Five Views on the Extent of the Atonement

Zondervan, Adam J. Johnson, Stanley N. Gundry

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310527732
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Explore the question of the extent of Christ's atonement: to whom will grace be extended in the end? Will only professing Christians be saved? Or does the Bible suggest that the breadth of Grace is greater? And, if so, what does that mean for the Church?

These are questions of great importance for the Christian faith and to our understanding of Scripture. This volume of the clear and fair-minded Counterpoints series elevates the conversation about atonement to include a range of contributors who represent the breadth of Christian tradition:

• Traditional Reformed: Michael Horton
• Wesleyan: Fred Sanders
• Roman Catholic: Matthew Levering
• Eastern Orthodox: Andrew Louth
• Barthian Universalism: Tom Greggs

This book serves not only as a single-volume resource for engaging the views on the extent of the atonement but also as a catalyst for understanding and advancing a balanced approach to this core Christian doctrine.

Explore the question of the extent of Christ's atonement: to whom will grace be extended in the end? Will only professing Christians be saved? Or does the Bible suggest that the breadth of Grace is greater? And, if so, what does that mean for the Church?

These are questions of great importance for the Christian faith and to our understanding of Scripture. This volume of the clear and fair-minded Counterpoints series elevates the conversation about atonement to include a range of contributors who represent the breadth of Christian tradition:

• Traditional Reformed: Michael Horton
• Wesleyan: Fred Sanders
• Roman Catholic: Matthew Levering
• Eastern Orthodox: Andrew Louth
• Barthian Universalism: Tom Greggs

This book serves not only as a single-volume resource for engaging the views on the extent of the atonement but also as a catalyst for understanding and advancing a balanced approach to this core Christian doctrine.

CHAPTER ONE
EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW

ANDREW LOUTH

One problem faced by Orthodox seeking to participate in almost any discussion of theological topics with fellow Christians of Western traditions is that what one might call the linguistic and conceptual geography appears strange. Terms are used that are difficult to translate into Greek, the originary language of Eastern Orthodoxy, something made even more difficult when one is considering the way these theological terms or concepts relate to one another: the theological terrain, mapped out by the concepts expressed in (ultimately, for the West, generally Latin), often seems quite unfamiliar. To ask what Orthodox theology makes of original sin, or the atonement, is to ask first for an effort of translation of an unfamiliar concept into something recognizable on the terrain of Orthodox theology. Of course, it was the other way around in the formative years of the church; then the terminology of theology was primarily Greek—one might indeed argue that the aboriginal language of Christianity, once it realized its mission to the nations, is Greek; indeed, Latin was late to emerge. So it was that Latin thinkers struggled to represent Greek terms and distinctions in Latin, something that was often very difficult. Latin theologians were aware of this: Augustine is quite conscious that the terminology of Greek Trinitarian theology, involving the distinction between hypostasis, the word that came to be used for the members of the Trinity, and ousia (“being” or “essence”) or physis (“nature”), used for the divine unity, was poorly expressed by the traditional language of Latin Trinitarian theology, which distinguished between persona and substantia. Indeed the confusion was in danger of being further confounded by the fact that substantia in Latin, representing the unity of the Godhead, corresponded most closely to—what linguists call a “calque” of—the Greek hypostasis, used in Greek theology to represent the three members of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The case of the atonement represents a further problem, for atonement is one of the few theological terms that is aboriginally English. The earliest use of the word, in a theological context, seems to occur in Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, where it was used to translate 2 Corinthians 5:18 (τὴν διακονίαν τῆς καταλλαγῆς: “ministry of atonement”). This use of atonement did not survive in the later English translations of the Bible. In the King James Version, atonement is only used once in the New Testament, in Romans 5:11; generally, the word reconciliation is used to render καταλλαγή (katallagē). In the KJV atonement is used much more widely in translating the Old Testament, especially in connexion with the sacrificial ceremonies laid out in the Pentateuch. The regular use of the word in English theology seems much later (according to the online Oxford English Dictionary), in the mid-nineteenth century, to which belongs the spelling out of its meaning as at-one-ment. The word “atonement” looks as if it is derived from the verb “to atone,” but the evidence of use does not support this (our expectations are often undermined by the lexicographers’ craft). The early uses of “atonement” and “atone” were not religious and often very general: bringing together estranged parties into unity, reconciliation, and so forth. However, the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the older, more general meanings become obsolete; it is the fourth meaning, listed, as usual, chronologically in terms of attestation, that became normal: making amends, satisfaction, expiation. In other words, the meaning of atonement, once close to what the etymology of the word suggests, that is, “bringing into one, to unify,” fairly quickly gravitated towards a forensic meaning.

Atone is not, however, the only verb related to atonement. In Middle English there is another etymologically close word: the verb to one—that is, the noun one used as a verb. Its provenance is interesting. The first example given in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from a treatise called Aȝenbite of Inwit dated to about 1340.¹ More familiar examples can be found. For example, in the long version of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1395), she says that “than shall our blissid saviour perfectly helyn us and one us to him.”² The Cloud of Unknowing (late fourteenth century) also speaks of the soul as “onyd Þus to God in spirit.”³ To think of atonement as related to this use of the verb to one suggests a very different linguistic career for the word atonement—being drawn less into the forensic orbit, as actually happened, and instead coming to belong to the language of the spiritual (“mystical”) experience of union with God, of “oning” to God, envisaged by the Middle English mystics. “Atonement,” at-one-ment, would in this case suggest deification (θέωσις). This—in what must seem like a—flight of linguistic fancy is not irrelevant to this essay, but I shall leave its relevance to emerge in what follows.

Atonement, then, set out on its linguistic path with a forensic meaning of making amends, satisfaction, something that could be demanded and supervised by legal process and the courts. In its eventual theological use, it picked up the tendency of Western theology, present arguably since Tertullian, to frame our relationship with God, and especially its restoration, in legal terms. This is hardly a surprising development: the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament makes much of the Day of Judgment of the Lord, when all will appear before God’s judgment seat. Forensic language of being found guilty or acquitted becomes commonplace and enters deeply into devotional language; it is frequently found in the Psalms—“blessed is the one whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and whose sin is covered” (Ps. 31/32:1).⁴ The forensic language merges with ritual language, as in the verse just quoted: “covering” of sin belongs to the Hebrew language of sacrifice.⁵ That the language of atonement attracted such forensic connotations is scarcely surprising if one thinks that the development of this term belongs to the later Middle Ages, which, under the influence of the covenant theology of that period and fostered jointly by the popularity of nominalism in philosophy and the “two-powers” doctrine in theology, discouraged ontological and metaphysical ways of understanding the relationship of the creature to God and laid all the emphasis on the covenant, established by God’s will, as determining the creature’s relationship to God. The focus of theology in this late phase of scholasticism shifted from metaphysics, as with Aquinas (analogia entis), to canon law, understood as exploring how God’s will for his creatures is set forth. In this context, forensic concepts, such as justification, came to the fore and were finally confirmed in the centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith for the Reformers, especially Luther. The language of atonement is part of this way of understanding the relationship between the human and God.

It is a theological development that has little resonance with the theological development of the Orthodox East. This is manifest from Alister McGrath’s early work Iustitia Dei.⁶ In the first volume, which leads up to the Reformation, McGrath skips from Latin theologian to Latin theologian and only begins to settle down to the development of justification in the later Middle Ages. The Greek Fathers are passed over in a few pages. The second volume, which starts with the Reformation, finds itself pursuing a proper subject, led by the Reformers and their successors, with Catholic theology responding to what Catholics perceived to be errors in this essentially juridical notion. Luther’s point of view—nurtured in this to a degree by his reception of late medieval theology, but inspired by the analogy he perceived between his protest against the medieval Catholic Church and the apostle Paul’s polemic against the place of the law in the thought of the Pharisees, from whose ranks he had come—made justification by faith central and read Saint Paul’s letters in the light of this doctrine. This led to making Romans and Galatians the core of the Pauline corpus, the other epistles being treated as satellites in this theological constellation. Once put like that, it is evident that other ways of conceiving of the Pauline corpus are possible: focusing on the epistles to the Corinthians, for example, would hardly lead to justification being regarded as central—the Eucharist would assume a more central place, along with Paul’s reflection on his own transforming experience of God’s grace, leading from glory to glory, and working out a dialectic of death and resurrection, of human dying to the “flesh” enabling human resurrection and transformation by grace and by the Holy Spirit (see 2 Cor. 3–4; 12; and esp. 3:18; 4:7–12; 12:1–10).

Another more systematic and less historical way of locating the place of atonement in the theological landscape would be to observe that the Scriptures and, following and interpreting them, theology use a wide range of metaphors in interpreting God’s action in Christ. One of these metaphors is judgment and acquittal, which is inhabited by the language of atonement and justification. But there are others: Christ as victor, on the cross engaging in a mortal struggle with death, manifest as victorious in the resurrection (mors et vita duello / conflixere mirando / dux vitae mortuus / regnat vivus); Christ as a sacrificial victim, making expiation for the sins of humanity but also as priest offering sacrifice (Victimae paschali laudes / immolent Christiani. / Agnus redemit oves. / Christus innocens Patri / reconciliavit / peccatores);⁷ Christ as healer (cf. Julian, quoted above: “than shall our blissid saviour perfectly helyn us and one us to him”);⁸ Christ as teacher; Christ as perfect example of what it is to be human (these last two examples rarely appear alone, at least in the Fathers).

There is a further point to be made about these images for interpreting God’s action in Christ. They are all, in different ways, paradoxical. The cross was an instrument of painful and prolonged execution; no one would naturally think of it as an altar, nor an emblem of victory. The death of a man on a cross does not suggest, in itself, victory over death; it looks all too like subjection to death, the fate of all mortals. To see Christ on the cross as “riding the Axile Tree”⁹ is a heroic bringing together of metaphors, fusing Yggdrasil—the cosmic tree of Nordic myth—with a cruel instrument of Roman execution. Even what might seem such a straightforward metaphor of Christ as the healer insists on paradox. When Eusebius of Caesarea, in his festal oration at Tyre, compares Christ to “a devoted physician [who], to save the lives of the sick, sees the horrible danger yet touches the infected place, and in treating another’s troubles brings suffering on himself”¹⁰ —anticipating T. S. Eliot’s “wounded surgeon,” whose “steel . . . questions the distempered part.”¹¹ The indirectness of the metaphor, the way in which it invites other metaphors that conflict or set it off, is important to note. There is danger in limiting the range of imagery in interpreting Christ’s saving work, as one of the great Orthodox theologian of the last century, Vladimir Lossky, warned:

Nevertheless, when the dogma of the redemption is treated in isolation from the general body of Christian teaching, there is always the risk of limiting the tradition by interpreting it exclusively in terms of the work of the Redeemer. Then theological thought develops along three lines: original sin, its reparation on the cross, and the appropriation of the saving results of the work of Christ to Christians. In these constricting perspectives of a theology dominated by the idea of redemption, the patristic sentence, “God made Himself man that man might become God,” seems to be strange and abnormal. The thought of union with God is forgotten because of our preoccupation solely with our own salvation; or rather, union with God is seen only negatively, in contrast with our present wretchedness.¹²

That Lossky has in mind Western theology (and maybe the impact of such Western theology in the kind of textbooks traditionally used in Orthodox theological faculties and seminaries) becomes apparent in the following section, which traces this narrowing of theology to Anselm of Canterbury and his Cur Deus homo.

Anselm does seem to mark a watershed in Western theology of the atonement (and in other areas, notably the question of the filioque). In the case of the atoneme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction—Adam J. Johnson
• 1. Eastern Orthodox View: Andrew Louth
• 2. Roman Catholic View: Matthew Levering
• 3. Traditional Reformed View: Michael Horton
• 4. Wesleyan View: Fred Sanders
• 5. Christian Universalist View: Tom Greggs
• Conclusion—Adam J. Johnson
• General Index