New
Reconciliation?
January
1, 2022
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
There is a
passage in Paul’s Second Letter to the church in Corinth that I have long
loved. It reads:
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:
everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is
from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the
ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message
of reconciliation to us. 2 Corinthians 5:17-19.
I have long loved this passage
because it gives us a soteriology that is very different from the classical
theory of atonement that most people think is what Christianity is but that I
rejected a long time ago.[1]
Notice what Paul does not say here. There is no mention of the cross (though
the cross was important to Paul). There is no mention of Christ’s suffering and
dying. It is only “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not
counting their trespasses against them.” There’s no mention of God demanding
that a price be paid before God would forgive human sin.[2]
There’s no feudal nonsense about God’s “honor” as there is the foundational
text of the classical atonement theory. There’s no sense that we humans are so
horribly sinful that only the unjust suffering and death of God’s own Son could
be a price high enough to get God to forgive us as, something on which the classical
theory of atonement insists. No, there’s just in Christ God reconciled the
world to Godself. I so prefer that way of thinking about Christian soteriology
to the classical theory of atonement, which I see as basically a theory of
cosmic child abuse.
I’ve so preferred
reconciliation to substitutionary sacrificial atonement (i.e., the classical
theory of atonement) that until recently I hadn’t noticed a problem with this
theology of salvation through reconciliation. It’s the problem that I have with
the notion that Jesus Christ somehow brought a salvation that hadn’t been there
before him. I have recently written about this issue on this blog. See my blog
posts “On Salvation” and “Did Jesus Bring Salvation?” I won’t repeat here
everything I said there. I’ll just say that it makes no sense to me to say, as
popular Christianity always does, that before Jesus Christ with his suffering
and death no one was ever saved because Jesus hadn’t come, suffered, died yet.
I have concluded that Jesus didn’t bring a salvation that wasn’t possible
before him. Rather, he demonstrated a salvation that was always there and always
will be. In Jesus Christ we see God’s unshakable solidarity with all of
humanity, all of creation really.[3]
In and through him we can enter into that salvation and come to know it in and
for this life as well as for the next life.
The same thing
must be true of the reconciliation of which Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians. That
reconciliation of God and humanity must always have been there. At least it
must always have been there as far is God is concerned. Why would God suddenly
decide to reconcile the world to Godself at a particular time in human history
when God hadn’t done that before? It makes no sense to say that God did. Yet
Paul seems to be saying that in Christ God was effecting a reconciliation that
hadn’t been there before. He says that in Christ God “was reconciling” humanity
with Godself. The form of the very Paul uses here (at least in English
translation) necessarily implies that in Christ God was creating something that
hadn’t existed but that God now decided needed to exist. Paul strongly suggests
that Christ was a necessary instrument of God creating that reconciliation. Yet
I simply cannot accept the notion that before Christ we were not reconciled
with God but after Christ we are.
So if Jesus didn’t
effect the reconciliation of which Paul speaks, is he irrelevant to our
reconciliation with God? No, he’s not irrelevant at all; but he is relevant in
a way very different from the way most Christians understand his saving work.
He is relevant to our reconciliation with God in the same way that he is relevant
to our salvation in God, reconciliation being another way to speak of salvation.
He didn’t create reconciliation between God and us humans. Rather, he
demonstrated a reconciliation that was always there but that most humans in all
eras of history have failed to see and failed to learn from. In Jesus we see
that God and humanity have always been reconciled to an extent we didn’t know
before. By worshipping Jesus as God the Son Incarnate and by trying to be his
disciples as best we can, we can access God’s reconciliation with us. We can
access it here and now. We don’t have to wait for a there and then after death
to live into the reconciliation that God has always known God had created but
most humans haven’t known at all.
Do we gain
anything by recognizing and living into God’s reconciliation with us? Oh yes,
we gain a great deal when we do that. Our souls can rest at ease in the
knowledge that God does not count our trespasses against us. We come to know
that we aren’t the only ones God loves so much that God reconciles us to God.
We learn that every single human who ever lived or ever will live (yes, even
the ones who have been great monsters in human history) is a person God loves
as much as God loves us. When we really know that there is no existential gap
between God and us we can find the strength to face whatever we must face in
life. We can find the courage to keep doing the work of the realm of God no
matter how much the world hates, reviles, and even harms us for doing it. We
can truly know that hatred and violence toward any one of God’s people (and all
people are God’s people) is excluded from the life of faith. We can live and
work in a peace and with a courage we never knew we had.
So St. Paul, with
all due respect, no. God did not reconcile Godself to us Christ. God didn’t do
that because God didn’t need to it. Reconciliation was already done. It was
already there because it’s who God is, always has been, and always will be. It
is of God’s nature to be reconciled with all creation. God can’t not be
reconciled with all creation, for being unreconciled contradicts God’s very
essence. So let’s realize that there is no gap between God and us. There never
has been a gap and there never will be a gap as far as God is concerned. Jesus
brings us that truth incarnationally. He brings it so we can see it. He brings
it so we can live into it. So let’s get on with it, shall we? May it be so.
[1] For
a discussion of the shortcomings of the classical theory of atonement see
Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement,” in my book Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised
Edition, which is available in paperback and e-book forms at amazon.com.
[2]
See the book Cur Deus Homo? by Anselm of Canterbury published in 1107.
[3] This
theology is called theology of the cross. For more on it see Chapter 9 of my
book Liberating Christianity cited in footnote 1 here. It’s titled “The
Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity.”
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