The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement

A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.

From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."

The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.

I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.

At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.

Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.

The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.

Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.

At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).

In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:

If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”

Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.

It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.

For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.

Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.

That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.