we've been having a lot of discussions about at our
bible study about the tour and a friend read
"fingerprints of God" which bell recommended in one of
his book. i'm trying to straighten all this our in my
head. from what it seems like, was bell saying that an
atonement was not needed on our behalf? i understand
the part where he quotes
scripture in essentially saying that "it's not like i
needed these sacrifices from you. you couldn't
understand how much i love you so i told you to do
these things and hopefully in acting them out, you can
grasp my grace." i get that. but when it comes to
Jesus is this the same thing? if he did intend this,
then how do we reconcile it with a lot of the new
testament?
And I responded saying...
(this deserves lots of disclaimers like I was tired and it is not perfect...just to be clear. all my theologizing is a work in progress.)
haven't read "fingerprints of God," I haven't read any of Bell all the way through, but I have been to Mars Hill BC a lot of times and listened to his sermons on line. So, I will speak some of what I know and think about it, not what I think Bell thinks...Really though, this is a much larger question/discussion than Bell or any other current authors and debates. It has huge history and some people get really fired up about it.
First, I am glad your group of friends is willing and able to have really searching questions about things like atonement and I will generally phrase the topic, "How Jesus/God saves." Some groups of Christians make this topic to kind of be an untouchable and that is a bad idea. There are and have been active disagreements about the meaning of the cross/How Jesus saves since the first generations of the Apostolic church, so it is nothing new. Reading things like the Epistles of John and 1 Corinthians reveal to us that there was debate in the earliest Christian communities about the theology of cross/resurrection all related to questions of Jesus humanity/divinity. Questions about this are as old as dirt and as fresh and contemporary as anything in theology. I point all that out to say that I don't think there is a single monolithic Biblical voice on the meaning of Jesus' life, death and resurrection, hence we have 4 gospels, all with different foci and accounts plus a pile of letters with different authors to very different communities. There is not "1 Biblical answer" to the question of atonement/How Jesus/God saves. There are lots.
Now I actually try to answer your question. Did we need atonement of Jesus on our behalf? I go back to pre-Jesus to try to answer. I think the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible reveals the truth/reality of who Yahweh is through the story of the Israelite people. It tells us that this Yahweh (Y) is a saving God. Y saved Israelites from slavery. As chroniclers and prophets testify, God is saving poor people from oppression, God is restoring Zion all the time. God is also a forgiving God and that is saying something about the character of Y. Y saves and forgives the people whom he has claimed and loved. In the earlier parts of the OT this is the Israelites, but the prophets are clear that God's saving and forgiving and relationship is extending beyond Israel to other nations and all of creation. Cf. Isaiah 40-55. It is about God helping Israel through Persia. Persia is involved in the plans of Y. I digress. That is the character of God and that is who God is. There is an elaborate sacrifice and purity system in place during some periods of the OT and Rob Bell is suggesting that these are human religious practices to reflect devotion to God, not to actually appease an angry God. I believe that. Sacrifice and religion and purity codes are always human systems. God is God. My answer from the OT is that God does save and heal and forgive and make whole and make things new before Jesus walked the earth. That's who God is.
Jesus is fully God and fully human. Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection reveals to us the fullness of who God is and the fullness of what it means to be human. My capsule. Jesus proclaimed the present kingdom of God and lived as if it were actually wholly present, healing people, breaking through boundaries of purity code, loving unconditionally, respecting women, tax collectors, etc. I believe that because of all this craziness Jesus lived out that is the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, he was marked as a political revolutionary and disturber of peace and the powers that be conspired against him and killed him. He died because of how he lived. He was resurrected by the power of God and I believe the central point of that is that he was vindicated. Death does not have the final word over divine love and thus Jesus lives, God is that kind of crazy Jesus love, and in the resurrection Jesus was revealed to many to be truly divine and...
All who have come after Jesus, in our records starting with Paul, Mark, Luke, Matthew, John,...early church... theologians for centuries...up to us have tried to interpret what all this life, death, and resurrection of Jesus meant. I really emphasize that. Even the earliest apostles were trying to make sense of everything that happened with Jesus. They had no reference point for most of it. It may seem tame and familiar to us, but not to many there in their reality. They had to use existing categories to describe new realities of community, Spirit, ressurected presence, etc. Many of the first generations of Christians were trying to make sense of it through their worldview of emerging Judaism (Judaism as we know it started it's wheels cranking in 1st c. BCE, just before Christianity), including their knowledge of Torah. The word atonement is all over Exodus and Leviticus. The word describes specific sacrifices and rituals that symbolized God purchasing back the whole Israelite nation in the Exodus, symbolized forgiveness of sin, etc. and it did have to do with an economic exchange. People gave atonement offerings to priests as part of this scheduled ritual (see Ex. 13 and 30). This is one of the lenses through which Paul and others began interpreting Jesus' sacrificial death and resurrection. For Paul salvation clearly has at least as much to do with resurrection as the cross, if not more (See 1 Corinthians 15). One of the other major lenses is Jewish apocalyptica. A major study. The super brief is that Paul saw Cross as the end of an age ( a present reality) and the resurrection as the beginning of a new age ( a new and present/imminent reality). Jesus as Messiah brought us out of an old age of sin/judgment/condemnation
I stop there and that is like 60 CE with Paul. From there forward there were three major theories of atonment: Christus Victor, Sacrifice (sometimes with Substitutionary language), and Satisfaction/Divine Justice. These all have old histories and innumerable current reinterpretations. Maybe another day. Hope I spurred endless questions.
I am getting tired and I have tons more reading for my own classes to do tomorrow.
