Divine Violence and the Christus Victor Atonement Model

God's Reluctant Use of Violence for Soteriological Ends

Martyn J. Smith

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498239486
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In this book Martyn Smith addresses the issue of God's violence and refuses to shy away from difficult and controversial conclusions. Through his wide-ranging and measured study he reflects upon God and violence in both biblical and theological contexts, assessing the implications of divine violence for understanding and engaging with God's nature and character. Jesus too, through his dramatic actions in the temple, is presented as one capable of exhibiting a surprising degree of violent behavior in the furtherance of God's purposes.Through a reappropriation of the ancient Christus Victor model of atonement, with its dramatic representation of God's war with the Satan, Smith proposes that Christian understanding of both God and salvation has to return to its long-neglected past in order to move forward, both biblically and dynamically, into the future.

1

God & Violence

The Problem

Research in recent decades that implicates traditional models of the atonement in brutality, abuse and violence suggests careful reflection be made on the issue.1 Whilst each generation views and understands itself within the broader context of theological development it also does so in relation to previous doctrines and creeds. As thought and human history develops the temptation can be to jettison unpalatable ideas due to their impact on current sensibilities.2 Instead, options should remain open until there is substantive evidence to believe otherwise at least in order to challenge the affiliated belief that there has historically and theologically been a de facto positive and progressive evolution of human morality, understanding and practice.3

The central issue to be addressed in this thesis, therefore, is whether God has, however minimally, an intrinsic part of his character that is violent and whether this violence is essential in terms of how God both chooses to deal with and reveal himself to humanity. Further, it will be considered if such violence is necessary as God’s chosen means of overcoming an actual, ontological enemy, the Satan and a demonic, evil realm. Finally, the Christus Victor atonement model will be explored as potentially the best, perhaps the only, means of understanding and presenting these features and purposes of God. It will then be considered whether divine violence is ontological and soteriologically asserted as the essential and only means of The Satan’s demise.

These issues call into question the very nature of the Christian Gospel and how it should be framed; not only in terms of what it is but for whom it is and on what basis. The question whether humans are well disposed to embrace a Divine Message that includes violence because of problems of palatability is, however, theologically irrelevant to how the Gospel is understood and presented. Walker notes that the Gospel is not only the central message of the Christian faith: it is both the story and its telling that makes the message become gospel.4 Specifically it is a Gospel detailing a macro-narrative, a salvation history that presents God as One who urgently desires to be known, perhaps at any cost and by any means, but who has an enemy to himself, his message and its recipients.

Most of the New Testament uses of εὐαγγέλιον are in Paul and in almost half of the passages where he uses the term he speaks of it in the absolute, not using nouns or adjectives to define it, such was the extant familiarity with the term; it remains, however, a somewhat elusive word, not compliant to expression in a brief formula. Predominantly it is a nomen actionis describing the act of proclamation, praise at the preaching of the Gospel and the beginning of activity as an evangelist. This “Gospel,” therefore, does not bear witness to merely an historical event for the concepts it recounts, namely resurrection and exaltation, are beyond the scope of historical judgment, thereby transcending history. Nor is “Gospel” a set of narratives and sayings concerning Jesus to be believed and learnt by Christians; on the contrary, it is a word and a concept related to human reality and to be perceived as living power.5 In contrast to its usage in the Old Testament and in Jewish and secular Greek literature, where it meant “news of victory” or “recompense for a good report” εὐαγγέλιον in the New Testament denotes news concerning or coming from God.6 The biblical noun “gospel” is beheld in the notion of euangelion, the evangel, or message and is perceived as a positive, living message from God that must be treated and relayed with urgency and import.

A key paradox of these gospel propositions and of atonement doctrine in particular is that they present an unusual marriage of primitive concepts of a violent god and the revealed teaching of a loving God.7 These seemingly mutually exclusive and apparently contradictory theological elements being conjoined and in this instance being expressed as “good news” represent another key subject receiving attention in this thesis. These difficult issues can be framed in terms of whether the marriage of an ancient idea, in this instance atonement and a newer one of God’s love, can nonetheless endure or whether they are mismatched from the start, incorporating a pouring of new wine into old wineskins.8 Certainly these are thorny and controversial issues that at best appear to represent a conflicted message and at worst a conflicted God. Nonetheless a resolution will be explored in order to avert the accusation that in atonement models little more is being done than to provide mere restatements of the happening and not explanations.9

Rather than setting up an interpretative and perceptual dichotomy between a message of peace and violence it might be asserted that religion is nothing other than an immense effort to keep the peace and that the sacred is violence, but that if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence.10 This linking of violence and peace as necessary corollaries within the sacred and the religious is suggestive and will be at the forefront of this thesis.

It will be argued that the desire to disassociate God with violence has caused the revision of significant elements of many theological propositions. This is perhaps particularly true of the main atonement models—particularly in regard to God making a deal with or deceiving the Devil, or of sacrificing his innocent Son on the cross; indeed, God can only be shielded from the violence of the cross at the cost of parting ways with the tradition of the Church.11 There may be times where such a parting is legitimate, or even necessary; but only after careful consideration and because of concern over explicitly non-biblical doctrine or unsubstantiated theological perspectives. It should be with great caution that such a parting ever occurred and especially if it is in order to match a priori desires that require the delivery of doctrines that “sit well” with particular personal, doctrinal or historical preconceptions of God. Rather than changing theology to match a view of God it is instead apposite to consider how biblica...

Table of contents

• Prolegomena
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: God & Violence
• Chapter 2: Biblical Violence
• Chapter 3: Metaphor & Models
• Chapter 4: Scholars on Violence
• Chapter 5: The Primacy of the Christus Victor Model
• Conclusion
• Bibliography