One of the parents in the congregation recently was saying how hard it is to answer good questions from children about why Jesus came and had resorted to trying to explain it in terms of the Naughty Step.
I thought it might be helpful to lay out some of the main theories of the Atonement thus:
- Ransom theory – our parents were so naughty that they deserve the naughty step and have passed their naughtiness onto us. Justice requires that someone has to go to the naughty step to pay for this and God tricked the devil into seeing Jesus on the naughty step as sufficient payment for this.
- Christus victor theory – Jesus has gloriously broken down the powers and dominions of naughtiness and only has to glance at the naughty-step for his holiness to turn it in to dust. Nothing can withstand his might and power.
- Moral influence theory – Jesus came to teach us how to be so good that we would never be sent to the naughty step.
- Penal substitution theory – God simply won’t forgive anyone until He is satisfied that the naughty step punishment has been fulfilled in full. Fortunately, Jesus comes along and takes on that naughtiness for himself, freely offering to pay the debt of naughtiness to God the Father. We need urgently to recognise this offer and accept it.
- Incarnation theory – the amazing thing is that Jesus comes and sits on the naughty step with us, sharing our frailty and sharing our sorrows.
There are other possibilities, but those should keep you going for a bit.
Now, all these things have been believed by Christians. However, it doesn’t make much sense to claim that you believe them all at once. Notwithstanding that, I’d say that they all move me at one time or another, even though I tend towards one of them as my dominant way of understanding why Jesus came. We encounter all of these theories in our hymns, if not elsewhere.
That’s the way atonement theory works for me.
Rosemany writes: “Certainly in the Hebrew Scriptures, sacrifice/blood can be used to seal a covenant. It is not a ransom, in that context, nor a price paid.”
This is not quite right. The scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16 and the asham offering did involve the symbolic transfer of sin onto the animal victim. The many ‘sin offerings’ of animals in the OT are precisely so that the offerer ‘may not die’ for his sins. This is the essential background to the theology of the Cross in the Letter to the Hebrews.
What I wrote was that blood CAN be used to seal a covenant, and that (in that context, that is, in that particular context) it is neither a ransom nor yet a price paid. It interests me that it is so.
I did not write, nor intend to be heard to say, that sacrifice is never for sin offering. The scapegoat, however, is notoriously NOT put to death. Sin offerings there are, but there is not a simple transfer of sin from the person to the animal and it is plain that the person (who might die) is of greater worth than the animal offered.
Rosemary, all your comments are correct and invite further reflection.
Why was there a blood sacrifice to seal a covenant (karat berith)? Possibly as an invocation of a curse upon oneself if one broke the covenant. Ancient conditional covenant treaties typically ended with curse formulae, as we find in Deuteronomy. The Abrahamic covenant also involved cutting (karat) animals and passing between them.
Yes, the scapegoat was not put to death, but was driven out into the wilderness, symbolically removing the sin from the camp.
The sin offering in the OT was substitutionary in character, but the NT, esp. Hebrews, understands these rites as ‘shadows and types’ of the reality to come, which was the Cross of Christ. Hebrews sees the Cross as the final and definitive sacrifice that retrospectively and proleptically deals with the sin of the world.
From the viewpoint of NT theology, I think it is best to consider the Cross as having a polyvalent character with regard to the OT sacrifices, embracing the sin-offering, the removal or ‘covering’ (kippur) of sin and the sealing of the new covenant.
Indeed why does blood seal a sacrifice. Possibly not as an invocation of a curse. Potentially for any number of reasons. I would not be too hasty to read the NT back into the Hebrew Scriptures, myself.
Rosemary writes: “I would not be too hasty to read the NT back into the Hebrew Scriptures, myself.”
But it’s something I have to do as a Christian, because the “Hebrew Scriptures” are *Christian Scriptures that look forward to their consummation and fulfilment, and the NT explicitly makes this claim; not least in the words of our Lord to the disciples on the Emmaus road. Of course a Jew will not agree with this; but if Jesus is the Messiah of promise, then all God’s promises find their ‘yes’ in Him.
…well, in the words of Luke, anyway…
For myself, I need to find out as best I can just what the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures meant in their own time and context first, before I start sticking traditional interpretations on to them. We will agree to differ.
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