Thesis: Atonement represents not an affirmation of justice, but rather instead its unraveling.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Failure of Roman Justice
- The Failure of Israel’s Justice (work in progress)
- Beyond Justice (not started)
- Bibliography
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. (Isaiah 53:3-8 KJV)
Like a lamb to the slaughter. When Christ was being dragged onto the cross, he was helpless like a lamb, blameless like a lamb, and wearing the blame of another’s sin, just like a lamb.
A man who committed no crime (Luke 23:4) nailed next to a thief, all while a murderer walks in his place. He who spoke the Scriptures (Matthew 5:17) branded a heretic by the very same priests and scribes who preached Messiah. The one child of God to have never sinned against God forsaken by God (Matthew 27:46). The blood of the faithful shed so the faithless may live (Jeremiah 3:6-10, Ephesians 2:4-7).
Nowhere in this portrait of Calvary can we speak of justice as we know it.
Where was “justice before the law” when the Roman state chose to wash its hands (Matthew 27:24) of an affair it carried out? Where was the justice of religion when lies were allowed to prevail over truth? (John 12:42) Where was God to right these wrongs, and lift away his son from the altar the way Abraham lifted away Isaac?
God was on the cross. God – the Divine, the Transcendent, the Eternal, the Truth – stood not above this predicament but directly in the midst of it. God – the Invisible, Timeless, Formless God – the one who said unto Moses “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14), the one who stood in opposition to the sculpted and graven images grasped by the hands of men, stood here in a historical moment among men.
The contradiction of Incarnation stands at the center of Christianity. This perfect God – so completely and utterly removed from how we live, what we experience, what we are capable of – taking the very form most familiar to us.
In doing this, what Christ did becomes an example for what we are to do (1 Peter 2:21), what Christ experienced becomes our experience (John 15:20), and the question of what he represents is quite literally a matter of life and death for us.
To do as many Christians have done, and simply write off atonement as a settling of debts, is to neglect the revelation present in the process of its realization.
Until we tackle the question of Calvary, it will continue to haunt over us like a spectre. Any Christian can tell you that the redeeming work brought about resolution, but what is the substance of that resolution? What is it’s nature? Does salvation mean things continuing on as they had before? What is preserved? What is fulfilled? What is dissolved?
The events of that night do not stand in some remote “dispensation” tacked onto an arbitrary timeline. This scene is a microcosm of the larger drama that continually, cyclically plays out in human history.
The same questions of justice, politics, theodicy, morality, which we never seem to fully resolve loom over that night all the same.
The conceit of both the traditionalist and the progressive is to overstate the uniqueness of historical periods.
No amount of philosophical, scientific, cultural, or technological progress will ever change the fact that we are men and our institutions are brick and mortar. We cannot so completely advance past our position or degenerate below it that these fundamental questions to being — how we are to live among other beings and what we are to make of our eventual demise — will cease to bear relevance.
If turning to the past was enough, there would be no need for God – this ultimate religious crystallization of tradition – to be put to death. Yet if the present holds the answers, there would be no need for God to resurrect.
The process is the same irrespective of whether we are talking about morality or politics or religion. We must first put to death the notions of the old, as they represent attempts by man to define righteousness on his own terms. And at that precise moment the old has been done away with, in that brief moment of uncertainty, we discover that contained within the carcass of the old notion is a higher essence, only realized through its negation. Christ said he came to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17), but the nature of this fulfillment is that it realizes itself through destruction.
Or to put it in simpler terms, the failure of the Romans and Jews that night was not just the failure of specific peoples in a specific historical period, but symbolic of something much larger.
Each figure is ultimately an archetype, representing the responses men have taken to making sense of their fallenness. In the Pharisee we see the religious man, the one whose gaze is so fixated on the heavens he forgets his own existence on Earth. Whereas the Roman is emblematic of the secular man, the one so preoccupied with managing and living with men’s fallenness, that the concept of a righteousness which exists beyond his line of sight appears absurdity. Yet, despite how familiar these tropes are to us, what we will see as we dig deeper is that they aren’t so mutually exclusive: one always has a tendency to pass into the other.
By studying the Roman, studying the Pharisee, one will see how God was crucified not by a people, but people: their virtues, their institutions, their practices all falling apart before God’s presence.
Continue to Part II
Evangelical Christian, Marxist, and a bit of a Luddite. I run this blog as a way to compile my various theories and arguments spanning a wide variety of subjects from technology to politics.
