A Community Called Atonement- part 5

In the last section of A Community Called Atonement, Scott McKnight moves away from the theological examination of atonement and explores the social aspects of understanding atonement as a way of life for the church community. Living out this theological understanding is what he calls “Atonement as Missional Praxis”.

The first area of this missional praxis McKnight explores is Fellowship. Being a Reformed theologian, he grounds this understanding of fellowship in God’s life in Trinity. The Trinity exists is perichoresis: an equal, mutually beneficial relationship with one another where no member dominates another. While each member of the Trinity is interdependent with one another, they each have a strong sense of self-identity within the relationship. McKnight takes the Trinitarian life as the model for the human community. In this way the life of the human community can be atoning because it reflects the life of the divine community.

Justice is the next area of missional praxis. McKnight is careful to define justice as God’s standard for human behavior instead of by what he sees as secular theories of justice that are not rooted in an understanding of God. McKnight spends most of this chapter discussing what he believes is God’s standard for humanity as revealed in the Bible, specifically in passages from Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Minor Prophets, Matthew, Acts, and Ephesians. McKnight understands justice in the human community as restoring “cracked Eikons” (imperfect bearers of God’s image) to more accurately reflect their created purpose.

Mission itself is an area of missional praxis. McKnight talks about this by contrasting what he calls “missional” and “attractional” ecclesiologies (theologies of church). An attractional ecclesiology is designed to get as many people in the door as possible in hopes of saving the greatest number of souls. The end result is the church being a large, complex organization. A missional ecclesiology, on the other hand, is one where the church seeks to minimize itself and seeks to equip its members to live missional lives. McKnight defines a missional ecclesiology as the church existing for the world. This missional focus is evangelistic because it seeks to show the self emptying love of God in every action.

Another aspect of practicing atonement as missional praxis is living out the story of the Word. McKnight is suggesting that Scripture itself plays an atoning role in the life of the community. He contrasts his vision of Scripture’s role in communal life against Bibliodolatry: giving the Bible itself a place coequal to (or even above) God. He rightly points out that the Bible is a book produced by the church (sorry, but the King James version did not float down from Heaven) and neither can exist apart from the other. Scripture does not exist to be probed for secrets and codes, but to shape the lives of individuals and communities and direct them to having a missional focus.

The practices of baptism, Eucharist, and prayer also play into the concept of atonement as missional praxis. Baptism is symbolic of purification from Sin and incorporation into the life of the community, and therefore embodies atonement. Similarly, the Eucharist is the sign of our continuing incorporation into the Body of Christ and our missional calling as part of that body. The Eucharistic prayers recall the death and Resurrection of Jesus- the central narrative of atonement. Likewise, prayer is a continual reminder of this incorporation because we are privileged to have direct communication with God, which would not be possible without atonement.

With these reflections McKnight ends the book rather abruptly. There is no proper conclusion, formal or informal. This is rather appropriate because while I found the premise of this book very exciting and certain parts extremely satisfying, ultimately I found that the project never really came to fruition. Instead of letting the merits of each atonement story stand on their own and interact with one another freely, McKnight succumbed to the pressure of providing his own definitive answer to which narrative is most useful. The criterion he sets for the conversation greatly privilege the penal substitution theory of atonement, and ultimately serves to destroy the collegial tone McKnight sets out at the beginning. If he had left out Part III of the book and had an actual conclusion to the whole work he would have been much better off.

As it is, A Community Called Atonement is a book that had tons of potential but never fully realized it. Perhaps it reflects the ultimate fate of the whole Emerging Church phenomenon: lots of great potential but no one is ever really able to see it through? And is this necessarily such a bad thing? For its many flaws, McKnight’s book serves as great fodder for discussion and debate over the place of atonement in the future of the church.

A Community Called Atonement- Part 2

Hey everyone. Sorry I haven't posted in so long. It turns out this "Full Time Senior Pastor" thing cuts into blogging time. Who knew?

Picking up where we left off last time, McKnight begins Part 1 of the book by asserting again that when he uses the word atonement he is talking about far more than soteriology (how salvation works), but instead about our understanding of the Kingdom of God itself. That is, McKnight is talking about how we understand the Christian faith itself.

Since atonement theories point to a larger reality than that which they can encompass, therefore being ultimately inadequate to provide a full understanding of the subject in and of themselves, we have to use a plurality of metaphors when talking about atonement. If I may overlay Paul Tillich on McKnight’s text for a moment (something which I think McKnight would not mind terribly), a metaphor is another way of saying “symbolic language”. A symbol participates in the reality of that to which it points, but is not the thing itself. So if we were to absolutize only one atonement theory/metaphor/symbol we would be absolutizing something that is far less than absolute reality, i.e. God. The Bible calls this idolatry, which is a pretty major sin, so McKnight is right on in his insistence on using a plurality of metaphors to talk about atonement.

While McKnight’s list of starting points for talking about atonement is certainly not the end-all be-all list of possibilities (and I don’t see him implying that it is), his list is fairly comprehensive and each item merits some discussion.

Jesus: This may seem like a giant no-brainer, but most discussion of atonement begins with a definition of Sin, only then proceeding to Jesus. McKnight contends that Christian theology must begin with Christ. I tend to see theology as a circular undertaking, where our stance on every issue affects every other issue; hence there is no single starting point. Still, starting with Jesus is probably as good a place as any. McKnight takes Luke’s Jesus (let’s be clear- each gospel writer has his own distinct Jesus) and highlights the constant theme of reversal in Luke’s gospel: the last will be first, etc. This theme of reversal continues through Acts, of course, with the Gentiles inheriting the Kingdom that was supposed to be just for Israel. In a world where the divide between haves and have-nots is greater than ever, Luke’s Jesus has a special significance if we’re trying to articulate a relevant Christianity to that world.

God, Eikons, and Sin: For McKnight, these three things are the chronological beginning of the narrative. Theologians call this theological anthropology: how we understand humanity in relationship to God. Long story short, the loving God created us in God’s image (Eikons) and we quickly brought Sin into the picture and screwed up the imago Dei (Latin for the image of God). McKnight understands Sin as “hyper-relational”: breaking many strands in the complex web of relationships between God, the creation, individuals, families, communities, etc. It is this brokenness, estrangement, marred image, and separation that creates the basic problem that Jesus came to deal with. In Jesus, all of this brokenness is made “at one” again: atonement.

Eternity, Ecclesial Community, and Praxis: If Sin is hyper-relational, dealing with a complex web of relationships, than the cure is going to be complex and intertwined as well. It’s so complex as to literally have no beginning or end: hence the term eternity. McKnight employs the image of Ecclesial Community for much the same reason. Atonement is not simply the reconciliation of individual souls to God. It is also the reconciliation of our communal lives to God (Social Gospel, anyone?), and of ourselves to one another. How does this all work? That is the realm of Praxis: the intersection of theory (theology) and practice. Living out these nice, clean abstractions in the messy realities of everyday life is the tough part, and it’s a never-ending (eternal) conversation as to how this whole Christianity thing actually works.

Reflections: I like the ground McKnight has covered thus far. He genuinely seems committed to ecumenical dialogue without letting one particular voice dominate the conversation. I am trying to figure out what particular theological tradition McKnight hails from. My hunch is some branch of the Reformed/Calvinist tradition, but I’m not sure yet. Anybody have any thoughts or insights on this question or anything else I’ve brought up here?

Discuss…

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.