Knight again: “In reply to Sanders’s claim that Lutheran talk of representation and substitution is alien to Israelite sacrifice, I suggest that we should see Old Testament talk of atonement of place as a solution, not a problem. If we make a hard distinction between individuals and persons defined by relations, we can say that Israelites came to the temple as individuals and left as persons. They arrived alienated and left reconciled with God and his people. They came friendless and left befriended. This is what Christian doctrine terms ‘justification.’ God says to them, ‘You are with me,” and by this announcement these people are brought into the people of God, so that no other power may touch them. It is precisely individuality, the state of being with insufficient relationship, that was atoned for by the supply of relationship with God.”
Echoes of Zizioulas throughout this passage (and indeed throughout the book), but firmly set in the context of biblical theology. And by combining Zizioulas and attending to Israel’s role in God’s formation of humanity and specifically of the role of Israel’s sacrifice, Knight is able to rebut Kant’s charge that atonement is irrational because it involves an illegitimate sharing of liability, a transfer from one individual to another: “Modern theological anthropology has largely followed Kant in this. It does not allow that persons receive their personhood from God, and thus it has had the greatest difficulty in setting out an account of the death of Jesus Christ in terms of a single work shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
Kant’s not entirely to blame, as “this difficulty itself is the result of a long failure to relate the work of Christ to the sacrificial, liturgical creation theology by which Israel displays this economy of sonship before the world.” We can defend the rationality of sacrifice only with “such a view of Israel’s commissioning and employment in the persons-formative work of Israel’s God.”
It seems to me that certain formulations of “imputation” suffer from the same problems that Knight identifies here. Insofar as imputation is understood as a transfer of guilt or righteousness from one individual to another individual, it is locked into a view that ignores both the relationality of persons and the role of Israel.
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