Atonement

Dear Students,

I really enjoyed our look at the atonement through the eyes of philosophers (I’ve enjoyed everything we’ve looked at thus far in our course as well J). In this post, I am just rambling a bit. 

As you could tell in class, I do not have my own theory worked out in any detail. I still tend to think that all of the models I am familiar with say something important and that it may be a big mistake to rule out any of them completely. But I am inclined to think that emphasis matters as does starting point. For example, if I emphasize Christ as a moral role-model to the exclusion of Christ as a sacrificial lamb, I am not only going to miss something important about Christ’s atoning work, I am going to miss something important about the nature of God, the nature of sin, justice, goodness, love, etc. 

One of the things that struck me about the Strabbing piece came right at the end of it. She wrote: “By appealing to the expressive function of punishment, as opposed to the retributive function, the heart of the penal substitution model is God’s mercy, not His wrath. In choosing penal substitution, God mercifully takes amongst His available options the best option for us – the only one that allows us to be morally transformed and restored to a right relationship with Him.”

My sense is that when most people think about PSA they pretty quickly think about God’s wrath. Strabbing’s model includes divine wrath—her stuff on desert is an example—but as she says the heart of it is divine mercy. This leads us to another element that I think a theory of atonement should probably include and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. 

It seems to me that it is a part of traditional Christianity (i.e. the doctrines common to Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism) that the atonement is an act (or series of acts) that God’s nature did not require Him to perform. Put differently, God’s nature does not necessitate that He save humans from their sin and alienation from Him. God’s nature does, it seems, necessitate, as far as we can tell, other things: promise-keeping, love, infinite knowledge, and power, truth-telling, holiness, etc. But the tradition has long supposed, I think, that God could have decided not to save and still been perfectly loving, knowledgeable, powerful, good, etc. If that is correct, then a good theory of the atonement should include it. That is, a good theory of the atonement should not imply that God had to save. Obviously, it better include that He does save, but the fact that God does save us, does not imply that He had to save us (analogy: a good theory of creation should not imply that God had to create, even though it better include that He did create). 

If all of that is right, does it follow that universalism is false? I don’t think so. What does appear to follow is that universalism is not required by God’s nature. 

If all of that is right, does it follow that everlasting hell is compatible with God’s nature? I don’t think so (even though I affirm that everlasting hell is fact compatible with God's nature; the point here is that it's not going to follow from the claim that God is not required to save). 

The following are compatible, I think: 
1.     God is not required to save alienated sinners
2.     Everlasting hell is incompatible with God’s nature

What follows from the above two statements is this:
3.     If God had decided not to save alienated sinners, God would have decided to annihilate them.

So, it seems to me that a good theory of the atonement should probably be compatible with the claim that God did not have to make a way for sinners to be reconciled to himself. My sense is that Strabbing’s model includes this, but I am not certain (her comments on divine mercy suggest that it does, but other things she said suggests that it might not). Anyway, I am curious to hear your thoughts. You may either email them to me or post them here. 







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