Sunday, August 29, 2021

Eleonore Stump vs. the “Citation” Reading of Jesus’ Use of Psalm 22:1 and Cry of Dereliction on the Cross


 

On this sort of interpretation of the cry, then, Christ is making use of a Jewish convention that cites the first line of a Psalm to express the whole of the Psalm. The cry therefore is not to be understood as an expression by Christ of an experience of desolation.

 

But this is an implausible interpretation of the cry, in my view. After all, nothing about the convention that lets the first line of a Psalm serve as a reference for the Psalm as a whole prevents a person from uttering any particular lines of the Psalm, as the citation of lines from the Psalms in the New Testament makes clear. So it was possible for Christ to give utterance to the lines at the end of the Psalm, as well as to the cry that expresses the Psalm’s opening line; and doing so would obviously have been a much wiser thing to do in the circumstances. Since the rebukes of the bystanders include the derisory innuendo that God has in fact abandoned Christ, it is at least highly misleading, not to say damaging to the faith of his followers, for Christ to cite this Psalm by its first line if its last lines are that he intended to express.

 

As far as that goes, the first line itself is not cited by Christ but rather uttered as a cry by Christ on the cross as he is dying. In that context, it is strongly evocative of desolation. The context in which the line is uttered colors its meaning. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” has one sort of resonance when it is expressed as a liturgical line in a context of ritual prayer, for example. It has another sort of resonance entirely when it is expressed as a cry by a lone man who is being tortured to death by political and religious authorities hostile to him. (Eleonore Stump, Atonement [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 148)

 

Further Reading

 

Was Jesus Abandoned by God on the Cross?

 

Does Jesus’ Cry on the Cross Support Penal Substitution?