Triune Atonement: The Foundation of the Doctrine
Masaccio’s fresco The Trinity beautifully depicts the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Christ is in the centre, crucified, while the Father stands behind him, arms supporting the cross. Between them flies the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. But why label this crucifixion scene ‘The Trinity’? As The Count of Monte Cristo suggests, ‘It is only at [the moment of death] that one can make a study of character’ – a point we will explore at length in this and the ensuing chapter.1 The death and resurrection of Christ is where the character of God reveals itself most fully: where the attributes of God shine forth most brightly, where the depths of God’s self-involvement with creation are revealed, and where the reality of God’s triune life enacts itself most clearly and efficaciously for us and for our salvation. Masaccio’s naming of his piece was most appropriate, for it is in the passion of Christ that the triune life of God manifests itself most clearly, and for this reason the doctrine of the Trinity likewise affords us the best and fullest perspective from which to understand the meaning and significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. ‘The bedrock of soteriology is the doctrine of the Trinity. The perfect life of the Holy Trinity is the all-encompassing and first reality from whose completeness all else derives.’2
The divine dilemma3
The atonement is a response to a problem – but whose problem? The temptation is to dive into questions surrounding Christ’s death and resurrection as God’s way of dealing with sin and evil; but the resolution of this problem, our salvation, takes place within a bigger, all-encompassing mystery. As Migliore notes, ‘Christian theology begins, continues, and ends with the inexhaustible mystery of God.’4 Our task in the present chapter is to explore some of the ways in which this is the case: the ways in which the atonement begins, continues and ends with this mystery, the ways that ‘the perfect life of the Trinity’ is ‘the bedrock of soteriology’.5 Approaching the doctrine of the atonement from within this mystery affords us a unique vantage point for perceiving the ‘problem’ of the atonement.
There are many different ways to express the dilemma underlying the atonement – the crisis for which Christ’s saving work is the solution. Typically, explanations canvas some aspect of the human plight: our inability to partake of everlasting life and happiness due to our guilt and uncleanness, our incapacity to offer satisfaction to God, our failure to obey the law and consequent disobedience and necessary punishment, and our bondage to Satan are commonplace answers. In a markedly different approach, Athanasius draws attention to the surprising way in which these different aspects of the human problem take place within an account of God’s own dilemma.
What was God to do? Be silent before such things and let human beings be deceived by the demons and be ignorant of God? But then what need was there in the beginning for human beings to come into being in the image of God? . . . Or what profit would there be to the maker God, or what glory for him, if human beings, brought into being by him, did not revere him but reckoned others to be their maker? For God would be found creating them for others and not for himself. . . . What then was God to do? (De inc, §13)
Why does Athanasius put it this way? Are not our dehumanization, ignorance, deception and death our problem? Surely they are the result of our actions, and we suffer their disastrous consequences. Why turn the tables, burdening God with our problem?6 This seems like the antic of a rebellious teen, blaming her parents for her problems and angst. Is this not the height of impiety, burdening God with a dilemma that is ours and ours alone?
The answer lies within the will of God, for our dilemma, and the whole of creaturely reality within which this dilemma occurs, takes place only because of the prior and fundamental reality of the life and will of the triune God.7 This God is the maker of heaven and earth: ‘All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made’ (Jn 1:3). All of reality, all things in heaven and earth receive their nature, existence and purpose from God – a fact entailing far more than the negation of a creative source other than God. For instance, creatio ex nihilo means that the resources, inspirations and motives for creating all things were God’s alone – God himself, to be precise. As Thomas puts it, ‘[T]he entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God’ (ST, 1.65.3). God was not motivated by an inspiration external to himself, a competitive desire to outdo someone, or by any lack on his part. His fundamental motive in creation was the grace of sharing himself with that which was yet to be, or as Thomas puts it, for the ‘fruition of God’ (ST, 1.65.3) for the benefit of the creature. In doing so, God glorifies himself anew by sharing his glory.8
But since God is the only source for creation, its failure and shame rests first and foremost on him as well. For where the triune God binds to himself a purpose, the fulfilment (or failure) thereof becomes a part of God’s identity due to the strength of that bond. Not only is God not honoured when we sin – he is dishonoured by us.9 Not only is God’s name not magnified when we sin – it is taken in vain. God’s binding a purpose to himself through both creation and covenant entails God making himself vulnerable in certain ways – vulnerable to being sinned against, being dishonoured and being confronted with dilemmas. Take, for example, the doctrine of the imago Dei – that as men and women we are made in the image of God. We typically explore this doctrine anthropologically, attending to those unique characteristics of our creaturely being and vocation. Another way to approach this doctrine is to explore what it means for God to be imaged, or portrayed, by the creatures he has made.10 In our misrepresentation of God we nonetheless continue to represent him, but do so poorly. And while we may think that this would not affect God, Scripture suggests otherwise. This is the mystery of the self-imposed dilemma of God – where God in his freedom chooses to bind himself to creatures, thereby in a sense binding their failures to himself.
After the incident of the Golden Calf, the Lord tells Moses: ‘Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against [the people] and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.’ To this, Moses replies: ‘O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, “With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth?”’ In response, ‘The Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on this people’ (Ex. 32:10-14). The logic with which Moses pled his case to God is fascinating: a form of national pressure based on what the Egyptians would think. But why would God care about what the Egyptians thought, when he had just devastated them with the plagues, rescuing the Israelites from their grasp?
The answer has to do with how God seeks to be known by his creation. By creating free and rational creatures out of nothing, God bound himself to his creation, vesting himself fully (TD, 174) in this enterprise, that his creatures might reflect his glory through knowledge and worship. But failure in the creative project, failure on the part of the creature’s understanding and reverence, sully the glory of God, in addition to its consequences for the creature.11 What does it mean for God to have free and rational creatures failing to know and delight in him? This failure transcends disappointment, or jealousy. If God has bound his purpose to himself and his purpose is failing, then God is failing; our failure to know and worship God is for God to fail to be who he has set out to be, to fail to be worshipped by us.12 This is why God was so concerned about the reaction of the Egyptians (Ex. 32:12), and why the problem of our misdirected worship (Rom. 1:25) is first and foremost the Creator God’s concern: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The failure of the creature is the failure of the Creator whose creature this is.
Our problem is God’s problem because God has bound himself to our creaturely thriving in such a way as to make our failure redound to himself. But as Thomas notes, there were any number of possible solutions to this dilemma (ST, 3.46.1) – so why the incarnation? Why did the Son come as Mediator? Athanasius suggests that neither men nor angels could have accomplished the work of reconciliation, for men are made after the image of God but are not the image itself, and angels are not made after the image at all – so only the incarnate Son, the Image of God himself, would serve to remake us in the image of God once more (De inc, §13). Anselm notes, ‘Supposing any other person were to rescue man from eternal death, man would rightly be judged his bondslave. . . . If he were this, he would in no way have been restored to that dignity which he would have had in the future, if he had not sinned’ (CDH, 1.5). While good answers to the question ‘why the incarnation?’ abound, we will explore several related answers, providing an entry into the relationship between the Trinity and atonement.
As triune, God is self-knowing, and seeks to involve his creatures in the self-knowing proper to himself (Mt. 11:27) – an involvement redounding to the joy of Creator and creature alike. In our sin we rejected knowledge of God, becoming ignorant and foolish (Gen. 3; Rom. 1). Why did God not choose a means other than himself to accomplish atonement? Because the atonement is not simply a matter of overcoming our plight, but also and primarily a matter of undoing the dilemma by re-establishing God’s creative purpose: of involving the creature in his self-knowledge. Why did the Son become our Mediator? That overcoming our sin, bringing us to creaturely fulfilment and sharing with us the divine life might together find their completion in a single source: the life of Jesus Christ. Why did the Son become the Mediator? He did so that the self-investment at the beginning of creation might be equalled or exceeded in bringing that same creation to fulfilment. He did so that the means of overcoming our sin and ignorance might itself be the end for which he saves us: himself.13
As triune, God is glorious, eternally glorifying himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Creation was the act of God opening up this self-glorifying work, that God’s creatures might enter this exchange of glory. However, in our sin we dishonour God, bestowing glory on ourselves and other creatures (Rom. 1), rejecting the Creator whence all glory comes. Why did God not send someone other than himself to accomplish atonement? Because the atonement is God’s reaffirmation of his glory in the face of his dilemma in such a way as to glorify himself, glorify his creatures and free them to join once more in this process of ongoing glorification. Why did the Son come to be the Mediator? To bind himself once more to creation: that the means of overcoming our shame might itself be the entry into and the very locus of the fulfilment of God’s original plan to share his glory and honour. Christ’s atonement is not simply a means to some distant end, but is itself the reality of God’s self-glorification into which we are brought through Christ.
As triune, God is self-loving, eternally loving himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Creation was the act of God sharing this love, that God’s creatures might delight in and reciprocate this love to their Creator and each other. In our sin and perversion we elevate ourselves as the chief object of our love, hating our neighbours and Creator. Why did God not send someone other than himself to accomplish atonement? Because the atonement is God’s reaffirmation of his love to us in the face of his dilemma by means of bringing his life of love into the circumstances of our life of hate. Why did the Son come to be the Mediator? Because the atonement is not only the means for God to love us, but the love of God itself, enacted for us and for our salvation. The atonement is therefore the means to God’s love precisely because it is itself the love of God, shared with us in face of our hate.
Why did God make himself the Mediator? Why did the Son become incarnate, so to accomplish our atonement? And was this necessary? God chose to make himself the Mediator because the atonement is God’s reaffirmation of the bond with which he committed himself to his creative purposes.14 Christ is the reality into which he invites us, rather than a mere means to it, because God’s goal always was that he might be the means to himself: that he might be in relationship with us. In short, the atonement is God’s chosen means of fulfilling his original purpose while simultaneously being that reality into which he invites us. Anything less would be unworthy of the intensity and completeness with which God bound himself, his life, his purposes to the creative project, to us.15 Only the significance of this choice and the depth of this bond sufficiently explain the jealousy, zeal and even violence of God.
The necessity of Christ’s atonement lies not in the nature of our sin, for there are other ways that sin could be dealt with. Neither did it lie in the prophecies needing fulfilment, for these need not have been made. The necessity lies in the divine will itself. To be clear, this necessity does not force God into an undesired path; rather, it is the necessity of relentlessly self-giving divine love, the necessity of the delight God takes in the most fitting or appropriate way to fulfil his creative purposes: sharing the divine life with the creature.16 The mechanics creating the divine dilemma are the same as those operative in its resolution: the completeness with which God seeks to share himself with his creation. Was Christ’s atonement necessary? As Thomas says, it was ‘necessary from the necessity of the end proposed’ by God (ST, 3.46.1), the necessity of the freedom, grace and love God holds out for us and which we can have, in him.
And in writing of this necessity, we are already working within the sphere of the doctrine of the Trinity, for assumed throughout all this material is the belief that as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God ‘is self-expending, other-affirming, community-building love’, and that it is this ‘exchange of love’ within the triune life that constitutes the basis of both that for which God saves us and the means by which he does so.17 The business of the doctrine of the Trinity is to explore precisely this: to ‘describe God in terms of shared life and love’ as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,18 to ponder what it means to affirm that ‘in himself and without any reference to a created world or plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit’.19 And it is the business of the doctrine of the atonement to unpack the reality of God’s triune life as basis for God’s saving activity in Christ.
Divine violence
But to bring up the Trinity in this context is a highly contested matter. Recent decades have witnessed a manifold attack on traditional understandings that the death of Christ was an intentional act on the part of God, a chosen means for responding to the divine dilemma.20 This critique contends that if Christ’s death and resurrection accomplishes atonement, then it is by means of an act on the part of the Father that is violently antithetical to the shared life and love of God. Christ’s death, understood this way, is a shameful, hateful and violent act on the part of God, and therefore to be rejected.21 Given the force of this critique in present work on the doctrine, it is impossible to overlook this material precisely at this point in the book. I will briefly sum up these concerns, allowing the constructive arguments that follow to provide a response largely free of polemic.22
Feminist theologians have launched a vigorous critique against Christus victor, satisfaction (especially penal substitution) and exemplarist theories of the atonement, rejecting the work of Christ as being in any way a substitutional or surrogate work, opting instead to find in the life of Jesus a ‘new vision to see resources for positive, abundant relational life’.23 They abhor any explanation of the death and resurrection of Christ by means of a dynamic between himself and the Father in which the Father intends the crucifixion of the Son and relates to him as a sinner or as bearing our sin. These theologians deny any such reality within the life of God, understanding any violence or punishment on the part of the Father towards the incarnate Son to be of a wicked and abusive sort.24 ‘If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence. . . . The child or the spouse who believes that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an effort to be a good Christian.’25
There are many genuine and valuable insights offered by feminist theology, some of which we will explore elsewhere.26 For the time being, we focus on the question feminist reflection on the cross raises regarding the role of the Trinity in Christ’s death. Feminist theologians largely agree in rejecting the death of Christ as a theologically necessary event, a ‘necessary . . . part of an overall plan of God to reconcile Godself with the world’.27 This is due to the fact that such an image is said to create a dynamic of violence, oppression and dominance within the Godhead (a dynamic spilling over into deeply harmful social relations). Even granting Moltmann’s efforts at making the role of the Trinity in Christ’s passion a viable alternative within the feminist movement,28 the question remains for many: ‘Can there be salvific power in Christian images of oppression (for example, Jesus on the cross) meant to teach something about redemption?’29 The question to which we now turn lies at the heart of this critique: in what sense can we describe the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a work willed and accomplished by the triune God, without introducing violence and oppression into the life of God and his followers?
The atonement as the work of the one God
Not every critique of the role of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the atonement critiques the Christian faith – for not all who speak of a father, a son and a holy spirit are in fact speaking of the triune God of the Gospel. At the heart of many feminist critiques is an account of God bordering on, if not fully embracing, a tri-theistic interpretation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as distinct entities or personalities, in which the Father relates to the Son in a violent and abusive manner.30 They employ these words in the way one might when one person acts towards another: a father towards a son, a coach to a player, a robber to a victim. But the Father and the Son are not distinct in the same way that a boss and an employee are distinct entities, for the God of the Gospel is one God, and monotheism is a fundamental commitment at the core of its message: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one’ (Deut. 6:4; cf. Mk. 12:29). Concerning the oneness of God, Gregory of Nazianzus writes:
Monotheism, with its single governing principle, is what we value – not monotheism defined as the sovereignty of a single person . . . but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action, and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity – none of which is possible in the case of created nature.31
There is a single nature, substance or essence in God. What it means for God to be God is for God to be a simple rather than composite reality, incapable of division or corruption. What it means for God to be God is for him to be of a single, harmonious will – a will that does not work to accomplish different or conflicting ends, or stem from different or conflicting motives. And because God’s nature and will is such, his action is also one: rooted in and utterly faithful to his nature, incapable of failing in this regard as is possible with a composite being made up of parts. Such is the unity between God’s acts and his nature that Barth has gone so far as to say that God’s being is in his act (CD II/1, 257–72): God’s being is a living and active being, in which there is no separation between what it means for God to be God (his nature), and the enacted identity of God’s life (his act); God is what he does and vice versa. In contrast to all forms of polytheism or tritheism on the one hand, and to any account of unity or oneness inclusive of parts or divisions capable of discord, conflict or separation on the other, God is one.32
With that said, the doctrine of the Trinity does not stop with the oneness of God, for this one ‘eternally changes to a two and stops at three – meaning the Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.33 As Thomas puts it, these three objects of belief and worship, these three persons ‘signif[y] in God a relation as subsisting in the divine nature [by relation of origin]. . . . There are several real relations in God; and hence it follows that there are also several realities subsistent in the divine nature; which means that there are several persons in God’ (ST, 1.30.1). To account for this feature of the divine life is one of the great challenges of the doctrine of the Trinity, well beyond the scope of the present work. For our purposes, we presuppose as axiomatic the oneness and threeness of God, such that this one, undivided and living God lives, from eternity, in eternal repetition of himself, and therefore in relation to himself. That is to say, because the one God is living, active and personal, in his threefold self-repetition he relates to himself in a living, active and personal way. As Migliore puts it, ‘the Trinitarian persons are precisely not self-enclosed subjects who define themselves in separation from and opposition to others. Rather, in God “persons” are relational realities and are defined by intersubjectivity, shared consciousness, faithful relationships, and the mutual giving and receiving of love.’34 We thus speak ‘not of three divine I’s’, three Gods, ‘but thrice of the one divine I’ (CD I/1, 351). We speak of God relating to God, relating God; and inasmuch as Scriptural names inform this language, we speak of Father, Son and Holy Spirit: one fully relational God.35
What happens if we explore the violent death of the incarnate Son from a consistently Trinitarian perspective? We begin by emphasizing the fact that the triune God is one, which means, among other things, that he is of one will: they ‘have one will as [they] have one Godhead’.36 There is no struggle, no difference of will within the Godhead, as if the Father wills one thing, and the Son wills another.37 Whatever God wills, God wills it as one, whether that is creation, the election of Israel, or the substitutionary death of Christ. This does not mean, of course, that God wills everything he wills monolithically, in the same way – for he wills what he wills in the oneness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Accordingly, we might say that the one God wills the passion of Christ triunely – which is to say, the one God willed the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and yet did so according to his triune mode of living as Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the Father by willing the death of the Son, the Son by willing his own death and suffering and the Spirit by willing to accompany the Son in obedience to the Father.38
In this we do not suggest that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three independent persons, such that the Father willed to send someone other than himself to suffer a horrible death. Rather, the one God willed to send himself by means of a threefold willing: as Father he willed to sacrifice; as Son he willed to be sacrificed; and as Spirit he willed to accompany and enable the sacrifice.39 Willing, sending, sacrificing: God does these things, not as one wills another to do something, or sends a servant to fulfil a task, but as one wills oneself to do a task. The difference between God and ourselves is that God exists in this threefold repetition, so that he can relate to himself as another, without in fact relating to another which is a distinct and separate person. If anything, as McCormack notes, feminists should critique the cross as an instance of masochism, for this is an event God willed for himself, rather than event he willed for another.40
Rather than speaking of the violence of Father against Son, it is best to affirm something along Kitamori’s claim that ‘God himself was broken, was wounded, and suffered, because he embraced those who should not be embraced’.41 Of course this breaking, wounding and suffering of God occurs in a differentiated manner fitting to the threefold way of being proper to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – but it was a genuine suffering of the one God. We speak of this event improperly if we refer to the Father abusing or pouring out his anger upon the Son as though the latter were an entity or being distinct from himself. As Benedict XVI writes:
It is not a case of a cruel God demanding the infinite. It is exactly the opposite: God himself becomes the locus of reconciliation, and in the person of his Son takes the suffering upon himself. . . . God himself ‘drinks the cup’ of every horror to the dregs and thereby restores justice through the greatness of his love, which, through suffering, transforms the darkness.42
It is for this reason that the Father, like the Son, stands with arms outstretched at the cross, with an expression akin to that of his Son, in Masaccio’s fresco mentioned at the beginning of the chapter: it affirms the fatherly suffering of God.43 The cross, we affirm, is the work of the triune God.
The implications of such a vantage point for viewing the Gospel are momentous, particularly in allowing us to reaffirm God’s bond with his creation in the form of his utter self-involvement in Christ’s atoning work. In sending the Son, the Father does not hold himself back but gives himself fully in giving the Son (cf. TD, 52). In coming to us, the incarnate Son does not leave behind the Father, but is the mode of the Father’s presence with us. In the death of Christ the Father is not hidden, for his death is the revelation of the Father – the Father who suffers in the suffering of the Son. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is a threefold act of the triune God – one in which the one God fully enters our situation, making it his own, according to his threefold way of living and willing. There is no room whatsoever within this view of a father who wills for his son what he would not will for himself, who abuses or takes out his frustration upon his son. Rather, we have a God who fully invests himself in this project to overcome its manifold dilemma, as the one who simultaneously sends, is sent and accompanies the sending, that he might fully enter our situation so as to redeem it. Out of the resources of the divine life, God both makes us fit for, and brings us into, that same divine life: ‘If the triune God is self-giving love that liberates life and creates new and inclusive community, there is no salvation for the creature apart from sharing in God’s agapic way of life.’44
Critiques of the atonement as intra-divine abuse fall radically short of the threefold self-involvement of the one God of the Gospel. At the same time, this means that we must chastise the language sometimes employed by adherents to more traditional views of the atonement in which Christ transforms the wrath of the Father into love through his sacrifice.45 Such a view presumes a wrathful Father and a loving Son – a difference within the life of God unpalatable for any consistently Trinitarian account of the atonement. Any time we speak of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as though they were opposed, we do so at the expense of the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore at the expense of the Gospel – and this is just as true of those critical of the tradition as it is of its overzealous adherents.46 Much better to follow George Herbert, who writes in his poem Prayer (2):
Of what unmeasurable love
Art thou possessed, who, when thou couldst not die,
Wert fain to take our flesh and curse,
And for our sakes in person sin reprove,
That by destroying that which tied thy pursue,
Thou mightst make way for liberality!47
But we have far from exhausted the significance of the oneness of God for the doctrine of the atonement. A further implication of God’s oneness within the saving work of Christ hearkens back to the first chapter of the book, and the way in which Jesus Christ accomplished atonement that we might know the Father. If we depend upon a tri-theistic account of God, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ do not reveal anything about the character of the Father – we are left entirely in the dark. If the Father is a second god over and against the Son, and thus is a hidden god, how could we possibly discern whether this ‘Father’, if there was any such reality, approved or disapproved of the work of Jesus? And if this ‘Father’ could change his mind (and who would say that he could not?), then how would we know that through the work of Christ we had a secure relationship not only with Christ, but with the Father as well? It is because God is one God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that in Christ and through his Spirit we know the Father – not in part, not a knowledge in passing, a mere acquaintance, but a genuine, abiding and saving knowledge of the Father. To put it differently, because God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one God, in Jesus Christ we know God himself – who he is, what he thinks of us, what he has done for us and who we are in him.48 And this knowledge, as we saw in Chapter 2, is no inconsequential matter!
But just as the oneness of God has radical implications for how we understand the doctrine of the atonement, so, upon that basis, does the atonement have radical implications for how we understand God, particularly God the Father. Typically, the atonement highlights the suffering of Jesus Christ, the creaturely suffering of the Son. God brings suffering into the divine life in the person of the Son by means of the incarnation: ‘[W]e are saved by the sufferings of the impassible [One],’ as Nazianzus says.49 But if God is one, and the Son suffers by means of the incarnation, what does that say of the Father? The past century or so has witnessed an increased interest in what we might call the fellow suffering of the Father (CD IV/2, 357), in which the ‘Son suffers dying, [and] the Father suffers the death of the Son.’50 That is to say: in some sense the Father suffers in the sending and the suffering of the incarnate Son, for the love and unity between God the Father and God the Son is not such as to allow the suffering of one without the suffering (in some form) of the other.
It is at this point more than any other that the eternal act of the living and loving God, what Hegel calls the ‘play of love with itself, which does not arrive at the seriousness of other-being, of separation and rupture’, becomes, as Hodgson says, ‘deadly serious’ – where the love between Father and Son brings a new dynamic into the divine life, a dynamic of suffering and pain.51 It is here that we see the full resources of the divine life, of the divine play, in terms of what this life is capable of in terms of entering our situation, and grappling with pain, suffering and evil.52 We are powerfully reminded of this by the tiny sketch of the passion by St John of the Cross, which for the first time in the history of the Church portrays the passion from the vantage point of the Father, looking down on his beloved Son.53 The physical suffering of the incarnate Son is the vehicle by means of which suffering enters the divine life to the fullest possible extent, a suffering made possible or given room only because of the love proper to the life of God.
This brings us to the conclusion of our treatment of the oneness of God. In Christ’s atonement we see the full self-investment of God which began at creation and awaits fulfilment in the new earth – an investment so complete as to bring suffering into the life of God. To be clear, generic suffering as such is not and never will be saving, but in this case it is the chosen and effective means by which we are brought into the saving life of God through the mediatorial work of the same.54 We thus honour the basic insight of the feminist perspective ‘that redemption had to do with God, through Jesus, giving humankind . . . positive, abundant relational life’ – but do so via a properly Trinitarian account of the one God embracing us through the way of the cross and suffering.55 The death of Jesus is saving because it is the way to life – the effective means of God dealing not only with our sin, but of bringing us into the life he always intended for us.
The atonement as work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
Thus far we have emphasized the oneness of God, though in constant awareness that God is one as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We now explore the atonement once more, from the other vantage point: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and only as such is he one. In doing so, we delve further into the Trinitarian logic of the doctrine of the atonement, particularly in the way that through Jesus Christ the triune God brought the reality of sin into his own proper life, that he might deal with it in and through himself.
From eternity, the one God lives out his life in a threefold way, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One could never reach behind this threefold life to reach the one God, because the one God lives out his identity as the one God only and exclusively, from eternity, in this threefold repetition. In the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God brings this threefold self-repetition to bear upon sin and need, enacting the resources proper to the divine life for us and for our salvation. We often hear this incarnation described as the downward movement of the Son of God, as he leaves the glory of heaven that was rightfully his, to dwell with us.56
This is a fully valid way of exploring the reality of the incarnation, bringing to light certain vital aspects of the glory and life of God, particularly the way that God is capable of self-humiliation. For our present purposes, however, we will take a quite different approach, following an altogether different movement, exploring the incarnation as an ascent – not of the Son of God, but of our human nature.57 Given that God is omnipresent, it is just as appropriate to think of the descent of the Son of God as it is of the ascent of our human nature in the incarnation, for through the Virgin birth by the power of the Holy Spirit, God brought human existence into his own proper being and life in the person of the Son. To be more specific, in this event God brought our sinful condition up into his own life, that he might bear this reality in himself so as to deal with it as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.58
To say that God brings our sinful condition up is to affirm that he ‘takes this human experience into his own life; he “drinks it to the dregs”’.59 As von Balthasar writes, ‘[T]his dramatic aspect does not entangle the immanent Trinity in the world’s fate . . . but it does lift the latter’s fate to the level of the economic Trinity, which always presupposes the immanent’ (TD, 362). While the descent of the Son means God’s gift of himself to us, the ascent we emphasize here is a matter of God making his own, or taking to himself our fate, our condition and the reality of our sinful existence. Guilt, shame, death . . . the full horror and reality of sin is not something foreign to God, alien to himself, to which he relates as a third party, as an unaffected judge. God enters our condition. He makes it his own. Without himself sinning, without himself willing and creating these dynamics, he lifts their reality up into his divine life in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. As Kitamori puts it, ‘[T]he cross is in no sense an external act of God, but an act within himself.’ Accordingly, ‘[T]he question in regard to the salvation of the world . . . is not the relation between God and the world, or God and Satan, but the relation between God and God to the world,’ a matter of God’s faithfulness to himself in his faithfulness to his creation.60 The remainder of this section explores two related questions we can ask of this line of thought: (1) why deal with sin in this way and (2) how is dealing with sin in this way possible without leading to a disastrous understanding of a deeply conflicted and divided God?
Why deal with sin in this way? Why would God bring sin into his own life through the incarnation? The motive of Christ’s saving work is for God to reaffirm his creative purposes in the face of sin, bringing his fallen creatures into a restored relationship with himself, with all the blessings entailed therein. ‘In the face of sin’, however, is a monumental qualification, for sin opposes the being and will of God, distorting and rejecting him in every possible way. God’s reaffirmation of his purposes accordingly had to take into account in some way this holistic opposition to himself on the part of his creation – an opposition consisting of a matrix of personal and social intentions, actions, habits and consequences. In Genesis, God comes close to rejecting and destroying his sinful creation in the story of Noah, but ultimately rejected this as a viable alternative, given his unrelenting commitment to his creation (Gen. 6:11-13; 8:20-22). The challenge was to reject and destroy sin while simultaneously preserving the integrity of the creature. God’s answer was to make sin his own, so that he could fully reject and destroy sin and evil, while ultimately safeguarding his beloved creatures from that same rejection and destruction.
And how does God do this? Simply put, he does this, he can do this, because he is the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in the space contained within these relationships he has the resources necessary for the work of atonement accomplished in Jesus Christ. ‘The Son’s eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy distance of the world’s sin can be transposed into it, can be transcended and overcome by it’ (TD, 362).61 It is this ‘holy distance’, the otherness within which God relates to himself, the room or space within which the living and active God loves and relates to himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which contains within itself the dynamics and realities amply sufficient for the work which was to be done for us.
As Father, God is free to respond to the sin borne by the Son in a way fully in keeping with his nature as God: to deny, reject, punish and destroy that which opposes him. God is free to exercise his love, righteousness and holiness towards sin, which is to say that he is free to hate, judge and cast it away, to destroy and abolish this wilful and destructive opposition to and perversion of himself. While divine violence has rightly been questioned in some contexts, it is here that it finds its proper place: the full unleashing of the gentleness, compassion and peacefulness of God against that which is utterly opposed to these things, an unleashing which takes the form of violence, destruction and unrestrained conflict, because that which it confronts is inherently and essentially opposed to the life and will of God.62 But as Kierkegaard notes, this violence takes a surprising form: ‘Only one who knows anguish finds rest, only one who descends to the underworld saves the loved one, only one who draws the knife gets Isaac.’63 Wrath is an expression of the divine love,64 for only a divine love is so intense as to destroy that which is evil, uncompromisingly given over to the good of the creature.
As the incarnate Son, God is free to bear his own judgement, opposition and destruction of sin, without himself being utterly overthrown and destroyed.65 As man, God is able to suffer and die, experiencing in himself the full consequences of the sin he bears, the full reality of this curse, while as God he is able to withstand this reality without suffering dissolution, and ceasing to be altogether. As the incarnate God he is able on the one hand to repent, confess and acknowledge the goodness of the wrath, jealousy and forsakenness he directs towards himself, to ‘appropriate [our] want of submission . . . effect[ing] our submission, mak[ing] it his own and present[ing] it to God’.66 On the other hand, as the incarnate Son bearing our sin he ‘expresses our condition’ in the ‘sufferings of the impassible’.67 As Nazianzus puts it, ‘He bears the whole of me, along with all that is mine, in himself, so that he may consume within himself the meaner element, as fire consumes wax or the Sun ground mist, and so that I may share in what is his through the intermingling.’68 The second movement, our sharing what is his, we will consider shortly. In the meantime, we acknowledge that because God is the incarnate Son, he is able to bear in himself the whole of what we are, consuming within himself that which is evil.
And as the Holy Spirit, God is free to accompany and enable this process in which he deals conclusively with our sin. The Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, is free to accompany the crucified and risen Christ. Inasmuch as Christ bore the burden of our sin, on the cross and over the course of Holy Saturday, the Spirit mediated to Jesus the presence of the Father. And because Jesus was bearing our sin, the experience of the Father mediated by the Spirit could only be the experience of death, forsakenness, judgement and expulsion.69 But inasmuch as the reality of sin and evil was exhausted in this event, God continues to accompany himself, sharing himself as Spirit with himself as incarnate Son, filling him who was now free of sin with the life of God, an experience which sinless man could experience only as resurrection, the fullness of human life and graced existence.
In short, because God is triune, God is free to take our sin up into his own life, and deal with it as God by means of the relationships proper to his own being and life. The bearing of and doing away with our sin is thus a thoroughly Trinitarian event. This is so much the case, in fact, that were it not for God’s triunity, such an event would be impossible – for it is God’s freedom to relate to himself as himself by means of himself that enables him to bring sin into his own life, and relate to it as such on the basis of his own being and life.70 Were God monolithic, a single God, he would not be free to relate to himself in this way. However, were God three individual and distinct gods, he could relate only to others which were not himself, thereby inflicting on other gods that which he himself was not willing to do, a position readily and rightly condemned in feminist critiques.
Because God is one, the action he accomplishes and effects in Christ is willed and accomplished in and through himself without division, without conflict.71 And it is because the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, eternally living with and relating to himself, that he is able to enact the dynamics of these relationships, of the divine life, for us, bearing our sin and re-establishing us as his creatures. That is to say, it is because God is triune that he is able to be both God and our God, to do away with our sin without being faithless to himself or destroying us, and in that same act, able to establish us in eternal life with himself.
The triumph of the life of God: Atonement as theōsis
But our life with God is key, for it is without question the focus of the atonement; this is why Christ came, that we might have abundant life (Jn 10:10). God deals with our sin through the resources proper to his being and life, and it is the positive and creative triumph of this life of God in the resurrected Jesus Christ that gives the atonement its definitive character and meaning. God’s intent was not merely to overcome sin, ‘but rather a profound reworking and anakephalaiosis [recapitulation, or transformative summing-up] of the terms of ordinary humanity, into a divinely graced life-form that would experience an ascentive metamorphosis’, an ‘abundantly energized life’ in relationship with the giver of life himself.72 That is to say, the goal of atonement is our ongoing transformation in Christ, into a life that is so filled with the grace, power and character of God that it pushes the boundaries of what we now recognize as human. The goal of the atonement is that we participate in the life of God as completely as possible, without ceasing to be the distinct and unique creatures God made us to be.
Current scholarship capitalizes on the life-giving aspect of Christ’s work by means of a range of more or less related theories traditionally known as theōsis, divinization and union with Christ.73 This emphasis draws considerable energy from Patristic and particularly Orthodox theology, and is partly intended to overcome contemporary theology’s perceived overemphasis upon the death and suffering of Christ (at the expense of his life before and after his passion). The basic insight is that the atonement, while dealing with sin and its consequences, brings us into the life of God, that we might be creaturely sons and daughters of God, and co-heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:14-16).74 The benefit we receive from Christ is not abstracted from or unrelated to his life as the incarnate Son of God, a whimsical vision of life on a paradisiacal beach. Rather, the good that God has in store for us is his very self, his life, such that he is both the means and the end of our salvation, of our filial relationship with him.
There are several ways to employ this constellation of theories (which I refer to simply as theōsis), two of which we explore here. One is to develop them as models of salvation inherently opposed to theories of the atonement, exploring the saving nature of the incarnation and life of Jesus (often while deploring the cross as an unfortunate political event). We see such an approach in the work of Stephen Finlan, who asks:
What happens if we restate the divine Incarnation of Jesus, thereby highlighting the fact of God’s near approach to humanity and to human suffering through the Incarnation of Jesus through his whole life, but drop the idea of any magical transaction taking place at the cross [i.e. any traditional theory of atonement]? – What happens is that we return to Jesus’ parental God who wants only spiritual progress and maturation for God’s offspring.75
Finlan touts spiritual progress and maturation, making the incarnation the original and central doctrine of the Christian faith, relegating the atonement to the status of an impure accretion.76 An altogether different approach explores theōsis as a comprehensive model of salvation, including a definite place for the atonement. ‘Deification,’ Andrew Louth writes, ‘is not to be equated with redemption. Christ certainly came to save us, and in our response to his saving action and word we are redeemed; but deification belongs to a broader conception of the divine [economy]: deification is the fulfillment of creation, not just the rectification of the Fall.’77 For Louth, theōsis is a model of salvation that honours the role of redemption while focusing on eschatology and the sanctification anticipating it.
We can and should take a further step in relating theōsis to atonement, partly to counteract the tendency of some contemporary thought to pit these two against each other. More importantly, while there is much to appreciate in Louth’s claim that atonement is a matter of redemption from the consequences of the Fall, this book argues for a far more comprehensive understanding of the atoning work of Christ, one which emphasizes the at-one-ment so prized by theōsis: our creaturely oneness or union with God through our reconstitution in Christ. How then might we develop theōsis as itself a theory of the atonement? History is on our side, for the author of one of the most famous Patristic affirmations of divinization provides us with precisely such an integration of atonement and theōsis.
Athanasius claims that ‘[the Son] was incarnate that we might be made God’ (De inc, 54), embedding this affirmation within the context of several statements concerning Christ’s work: ‘[T]hrough death incorruptibility has come to all,’ ‘[H]e endured the insults of human beings, that we might inherit incorruptibility,’ and ‘[H]e held and preserved in his own impassibility the suffering human beings, on whose account he endured these things.’ Amid such claims, Athanasius writes, ‘He himself was harmed in no way, being impassible and incorruptible.’ This context – particularly the themes of corruption and incorruption – provides us with the necessary tools for exploring Athanasius’ view.
Throughout De incarnatione, Athanasius consistently refers to the incorruption of God as one of his chief attributes. In his grace and by the Word, God made us out of nothing and ‘granted us by the grace of the Word to live a life according to God’. However, by turning away from him, humankind became corruptible – a corruption unto death (De inc, §§4–5). The purpose of the incarnation of the Son was that the incorruptible God might clothe himself with mortality, enduring corruption and death in our place (De inc, §§8, 20) that he might bring ‘the corruptible to incorruptibility’ in such a way as to ‘maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all’ (De inc, §7). Such a goal meant that Christ not only dealt with the source of our corruption (guilt, shame, debt, punishment etc.) but above all gave us life and incorruption once more, through the resurrection (De inc, §§21–2). In this way, he brought resurrection and immortality to all, through union with himself (De inc, §§34, 56). In sum, Athanasius develops the atonement in light of God’s incorruptibility and our corruption, exploring the way in which Jesus Christ suffers the latter in his death that he might bring us to the former through his resurrection, sharing with us the life, or incorruptibility, of God.
Theōsis, we might therefore say, is (at least in this instance) a theory of the atonement developed in light of the incorruptibility of God, rather than an account of salvation which leaves room for a doctrine of redemption – Athanasius integrates the two much more closely than that. While not every theory of theōsis focuses on this attribute, and many theologians may develop theōsis largely as a vision of salvation including within it an account of Christ’s death and resurrection, this is not the case here. In Athanasius we find a more integrated vision of atonement and theōsis – one which powerfully brings to light the central claim of this chapter: that in and through the atonement the triune God reaffirmed his creative purposes in order to share his own proper life with us through union with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son.
Conclusion
The atonement is an event within the life of God. It is because God is triune that the life, death and resurrection of the incarnate Son is meaningful and effective for us; it is because God is triune that he is able to take up our plight into himself, so as to deal with it on the basis of the resources and relationships proper to the divine life. And it is precisely this divine life that is the goal of the atonement: that which God seeks to share with us, as he reconstitutes our creaturely being in Christ. At every step it is this fact which is determinative for shaping the structure, determining the motives and explaining the outcomes of Christ’s work: the fact that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the work of the triune God, Father, incarnate Son and Holy Spirit. In the next chapter we continue to develop this line of thought by attending more carefully to the life or attributes of the holy Trinity, and the determinative role they play in the atonement of Jesus Christ.
Notes
1Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, trans. Robin Buss (New York: Penguin, 2003), 342.
2Webster, ‘It Was the Will’, 18.
3To balance this emphasis upon the divine dilemma, we would need to expound upon the delight God takes in sharing himself with the creature, in this act of unrestrained freedom and grace.
4Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 64.
5Webster, ‘It Was the Will’, 18.
6McCall rejects the idea that we can ‘posit an internal struggle within God’s own life’. Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), 81. While this may seem to contradict the divine dilemma outlined here, that is not the case. McCall is working with struggle within the character of God, between his attributes. This we both reject. I locate the struggle not within the character of God, but between God’s purposes and their fulfilment in creation, noting that ultimately all struggle gives way to the efficacy of God’s will.
7And because it lies within the will of God, at the same time it is a dilemma, it is simultaneously his joy. Julian of Norwich writes of Christ’s passion: ‘[W]hat I am describing now is [such] a great joy to Jesus that he counts as nothing his labour and his sufferings and his cruel and shameful death. . . . The love which made him suffer it surpasses all his sufferings, as much as heaven is above earth. . . . This deed and this work for our salvation were as well devised as God could devise it. It was done as honourably as Christ could do it, and here I saw complete joy in Christ, for his joy would not have been complete if the deed could have been done any better than it was.’ Norwich, Showings, 216–18. Cf. 279.
8Jonathan Edwards, ‘Dissertation on the End for Which God Created the World’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Henry Rogers, Sereno Edwards Dwight and Edward Hickman (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998).
9Anselm was wrong to argue ‘nothing can be added to, or subtracted from, the honour of God, in so far as it related to God himself. For this same honour is, in relation to him, inherently incorruptible and in no way capable of change.’ (CDH, 288). The division between God’s honour ‘in so far as it related to God himself’ and in so far as it relates to us is one which should at best be a distinction.
10Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–57.
11As we will see in Chapter 6, the glory of God can be sullied to the extent that God puts his glory at stake within creation.
12That God is failing does not mean that God fails, for his failing is an act of his patience, ordered towards the fruition of his purposes. That is to say, God is not a God who fails. But as one who fulfils his purposes patiently in relationship with his free creatures, there is a nuanced way in which we can affirm that God and his purposes, can, for a time, be failing, within the overall providence he exercises so as to bring his works to completion.
13An example of this line of thinking is Jeremy Treat’s integration of kingdom and cross theology, where ‘God’s kingdom is qualified by the cross and Christ’s death is characterized by God’s reign’. Treat, The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology, 141. Treat’s whole project is oriented towards integrating the cross (as means) and the kingdom (as end).
14As Adam Kotsko puts it, ‘In Jesus Christ, the purpose of creation persuasively reasserts itself.’ Kotsko, Politics, 199.
15Sanders, while noting that there may have been other ways that God could have accomplished the same result, affirms that ‘the one thing we know is that what God in fact chose to do was to give himself to us personally to be our salvation. Apparently that self-giving is what counts for God as the kind of salvation he wants to extend to fallen humankind.’ Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, 120.
16‘The Trinity and the gospel have the same shape! This is because the good news of salvation is ultimately that God opens his Trinitarian life to us.’ Ibid., 98.
17Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 72.
18Ibid., 73. I have sought to integrate what Migliore refers to as the ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ grammar.
19Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, 62.
20For a recent work highlighting many of the key figures and concerns of this movement, cf. Marit Trelstad, Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).
21Along the lines of Feuerbach, such a move could be little but a projection into the infinite of our own patterns of violence. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), 60–1.
22In other words, I will address feminist concerns indirectly, allowing a constructive proposal to take the place of polemic interaction with key feminist texts. As Webster notes, we should ‘be cautious about ordering [our] material around some theme (such as “facing” or “hospitality”), or as a response to a perceived problem (such as violence)’. Webster, ‘It Was the Will’, 16–17.
23Williams, ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy’, 31.
24A recent defence of different kinds of violence can be found in Boersma, Violence. Cf. a counter argument in Kotsko, Politics, 53–70.
25Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 30–1. On a personal note, I have witnessed the doctrine of the atonement abused in an attempt to keep victims of abuse in dangerous situations. While I am wholly sympathetic with the feminist outrage at this abuse, I am inclined to offer constructive alternatives from within the tradition, rooted in a properly Trinitarian account.
26For works which highlight these insights, cf: Arnfríður Guðmundsdóttir, Meeting God on the Cross: Christ, the Cross, and the Feminist Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tanner, Christ the Key, 247–73.
27Trelstad, Cross Examinations, 15.
28Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); ‘The Motherly Father: Is Trinitarian Patripassianism Replacing Theological Patriarchalism?’, in God as Father, ed. Johannes-Baptist Metz, Edward Schillebeeckx and Marcus Lefébvre (New York: Seabury, 1981).
29Williams, ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy’, 28.
30One finds many such instances in these collections: Trelstad, Cross Examinations; Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin, eds, Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).
31Nazianzus, On God, 70.
32 As John Stott writes, ‘Any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role . . . is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence.’ John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), 158.
33On God, 70.
34Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 77.
35I develop this material in greater depth in relation to Barth’s theology in Johnson, God’s Being, 57–84.
36Nazianzus, On God, 103.
37Even the affirmation that ‘God required Jesus’ death’ goes too far, and is inadequate in its summation of the logic of traditional theories of the atonement. God is not a distinct personality from Jesus, that he might require him to do something. Such language presupposes too much divergence of will. JoAnne Marie Terrell, ‘Our Mothers’ Gardens: Rethinking Sacrifice’, in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 40.
38Bruce L. McCormack, ‘The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement’, in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical and Practical Perspectives, ed. Roger R. Nicole, Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 362. I use the word ‘mode’ in the qualified sense employed by Barth – not as a movement towards modalism.
39Cf. Nazianzus, On God, 96; Davidson, ‘Introduction: God of Salvation’, 3.
40McCormack, ‘Ontological Presuppositions’, 364.
41Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God, 22. von Balthasar grounds this suffering by means of positing a distance or primal kenosis within the immanent Trinity so comprehensive as to ground and allow for ‘all we mean by separation, pain and alienation’ (TD, 319–28).
42Benedict XVI, Jesus, 232.
43The same expression on the faces Jesus and his Father further warrants this interpretation. Cf. Julian’s affirmation that ‘of all the pains that lead to salvation, this is the greatest: to see the lover suffer’. Norwich, Showings, 209.
44Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 81.
45In the current climate of bias against traditional interpretations, it is important to heed Marshall’s challenge to name the scholars and the sources, rather than generically deploring ‘abuses’. I. Howard Marshall, ‘The Theology of the Atonement’, in The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement, ed. Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 63.
I am sceptical that this happens as often as critics would suggest. Stephen Finlan, for example, quotes Don Carson as making such a move. In context, however, Carson is affirming both the love and wrath of the Father, addressing precisely Finlan’s question in a nuanced and theologically informed way. Cf. Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy About, the Atonement Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 2 n.9; Carson, ‘The Glory of the Atonement’, 130–1.
Perhaps this view owes more to the critics of traditional views than its proponents. Troeltsch, for instance, writes of the holy love of God, critiquing the old school, wherein ‘God was the essence of righteousness, and only Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice for sin could mitigate God’s righteous condemnation of humanity and transform divine punishment into mercy. But Jesus held no such view.’ Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith: Based on Lectures Delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1912 and 1913, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 182–3.
46A delightful text to contemplate in this regard is Luke 22:39-46.
47George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. J. J. M. Tobin (New York: Penguin, 1991), 95. As McCall notes, ‘[T]he death of Jesus does not make it possible for God to love us.’ McCall, Forsaken, 91. Forgiveness precedes atonement, for the atonement is an act of love. Or, to be more precise, atonement is an act of forgiveness.
48‘Salvation is secure because the works of the redeemer and the sanctifier can be traced to the inner life of God, behind which there lies nothing.’ Webster, ‘It Was the Will’, 27.
49Nazianzus, On God, 97.
50Moltmann, The Crucified God, 243. For current scholarship which also serves as a wonderful guide into the historical figures and debates, cf. James Keating and Thomas Joseph White, Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). On Barth’s formulation of the fatherly suffering of God, and its distinction from Moltmann, cf. Johnson, God’s Being, 81–3; Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 225.
51Peter C. Hodgson, ‘Alienation and Reconciliation in Hegelian and Post-Hegelian Perspective’, Modern Theology 2, no. 1 (1985): 51; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, 292.
But play and seriousness are one for God. For in this event ‘the Father is pleased, the Son is honoured, the Holy Spirit takes delight’, as Julian of Norwich writes. Norwich, Showings, 146.
52It is here, according to von Balthasar, that we see the ‘seriousness’ of the immanent Trinity, the initial or ‘primal “kenosis” [emptying] within the Godhead that underpins all subsequent kenosis’ (TD, 320, 323).
53Graham M. Schweig, ‘Imagery of Divine Love: The Crucifix Drawing of St. John of the Cross’, in John of the Cross: Conferences and Essays by Members of the Institute of Carmelite Studies and Others, ed. Steven Payne (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1992).
54Tanner, Christ the Key, 261. As Dillistone says, ‘Jesus is not to be regarded as a hero in the sense of one who engages in a conflict for conflict’s sake . . . he is a hero in the sense that his whole struggle is directed toward the achievement of a worthy end.’ F. W. Dillistone, Jesus Christ and His Cross: Studies on the Saving Work of Christ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 21–2. Campbell writes in a similar vein: ‘Love cannot be conceived of as doing anything gratuitously, merely to shew its own depth, for which there was no call in the circumstances of the case viewed in themselves.’ Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 49.
As Luther writes in a 1530 sermon, ‘[Y]ou should accustom yourself to distinguish carefully between the suffering of Christ and all other suffering and know that his is a heavenly suffering and ours is a worldly, that his accomplishes everything, while ours does nothing except that we become conformed to Christ.’ LW 51, 208.
55Williams, ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy’, 30–1.
56While ‘descent’ is not mentioned in Philippians 2:5-11, the twofold movement of servant-hood, paired with his subsequent exaltation clearly implies a descent of sorts. But what does it mean for an omnipresent God to descend? Obviously we cannot explain such a claim with a simplistic literalism, for a descent would imply movement from a higher place to a lower, implying a vacation of the former place and a denial of omnipresence. Thus, while the notion of descent is a valuable resource for thinking about the incarnation, it is not exhaustive.
57Put somewhat differently, Nazianzus notes that the Son ‘remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed’. I take this ‘assumption’ to be roughly equivalent to the upward movement I develop in this section. Nazianzus, On God, 86.
58Marshall, Aspects, 66.
59McCormack, ‘Ontological Presuppositions’, 364.
60Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God, 45. Kitamori follows Moltmann in his account of ‘God against God’. This is unfortunate, for it goes beyond the bounds of a properly Trinitarian account, suggesting that there is a ‘stasis within God – “God against God”’, and that ‘the cross of the Son divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction’. Moltmann, The Crucified God, 152.
61As Migliore puts it, ‘God can enter into vulnerable interaction with the world, even to the depths of temporality, deprivation, suffering, and death, because as Father, Son and Holy Spirit God is essentially an inexhaustible history of mutual self-surrendering love.’ Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 81.
62‘The fact that God’s love reacts violently to the violence done to it by men is explained by God’s total investment of himself and by the utterly astonishing indifference, rejection and hardness of heart on man’s part’ (TD, 174). While divine violence is an important topic, its dogmatic location should be kept in mind – precisely at the intersection of God’s loving self-involvement with creation, and the astonishing nature of sin.
63Sören Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes De Silentio, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1985), 57.
64McCall, Forsaken, 86.
65But this is true only because of who he is: the incarnate Son of God. As Torrance puts it, ‘[E]verything depends on who He was, for the significance of His acts in life and death depends on the nature of His Person . . . we must allow the Person of Christ to determine for us the nature of His saving work, rather than the other way around.’ Thomas F. Torrance, God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 64.
66Nazianzus, On God, 96.
67Ibid.
68Ibid., 97.
69Death is not the cessation of existence – Scripture does not tend to explain death in such a way. Rather, death is the experience on the part of the sinner of the living God, which includes the cessation of bodily life, but transcends it.
70As Hegel writes, from the incarnation and atonement ‘develops the consciousness that knows that God is triune. The reconciliation in Christ, in which one believes, makes no sense if God is not known as the triune God, [if it is not recognized] that God is, but also is as the other, as self-distinguishing, so that this other is God himself.’ Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, 469.
71Cf. Bruce McCormack’s excellent account, rooted in the continual emphasis that the atonement is a matter of the work and relationships of the Father, incarnate Son and Holy Spirit, and therefore not to be read back directly into the modes of relating between the Father and Son. McCormack, ‘Ontological Presuppositions’, 363–5.
72J. A. McGuckin, ‘The Strategic Adaptation of Deification in the Cappadocians’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deificiation in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 96–7.
73This is not to suggest that these theories are identical. They vary widely, both in terms of how the terms are to be understood, and within theological traditions, particularly when it comes to their metaphysical presuppositions. For an introduction to this family of thought in a wide variety of traditions, see: Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2006); Christensen and Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deificiation in the Christian Traditions; Vladimir Kharlamov, Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, vol. 2 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011); Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
74Pseudo-Dionysius writes, for instance, that: ‘God has come down to us and that, like a fire, he has made one with himself all those capable of being divinized,’ citing John 1:12f. as support of his claim: ‘[F]or to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.’ Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 201.
75Finlan, Problems with Atonement: The Origins of, and Controversy About, the Atonement Doctrine, 119. While Finlan commends the antiquity of this view, note the deplorably selective reading he offers of the history of the Church, endorsing choice quotes from figures such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, while rejecting the overall shape of their soteriology which includes, of course, robust doctrines of the atonement. Regarding his rejection of the atonement as the central doctrine of the Christian faith, see Athanasius’ claim: ‘The next step is to recount the end of his life and dealings in the body and to relate also of what kind was the death of the body, especially because this is the chief point of our faith’ (De inc, §19).
76Ibid., 117–20.
77Andrew Louth, ‘The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deificiation in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 34–5.