The Atonement is reciprocal praxis
I know, I know. This book is so last year.
I picked up Scot McKnight‘s A Community Called Atonement last month with a Barnes & Noble giftcard. I started it a few days ago and finished it last night.
It’s a really great book. Not just on atonement theology, but also on what it means to be missional. While I don’t always completely agree with his conclusions (mainly I think he gives penal substitution too much credit) McKnight does a wonderful job of covering all the bases while offering up the ideas of atonement as the restorative practice of justice and reconciliation within the local community and the poignant need to use and give proper recognition to, every metaphor and image we have available to describe the atonement. Which is awesome. Read it if you haven’t already.
There are too many good quotes but here are a few (or four) that I think grasp the overall thrust of the book.1
“Atonement language includes several evocative metaphors: there is a sacrificial metaphor (offering), and a legal metaphor (justification), and an interpersonal metaphor (reconciliation), and a commercial metaphor (redemption), and a military metaphor (ransom). Each is designed to carry us…to the thing. But the metaphor is not the thing. The metaphor gives the reader or hearer an imagination of the thing, a vision of the thing, a window onto the thing, a lens through which to look in order to see the thing. Metaphors take us there, but they are not ‘there.’”
“Knowing that the metaphor is not the thing leads to important implications, not the least of which is to admit in humility that we can have proper confidence in the God who atones by indwelling each of the many metaphors that lead us to the God who atones. We need each of them. We need…[each of them]…becauase each them in its own language game of metaphorical exploration and imagination, leads us to the core of it all: reconiliation (which is a metaphor) with God, self, others, and the world.” (38)
And I would add in there somewhere — and, to be fair, McKnight does as well elsewhere in the book — that each image/metaphor needs to be understood and situated within its original context and with its original language so we can understand its original meaning and significance. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s my problem with penal substitution.
“[A]tonement is only understood when it is understood as the restoration of humans — in all directions — so that the form a society (the ecclesia, the church) wherein God’s will is lived out and given freedom to transform all of life. Any theory of atonement that is not an ecclesial theory of the atonement is inadequate….” (9)
“To be forgiven, to be atoned for, to be reconciled — synonymous expressions — is to be granted a mission to become a reciprocal performer of the same: to forgive, to work atonement, and to be an agent of reconciliation. Thus, atonement is not just something done to us and for us, it is something we participate in — in the world, in the here and now. It is not just something done, but somthing that is being done and something we do as we join God in missio Dei.” (30-31)
“[A]tonement is something done not only by God for us but also something we do with God for others…atonement is praxis. … [I]t is embodied in what God does for us in such a way that we a summoned to participate with God in [God's] redemptive work.” (117)
And I have no commentary for that. It speaks for itself: we the members of authentic and relational community are enabled, by the life and ministry of Jesus and by the Spirit to partner with God — partaking in the life of the divine — participating in what God is already doing in the world and in the cosmos, that is the process of restoration and reconciliation and the unfolding narrative of re-creation and justice.
Read the book.
- All emphases are original [↩]
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