As members of my congregation and readers of this blog know, I believe that nonviolence must be the way of the Christian because it was the way of Christ and is the way of God. I have written about nonviolence in my book, and I have other posts on nonviolence on this blog. Christians have, of course, been infinitely creative in thinking of ways around Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. It began with the development of Christian just war theory in the late fourth century CE. It continued in the Middle Ages with the absolute conviction that surely God would want the Christian West to use force to drive the infidel Muslims out of the holy places in Jerusalem, such an affront to God the presence of those devils (as western Christians saw them) in the places of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection surely must be to God. (Western Christians were of course projecting their own sense of the impropriety of the Muslims being in those places onto God, but then we humans never tire of projecting our own prejudices and hatreds onto God.) In our time the arguments against Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence tend to be pragmatic. Violence “works,” nonviolence doesn’t, we say. It’s not true, but we say it as though it were. But I recently heard one justification for rejecting Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence that I hadn’t heard before, and it is that objection and some of its theological consequences that I want to examine here.
This objection to the binding nature of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence for us goes like this: God gave us life. Life is God’s gracious gift to us, indeed, it is perhaps God’s most significant and precious gift to us. God wants us to have life, therefore we have a sacred duty to defend our life even if we must use violence to do it. A Christian may therefore use violence at least to defend her or his own life. It is a short additional step to make this justification for the use of violence in self defense a justification for using violence to defend the life of another. The person I heard this line of argument from recently didn’t take it this far, but this line of reasoning could, I suppose, be used to justify the use of violence in the defense of anything that is seen as gift of God. In my recent conversation on this subject I pointed out that in all four Gospels Jesus objects to his disciples using violence to defend him at the time of his arrest. (Yes, John’s Jesus states a different rational for his objection to the use of violence than we find in the Synoptics, but he still objects. More about that below.) My interlocutor responded: Yes, but he came to die. There is of course a whole theology in that response “He came to die.” It is that theology that I want to discuss here. I have discussed it elsewhere, in particular in Chapters 8 and 9 of my book, but the matter is so significant that it certainly deserves further, if brief, treatment here.
The theology behind the objection “He came to die” is of course the classical theory of atonement, the theory that says that God became human in Jesus for the purpose of suffering and dying as the necessary atonement for human sin. The objections to the classical theory of atonement are well known. It isn’t biblically mandated. It presents God as violent. It presents God as concerned more than anything else with God’s own honor. It convicts God of cosmic child abuse. It ignores the way that in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere God forgives human sin without demanding the sacrifice of God’s own Son as a precondition. All of these objections are well developed in contemporary theological literature.
My recent conversation points to yet another objection to the classical theory of atonement, one that has perhaps not received sufficient attention. That objection is this: The classical theory of atonement, the notion that, as Mel Gibson put it, “Dying was his reason for living,” eliminates Jesus as a model for human living. Eliminating Jesus as a model for human living is precisely what my conversation partner was doing when she dismissed my statement about Jesus’ rejecting the use of force at the time of his arrest with her “He came to die.” The classical theory of atonement limits Jesus’ purpose to one unique divine mission, the mission of being a God-man who suffers and dies. The problem isn’t that the theory makes Jesus unique. For Christians Jesus was unique. The problem is that it makes his uniqueness something that has to do only with him and God, not with us, or at least only indirectly with us. We are purely passive beneficiaries of Jesus’ sacrifice. He is not there to be a model for us, only to die for us.
The classical theory of atonement does depend on the concept incarnation. In its classical formulation by Anselm of Canterbury in the early years of the twelfth century CE it says that the necessary price for human sin, the repayment due to God to restore God’s honor that has been horribly besmirched by human sin, could be paid only by a creature who was both human and divine. Yet the classical theory of atonement severely limits the scope of the Incarnation’s meaning. Broadly understood the doctrine of the Incarnation says that Jesus both reveals God’s nature to us and reveals pure human nature to us, human nature the way God intends it to be. Jesus then becomes both our window onto God and the model of the ideal human life. That it points in both directions, revealing to us divine truth both about God and about ourselves, is one of the Incarnation’s great virtues.
Some streams within the Christian tradition have actually emphasized Jesus’ role as a model for the ideal human life. There is a tradition within Christianity of the Imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, in which men and women have intentionally set out to imitate Jesus Christ in the way they lived their lives. When Jesus Christ is understood only according to the classical theory of atonement, however, imitating Christ becomes impossible. It becomes impossible because to do what Christ came to do he had to be both human and divine, and we of course are only human. (That we may have some spark of divinity within us does not take away from the truth that in his nature as both fully human and fully divine Christ was in a fundamental way other than us while at the same time being one of us.) Therefore seeking to imitate Christ makes no sense in this view of things, as it is trying to do the impossible. Truly imitating Christ using a broader understanding of the Incarnation may be trying to do the impossible too, but Christ as a human being can remain nonetheless our model and our goal. The impossibility of the task in this view arises not from the nature of the task but from our nature as imperfect creatures rather than gods.
Making Christ irrelevant as a model for human life as the classical theory of atonement does is far from harmless. Making Jesus a divine and human sacrifice for human sin, and thereby making him irrelevant as a model for human living, becomes a ready excuse for not even trying to follow his teachings about the Kingdom of God. As I saw in the conversation I related above it becomes a handy excuse for avoiding Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence. It is an equally handy excuse for not following Jesus’ teaching on anything else too, not his teaching on justice, not his teaching on inclusion of the excluded, not his teaching on the equality of woman (see the story of Mary and Martha and the role of Mary Magdalene in bringing the news of the Resurrection, for example), not any of his teaching. His teaching is simply irrelevant to the classical theory of atonement, which focuses exclusively on Jesus’ death. It ignores his life. It even ignores his Resurrection, which the classical theory of atonement in no way requires. The way in which the classical theory of atonement focuses the Christian’s attention exclusively on Jesus’ death goes hand in hand, both theoretically and historically, with the way the Christian tradition made the faith be about how our souls get to heaven when we die rather than about how we live our lives here on earth; and it shares the danger and the fallacy of the Christian focus on heaven of making our commitment to Jesus’ way of peace and justice irrelevant.
The person with whom I had that conversation in which she said that Jesus came to die is a good Christian person with a generous spirit and a kind heart. She struggles with Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence, as I suppose we all do. She was expressing an understanding that the Christian Church has given her, one that has biblical support, among other places, in the Gospel of John’s version of Jesus’ arrest. In that story, when Peter strikes out with a sword to defend Jesus, Jesus says: “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” John 18:11 The author of the Gospel of John believed that preventing Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion would have stopped Jesus from accomplishing the most important thing that he came to do, namely, to die. So does the classical theory of atonement.
Which of course does not mean that we must profess the classical theory of atonement. That theory does in fact offer one powerful explanation of the significance of Jesus Christ for us humans. Yet the theory’s shortcomings are so significant and so manifold that in the end we must reject it. One of those shortcomings that I find to be quite significant is the way in which it makes Jesus irrelevant for human life. My friend, echoing the classical theory of atonement, said: He came to die. Respectfully, speaking the truth in love, we reply: No he didn’t.
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