Cross and Culture

Peter J. Leithart, July 09, 2004

This is a brief overview of a project on the atonement, first delivered as my inaugural lecture as Senior Fellow of Theology at NSA a few years ago. (I don't think this has been posted already; if it has, my deep apologies.)

My title is �Cross and Culture,�Ebut that needs to be made more specific. The cross is described in the New Testament in a variety of ways: It is a military operation, the Divine Warrior�s victory over Satan, sin, and death; it is an act of diplomacy, reconciling the world to God; it is a legal act, the execution of a sentence of death; it is a cultic act, the sacrifice that ends all sacrifice. This last will occupy me, and my theme can be stated more precisely as �sacrifice and the redemption of society.�E

It is clear from the New Testament that the cross has both theological and sociological dimensions. That is, the cross reconciles God with man and also reconciles man and man, redeeming human society. My goal is to outline some of the resources that could be used in developing a biblical account of the cross that integrates these two dimensions, an account that shows both that the theological dimension is indispensable to the redemption of society, and that the redemption of society is directly implicated in our reconciliation to God. My ultimate aim is to answer Anselm�s question, Cur Deus Homo? in a way that demonstrates not only the theological but the �sociological�Enecessity of the cross.

I.
Raising the question this way immediately raises a conflict with secular thought. To be sure, Christians and secularists agree that society needs to be redeemed. Though secularists may object to the use of a religiously loaded word like �redemption,�Eone of the driving forces of post-Enlightenment modernity has been the passion to liberate human society from its pathologies so that it may flourish in freedom and peace. A central question that divides Christians and moderns has to do with the means for achieving that condition. For Christianity, society is redeemed by the Incarnate Son, who entered a disordered and perverted world reeling under the curse and wrath of God (Rom. 1:18-32) to redeem �us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us�Eon the cross (Gal. 3:13). Through the blood of Christ and through His cross, Jew and Gentile have been made �one new man�Eand are �reconciled in one body�E(Eph 2:11-16). Through Jesus, societies torn by violence, hatred, and envy, societies inflated with pride, societies distracted and obsessed by sensuality are renewed in joy, peace, patience, love, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control.

For moderns, on the other hand, Christianity is one of the pathologies from which society must be delivered. Moderns are repulsed at the idea of substitutionary atonement and by sacrifice. For Jesus to take our place is unjust and unbecoming of God. According to Nietzsche, the �god on the cross�Ecannot be the redeemer of society and human life; rather, the cross was the negation of life. For others, claiming that a violent death lies at the heart of history legitimizes violence, and to suggest that human society and culture can be redeemed only by an event during the first century, an event that took place in the Eastern backwaters of the Roman Empire, is patently absurd. Who needs that? If we liberalize political systems, adjust the incentive structure of the economy, break down invidious class barriers �Eif all this can be done, then soon the lion will lie with the lamb and the cow and the bear will graze together. This confidence that society can be redeemed by human effort cuts across the political spectrum; it can take a conservative law-and-order regime or a liberal agenda of removing-discrimination-and-inequalities. The differences between conservative and liberal are less important than their essential agreement that society can be redeemed by law. Both agree that a �new order of the ages�Ecan be established by Constitutional Convention, without the gore of crucifixion or the miracle of resurrection.

Theologians in the modern world have felt the pressure of these objections to traditional theories of the atonement. Beginning with the Socinians of the sixteenth century, and increasingly in the subsequent two centuries, sociological (and psychological) theories of the atonement supplanted earlier theological theories. For modern theologians the cross did not effect a transformation of human life, but instead set an example of the kind of life that would regenerate man. If only we all lived like Jesus, pouring ourselves out for others, sympathizing with the miserable, identifying ourselves with outcasts, we could usher in the millennium.

Intellectual history is full of paradoxes, and several are involved in modern theology�s abandonment of satisfaction theories of the atonement. For one, many modern thinkers, eager to escape the long shadow of Anselm, found that some idea of atonement and substitution was essential to any coherent moral philosophy. Kant serves to illustrate this point. According to the analysis offered by R. R. Reno, Kant, like other thinkers of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, attempted to hold together three premises concerning the possibility of redemptive change for man or for society. First, according to the �personal continuity�Ecriterion, a man or society who changes from evil to good must be somehow the same throughout the process of change. Otherwise, obviously, no change has taken place, but only replacement. Second, according to the principle of �moral determination,�Ewhat we are morally is who we are. Our moral condition is the key to our identity. Finally, according to the (Pelagian) criterion of �personal potency,�Ethe power to change from evil to good must lie in human beings themselves.

But Kant ultimately could not avoid some kind of atonement, even substitutionary atonement. There is evidently a conflict between the �personal continuity�Ecriterion and the �moral determination�Ecriterion. If our moral condition determines our identity, then the �new man�Eis not the same person as the old man and if this is true, it does not seem that moral change is possible. The problem becomes acute in Kant�s analysis of punishment. Those who sin must be punished, but the new man is not the same as the old man, and therefore it is unjust for him to suffer the consequences of his former self�s actions. But if the new man does not suffer any consequences of his former self�s sins then there does not appear to be any meaningful moral continuity between the old man and the new.

Kant�s solution to this dilemma is to introduce a concept of vicarious suffering. Though the new man is not strictly liable for the sins of his former self, yet he suffers the consequences of the old man�s sins. As Reno puts it, �The righteous person I seek to become pays the debt of the sinful person I presently am.�E Kant has not dispensed with the need for substitutionary atonement and vicarious suffering but merely relocated it. In place of an external atonement through Jesus�Esufferings and death, Kant offers a self-atonement. Here it becomes clear that Kant�s �personal potency�Ecriterion is supreme above all: What Kant and the Enlightenment reject is not atonement per se, but the idea that we need someone else to atone for us. Fundamentally, the Enlightenment rejected the Christian doctrine of atonement because it conflicted with the basic assumption that man is autonomous, capable of making his own way.

I wish to focus, however, on a second paradox, which is this: At the same time that theologians were busy seeking alternatives to sacrificial accounts of Christ�s death, anthropologists and psychologists were discovering that sacrifice was at the heart of ancient and primitive society, and had left a permanent imprint on human psychology and culture. Freud believed that society grew out of a primal murder, and James Frazer�s monumental Golden Bough traced the myth of the dying and rising god through Greek and other mythologies, showing how this provided the background for rituals of death and resurrection that were believed to renew nature and society. Early in the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss uncovered links between religious transactions and human social transactions by focusing on the phenomenon of gift-exchange. Relations with the gods were constituted by sacrificial offerings, in much the same way that relations among men were nourished by mutual giving and receiving. By the middle of the last century, Mary Douglas was defending the logic of supposedly primitive notions of pollution, purity, and sacrifice, and claiming that these were still at work in our own sanitized culture.

Over the past thirty years, the most thorough account of sacrifice and its role in social regeneration has been offered by the French-American literary critic and philosopher, Rene Girard. Girard has developed a theory of religion and culture that highlights the formative role of sacrifice and scapegoating, and this theory has led him to convert to Christianity. Girard�s theory is worth lingering over for a few moments.

Central to Girard�s work are his notions of �mimetic desire�Eand �mimetic rivalry.�E Contrary to the Enlightenment assumption that men are autonomous, Girard asserts that we are radically social, so much so that even our desires �Ewhich we often think of as uniquely our own �Eare socially formed. We desire �mimetically,�Ethat is, because we imitate the desires of others. When we see another person, especially someone we admire, desiring something or someone, we begin to desire it as well. This is simply a fact of human life, according to Girard, but it has a built-in bias toward rivalry. If I see my friend�s desire for a woman, and begin to imitate that desire, we are shortly drawn into rivalry for the woman. There is, after all, only one woman between us. Societies can degenerate into little more than a network of mimetic rivalries, and at that point they have reached what Girard calls a �sacrificial crisis,�Ea time when �love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt father and son,�Ewhen life is dominated by �machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves�E(King Lear 1.2.106-109, 112-114).

Such a war of all against all can end in only two ways: either the society disintegrates completely, or the rivalries are defused through sacrifice. A society in the midst of sacrificial crisis reunifies and restores harmony by directing the violence of rivalry toward a scapegoat. Because every member of the society joins with others in abhorrence toward the �outsider�Ewho serves as sacrificial victim, the slaughter of the sacrifice helps to restore order. Rivals are reduced to friends when they find a third party to attack together. For Girard, this sociological theory leads into a theory of religion: Ritual sacrifices are repeated regularly to avert dissolution and to maintain the order and unity of a religious community.

There is more to Girard�s theory, but this sketch is sufficient to indicate how Girard was led to embrace Christianity. In Girard�s view, though the gospels appear to endorse this sacrificial mechanism, they in fact undermine it. Jesus is made a scapegoat, but the gospels (unlike ancient myths) insist on his innocence and thereby expose the dynamics of sacrifice. Dissemination of the gospel and the gospels therefore unravels the dynamics of scapegoating that served as the basis for all previous societies, and open the possibility of another city, a society based not on victimization and slaughter but one based on love.

Despite its interest and in spite of Girard�s admiration for the gospels and Jesus, there are lingering questions. First, it is not clear that Girard�s theory requires anything like an orthodox Christology: Why is it necessary for the scapegoat to be the Son of God in flesh, or for there to be a god at all for that matter? Girard affirms in his most recent work that only the Son of God can bring an end to the scapegoat mechanism, but the whole theory was developed before Girard came to this confession. It appears that the incarnation is extrinsic to the atonement, something that cannot be the case. Second, in Girard�s theory redemption does not actually occur at the cross; instead, the story of the cross exposes the foundations of culture, and therefore the preaching of the gospel is the moment of redemption. True as this is in certain respects, in orthodox Christian doctrine the preaching of the gospel is the announcement of an accomplished event that objectively, apart from any response or announcement, changed the world.

Despite these weaknesses, at another level Girard�s theory poses questions that have been inadequately answered in traditional theories of the atonement. By placing the cross in the context of a cultural history of sacrifice, Girard shows with striking clarity why redemption had to take the form that it did �Ethe sacrificial death of an innocent victim. And, Girard shows that there is an internal connection between the cross and the redemption of society. Girard, in short, insists on the sociological necessity of the cross, and if we cannot entirely accept his answers, at least we can appreciate the force of his questions.

II.
In addition to Girard and other anthropological studies, several developments in recent theology provide resources for exploring the sociological dimensions of the atonement. I will enumerate three, developing the last at somewhat more length. First, detailed and valuable work was done on Leviticus during the nineteenth century, and, inspired by the work of Jacob Milgrom, Mary Douglas, and others, study of the book of Leviticus has become a growth industry in Old Testament studies. This has produced a more nuanced and precise understanding of the nature of sacrifice in the Bible, which is essential background for grasping the significance of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Two points will illustrate how this might affect the theology of the atonement. Old Testament sacrifices were indeed expiations, cleansing sin through the death of a substitute, but that was only one moment of a larger sacrificial sequence. After being killed, the animal was transformed into smoke to ascend to heaven and its flesh was given to the worshiper as food, and that whole ritual comes under the rubric of sacrifice. Biblically, to speak of Jesus�Ework as �sacrificial�Emeans not only that He was put to death for our sins; Christ�s �sacrifice�Eembraces His resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and even Eucharist. To speak of Christ�s sacrifice is to say that He achieved atonement by passing through death into the presence of His Father. Second, sacrifice is a liturgical act, and if the atonement was sacrificial, then it was an act of worship. How does an act of worship by the Incarnate Son atone for sin? Exploring this question may bring us close to Thomas Aquinas, who taught that Christ�s supreme act of reconciling obedience was a supreme and redeeming Eucharist. Jesus�Emain explanation of His death occurred at the Last Supper, and that may be more significant than Protestants, at least, have realized.

Turning to New Testament studies: since Krister Stendahl�s landmark article, �Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,�ENew Testament scholars have recognized that Paul was not a theologian of the soul so much as a theologian of Israel and an apostolic herald of a counter-imperial gospel. Political theology is as central to Paul as the forgiveness of individual sins. Clearly, Paul is also a herald of the crucified Christ. If he is both a theologian of the cross and a theologian of Israel, Paul�s letters are central in any effort to explore the sociological dimensions of the atonement. Moreover, if Paul saw Jesus as the climax of the history of Israel, then that history must play a much larger role in our understanding of the atonement that it has traditionally done. Our theology of the atonement cannot bypass the Old Testament and move immediately from Adam�s sin to the cross. Atonement theology must be to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

Finally, and a bit more expansively, recent treatments of the Trinity are very relevant to this discussion. As Bonhoeffer said, the Who question is more fundamental than the How question. The question, Who is the Redeemer? shapes our answer to the question, How is redemption accomplished? And the New Testament�s answer to the �Who�Equestion is, Father, Son, and Spirit. How does this figure into our understanding of the cross?

In the wake of Barth, most writers in Trinitarian theology emphasize that we must move from the economic to the ontological trinity, that is, from the history of redemption to our understanding of who God is in Himself. Theology proper must take its cues from the revelation of God in His dealings with Israel and in Jesus. Michael Ramsey put it succinctly: �God is Christlike and in Him there is no unChristlikeness at all.�E If we move in the opposite direction �Efrom the ontological to the economic Trinity �Ewe run the risk of formulating a generic doctrine of God that limits beforehand what God might possibly do, an apophatic theology that defines God without any reference to His actual words or works.

This suggests that the doctrine of the atonement should be consistent with, should �fit,�Ewhat we know of the inner life of Father, Son, and Spirit, and that the atonement in fact is one of the main places where that inner life is unveiled. To fill out this point, we can borrow some insights from the French Catholic theologian Francois Xavier Durrwell. Two themes guide Durrwell�s Trinitarian theology. First, in Augustinian fashion, he focuses attention on the Spirit as the bond of unity of Father and Son and as the love in which the Father begets the Son. Second, following insights from Athanasius, he insists that the relations of Father and Son are reciprocal, mutually determining. The Father is as dependent for His Fatherhood on the existence of the Son as the Son is dependent on the Father for His Sonship. There is no Son without a Father, but it is also true that the Father is not Father unless He has a Son.

Durrwell�s way of making these points, however, is peculiarly illuminating. As summarized by Anne Hunt, Durrwell taught that �The Holy Spirit . . . flows from the Father not just in a primordial or originating sense but in loving response to the Son. In other words we can understand that the Son�s love of the Father prompts the love of the Father for the Son.�E Durrwell himself stated the point this way: �The Father fills the Son with his Spirit of Love and the love that takes over the Son elicits from the Father the gift of the Spirit in a perpetual round.�E This conception of Trinitarian life is certainly evident economically, in the atoning work of the Incarnate Son. As Peter said in his Pentecost sermon, the Son who obeyed unto death was exalted by His Father and given the gift of the Spirit, which was then poured out on the gathered disciples. If we can reason from economy to ontology �Eon the assumption that God is as He has revealed Himself �Ethen this is a revelation of the interTrinitarian life: The Father gives the Spirit to the Son, who, in the Spirit, offers Himself to the Father in love and obedience, which in turn elicits the outpouring of the Spirit from the Father to the Son. This is a round; or, as Catherine LaCugna put it, the Trinitarian life as eternal chiastic motion and exchange.

This gives us some insight into the structure of the atonement, as well as its sociological import. On the cross, the Son, incarnate in the likeness of sinful flesh and operating according to the demands of the fallen world, offered Himself to His Father in perfect obedience to death, and as a result elicited the gift of the Spirit from His loving Father. The sociological dimension immediately follows. The Spirit is the bond of communion, the Lord and giver of life, including social life. When the Spirit is poured out, the earth is renewed, the fruits of the Spirit flourish, the righteous decree of the law is fulfilled, and men worship and serve the Creator rather than the creature. The need for the redemption of society can be stated as a need for the outpouring of the Spirit, who is the unity of the society of Father and Son, and the Spirit is secured for us by the obedience of the Son to the Father. A Trinitarian theology of the atonement thus integrates the theological and sociological dimensions, and takes a step toward accounting for the sociological necessity of the cross. The Spirit is necessary for the redemption of society; the Son�s obedience on the cross secures the Spirit; and therefore the �sacrifice�Eof Jesus is the necessary condition for the redemption of society.

A fine recent article by Kahled Anatolios, published in Pro Ecclesia, brings out another feature of a Trinitarian account of the atonement. Anatolios describes the Spirit as the immanent (within the Triune life) agent of the �mutual love�Eof the Father and the Son and the Spirit�s economic work (God�s actions outside Himself) as the �availability�Eof God to us. It is through the Spirit that we come to share in the inherently �un-sharable�Esonship of the Eternal Son. This Trinitarian soteriology also takes on an ecclesial or social dimension. The Spirit, who is the agent of God�s availability to us, works to open us out in availability for others. As Anatolios puts it, �By the Spirit, we experience, from within, the appeal to render available to others as much love as we ourselves receive as �beloved,�Eso that the outward availability of this love, in the Spirit, becomes equal to our status as beloved, in the Son.�E Since mutual availability is the prerequisite of community, it is the Spirit, secured and given to us by and in the Son in His atonement, who is the bond of any true �commonwealth.�E

III.
I have been discussing the theology and �theory�Eof the atonement, and have grasped for ways to express this. But Robert Jenson is no doubt correct that a theory of the atonement is far less important than its enactment, and particularly its liturgical enactment. What will make the sociological necessity of the cross most obvious and persuasive are not a theologian�s puzzlings, but the joy and praise and self-sacrifice of a church that knows, worships, and serves Jesus, and Him Crucified.