Below is the schedule from a conference in which I was able to participate this past weekend, and I’m going to be posting some of the notes from my response to Mark L. Taylor‘s presentation in the coming days. The papers and responses will be submitted for publication this summer. 

“[O]nly if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord. No matter how often the subsequent history of the church belied this confession, it is this presence within time of an eschatological and divine peace, really incarnate in the person of Jesus and forever imparted to the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, that remains the very essence of the church’s evangelical appeal to the world at large, and of the salvation it proclaims.” – David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

About a decade ago, Princeton theologian Mark Lewis Taylor wrote a book called The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America.  “Executed,” refers to the death penalty and the provocative claim that Jesus too was executed.   As one reviewer remarked, Taylor is reminding Christians that they follow an “executed God,” not just a crucified one; Jesus, like many of America’s and the world’s “surplus populations” died because of the self-interest of imperial and religious authority.  And while we say that Jesus was certainly innocent, according to Taylor’s research and others I’ve read, there has also been the shocking estimate that as many as 1 in 9 death row inmates are thought to be innocent of the crime(s) for which they have been sentenced to die.

I’m going to have the privilege of responding to Taylor at a conference coming up in Claremont in just a few weeks.  His paper is entitled, “U.S. Mass Incarceration as Decolonial Struggle: A Theo-political and Theo-poetic Challenge.”  Obviously, the fact that he’s still writing about this reflects the unfortunate reality that the problem has only gotten worse.  Having written some on the Drug War, I’m very interested in his topic.  In many ways, the violence in Mexico and the overpopulation of our prisons are two sides of the same coin (for more on this, see the manuscript from my presentation on this subject at the American Academy of Religion conference in 2011 here).  In Columbia and Mexico, Cartels pay assassins called sicaros to execute rival gang members.  In the process, many innocent victims have been executed as well.

As a Christian, I affirm the creeds of orthodoxy.  I believe in the resurrection, and I confess that Jesus is Lord.  As many believers throughout the centuries have remarked though, this confession is vacuous apart from a life and a community that is striving to follow in the way of the cross.  The church is called to testify to the reality and hope of the resurrection by existing as a sign, a witness, and a foretaste of God’s dream for the world (see Alan Roxburgh’s Introducing the Missional Church).

And as one friend of mine Tad Delay recently argued, this means that church, faith, and theology are always political.  Of course this doesn’t mean only political; nor does it mean partisan, necessarily.  Nor again does it mean coercive.  Two extremes of passive resignation on the one-hand and partisan over-identification on the other are much easier and much more appealing than the narrow, sub-versive, transcendent path and vision of the executed One.

Taylor explains:

The very notion of gospel, eungelion, is a case in point.  It is a term that originates neither from the early Jesus movement(s), nor from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew testament dating from third-century B.C.E.).  Gospel was a term for the glad tidings that announced and eulogized military victories of Roman campaigns or the celebrations and sacrifices made on behalf of the emperor, who was uniquely proclaimed as soter (savior), one who brings world peace, the enforced peace of Roman power, the Pax Romana [which Taylor again provocatively compares to Pax Americana].  Glorification of the emperor, indeed his deification, “gives euangelion its significance and power. . . . Because the emperor is more than a common man, his ordinances are glad messages and his commands are sacred writings. . . . He proclaims euangelia through his peace. . . . The first eugelion is the news of his birth.”

When Paul forged a grammar dynamically structured around the terms gospel and soter, he was, in effect, laying down a gauntlet to the standing political powers of Roman jurisdiction and to its own divine charter myth.  Paul’s couching the good news of Jesus as gospel and his talk of Jesus as savior (soter) bringing salvation, soteria (see 1 Thess. 5:8-9, Phil. 1:28; 2:12; Rom. 1:16; 10:1; 11:11; and 13:11), would certainly be heard as an alternative claim not only about the cosmos but also about victory and power in very concrete domains of earth and politics.  Paul’s gospel set forth an alternative lord to the imperium’s claims to possess saving power, a clear challenge to the imperial cult running from Caesar Augustus to his successors.  Our enforced distinctions between religion and politics, church and state, often render us tone deaf to both what Paul was saying and what the people were hearing: a theological-ethical-political challenge to the claims of the empire that structured their daily lives (82).

Other words worth mentioning that Paul appropriated from the public context:

• Pistis (this word often appeared on coins) – God’s faithfulness or loyalty to all people, not the emperor/Rome’s faithfulness.
• Kyrios – Jesus is Lord.  Not Caesar.
• Eirene – “Peace and Security”: proclaiming peace when there is no peace.

Obviously, these too are politically charged terms, set in the context of his discussion of the coming “day of the Lord,” an event to “shatter the false peace and security of the Roman establishment.”  As this indicates, his famous apocalyptic orientation is not an otherwordly discourse but a theopolitical challenge.  [Nor are these] inconsequential terms.  They are central to our concept of faith.  And bear in mind that this message is meant to be taken neither as a call for violent tactical maneuvering nor passive endurance.  By and large, however, we’re far too caught up in the latter (83). 

This is why Taylor discusses adversarial politics and the need for a theatrics of counter-terrorism and resistance to empire for a movement in the United States against mass incarceration, and, as I want to appropriate it, against the drug war.

Ok, so the gospel was political.  But it was also eschatological, meaning future and salvation-oriented for not just individuals but all of creation.  Taylor addresses this dimension as well:

Yes, Paul has a cosmic Christ, and the powers of evil he addresses have a kind of cosmic and even metaphysical beyondness, if you will, vis-a-vis the politics of Rome.  Yet, and this is crucial, we neither understand the apocalyptic Paul nor his cosmic Christ except through the adversarial stance he assumes and sharpens by critically engaging the political claims of the imperial cult.  Recall that the imperial cult, for all its political ideology and practice, also made cosmic, religious claims.  Rome’s gospel and Paul’s gospel do not represent an opposition between a political force and a religious force.  No, this is a struggle between two visions and two communal ways of inhabiting the earth, both of which are inextricably political and religious. Both are freighted with this-worldly concern for flesh-and-blood human beings; both are full of cosmic and religious meaning and aspirations (84).

In sum, I would just say this: a lot of people are tired of talking politics, but that’s because the media and our electoral process has co-opted what should otherwise be the deeper, fuller, and more robustly theological importance of the political realm.   It’s hard to imagine a more profoundly political statement than the willful submission by the son of God to imperial torture and execution.  I guess in my experience I just get concerned that talk of peace and quiet in the shadow of a national superpower by the relatively affluent can quickly become an excuse for doing/saying very little to actually transform the world.  At the same time, as long as we’re making a concerted effort to live the mission of God faithfully in our context, the still, silent mourning, set apart from the clamor of society’s shallow conception of democracy and freedom, might be the perfect way to honor and host of the crucified/executed One on Good Friday.

Friend:  this atonement stuff is FLYING over my head

Sent at 1:40 PM on Monday

Moving closer to good Friday, and in light of Tony Jones’ recent request for sharing more posts on the subject, I’ve adapted this passage from a section in a final paper I wrote for a class called, “Theology of Globalization” with Anselm Min.  By drawing on the work of a few other figures, it expounds upon the solidarity idea in Moltmann that was highlighted in my previous post on Jones’ book, A Better Atonement. 

The Salvadorian Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino contends that “the New Testament does not insist that the pain of the cross, in itself, produces salvation . . . What we must not do is to theoretically equate love and sacrifice . . . The cross, as a historically necessary component of love, is part of its historical fullness, and what God was pleased by was this fullness of love.  This means that what is pleasing to God is not just one event.”[i] It is Jesus’s whole life combined with his faithfulness to the point of death that pleases God.  Sobrino adds:

“In the Greek philosophical outlook, the incarnation can be understood as a “participation” in human nature, from which we get its famous maxim: “What has not been accepted cannot be redeemed.”  In this way the cross is sacrifice, death, and the supreme expression of negativity – the acceptance of which, in Latin theology, is the condition that alone makes it possible to overcome the negativity, though the specific models used to explain this have an excessively legalistic and formal ring to them.”[ii]

Sobrino is clearly struggling with the tension between an unwillingness to relinquish the function of and need for atonement on the one hand and the inability for any metaphor or human language to fully capture and do justice to Christ’s saving death on the other hand – a death that has so often been misunderstood and manipulated, distorting the image of God that Christ reveals.  There is ever present in the cross a dialectic of mercy and justice, grace and judgment, forgiveness and condemnation.  The cross expresses and embodies each aspect at once.  As Sobrino further elucidates, Jesus is both the Suffering Servant and the one who establishes righteousness and law.

There is a tendency even in Sobrino, however – no doubt in light of his context and immediate concerns for victims, and in fear of making God out to be an oppressor – to err on the side of reading the crucifixion in terms of mere symbolic causality rather than efficient causality.  While one must exercise extraordinary caution so as not to anthropomorphize God’s judgment, there is a very understandable preoccupation with whether one can praise and consistently envisage a God who allegedly reviles violence but also atones for sin through violence.

But even if the cross is conceived as necessary for many other reasons already mentioned (criticism, solidarity, etc.), to completely eradicate atonement and reduce Jesus’s death to a demonstration or to symbolism – however powerful – is for Christians to risk depriving the tradition of its soteriological depth.  S. Mark Heim makes a critical distinction in a reflection on Isaiah 52-53: “When we inflict iniquities on a victim, it is not same event as when God lays those same iniquities on him.”[iii]  The imperative is to guard well the distance between our human notions of jurisprudence and that which we imperfectly attribute to God for the purposes of reaching finite intuition about God’s nature, activity and relationship to the world.  It is easy to forget that one can only speak analogously about the manor in which the cross is a mechanism of God’s redeeming action.

This is not to say that one cannot construct new models and theories of atonement necessarily.  Nor is it to reify traditional concepts.  Jurgen Moltmann in turn provides what I think is a helpful additive with regard to the problem of violent, unjust sacrifice.  In “seeking to retrieve some aspects of the traditional theological reading of the cross while remaining faithful to the liberationist thrust of his earlier work,” Moltmann compliments the theme of solidarity with the theme of atonement for the perpetrators.[iv]  Christ’s death on the cross is only properly understood as atonement for the sins of perpetrators if God is present in Christ.  This death is endured by God vicariously for all who have fallen victim to death. It is atonement for the purpose of reconciling a hostile, sinful world:

“The love of God wounded by human injustice and violence becomes the love of God which endures pain; God’s ‘wrath’ becomes his compassion.”[v] Indeed, “God suffers injustice and violence as an injury to his love because and in so far as, he holds fast to his love for the unjust and the person who commits violence.  So his love must overcome his anger by ‘reconciling itself’ to the pain it has been caused.  This is what happens when God ‘carries’ or ‘bears’ the sins of his people.”[vi]

This “carrying” or “bearing” is described in Scripture in terms of expiation as well as propitiation.  In the former instance, the people’s sins are ritually transferred to a scapegoat and it takes them away to the wilderness.  In the latter, it is the prophetic vision of God’s Suffering Servant who “carries” the sins of the people in his vicarious suffering. In a similar vein, Miroslav Volf has developed the theme of “divine self-donation for the enemies and their reception into the eternal communion of God.”[vii]  Elsewhere even Sobrino seems to agree: “As historical violence come from injustice, we [too] have to bear injustice, which means taking the side of the victims of injustice and its violence, the poor majority, and bearing their fate: violence cannot be redeemed unless it is borne in some way.”[viii] It seems that with this language, and with a return to a more thoroughly Trinitarian vision, Christians might be able to assuage the uneasiness with talk of substitution.

What is more though, as others like Hans Urs von Balthasar and more recently Adam Kotsko have shown, for example, discussion about atonement does not end with Christ.  Without meaning to imply that human beings in any way contribute to their salvation in eschatological terms, there is nevertheless an important sense in which we must speak of the church’s participation and sanctification in the process of being made at-one with Christ (as in, at-one-ment) on behalf of the world.

Kotsko prefers the word “redemption” to “atonement” because the substitutionary connotation of the latter stands in the way and can perhaps delimit human involvement – not in the soteriological and initial divine action, but in the response and on-going sanctification that is also part of the “politics of redemption.”[ix]  The notion of Christ as representative (Dorothee Soelle) can also be an improvement on substitution language. In either case, the shift is to a more relational and even social conception of divine-human interaction.  Hence, Jesus models how to live without fear, without [causing suffering and shame], and without the lustful domination of others.

God desires that human beings have free enjoyment, not dominance by possessive relations.  Christ represents this possibility.  Christ “transcends the dialectic of [suffering] and sin….[with an] authority [that] is based in his radical openness to others.”[x] According to Kotsko, Christ restores connections that have been cut off, and he does not try to control the outcome of his interventions.[xi]  Kotsko stresses the responsibility human beings have to take up and repeat Christ’s self-effacing actions as opposed to the tendencies to reach for control.

In order to close and return to God’s agency, however, one can borrow a bit from the process perspective defended by Majorie Suchocki, as Austin Roberts explains – and this is where a theodicy is made explicit: “Precisely because God in the consequent nature feels every sin and knows our situations in full, God can then graciously offer us redemptive possibilities in the next moment of our existence. Suchocki concludes, ‘Through God’s crucifixion, God provides us with a resurrection fitted to us in a love that demands our well-being. Who would think of a God whose love involves God in our pain?'”

As Christians we like to talk about the “true” meaning of Christmas – the birth of Jesus Christ of course.  This has even made for a good Christmas political campaign ad in the past.  Sometimes it seems as if certain Christians think it’s sufficient to just mention more loudly than culture what the season is really “all about.”  Doing so gives a kind of cursory feeling of living counter-culturally and of being faithful to the Great Commission.  And it’s usually accompanied by abstract proclamations of love, joy, peace and hope.  I can’t help think again of the verse about “those who give assurance of peace when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).  But we know that beneath the surface there is much more to what Christ’s advent really signifies.

We live in an age when people aren’t hearing or seeing the Christmas story as relevant anymore.  On the one hand, we don’t worry about this too much, but on the other hand, have we ever asked why?  There’s so much craziness around the holidays at church.  Living nativities for example – what does this really communicate?  Do the people putting them on even know?  I’m not meaning to be cynical here; I genuinely wonder.  No doubt there are many reasons for society’s disenchantment, but I submit that at least one of them is the failure, in church, to name and confess the biggest sins of our people – social sins like war, coercive free trade agreements with South Korea, exploitation, environmental degradation, and excessive accumulation and resource consumption, or the personal ones like lust, addiction, fear, pride and insecurity.  And I mean like really concretely speak of them, by giving tangible examples and talking about them in the open, admitting our brokenness and mourning over the great, great costs that society and especially the global periphery has borne as a consequence.

The other tendency one notices is paradoxically related.  You see it in evangelical contexts particularly, but not only there.  It’s the use of the birth of Jesus as another chance to talk about the death of Jesus, and how it functions as a penal substitutionary sacrifice for our sins.  The danger in this case is similar in that, while harping some on individual sins, the message usually goes straight to celebrating what we get from this exchange.  The other problem is that the real richness of the Incarnation itself is lost, and Jesus is separated too much from God the Father.  It likewise precludes any grieving of the darkness around us and in ourselves.  Much like Holy Saturday, Advent is not yet the time for triumph.  With all of the devastation, agony and uncertainty in the world, it is right and even essential to say that God has unfinished work.  And even after the resurrection, which is a central part of God’s mission, the all-important restoration of creation and the dead is still pending.

Thus there is at least a twofold function to the Incarnation that we can speak of without yet getting to atonement.

First, Jesus’s birth into a political climate under the reign of the ruthless King Herod highlights the stark contrast between God’s way and the way of worldly power.  The lowliness, marginality and vulnerability that characterize Jesus’s family and historical setting invokes the theme of solidarity that he and therefore God has with the subjugated peoples of the world.  This includes especially the undocumented, the foreigner, the jobless, the sick, the elderly, the lonely, the prisoner, the troubled veteran, the homeless, the hungry and the uninsured.  As the one who’s first words at the beginning of his ministry were about proclaiming liberation to persons such as these, perhaps this is where our Christmas reflection should also begin.

Secondly, the Incarnation doesn’t just say that God is with us and for us.  It also echoes, in continuity with the Jewish prophetic tradition what God is against:

“All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the [Incarnate One]; but only those who struggle against evil by following [his] example will discover him at their side.  To claim the comfort of the Incarnation while rejecting [God’s] way is the advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.”[i]

The manor in which Jesus experiences the realities of life on earth in the birth narratives protests all human ambitions that lead to domination, exclusion and oppression.  From sleeping with animals and fleeing to Egypt, to growing up in Nazareth and being raised by a carpenter, Jesus manifests God’s partiality for the underside of history and defends the case of the sinned-against.

The themes of solidarity with the victims and the condemnation of injustice are later supplemented by the atonement by Christ for the perpetrators.  Only God can bring complete healing and reconciliation, and it’s true that we are all perpetrators to some extent – even the poor among us.  We should not romanticize their plight.  The question is not whether we are totally innocent, however – no one is; rather, as Baylor’s Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis explains, it’s whether we’re moving toward Community on the one hand or Empire on the other.  Ellis also says that for Christians, unlike Jews, they kind of have to downplay the messianic if they want to properly emphasize the prophetic.  At least for this season and context, I think he might be right.

There is another lesson from the Incarnation then.  Henri Nouwen says that “we read the Word[/Christ] so that the Word[/Christ] can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.”  He seems to be hinting here at the idea of theosis – that is, our sanctification and transformation into the image of the invisible God.  This change in us, however gradual and inconsistent, also demands a conversion of some kind, a repentance or “turning around” as John the Baptist insisted.

I like the words to a song my friend Tripp Fuller wrote and recently sang on his podcast which inspired part of this reflection:

“Pattern all your calculating

and the world we are creating

to the Advent we’re awaiting.

Come Lord Jesus come.”