Augustine and the atonement

This little passage from the City of God very helpfully clarifies something I was trying to say a week or so ago: that Jesus is not punished by God on the cross, though he pays the penalty for sin:

...the good and true Mediator has shown that it is sin which is evil, not the substance or nature of flesh, since that substance could be assumed, with a human soul, and preserved free from sin, and could be laid aside in death, and changed into something better by resurrection. He has shown that death itself, although it is the punishment for sin (a punishment which he paid for us, though being himself without sin), is not to be aovided by sinning but rather, if occasion offers, to be endured for the cause of right. For it is just because he died, and his death was not the penalty of sin, that he was able by dying to pay the price of our sins. X.24

And, to boot, a more positive role for the body than Augustine is often given credit for.

Vanhoozer and the atonement, more of.

[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.

George Pattison on Girard and the atonement...

George Pattison in his book A Short Course in Christian Doctrine adapts Girard's work to Christian thinking about the atonement thus:

Earlier, I looked briefly at René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. …Scapegoating works in the sense that it unifies society (“One man must die for the people”!), but it works only at the cost of a massive collective self-deception, a refusal of the self-knowledge that we are each complicit in and responsible for the violence that the act of scapegoating seeks to purge. Seeing Jesus as the scapegoat who bears our sins and thus takes away the sin of the world is, according to Girard, completely to miss the point of what we actually find in the Gospels. For what we see there is the historically unique witness to the profound injustice of the scapegoat phenomenon and, for the first time in history, a victim who refuses to accept the justice of his death, who, in effect, proclaims that one man should not die for the people. For if each person is, in themselves, a reflection of the image and likeness of God and called to fellowship in the divine life, then no act of killing can be “God’s will”. [Thus the passion narrative] offers a decisive insight into the systemic, structural injustice of the human condition and, through this self-knowledge, demystifies and frees us from the otherwise universal mechanisms of mimetic desire and their inevitable violent outcome. The cross, as witnessed in the Gospels, does set us free. But it does not do so because it is the supreme sacrifice. Rather, it does so because it exposes sacrifice for what it is: murder. If we understand this, then that path is for evermore closed and we are set on the new path of mutual responsibility and care. Where the Church persists in interpreting the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms, however, we may suspect that the lesson has not yet been learned. It is salutary to reflect that the Victorians’ preoccupation with sacrifice and atonement provided an all too easy context for the mystification of what happened in the First World War as a Christ-like sacrifice. Only too late did Europe realize that this was…just plain slaughter.

My question is: has there ever been a time when the church did not interpret the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms - let alone in the explicit and persistent language of the NT itself? The language of 'as witnessed in the Gospels' can only be true on a very bad reading of them. Can we retain some of the insight about the cross - that it puts an end to sacrifice and exposes the death of Jesus as a vile murder of an innocent man - and yet still say as orthodox Christians always have, that it was a sacrifice, supremely so?