REstory 6: Go Out in Joy and Be Led Back in Peace

Reconstructing Good Friday and Easter

Sifting is Hard Work

As a kid I did not like beans (not at all). But as an adult I have acquired the taste, and now I am a fan of all kinds of beans (especially with lots of onion and garlic). Depending on the season, though, you have to sift through dried beans in the basket to get all the rocks out before you can even start cooking. If you don’t, someone in your family or one of your guests might break a tooth.

Tanushree Rao on Unsplash

Faith shifting and reconstruction can often feel like sifting. How do we know what to keep and what to let go of? Some rocks reeeeeallly look like beans, but they will make you cry when you bite down, possibly cause injury, and they’re not nourishing at all. Sifting is painstaking, meticulous work — it requires scrutiny and squinting and it can make your back hurt and your brain so tired. It feels like it will take forever before the meal is actually cooked and ready to nourish your hunger.

I learned in Mozambique that sifting is much better done with others. Others can help you spot the rocks and discern which beans are worth keeping, and the work will go a little faster if we do it together. Faith sifting is also a team sport; we need a wide cloud of witnesses to discern which ideas or practices will cause injury and which ones will nourish us.

In my very first post I said that leaving the wrong story is so hard, but we can learn to Go Out In Joy. Referencing Isaiah 55, the imperative was to leave captivity, and the people were reminded that leaving false kingdoms built on oppression was already part of their story. Many of us were given the idea that being faithful means never deviating from what you were taught about God, but that view sadly ignores both history and scripture. There is no generation anywhere that has ever been exempt from unlearning some wrong ideas. But the fear of having been wrong keeps some people from expanding their view of God. I constantly wonder if some will only be willing to risk Going Out In Joy if they know they will Be Led Back In Peace by learning to love a bigger, truer God.

In the first REstory post, I shared the video presentation of the Gospel in Chairs.  That illustration used chairs to show the contrast between what we called Story A and Story B:

— Story A tells us about a God who can’t forgive or be near sinful humanity unless Jesus pays a blood payment (and would send them to hell if he doesn’t or if they don’t believe it). 

—Story B tells us that God looks like Jesus and is always pursuing humanity and offering death-defeating love even when humans kill God-in-Christ.

We discussed how the contrasts of the different stories show us different Gods, and that those different narratives will form people very differently. More and more people are realizing and admitting to themselves that they cannot love the God of Story A. Also, many versions of Story A make the Resurrection functionally irrelevant (though usually not denying the resurrection).

Then two weeks ago I listed 10 categories of atonement theories. Remember these are summaries — each of these options below has had whole books (even shelves of books!) written about them. Sometimes they get labeled with different terms depending on the author, and each one has a few variations within the category. Also, importantly, every option uses scripture AND prioritizes some scriptures/interpretations over others. Each of these theories or models is attempting to answer the question “Why did Jesus have to die?”

1. Legal Satisfaction says humans owe God not only payment for their sin debt but also an impossible payment to God’s offended honor, which only Jesus can pay on humanity’s behalf.

2. Moral Influence says Jesus died to show us the extent of God’s love and persuade us to follow and imitate that love.

3. Penal Substitution says God requires that human sin must be punished by death, and Jesus can take all of the punishment for all of humanity because he’s perfect.

4. Christus Victor says that Jesus’s death and resurrection was a victorious triumph over Sin, Death, and Satan.

5. Ransom says that God had to pay a ransom to Satan to rescue humans from imprisonment. 

6. Scapegoat/Mimetic Violence says that all human societies violently kill scapegoats, but that Christianity is the first religion to insist on the innocence of the scapegoat.

7. Recapitulation says Jesus came as the “new Adam” or a new captain of humanity to fully defeat death in humanity with the life of God.

8. New Covenant says that Jesus’s pouring out of his life (Kenosis) shows us God’s willingness to suffer in order to open a new covenant; humans are invited to imitate God’s suffering and inhabit God’s life (Theosis).

9. Liberation from Oppression says that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection happening on Passover importantly connects us to God’s solidarity with the oppressed and God’s mighty acts of freeing the enslaved from violent empires of exploitation; any atonement that ignores dignity and care of land and bodies is insufficient.

10. Womanist theologians say we must have more complex conversations beyond “redemptive” suffering because Jesus shows us a God who does not approve of violence.¹

I’ve gotten some feedback from readers who were relieved to realize there were so many options about how to think about atonement and how different groups think about the death of Jesus. But maybe it feels disorienting or overwhelming for some folks to survey ten options when we were just given one in childhood. Do we need more than one? How do we choose among so many options? How do we sift out ideas that may cause harm and keep what nourishes us? 

Imso Gabriel on Unsplash

In our first few years of atonement research, we approached the options with the lens of cultural contextualization. We thought of each of the atonement models as valid, thinking that each of the interpretations could make sense to different groups depending on their history and cultural context. For example, Scot McKnight offers the metaphor of a golf bag holding fourteen different clubs — each club can be used for different shots needed on different terrain, so maybe we should keep all the atonement models in the bag because different people in different situations might need those different perspectives.²

But I don’t think that anymore. 

It is possible to hold ideas about God that aren’t true. With continued research and wrestling, I now hold all of the categories listed above as fruitful and true *except* Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution. Let me explain part of how I got there.

Sifting out the rocks: Critiquing Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution

Sifting is tricky. Sometimes the search for “where did we get this idea?” requires engaging the primary sources as well as how their works have been received and repackaged by others after them.³ Here’s a snapshot:

Anselm (1033-1109) lived 1000 years after Jesus in feudal Britain and was archbishop of Canterbury for about 15 years at the end of his life. In his work Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man) he constructs a fictional dialogue with a student named Boso who’s asking why Jesus had to die in order to save us? Why couldn’t God just choose to forgive humans out of mercy? The prolonged dialogue uses primarily economic vocabulary; humans owe our obedience to God, therefore when we don’t obey we are stealing from God, incurring debt that must be repaid.⁴

What’s more, he claims that humans are each obligated to pay an infinitely larger amount to God because of the inherent insult of stealing. God is the offended nobility and humans are the workers or peasants in this extended analogy; the entire structure shows the influence of the feudal honor culture of medieval Europe in Anselm’s thinking. While the metaphors of legal satisfaction of economic debts is the primary category, he does cross over into penal categories a few times, like his argument that “it is not fitting for God to forgive a sin without punishment.”⁵

Please don’t hear me villainizing Anselm; every single theologian from church history (and currently today) has both lovely and lousy ideas. But no one today should have to remain hostage to an atonement metaphor based on exploitative feudal economies that was articulated 10 centuries after Jesus (and 10 centuries before us today). We need the courage to admit the contrasts between Story A and Story B — they are telling incompatible narratives about God. Then when we let those contrasts intersect with ten atonement categories above, Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution fall under Story A, and all the rest flow fruitfully and faithfully with Story B. 

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Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution are not compatible with the God that Jesus shows us, and they are causing injury and harm. Tragically, in many places in the West, these two models have been taught as the only way to think about the crucifixion, and they’ve been elevated to the level of the definition of Gospel in the past couple centuries. We do not have to remain hostage to those narratives; we can open these conversations with each other and host non threatening spaces where we can admit our ideas about God have room to grow. We can trade up and come to know a larger God of love. 

I mention in the Gospel in Chairs video that I don’t want to yank this Satisfaction or Substitution atonement away from someone who holds it dear. However, it is not responsible for a preacher or teacher to withhold from church members the other options in this wider conversation. The historical and pastoral evidence shows that these rocks in the beans are causing injury and not nourishing people.⁶ Satisfaction and substitution become the lens for the rest of Scripture and then malform their growth.⁷ We can and must do better!

The Honest Agony of Abandonment

I will address different scriptures used to support Story A (Legal Satisfaction and Penal Substitution) in a future series, but today as I wrap up, I want to mention Psalm 22. In one account, just before his last breath, Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15.34 or Matthew 27.46), which is a quotation of the opening line of Psalm 22. Sometimes this has been used to promote the Story A idea that since 1-God can’t be near sin, and 2-Jesus is carrying all our sin debt on the cross, then 3-God has to abandon Jesus in order to give him our punishment on the cross. However, this ignores the full witness of Psalm 22. Take a few minutes sometime today to read it slowly. What you will see is that the whole Psalm describes an experience of feeling extreme abandonment while acknowledging in fact, that the psalmist is not actually abandoned. In v. 24, the psalmist writes: 

For he did not despise or abhor 

the affliction of the afflicted.

He did not hide his face from him

but heard when he cried to him.

This psalm explores the experience of feeling utterly forsaken because we find ourselves surrounded by horrors, while naming that we are not actually forsaken. It’s misleading to ignore the full text of the psalm to support medieval atonement models. This God does not hide his face from the suffering of the desperate. God does NOT turn his face away.⁸ 

God-in-Jesus is showing us the full extent of the solidarity of God, willing to die a shameful death at the hands of a lynch mob in order to enter into death and heal it with life. And we can see this solidarity is not unique to this part of the story — solidarity is what this God has always been up to. This God wants to be with the children, living among them within creation. God calling Israel Beloved, coming as a human in Jesus, dying in shame like so many humans, conquering death to extend life to humans, and putting Godsself inside us so that with the Spirit we can start rehearsing for New Creation — all of these flow within this crescendoing trajectory of God With Us. 

Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Sifting is hard work, but it is so worth it to get the rocks out of the beans. Together we can Go Out in Joy and Be Led Back in Peace, finding our way into a wider, nourishing narrative of a God who does not abandon the Beloved in anguish but promises to heal and renew the whole story.

© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.

1. Check out the REstory 5 post for longer definitions and footnoted resources that describe each conversation.

2. McKnight’s golf bag analogy is found in his book A Community Called Atonement. My husband Alan used a kaleidoscope analogy when he wrote about this in 2009 for an article in IJFM. He also wrote about atonement in a 2016 article, also for IJFM, describing how different atonement models can make sense in different parts of the world depending on how a culture handles negative transgressions (cultures are often classified as primarily guilt, shame, or fear-focused).

3. Teachers and leaders must be doing this work and also making these resources available to lay members who want to access the wider conversation.

4. I have used Anselm of Canterbury: the Major Works. Cur Deus Homo is found on pp.260-356. I cannot emphasize enough how empowering it is to read the primary sources. Anselm assumes the doctrine of Original Sin throughout his writing; see Danielle Shroyer’s book Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place for a helpful perspective.

5. Anselm of Canterbury, 284.

6. Again, if your minister has not read Trauma Informed Evangelism by Charles Kiser and Elaine Heath you should buy them a copy!

7. I will address the passages from scripture that are assumed to support Satisfaction and Substitution in an upcoming series. For anyone looking for tools right now to re-read Scripture without Story A lenses, I will suggest a few accessible strategies: 1-try rereading that passage assuming that Resurrection and New Creation are the core of the “good news.” 2-when you come across words or phrases that sound like substitution, shift your understanding instead to representation (Jesus representing Israel and fulfilling Israel’s side of their covenant with God). 3-Substitute “justice” wherever you see “righteousness” in your New Testament. 4- Substitute “faithful/faithfulness” wherever you see “faith” in your Bible.

8. Many hymns and worship songs are full of Story A guilt-based blood-filled atonement lyrics, and this is a major area of needed reconstruction. Legal satisfaction (“he paid a debt he did not owe”) and Penal Substitution (“the Father turns his face away,” “his wounds have paid my ransom,” “till on that cross as Jesus died the wrath of God was satisfied”) are probably just as powerful in song lyrics as in sermons, and maybe more. Our family stopped singing those lyrics a long time ago, changing them whenever we could (“the Father turns his face OUR way,” “on the cross as Jesus died the LOVE of God was satisfied”). Misleading song lyrics are a significant pastoral concern for spiritual formation. For more, see Leigh Barnard, “The Atonement We Sing,” Dissertation, London School of Theology. (2011). For some peole changing song lyrics is upsetting and offensive; see Bob Smietana, “Song Dropped from Hymnal Sparks Atonement Debate,” National Catholic Reporter 49:23 (2013), 6. See also Kyle Kenneth Schiefelbein-Guerrero, “The Theology of Atonement in Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism Viewed through Hymnody,” Dialog 48:4 (2009), 329–38.