A little guide to 'Cur Deus homo?'

Anselm's "satisfaction theory of the atonement" is much maligned, often by those who, in my opinion, are dealing with a caricature of what Anselm actually advances in his eleventh-century work Cur Deus homo? His model often gets lumped in with penal substitutionary accounts of the atonement, despite the fact that Anselm goes out of his way to argue that the death of Christ is not an instance of God forcing an innocent person to die for the wicked. Also, Anselm's account is primarily ontological, and only distantly and secondarily juridical.

It's sometimes said that the concept of "honor" with which Anselm works is rooted in medieval feudalism and that, outside this context, this model of the atonement therefore falls apart. It's important to note that, when Anselm talks of the honor God is due, he is talking about the worship that the creature owes the Creator.

Anyways, if you're going to reject or critique Anselm's account, even in passing, you should at least have an accurate view of what he argues, and understand him on his own terms. So, in what follows I take a quick stab at laying out his argument for you, with references to the pertinent sections of the two books. I've skipped over some things (e.g., the discussion of why the number of fallen humanity couldn't be restored by angels), and I've left out any biblical references. This is designed to function as a rough-and-ready guide for you to read Cur Deus homo? for yourself.

Without further ado, here's my synthetic outline of Cur Deus homo?

A. The redeemer must be a divine person (1.5)

1. The one by whom humanity is redeemed is owed worship and service.
2. Humanity is not to worship and serve anything other than God.
3. Therefore, the one who redeems humanity must be God.

B. The redemption through this divine person cannot be externally compelled. (1.6-1.7)

1. If God is compelled to redemption by, e.g., the devil's power over human beings, then he is not omnipotent.
2. But God is omnipotent, and all things are in the power of his will.
3. Therefore, redemption must be compelled by God's will alone. 

C. The mode of this redemption (i.e., the incarnation of Christ the Son) must be necessary, consequent upon the wisdom of the divine will. (1.6-1.7)

1. God is supremely wise, which means he doesn't do anything unnecessarily.
2. God willed to redeem humankind through the incarnation of his Son. 
3. Therefore, the incarnation of God's Son must be necessary for redemption.

D. The mode of this redemption (i.e., the incarnation of Christ the Son) must be voluntary, consequent upon the justice of the divine will (1.8)

1. God is just, which means he does not force the innocent to bear the sins of the guilty.
2. Redemption came about through the incarnation of Christ the Son.
3. Therefore, the incarnation of Christ the Son is not a case of the innocent being forced to bear the sins of the guilty. 

E. The incarnation of Christ the Son achieved redemption, not through obedience to a command to die, but through obedience to a command to live as a righteous human being. (1.9-1.10)

1. What God commanded Christ the Son was what he commands of humankind generally: to live a righteous life of worship (or honor) of God. 
2. This was the command that Christ the Son obeyed, and it was for obedience to this command that sinful humanity killed him.
3. Therefore, Christ the Son's death is only secondarily related to redemption, consequent upon the state of those he came to redeem. 

F. Humanity must be redeemed from humanity's own inability to render to God the positive obedience and worship--"honor"--he is due. (1.11-12)

1. What is owed God is the "honor" he is due as Creator, that is, total and complete worship.
2. There is nothing greater than this that can be given to God in exchange for failure in this regard.
3. Therefore, this requirement of total honor must be satisfied by humanity. 

G. The necessity of punishment for failure to honor God is consequent upon the perfection of the divine nature. (1.13-15)

1. God's honor is incorruptible and unalterable, and every creature owes God this honor by virtue of its being related to him as Creator. 
2. The presence in God's creation of dishonor is an ontological challenge to God's very nature. 
3. Therefore, on the pain of compromising the perfection of the divine nature (impossible), God must punish sin. 

H. The punishment due for sin is proportional to the honor not given to God. (1.19-24) 

1. The honor that God is due, by virtue of his nature, is infinite and total. 
2. The punishment given for failure in this regard must be proportional to this failure.
3. Therefore, the punishment humanity incurs necessarily (on pain of God forfeiting his nature, which is impossible) is infinite and total. 

I. Only Jesus Christ as the divine-human mediator can render to God the positive honor he is due, and also bear the negative consequences of humanity's failure to honor God. (1.25)

1. To offer the honor God is due, he must be fully human. (2.6)
2. To overcome the infinite punishment humanity has incurred, he must enter into it as one whose infinite nature can overcome even this. He must be God, who is greater than all things. (2.7, 14-15)
3. Therefore, he must be both human and God, with these two natures neither mixed together, nor separated, but united hypostatically, in one person. (2.8-9)

J. It is necessary for God to become man in just this way, contingent on God's will to create. (2.4-5)

1. God is omnipotent and his purposes cannot be frustrated. 
2. God wills to create a humanity that honors him and attains blessedness.
3. Therefore, God must necessarily become incarnate and redeem humanity when it falls. 

What follows from all of this is that redemption, while it is achieved by Christ, is entered into only through being joined to Christ through the Spirit. Participation in Christ as the one who obeys and the one who undoes the consequences of sin ("punishment") is indispensable.

When it's all said and done, Anselm's interlocutor in this work, Boso, concludes of this model of the atonement: "There can be nothing more logical, nothing sweeter, nothing more desirable that the world can hear. I indeed derive such confidence from this that I cannot now express in words with what joy my heart is rejoicing" (2.19). You may not come to the same conclusion, but I hope at least you'll achieve a more accurate understanding of this great text.

Sacrifice and atonement in Origen

Yesterday at the ANZATS conference in Melbourne I gave a paper on sacrifice and atonement in Origen (focusing on Origen's Homilies on Leviticus). This was an attempt to develop some of the ideas sketched out in my earlier paper on the patristic atonement model. It was a special pleasure to have O̶r̶i̶g̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶s̶e̶l̶f̶ John Behr in the audience. At the same conference Behr gave an amazing paper discussing his new critical edition and translation of Origen's First Principles (forthcoming from OUP – it includes a 40,000 word introduction!). Anyway here's an excerpt from the end of my paper on sacrifice:

So to return to Gustaf Aulén’s alternatives: was Christ’s sacrifice the propitiation of an angry God, or was it a ransom offered to the devil? Is Origen’s model proto-Anselmian, or is it proto-Lutheran (i.e. christus victor)? Generations of theologians have addressed patristic authors with this kind of anachronistic and untheological question. Once the question is posed in those terms any answer will be false and uninteresting, because the alternatives are both wrong. Both options assume that sacrifice has a predominantly negative function: it averts the wrath, or satisfies the demands, of higher powers. It is an unfortunate solution to an otherwise insoluble cosmic dilemma. But for Origen sacrifice is a matter of joy. It is done for the sake of God’s delight. It is a festive offering in which the whole of humanity acts with one heart and one mind through the agency of one high priest, Jesus Christ. The logic of sacrifice is not fear but love.

I admit that this does not look very much like a theory of salvation. But that is my point. Sacrificial language in early Christian theology tends to serve other purposes. It is not primarily soteriological. It is used not so much to answer the question, “How does Jesus save?”, but a different question: “What does the proper response to God look like?” Origen’s Homilies on Leviticus give an answer: the response to God looks like joy, like a holiday, like the transformation of all things into one enormous festival offered up for the delight of God.

Five short videos on atonement theology

A while back I was interviewed for a series of short videos on atonement theology. The five clips below follow the overall arc of the Gospel story, discussing (1) the incarnation, (2) the role of Mary in salvation, (3) Jesus as teacher and healer (a patristic view of salvation that I've explained earlier in this post), (4) the death of Jesus, and (5) the resurrection and deification.









 

Stained glass for cows: Christmas reflections

1

In the beautiful Polish film Ida, Wanda tells her niece Anna about a woman she used to know: “She was an artistic type, always making things out of bits of cloth or glass. She once made a stained glass window and put it in the barn, to make the cows happy.” For some reason – I suppose it was the cows and the barn – this reminded me of the Christmas story. There is something a bit over the top about Christmas. All those prophecies, all those miracles and wonders, all those singing angels. There’s something extravagant, even superfluous, about the whole thing. It’s so superfluous that two of the evangelists took it for granted that they could tell the whole Gospel of Jesus without so much as mentioning the Christmas story. Do we need Christmas? Yes, I suppose so, in the same way that a barn needs a window.

2

One of my children asked me why we give gifts to each other at Christmas. It is Jesus’ birthday, after all, so shouldn’t all the gifts go to him? We puzzled over this for a bit. We noticed that gifts are given not only on birthdays but also on weddings, anniversaries, the announcement of a pregnancy, and other occasions when the heart is big with joy. We might also give gifts when someone dies or gets sick or when a friend moves away. We use gifts on such occasions because there’s no other way of adequately expressing what the heart feels. We exchange gifts when an exchange of words would not be enough to say what we really mean. Gifts are a release valve for the human spirit. The special thing about Christmas isn’t just the use of gifts – that happens on all special days – but the profligate scale of gift-giving. On nearly every other occasion, the gifts are received by one individual. But the joy of Christmas is so high and so deep that we can only express what it means by giving gifts in every direction. Even if we could bring our gifts directly to the baby Jesus, our hearts would still require a release valve: the joy would be too much for us. On our way home from visiting the baby in the manger we would find ourselves shaking hands with strangers in the street, passing gifts to one another, emptying our purse into the hands of a beggar and telling him to be of good cheer. Why do we give gifts at Christmas? Not because the baby Jesus needs our gifts but because we do: we need to give something to someone: otherwise our hearts would burst.

3

I’ve been thinking about all this as I prepare my talk on the atonement for the Los Angeles Theology Conference next month. Atonement is an important idea. It’s about trying to figure out exactly how Jesus saves. Having some clarity about this can help you to talk intelligibly about how the Gospel story relates to the lives of real people here and now. Anselm’s account of the atonement is one of the most powerful pieces of apologetics in Christian history. Anselm translates the whole Gospel story into an idiom of feudal honour. To his contemporaries it must have seemed as fresh and as compelling as if someone today were to explain the significance of Jesus’ death using the language of smart phones and social media. The concept of atonement serves a purpose. But it only goes so far. Explaining the mechanism by which Jesus saves might provide an accessible point of entry into the Gospel story. It might tell you why a barn needs a window. It might even tell you why the window had to be located at that particular spot. But it can’t explain why the window is made of such strange and lovely stained glass. It can’t explain the superfluous.

4

In a fourth-century sermon on Paul’s language of “abounding grace” (Romans 5:12-21), John Chrysostom describes the need for salvation as one small piece of a bigger picture. The main thing about grace isn’t that it meets your needs but that it totally surpasses them. What Christ brings into the world is much more than anybody needs. It’s stained glass for cows.

“Paul did not say ‘grace’ but ‘abounding grace’. For from that grace we received not only as much as was required for removing that sin, but much more. For surely we were both freed from punishment and we rid ourselves of all evil; we were born again from above; and when ‘the old man’ was buried, we rose again. We were redeemed and sanctified; we were brought into adoption and justification. We became brothers and sisters of the Only Begotten, his joint heirs, and of one body with him. Indeed, we were counted as his flesh and were joined to him as a body to its head. Not only did we receive a medication that would heal the wound inflicted by sin, but also one that would bring us health, beauty, honour, glory, and dignities far surpassing our nature. Each one of these was enough to destroy death. But when all of them run together as one, not even a trace of death is left, nor can even a shadow of it remain to be seen. For Christ paid off much more than we owed – as much more as a limitless ocean compared to a small drop of water.” (Homilies on Romans, Vol. 1, p. 186)

5

What are you waiting for? Don’t just stand there! Go out and kiss somebody! Throw a party! Make a feast! Sing a Christmas carol! Let the wine flow freely! Give somebody something and receive a gift from someone too! Don’t be shy! Christ is born and the angels are singing. Christ is born and the world is renewed. Christ is born and the sunlight we were longing for has flooded over us, filling our barn (we don’t know why) with colours.

How does Jesus save? An alternative typology (against Gustaf Aulén)

Gustaf Aulén's Christus Victor, first published in 1931, has influenced the way generations of students think about Christ's death. According to Aulén's typology, there are three main types of atonement theory: (1) the "classical" ransom theory, according to which God used Jesus as bait to rescue humanity from subjugation to the devil; (2) the "objective" satisfaction theory, according to which Jesus' death satisfies the demands of God's honour or justice; and (3) the "subjective" moral influence theory, according to which Jesus' obedient death has an exemplary moral power that can be imitated by others. 

I do not believe Aulén's typology is a reliable guide to the Christian tradition. Some comments on each of his three types: (1) His first category – intended to represent patristic thought – is a real muddle. The importance it gives to the role of the devil is very misleading. The image of Jesus as bait on a hook has no frequency or importance in patristic literature, and does not represent any typical understanding of Jesus' death. Aulén has mistaken an eccentricity for a type. (2) His second category, satisfaction, is the only one that strikes me as broadly reliable. (3) His third category, moral influence, is historically so marginal that it is quite misleading to include it at all. This category might have been interesting as a characterisation of patristic thought if it had been set against the backdrop of early Christian ideas about the spiritual power of imitation. But linking this category to Abelard makes it a mere triviality, of no real importance in the tradition. Again Aulén has made a type out of an eccentricity.

I've been teaching christology this semester (using mainly patristic sources), which has got me musing about alternative typologies of Christian views of salvation. So here's a suggested typology of six themes in patristic literature:

1. Christ the Second Adam. A major theme most powerfully developed by Irenaeus in his account of recapitulation. Christ restarts the human race from the beginning and sets it on a course towards life. Christ replaces Adam as the new life-giving head of the human family. (Main scriptural source: Romans 5.)

2. Christ the Sacrifice. This is an important background theme that becomes explicit mainly in liturgical texts. Melito of Sardis' On Pascha provides the most vivid elaboration of sacrificial imagery, artfully interwoven with a plethora of other Old Testament themes and images. (Main scriptural source: the Pentateuch and the Gospel of John.)

3. Christ the Teacher. A characteristic theme of the Alexandrian tradition. Christ is the divine pedagogue who, by a slow and patient process, leads human souls up into the presence of divine wisdom. In some accounts this process extends into the afterlife. Clement of Alexandria developed this theme explicitly. The same theme supplies the basic architecture of Origen's thought. Many accounts of deification are really just elaborations of the end result of this educational process: life is a school, and deification is the graduation prize. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)

4. Christ the Brother. The adoption theme is prevalent in early Christian writing. Christ becomes our brother. Through him we become members of God's family. What he is by nature, we become by grace. It is often in this context that language of deification is used: Christ is God by nature, and as his brothers and sisters we become gods by grace. Adoption language is especially pervasive in Origen. By the fourth and fifth centuries the emphasis tends to fall more on deification, but the deification theme should still be understood as a subset of either the adoption theme or the education theme (#3 above). (Main scriptural source: Romans 8.)

5. Christ the Life-giver. One finds this theme everywhere in early Christian liturgical and theological texts. It is developed with an impressive systematic rigour in the work of Athanasius. The divine Logos had to become incarnate in order to become capable of dying; by entering into death, he absorbs death into the divine life, thus draining away death's power; and by rising again, he transforms corruptible human nature into a glorious incorruptible nature. Here Christ's death and resurrection are equally emphasised as the two poles of the saving event. (Main scriptural source: 1 Corinthians 15.)

6. Christ the Healer. My impression is that this theme recurs more than any other soteriological theme in patristic writing, even though it is seldom developed in much detail. Very frequently Christ is described as a physician who cures our illness. Often he is also described as medicine. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the incarnation as a healing of human nature. Augustine is particularly fond of the healing theme, and it is a constant refrain in his sermons. He speaks of Adam as infecting the human race with the disease of pride, and of Christ's humility as the medicine that cures us. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)

Comments: (a) Even from these summaries, one can see that these themes are normally found not as separate ideas but as closely interwoven motifs. (b) Note the pronounced tendency to speak of salvation in corporate terms. Christ achieves salvation not for individuals but for human nature, for humanity as a whole. Only in the third theme (teaching) is there a more individual emphasis, but even here patristic authors believe that the whole of humanity is enrolled in Christ's school. Saints and martyrs are in the PhD program; the wicked are in kindergarten. (c) Only in the second category (sacrifice) is there any exclusive fixation on Christ's death as a saving event. Much more characteristic of early Christian writing is a broad vision of Christ's life, death, descent into hell, and resurrection as the one great drama of salvation. Even the sacrificial imagery that dominated early Christian interpretations of the passover (e.g. Melito's On Pascha) was qualified when Origen (in his own On Pascha) argued that the passover is not a type of Christ's sacrificial death, but a type of the whole movement whereby Christ's death, descent, and resurrection leads the human race in exodus from death to life. (d) While scholars like N. T. Wright routinely criticise orthodox christology as a flattening out of the Gospel witness, with no serious attention given to Jesus' earthly ministry, one can see above that two of these major soteriological themes (#3 and #6) were primarily adapted from the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry. Very prominent in all four Gospels is the portrayal of Jesus as Teacher and Healer. Through a spiritual interpretation of the Gospels, these features of Jesus' life and ministry became fundamental patterns for describing Christ's saving work.

A new typology of the atonement: Bruce McCormack's Croall Lectures

If you're lucky enough to be in Edinburgh, you've probably been going to hear Bruce McCormack's 2011 Croall Lectures over the past week at the University of Edinburgh. McCormack has developed a new typology of atonement theories, probably the most robust alternative to Gustaf Aulén's much-discussed (and overwhelmingly influential) typology in Christus Victor. Aulén's typology was (1) satisfaction, (2) moral influence, and (3) Christus victor. McCormack's typology centres on the concepts of the person and work of Christ, and his three categories are: (1) theories that order the work to the person, (2) theories that sever person and work, and (3) theories that order the person to the work. Another point of special interest is McCormack's challenge to non-violent atonement theories.

The lecture series is titled "Abandoned by God: The Death of Christ in Systematic, Historical, and Exegetical Perspective", and the six lectures are as follows:

• The Decline of Protestantism and the Perils of Penal Substitution
• The Incarnation as Saving Event: Theories Which Order the Work of Christ to a Metaphysical Conception of His Person
• Let Justice and Peace Reign: Theories Which Fail Adequately to Integrate the Person and Work of Christ
• After Metaphysics: Theories Which Order the Person of Christ to His Work
• The Cry of Dereliction: The Death of Jesus in Eschatological Perspective
• The Lord of Glory was Crucified: Reformed Kenoticism and Death in God

There's some detailed reporting on the first lecture over at Via Crucis.

Violence and atonement

The latest issue of the Princeton Theological Review is devoted to the theme of atonement. There are some very good articles, together with reviews of recent books on atonement-theology – including my own review of Rowan Williams’ beautiful little book, Tokens of Trust. I just focus on the book’s construal of violence, peace and atonement: “Williams’ meditation on the death and resurrection of Jesus offers rich resources for the ongoing constructive task of envisioning ‘atonement’ as that event in which one man’s violent death becomes the incursion of peace – the event in which a non-violent God shatters our violence and grants us his peace.”

You can download the PTR free of charge.

Ten propositions on penal substitution

by Kim Fabricius

1. The doctrine of penal substitution is a theory – or, better, a model – of the atonement, an extended metaphor that narrates how God reconciled the world to himself in Christ. It is one model, but it is not the only model. Indeed, without radical recalibration, it is a theologically repugnant model with potentially vicious and disastrous social and political implications. For now, however, the point is this: while the church dogmatically defined its Christology at the Council of Chalcedon (451), it left its soteriology underdetermined. Therefore penal substitution – or any other doctrine of the atonement – should not be deployed as a litmus test of faith. Stanley Hauerwas says, “If you need a theory to worship Christ, worship your f---ing theory!”

2. The doctrine of penal substitution finds its classical expression in the theology of John Calvin (1509-64), and its definitive form in the theology of Charles Hodge (1797-1878). Today it is the lynchpin of “sound” conservative evangelical theology. In essence it says that the divine justice demands that humanity must “pay the price of sin,” and that the sentence is death; but that on the cross, Jesus identified himself with our sinful condition and died in our place, taking our sins to the grave with him.

3. It is usually claimed that the doctrine of penal substitution is Pauline (indeed, pre-Pauline), but Paul Fiddes observes that while Paul certainly thought of Christ’s death in terms of “penal suffering” (since “Christ is identified with the human situation under the divine penalty”), Calvin’s doctrine requires the additional idea of the “transfer of penalty” – and this theory “requires the addition of an Anselmian view of debt repayment and a Roman view of criminal law” (Calvin, remember, was trained as a lawyer!). A fortiori, to cite patristic evidence for the doctrine is anachronistic.

4. It is also usually claimed that St Anselm (c. 1033-1100) anticipated Calvin. Insofar as Calvin was dependent on Anselm’s view of debt repayment, and also added to Anselm’s feudal emphasis on the compensation of God’s honour his own late medieval emphasis on the expiation/propitiation of God’s wrath, this claim is true. However, in contrast to Calvin, for Anselm punishment and satisfaction are not equivalents but alternatives: aut poena aut satisfactio. For Anselm, Christ is not punished in our place; rather he makes satisfaction on our behalf. Therefore Anselm does not propound a doctrine of penal substitution. “Indeed, in the end,” according to David Bentley Hart, “Anselm merely restates the oldest patristic model of atonement of all: recapitulation.”

5. If the doctrine of penal substitution is to have any place in contemporary soteriology, there are certain elements of its demotic form that have to be eliminated: especially the notion that Jesus died to placate or appease God, or to secure a change in God’s attitude, or to settle a score or balance the books – and, indeed, the notion that the cross is itself a divine punishment. Rather than drive such a wedge a between God and Jesus, the cross expresses their unity and mutual love. It is not a matter of anger or honour but of rescue and risk, obedience and self-sacrifice, of putting the world (Anselm’s ordo universi) to rights and making it beautiful again. Penal substitution is often narrowly construed in individualistic terms, so that the cosmic scope of the atonement is marginalised or missed altogether.

6. I repeat: God does not punish Jesus, or even will the death of Jesus tout court. Herbert McCabe: “The mission of Jesus from the Father is not the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be human.... [T]he fact that to be human means to be crucified is not something that the Father has directly planned but what we have arranged.” That is, the crucifixion of Christ is not a penalty inflicted by God but the result of human sin, what inevitably happens when human sin encounters divine love. The cross, therefore, represents the wrath and judgement of God not directly but indirectly: God “gives us up” (παρέδωκεν, Romans 1:24, 26, 28) to the consequences of our destructive desires and actions, the human condition with which Christ identified himself in life, and to which God “gave him up” (παρέδωκεν, Romans 8:32), and to which we (with Judas) “betrayed”/“handed him over” (παρέδωκεν, Mark 3:19), in death.

7. Expounders of the doctrine of penal substitution often elide the juridical with the sacrificial. This is a mistake: the law court, not the temple, is the metaphorical setting of this model. Sacrifice, in the Bible, is never punitive; rather, it is a divine gift which, as human offering, becomes an expression of praise and gratitude. It is also a demonstration that reconciliation is a costly matter. But justice too, in the Bible, is not essentially punitive or retributive; it is restorative. If we continue to think of the atonement in forensic terms, it is essential to see it not as a legal transaction but as the transformation of a relationship. No cross without a resurrection, and no justification without sanctification – connections not always convincingly made by advocates of the doctrine of penal substitution.

8. Substitution – or representation? Did Jesus die “in our place,” or “on our behalf”? The debate is barren: both are true. They are, as Colin Gunton says, “correlative, not opposed concepts. Because Jesus is our substitute, it is also right to call him our representative.” But, again, it is in the court, not the cult, that substitution gets its metaphorical purchase: in Christ, the judge steps into the dock and is judged in our place (Barth). And, again, the theme is God’s liberating initiative, not the demands of the law. “The centre of the doctrine of the atonement is that Christ is not only our substitute – ‘instead of’ – but that by the substitution he frees us to be ourselves. Substitution is grace” (Gunton). And grace, not sin, runs the show.

9. Nevertheless, others – particularly students of René Girard – declare that penal substitution is an inherently violent model of the atonement; moreover, that it underwrites a culture of brutality and vengeance, ethically, socially and politically. Radical feminist theologians Joan Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker have gone so far as to speak of “divine child abuse,” and to argue that the model’s image of Jesus voluntarily submitting to innocent suffering contributes to the victimisation of women. Black liberation theologian James Cone links the model to defences of slavery and colonialism. Michael Northcott suggests that it is no coincidence that leaders of the Religious Right, for whom the model is so central, are such staunch advocates of the lex talionis, capital punishment and the war on terror. Yet even Miroslav Volf, hardly a conservative evangelical, argues that “the only way in which non-violence and forgiveness will be possible in a world of violence is through displacement or transference of violence, not through its complete relinquishment.”

10. I am unimpressed and unconvinced by – and find myself finally opposed to – the idea of divine violence. Spin it as retributive justice all you like, I am with James Alison: “Nothing that is dependent on vengeance can be called reconciliation.” How can one say such a thing? The doctrine of the Trinity! If opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa, and if the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity (Rahner’s rule), how can the Spirit-anointed Jesus of Nazareth, who rejected the way of violence and vengeance, have a violent and vengeful Father? Not surprisingly, expositors of the doctrine of penal substitution usually isolate the cross not only from the resurrection of Jesus, but also from his life and witness. To rephrase I John 1:5: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is non-violent, and in him is no violence at all” – not even the violence of retributive justice! The work of Moltmann and Jüngel is an indispensable resource for working out the soteriological implications of the inextricable relationship between the doctrine of the Trinity and a theologia crucis. A doctrine of substitution may be salvageable, and still serviceable – but not a doctrine of penal substitution.

A lecture by Robert W. Jenson

At Princeton’s Centre for Theological Inquiry, Robert W. Jenson will be giving a public lecture on the doctrine of atonement. If you’re in the Princeton area this week, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to hear one of the world’s finest theological thinkers.