Faith, Atonement, and the Centrality of Jesus

I'm still dialoging with Harlan Quinn over at QuIRP on the idea of the atonement, and it looks like I will be contributing some ideas to a document that he hopes to create mapping out logically the concept of the atonement. The dialog has been stimulating, charitable, and good natured so far and I look forward to continuing it. It is making me think and reflect on ideas of law, justice, and sin as they relate to Christianity and the significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I have been reading Jan-Olav Henriksen's book The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and some of his thoughts on Kierkegaard have resonated with me as I have been thinking about the idea of atonement. Kierkegaard, though not without his flaws, is one of my favorite thinkers and writers and along with Nietzsche was the main reason I was drawn to this book. Henriksen emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity to Kierkegaard's thoughts on religion. Subjectivity, in the sense that religion is something that involves a person as a subject and focuses on God as another subject, helps point towards the personal nature of God and God's interaction with humans. What this means for Kierkegaard is that we make a mistake when we look to things like doctrine as being the heart of Christianity instead of the person of Jesus Christ and our own encounter with Him.

To quote from Henriksen, "Faith is first and foremost a relation to the communication of the mode of existence provided by the Teacher, a communication that cannot be separated from the Teacher himself . . . The statement that Christianity is not a doctrine but a communication or mediation of a mode of existence should not be taken as a direct negation of the doctrinal content in Christianity. It does have such a content, but this content is mainly related to personal and individual existence, not to what can be spelled out in paragraphs resulting from mere speculative thought" (114).

What we find in the words of the New Testament is a testimony to the person of Jesus and the accounts of the spiritual experiences and reflections of those who were his contemporaries and near contemporaries to the events of his life. However, we are making a mistake if we see these gospels and epistles as being primarily sources of doctrine instead of testimonies to the encounters with Jesus, both physically and spiritually, of the earliest believers. The New Testament as the "word of God" testifies to the pre-incarnate Word. As a Christian, Jesus was and must always be for me the Word of God, and while the words of the Bible are to be treasured and studied diligently, the two should not be confused.

Kierkegaard's work helps point to the need for following Jesus to be a subject-subject relationship, not a subject-object one, which is extremely easy to fall into. I know I frequently lose sight of the stunning picture of reality that we find in John's prologue: the Word, the logos, is personal. This means that Christianity makes a radical claim here, the claim that ultimate reality at its heart is personal. Thinking about God and faith isn't a matter of trying to investigate a set of circumstances or look for empirical data, because if we are dealing with something that is personal than we learn through conversation. We ask and are asked in return, and information can be willingly given or deliberately withheld, but cannot be attained without the consent of the other.

All this may sound somewhat abstract, but the point that I want to make when thinking about the atonement is that from a Christian perspective, if we are looking to apply logical principles and historical investigation to prove or disprove anything about the consequences of the life of Jesus, then we are in danger of missing a great deal of the story if we in fact really are dealing with a personal source of all reality. My intent is not to denigrate reason, philosophy, or history (all of which are passions of mine), but rather to make sure that we are not pushing them beyond their limits. We can know the past only indirectly and there will always be room for doubt and uncertainty, but there is no reason that this needs to leave us in a permanent state of agnosticism about God and Jesus Christ.

These are just some rough reflections that I have had, and I don't claim that this is the final or best word on the subject. I just want to raise the question of how, based on the testimony of Jesus and the scriptures, we might expect to most fruitfully go about reflecting on the idea of the atonement, and what I want to suggest is that it can never be separated from Jesus Christ and simply dealt with as a matter of doctrine. Once we start moving away from Jesus in these reflections, we are entering a realm of theology and philosophy that while certainly religious does not deserve to be called Christian.

Too often we as Christians forget our own namesake and slip into talk about an abstract entity called "God" that is defined anthropomorphically and said to have to meet certain standards of excellence or perfection. The only problem is that this vision of "god" has very little to do with the God we find in the Bible and even less to do with Jesus. If we make the mistake of viewing God as an object instead of a subject then all of our reflections on him and on doctrine will only be directed towards an idol. The atonement, like any other doctrine of Christian faith, only has value as a means of pointing beyond itself to Jesus Christ himself, and if we lose sight of this then I fear that we are merely engaging in one giant exercise in missing the point.