The Cross in History

Theodore Jennings doesn’t think that traditional notions of atonement speak to the contemporary world. We are “no longer familiar” with the language of sacrifice, and that is partly because of Christianity itself: “the Letter to the Hebrews is an essay that largely aims at the destruction of the notion of sacrifice” (Transforming Atonement, 5). He thinks the same is true of other traditional notions of atonement.

This elicits several responses: Is sacrifice really so foreign to contemporary thought? Does Hebrews aim at the “destruction” of the notion of sacrifice or at its transformation? And, ultimately, which is the master discourse here – does the Bible need to adjust to contemporary categories, or do we need to re-think our assumptions in the light of the Bible?

Jennnings’s positive case is more compelling. Like many other theologians today, he observes that much traditional reflection on the atonement is disconnected from Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, from the specific form of His ministry, and from the political situation of first-century Judaism. He complains that Jesus’ crucifixion has been theologically elevated above the earth where it actually took place. This complaint is overstated, but it is true enough as a generalization. 

His alternative assertion is: “Whatever the cross means, it must mean that reality has been changed. The reality that has been changed is not simply the inward one of our relation to God, or of God’s relation to us, but a change in the world itself, and even in God. The cross was a public event with public significance” (17).

Jennings fills out this program by explaining Pauline assertions about the cross by reference to the actual events of Jesus life, trial, death, and resurrection. Paul’s theology of atonement becomes a kind of short-hand for the gospel narrative. In Christ’s death, Paul says, Jew and Gentile are united, the marginal and excluded brought near. How does that work? Because Jesus became the excluded one. In His ministry and at His death, He is “one with the excluded,” yet this excluded one is God’s emissary, the Messiah, the Son of God. Thus, the notion that election means exclusion comes to an end in Jesus. The exclusion of humans from God’s presence comes to an end because Jesus rends the temple veil by His death (69-70). All other efforts to turn privileges into exclusions are also destroyed.

Similarly, “Jesus redeems from the curse of the law” is a way of summarizing Jesus’ solidarity with sinners, His sharing in their “cursed” state, His condemnation by Rome and the Jewish caretakers of the law. Jennings writes, “If the law condemns Jesus even though Jesus is the one who represents the divine will, then this accusation and condemnation is fundamentally false.” Paul continues to affirm the goodness of the law, “but the negative character of the law as the power of accusation and condemnation is broken. It no longer can have legitimacy” (99). The resurrection shows that Jesus is in the right, the law condemned for condemning the Righteous One.

He goes through other Pauline descriptions of the cross using the same method: Always referring back to the concrete historical circumstances of Jesus’ life and death.

This is all very illuminating, but marred in unfortunate ways. He says that Jesus removes “all” exclusion and demolishes all hierarchy, but then he has to explain away or ignore the passages that say otherwise. (The most egregious example is his interpretation of Jesus’ response to the adulterous woman of John 8, where he first ignores Jesus’ “Go and sin no more” [92-3] and later reduces it to “prudential advice” [103].) Strangely, he uses Matthew 23 to illustrate Jesus’ battle against accusers, never acknowledging that the chapter looks a lot like a set of accusations against scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites. He wants to say that all notions of religious privilege are gone, but he is too haunted by the Holocaust to deny Jewish election (83). He short-circuits the story of the cross and of martyrdom; he doesn’t reckon fully with the exaltation of the humble servant in Philippians 2 or of the martyrs in Revelation 20 (cf. Jesus’ promises to “overcomers” in Revelation 2-3).

And this brings us back to my original complaint: Too often Jennings conforms the transformation that atonement brings to the expectations of contemporary liberal culture. Contrary to his stated intentions, he ends with a cross that is not nearly counter-cultural enough.