[For your greater edification and entertainment, a photo of me graduating with the Master of Studies (Research) degree from Oxford, a degree I didn't even know I was enrolled for or intend to achieve! But they let you wear a fancy gown, so - what the hey!]I have been enjoying re-reading some of the essays in The Glory of the Atonement (ed. Hill and James). The survey of the biblical and historical material is thorough and careful and leaves me in no doubt that, if one wants to excise sacrificial language from the atonement (see below) or remove the substitutionary aspect, one does so against the overwhelming testimony of the scriptures and the tradition. Which is not to say that there isn't a subjective side to the atonement: it is just that if one has only the subjective side, it ain't enough.
Anyhow, Vanhoozer's essay is my favourite so far ("The Atonement in Postmodernity") - partly because it serves as a handbrake on some of the other essays. He goes so far as to accept the postmodern critique of theoria, at least up to a point. He writes:
The postmodern challenge requires us to develop a nonreductive doctrine of the atonement that perceives the saving significance of Jesus' death in terms other than this-worldly economies of exchange...
What the doctrine of the atonement attempts haltingly to articulate is the equal ultimacy of God's love and God's light (justice, holiness). On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment. It is precisely for this reason that theories of the atonement must resist explanations that reduce the significance of Jesus ' death either to unconditional mercy or to uncompromising justice.
9 comments:
Congratulations on your surprise degree - I think that happens to some Bachelor's students here in Sydney.
"On the cross neither mercy nor justice loses out; the cross is rather their mutual fulfillment." - Amen.
Hey, nice robe :-)
I was just wondering what's happening over at youbook? Do you think there's new stuff appearing? Cause I can't find any. And some of the links say "edit me".
I mainly ask because on this blog, most of it goes over my head, but I've got a slippery grip on "you"!
Nice bow tie. You should wear that get up back when your lecturing here. It'll go down a treat.
Sorry, Joanna, it is just a long pondering pause through lack of ideas and other projects taking over... as for the 'edit me': I dunno what thats about!
Yes Marty, the formal dress will go down well. And I am going to insist on being called Professor, or Dr Jensen.
Sounds very interesting. Vanhoozer had some thought provoking things to day about the atonement in The Drama of Doctrine. I'll have to add this book to my wishlist.
Congrats on the degree by the way! You must be really clever to have got an Oxford MA without even realising it.
Hey, that's ok, I know all about pauses :-)
I reckon women love a man in uniform.
;-)
The Hill & James book has been on my shelf for a little while, awaiting being read - I'll have to raise it up the list. But a brief comment - in lieu of a _much_ longer one - from my perspective the problem with a sacrificial penal substitution theory isn't the language of sacrifice, or even of substitution (by his wounds we are healed etc) but precisely the 'penal' bit. Tim Gorringe's book 'God's Just Vengeance' is the principal influence.
The penal bit is indeed controversial part (though the Pattison/Girard passage seems to want to hatchet out the sacrificial language). Aussie NT scholar Leon Morris (cited even by Balthasar in Mysterium Paschale I notice) made an extensive and exhaustive study of the language of the OT and NT on this - especially the hilasterion word in Rom 3 (so badly mistranslated 'expiation' in the RSV)...
I think Gorringe's book is extremely contentious in its critique of punishment! O'Donovan has an interesting and exacting page of response to Gorringe in 'Ways of Judgement'. (I love Gorringe's other stuff btw)
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