Presence.
When we read Genesis and Exodus together, the construction of the tabernacle toward the end of Exodus and the role of Aaron the high priest within it can be seen as a renewal or restoration of the original creation. In the “little world” of the sacred tent, close up and divinely personal, the story echoes the original creation. Heaven and earth belong together. God himself is mysteriously present. Humans, bearing the divine image, play their priestly role at the center.
Third, there are signs within Israel’s scriptures that the land itself was seen as an advance signpost for something much greater.
what happens when we read the story of Adam and Eve and then the story of Israel in parallel, on the one hand, and in sequence, on the other? In both cases the promise of life is exchanged for the reality of death, and for the same reason. The early humans rejected the Creator’s call and command; Israel rejected the much-amplified call and commands of the covenant God.
Some in the churches, fearful of moral anarchy, have tried to cling to the old rules. Others have switched attention to newer, more fashionable issues, still thumping the pulpit, but now warning against fossil fuels rather than fornication.
that humans were made for a purpose, that Israel was made for a purpose, and that humans and Israel alike have turned aside from that purpose, distorted the vision, and abused their vocation.
In the Bible, “sin”—for which there are various words in Hebrew—is the outworking of a prior disease, a prior disobedience: a failure of worship.
understand the idea of the “image,” as in Genesis 1:26–28, to mean that humans are designed to function like angled mirrors. We are created in order to reflect the worship of all creation back to the Creator and by that same means to reflect the wise sovereignty of the Creator into the world. Human beings, worshipping their Creator, were thus the intended key to the proper flourishing of the world.
The Great Playwright has composed a drama and written a wonderful part especially for us to play; and, like a spoiled and silly child, we have torn up the script and smirked our way through a self-serving but ultimately self-destructive plot of our own.
When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have.
You can see this in the obvious examples: money, sex, and power itself. Like fire, these “forces” are good servants but bad masters.
deep down underneath there is nothing arbitrary about sin or death. Choose the one, and you choose the other. Worship idols, and you’ll go into exile. Obey the serpent’s voice, and you will forfeit the right to the Tree of Life. You can’t have it both ways.
the tabernacle was designed as a miniature heaven-and-earth, a “little world” in which God and his people would meet. It would be a miniature Eden.
