Ordinary Atonement

In America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (125-7), Jenson summarizes Edwards’s discussion of atonement. Edwards begins with notion of “merit,” but he defines it in a way that, Jenson says, “amounts to its replacement.” Merit is something in a person that recommends that person to another’s regard, esteem, and affection. As Jenson says, this definition removes atonement from “the realm of abstract credits to be balanced by a judicial calculus” and places it instead “in the universal community of hearts.” In that context, things that otherwise seem arbitrary seem natural.

On the basis of “merit” in this sense, it is reasonable, Edwards says, “that respect should be shown to one on account of his . . . connexion with another.” B has merit in A’s regard, but because C is related to B, A regards him in the same way. Summarizing “crudely,” Jenson says that for Edwards “the atonement worked by Jesus’ life and death is achieved by such a community of him and us that if the Father loves the Son he must love us also.”

Using a patron-client model, Edwards explains how our connection with Christ makes for atonement. The summary is Jenson’s, the quoted material Edwards’s:

“Surely, thinks Edwards, if someone ‘that is very dear to any person, and of great merit in [his] eyes . . . , not only stands in a strict union with another, but also does particularly express a great desire of that other’s welfare . . . it is agreeable to nature, that the welfare of the person united to him should be regarded’ by the friend ‘as if it were his own.’ And, moving a step, this will be the more so ‘when the way in which this person . . . seeks . . . the client’s welfare . . . is by suffering and being at expense of his own.’ And yet more if the patron applies directly to his friend, and the ‘expense’ is for what ‘his friend regards as his own interest’ – as the Father regards both the salvation of his creatures and the rejection of sin. And yet another step more: ‘if the merit of the patron . . . especially appear’ in the pains he takes ‘for the client’s welfare.’ And finally, when the merit consists in the pain, the expended natural good is equal to the merit, that is, is itself a moral good: ‘the worthiness of the patron and the value expended are offered both together in one, as the price of the welfare of the client.’”

What closes the deal is when the client and patron are completely one, when “the patron’s heart is so united to the client, that when the client is destroyed, he from love is willing to take the destruction to himself,’ when ‘his love to the client is such . . . as to swallow up his [own] whole interest.’”

Complicated for sure, but as Jenson says, “That Christ’s life and death unite sinners with God is not, in his understanding, a breach of the ordinary way of things; it is no miracle, in the vulgar acceptation of that term. It is wholly ‘fit’ according to ‘nature.’”

Whatever we might say about the specifics of Edwards’s treatment here, any convincing theology of the atonement must meet the “ordindariness” standard. This both for apologetic reasons (because atonement often seems utterly arbitrary) and for theological reasons (because the way God saves should respect the contours of the world He created and is saving).