A Community Called Atonement- Part 1

Over the next couple weeks I’ll be reviewing a new book by Scott McKnight called A Community Called Atonement. While I am not being compensated in any way for this review or any endorsement (or lack thereof), I was fortunate enough to be provided an advance copy of the book by my wife, Jessica, who works at Abingdon Press. Those of us in the Nashville Emergent Cohort were asked to comment on several chapters while the book was in production, so these blog posts are an extension of that conversation.

Before I dive into the text itself, a few preliminary comments are in order. First of all, the word atonement (click here for a brief introduction to the concept) is itself an extremely loaded term that carries all kinds of baggage, both good and bad, with it. Atonement itself is an English word, and literally means “at one-ment”; literally, how we are made at one with God. The very fact that it is an English word makes its theological usefulness debatable because it has no direct translation into other languages. In a seminary class on Paul’s letter to the Romans, we asked the professor, who is French, how the tradition he grew up in deals with atonement theories. He responded, “Well, we don’t believe in atonement.”

Just because the word atonement is English, however, does not mean it is not worth discussing. The concept is certainly older than the sixteenth century origin of the particular word. When Christians talk about atonement it is usually in reference to how the death of Jesus works in the process of salvation. There are any number of different “atonement theories”, depending on whose list you look at, and I’m sure I’ll be referencing what I consider to be the three primary atonement theories (Christus Victor, Substitutionary Atonement, and Moral Influence) in these posts.

What Scott McKnight wants to do in this book is to push our understanding of atonement past a mere explanation of the function of Jesus’ death into a way that we talk about the substance of the Christian life. In fact, on the back cover McKnight poses the question, “Can atonement be a way of life?” From a cursory glance at the book it seems that McKnight wants to talk about atonement as a summation of the whole gospel, and that the interaction of different understandings of atonement all have something to say about the way Christians go about proclaiming the gospel in the world in both word and deed.

In light of the baggage the word atonement carries with it, this seems an ambitious undertaking, but one that Scott McKnight is well suited for. Stay tuned for my summations and assessment of his arguments, and please comment if you agree or (especially if) you disagree with my reflections.

The Myth of the Good Old Days

I don’t believe in “the Good Old Days”. You hear about them all the time. Someone will say something like, “Things were so much better when (fill in the blank). But now people (fill in the blank). So if we just (fill in the blank) things would be so much better than they are now.” This will get large cheers from a crowd and may even inspire donations to a church or political campaign. This is an especially favored rhetorical technique for preachers because it’s easy. We point to one particular thing and give a guarantee that if the people will just think and/or do what we say, things will return to the way they were in the “good old days”.

There are a couple problems with this. First of all, things were never as good as we remember them. There’s a popular joke in the United Methodist Church recalling a bishop who exclaimed “if the 1950s ever return, we’ll be ready!” I didn’t live through the 1950s, but my parents did. They tell me that there was drug use, teen pregnancy, divorce, homosexuality, and political corruption back then. It wasn’t as much as now, and it certainly wasn’t talked about as much back then, but it was there. My mother grew up in Memphis where Jim Crow laws were going strong in the 1950s, and she remembers “Whites only” water fountains, bathrooms, and swimming pools. We don’t have those today (even though racism is still alive and well), and I’d say that’s a decided improvement over “the good old days”.

The bigger problem, however, with the myth of the good old days is that it assumes that there is a system, a belief, or an institutional structure that transcends time, geography, cultural context, and even the type of people running the show.

This is the main problem in a new book that is currently all the rage in many United Methodist circles. In Restoring Methodism, James and Molly Scott argue that such a “good old days” existed in the early days of the Methodist movement in America (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, or the generations that experienced the American Revolution). They say that certain decisions that were made by the church during the twentieth century have been responsible for the current decline we are experiencing, and suggest ten changes that would return us to an earlier time and would, they claim, stop the losses.

I certainly agree that the church made mistakes during the twentieth century, but we made plenty of errors in previous centuries, too. The various incarnations of the church of Jesus Christ have been screwing up in large and small ways since day one! And I also agree that we can learn a lot from the successes of the past and that those successes can and definately should challenge our thinking about the way we do church today.

But what I have to take issue with is the idea that there was ever some state of pristine Methodism that transcended the context in which it found itself. The 1950s are never going to return, and the eighteenth century colonial frontier isn’t either. It’s the twenty-first century and we need to deal with it as it is. Each generation faces challenges that are its own, and simply replicating the ways church has been done before is as bad (if not worse) an idea than changing everything for the sake of changing it.

What if, instead of longing for a return to the “good old days”, we took an honest look at what the past was like and how that is similar and different to where we find ourselves today? What if we put together a companion volume to Restoring Methodism called For God’s Sake, Don’t Do This Again: Ways the Church Universal has Screwed Up Throughout History and how to Avoid Doing it Again? What if we chose to dream about what the future could be, and not just scheme about how to bring the past back to life?

Admittedly this idea requires a whole lot more time, effort, and work than simply following someone’s ten step plan. But doing so would give us the chance to make some “good new days”. The best might just be yet to come…