Monday, December 26, 2022

David M. Moffitt on Potential Theological Heresies with Traditional Models of the Atonement

  

To limit atonement only to what was accomplished when Jesus suffered and died leads to a reduction of the significance of the incarnation to the crucifixion (see, e.g., Stibbs, who identifies Jesus’s death as the purpose of the incarnation [Finished Work, esp. 28]). This reduction also leads to a confusion of biblical categories. The wide array of problems identified in Scripture that prevent fellowship between God and humanity are, on such an account, all imagined as being solved solely by means of Jesus’s suffering and death. Reconciliation, redemption, propitiation, purification, and forgiveness, to name some of the major biblical categories, basically become indistinguishable (if not in terms of the problems they address, then in terms of the solutions given in Scripture to those problems). If, instead of trying to lead everything onto the cross, we allow that Jesus is in himself at the center of atonement (Jesus is the solution to all the problems that separate God and humanity, not the death of Jesus), then the entirety of the incarnation—Jesus’s birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, and return—can be seen to contribute in particular ways to the atonement. Importantly, such an account would allow for distinct biblical problems to be solved by distinct aspects of the larger sweep of the incarnation. In the case of atoning sacrifice, rather than forcing this to be fundamentally about suffering and death, which Leviticus simply does not support (something that should matter if one wishes to avoid theologies that are essentially Gnostic and/or Marcionite), one could identify ways in which the logic of Jewish sacrifice and high-priestly ministry resolve particular problems that hinder divine-human relations without assuming that these solve all the problems. (David M. Moffitt, Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2022], 146-47 n. 28)

 

One needs, too, to take seriously the possibility that the self-evidence of a reduction of all of Jesus’s sacrificial and atoning work to the cross is both anachronistic and in danger of leading to a kind of diminution of the importance of Jewish Scripture, and practices for early Christian understandings of Jesus. This is still a long way from Marcion, but there are nevertheless real theological concern that need to be borne in mind if one wants to confess that the God who revealed the tabernacle, priesthood, and sacrificial system to Moses is the same God who appointed Jesus to the status of sacrifice and high priest according to the order of Melchizedek but that the God meant something entirely different by the terms “sacrifice” and “high priest” than what he revealed to his people in the Mosaic law. (Ibid., 150 n. 35)