What might it mean to take seriously the claim that Jesus, the son of God, the eternal word, and the second person of the trinity, suffered and died on the cross? From what I can tell from those who have attended and who have written wonderful summaries of the 2011 Croall lectures by Bruce McCormack on the topic of “The Death of Christ in Systematic and Historical Perspective,” the central aim of the lectures is to ask exactly this question. The lectures aim to express a new typology of atonement which, I feel, is much needed, especially among the evangelical circles that I exist in. On the one hand, my experience has been that certain strains of modern protestantism have thought of the atonement as being fundamentally a retributive moment between God and Jesus: God is angry, and Jesus satiates that anger by offering a sacrifice to the Father. Put another way, human sin created an infinite debt, and so Jesus’ death was, by necessity, the only way we could ever have been reconciled to God, as he is the only infinite form of “payment” in existence (James Alison has a wonderful article which turns this reading upside down). On the other hand, there are some movements within certain forms of protestantism that have begun to explore and adopt elements of what one might call the “orthodox” interpretations of atonement, interpretations which suggest that Jesus does not merely effect a “judicial” change for humanity, but also an ontological or cosmic change (the reality of cosmic evil defeated in the victory of God). The judicial reading often focuses on the cross where Jesus dies in our stead whereas the ontological reading focuses on the incarnation where Jesus, by becoming man and living in proper relationship to God, reconciles the human and the divine into a type of distanced union which has been, from the beginning of time, God’s intent and desire (this is, I believe, what is meant by the greek word epektasis). Rather than existing in a distanced union proper to the human creature, we have sought to become an immediate unity in and of ourselves as creatures, and this can mean nothing but annihilation for us as creatures of God.
How does this all relate to the atonement? How are we to understand in all of this what it means for God to have died? Bruce McCormack has some suggestions which, according to Brad Littlejohn, are directly related to his desire to see Protestantism maintain its radical edge over certain “orthodox” perspectives of the atonement that still hang on to a too metaphysical reading of the incarnation and therefore of the relationship between the Triune persons. From what I can gather, McCormack’s suggestion is simply that when dealing with Jesus’ death on the cross we must argue that, working with the judicial reading, God the Father actually abandoned Jesus in that moment. I do not think McCormack is arguing for a reading that separates the Triune persons in a spatial sense per se (if this were the case we would begin thinking of three Gods rather than one God in three persons). Rather, we are to understand that by God taking death up into his person in Jesus, he also takes upon himself the separation and death that has us in bondage. In a similar vein, I think this is what Stanely Hauerwas was getting at when he said, in response to the question, “So one person of the Trinity could feel completely alienated from the other?”, “Yes. And that means there is a time when we cannot approach God through Christ, because Christ was completely abandoned. That is a chilling, chilling notion: that there is a time when we cannot reach God through Christ. I think that’s what that means.” It seems like a totally counter-intuitive notion to a historical understanding of God, especially as what seems to be the picture of God found in the orthodox tradition. In orthodoxy, God’s impassibility means that nothing can ultimately move God to a point that negates God’s own fullness. God is always and already (to use two of Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s favorite words) full in Godself. Within this logic, to say that the Father could be separated from Jesus would be equal to saying that Jesus of Nazareth (as Word made flesh) is impassibly passible. Now, this is not necessarily a contradiction for the orthodox since it is precisely because God is always full that God can take up suffering and death into himself without experiencing loss in the sense that we as humans experience it. But is this really what someone like McCormack and Hauerwas are suggesting? Or are they suggesting a more radical separation that really deals with the judicial nature of the atonement? Can we take Jesus’ death and cry of dereliction seriously from a biblical perspective if we import what some argue is a pre-conceived idea of God’s impassibility (inherited from the Greek philosophic tradition) into that moment? What are your thoughts?
