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This is a dialouge with a scholar named David Moffitt about his new book Rethinking the Atonement. He specializes in the letter to the Hebrews, and this latest book is sort of summation of his interest in the subject of atonement that has emerged over the course of his career.
I wanted to post it. First because it resonates with much of my own personal journey when it comes to understanding atonement as a theology. Second because he at least aligns himself with the reformed tradition (Baptist variety), which I typically struggle with. The interview is both a good example of the policing and control that happens within reformed circles and the potential of thinkers within those circles when they are willing to challenge some of those tightly guarded ideas. His ideas here are profound and important, and you can see and feel him caught in the push and pull of his Tradition.
What resonated for me in terms of his ideas? He presents three fundamental truths about atonement and its relationship to sacrifice that challenge commonly held assumptions
1. Often blood gets associated with death when in scripture it is explicitly associated with life, especially when it comes to the sacrificial system. When we apply this both to the sacrifice of Jesus and to the day of atonement it changes how we perceive the cross and what the cross does
2. In the sacrificial system death always happens outside God’s dwelling place. It is seen by the ancient communities to be associated with the wilderness space. What’s really interesting about how he draws this up as a portrait is that he sees the cross (the death) as one part of a much larger story, and whereas the tendency is to boil atonement down to the cross and to interpret it through a necessary death, atonement is actually something that comes latter in the story.
To this end he imagines the story as a movement from one space to another. He notes how in the sacrifice system, which is telling a story itself through the different parts of the rites, most of which have nothing to do with death at all, it involves bringing a gift to God which can then be determined as acceptable in terms of how it fits into that story. These gifts are burnt and rise up into the space (the tabernacle/temple) where God dwells. Where it concerns the blood, the power of the unpolluted life is seen to cleanse the external space where God dwells of she pollution that occurs in proximity to the wilderness.
When we apply this to Jesus, what we have is the blood cleansing the temple space (creation) as it becomes an acceptable gift of God given to humanity. The death is not the gift, the blood is. As it is with all creatures, the blood resides with God as a representative work. The representation is not a necessary death but a transformed life in a transformed space that we can now reside in by way of the blood (life’s) transforming power. Thus Jesus resides at the right hand of the Father becoming our means of participation in this transformed space, leading to our transformation through faithfulness. This is where we find not a death that declares us forgiven but a proclamation of the full forgiveness
3. It is through the resurrection that we have the subsequent part of the story: the defeat of the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death, and in the ascension the establishing of a king over the new creation space. This is, Moffitt suggests, the difference between Jesus as an eternal high priest and the high priests who have died (citing Hebrews). Is that Jesus sits with the Father advocating for us. This is the continual work. And tgay advocating is tied to the idea of the acceptable gift. What is notable there is that the acceptable gift is not a sinless life but rather is a representative idea of what our lives become conformed to through faithfulness.
In this sense, the story is so much bigger than the cross, the cross is not a necessary death in that portrait, and as a story atonement becomes more of a multifaceted answer to the problem that we see in the world. I loved how he put this. That all have sinned is to break down the things that we use to separate us versus them, but what this does not mean is that this story is about total depravity needing a necessary payment of death as punishment. That’s not the story at all. The story that we get is Jesus, and Jesus’ story is telling the story of Israel as a Gospel for the whole of humanity. And thus we do have a portrait, especially where it intersects with passover of both oppressed and oppressor, sinner and sufferer. Atonement speaks, for example, as much to the abused as it does the abuser, and in different ways from different angles of and points in the larger story,
The Stories of my Life 