The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation 9781472550132, 9780567525888, 9780567185662

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Acknowledgments

This book is based on my dissertation for the Ph.D. program in Theology, Ethics, and the Human Sciences at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and I would first of all like to thank all the faculty members with whom I crossed paths there, particularly Ted Jennings—a truly exemplary advisor and friend—and my dissertation readers, Dow Edgerton, Laurel Schneider, Bo Myung Seo, and JoAnne Terrell. I would also like to thank the following colleagues who read and commented on this text, in whole or in part: Daniel Colucciello Barber, Josh Davis, Virgil Brower, Matt Frizzell, Anne Joh, Monica Miller, Brad Johnson, Anthony Paul Smith, and Cassie Trentaz; my editor,Tom Kraft, and all the staff at T&T Clark; my family, who have been unflagging in their support of my increasingly impractical educational ambitions; and Natalie Scoles, who has helped me in countless ways.

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Chapter 1

Thinking Relationally

The goal of this book is to bring to the surface the ontology implicit within the tradition of theological reflection on the question of why God became human, a tradition normally called “atonement theory.” By ontology, I simply mean the logic by which this tradition guides our thinking about the world and our place in it. My contention is that all the major thinkers in this tradition have been drawn, even if despite themselves, to speak according to a certain social or relational logic in their attempt to make sense of God’s saving work in Christ—and that their departures from this logic represent steps along a path that would ultimately render the Christian concept of salvation incomprehensible and irrelevant. On a certain level, my project is nothing unusual. In fact, one might even be tempted to say that in recent years, being a theologian has increasingly meant being an ontologist as well. Two prominent examples include the work of the Radical Orthodoxy school and of Mark C. Taylor, who advance a Neoplatonic ontology and one based on complex systems theory, respectively.1 Other major theological schools of thought have also demonstrated an awareness of the need for a holistic account of the way the world works, even if they are reluctant to call such an account an “ontology.” A key example here is feminist theology. Mary Daly’s reflections on God as Verb,2 Rosemary Radford Ruether’s incorporation of ecology into the feminist theological project,3 and 1

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See John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (New York: Routledge, 1999) and Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973). Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: Harper, 1992).

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The Politics of Redemption Rita Nakashima Brock’s work on “erotic power”4 all point in the direction of a comprehensive ontology, albeit one based in fluidity and relationality as opposed to the static and monadic style of thought often associated with classical Greek ontology. More recently, Laurel Schneider has called upon feminist theologians to explicitly take up the task of ontology and has begun developing her own ontology of multiplicity, drawing on sources ranging from the latest continental thought to Native American folklore.5 Thus there is a growing consensus, even among theologians who otherwise share very little, that the theological task calls for some degree of ontological reflection. What may seem unusual, however, is that I am choosing atonement theory as my point of departure. For one thing, there are many other traditional loci that seem like better choices. Certainly the doctrine of creation is an obvious option that I have already alluded to in connection with Ruether, and feminist theologians have found the doctrine of the Trinity attractive as well, due to its emphasis on relationality. Here most are following in the footsteps of Catherine LaCugna, who wants to get back to the original insights of the Trinity and who views the development of Trinitarian doctrine as a kind of betrayal of its early promise, effectively “walling off ” the Trinity in a way that reasserts simple monotheism and makes the doctrine functionally irrelevant.6 Whatever one thinks of LaCugna’s historical reconstruction, it seems clear that the appeal of the Trinity is its compatibility with what one could call the basic ontological concerns of feminist theology, which are centered on relationality. On the other hand, there is a consensus among feminists and other liberation theologians that the tradition’s reflections on atonement are unattractive and indeed destructive 4

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Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1991). Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (New York: Routledge, 2008). Catherine LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991). Laurel Schneider is among those who follow LaCugna, looking favorably upon Trinitarian thought—particularly in the form it takes in the work of Tertullian—as an alternative to the mainstream of strict monotheism. See Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, ch. 5, “‘I Am Because We Are’: The Roots of Multiplicity in Africa.”

Thinking Relationally in their consequences, and that attempts to get at the meaning of Christ’s work should start not with the concepts of Anselm, for example, but with the gospel narratives and above all the synoptic gospels, which are widely agreed to present a liberating, activist Jesus who resonates with the concerns of liberation-oriented theological movements. I take seriously the criticism of the atonement theory tradition stemming from the major schools of thought that could be grouped under the heading of “liberation theologies.” In fact, I share virtually all of their criticisms of what in the modern period has put itself forward as the “traditional” atonement theory. I hope in the chapters that follow to develop an approach that is useful to liberation theologians insofar as it opens up the tradition for them in a new way, revealing unexpected resources for transformation.The key to this approach will be to undertake a reading of the most important and original figures in the atonement theory tradition—namely, Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Abelard—from a social-relational perspective, breaking with the individualistic thought-patterns that have pervaded modern theological reflection. Doing so will mean above all displacing the God-soul polarity that has shaped modern readings of these texts and inquiring of each of the major figures in the development of atonement theory what they are saying about creation and particularly about the social structure of human life on earth. My core question is how the world must be put together if Christ’s work is to have the effects it does—that is, what kind of ontology must structure creation. On this point, there is a striking surface-level unanimity, because all the primary figures in the tradition are attempting to build on Paul’s basic “first and second Adam” schema from Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, where there is an insistence that Christ’s work somehow matches Adam’s fall: But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, 3

The Politics of Redemption but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of justice exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of justice leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made just. (Romans 5.15–19)7 Further on, the apostle expands the scope of his vision: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8.19–23) Paul’s argument here starts with the notion that there is something wrong. This “something wrong” resulted from a contingent historical action whose negative effects came to propagate themselves through the entire human race and all creation. However, God intervenes in Christ in such a way as to reverse these effects, a reversal that is at least in principle as universal as the effects themselves. That is to say, the act of salvation is somehow parallel to the origin of the problem it is trying to solve. I propose that for this to make sense, both the problem and the solution must be using some shared ontological “infrastructure.” 7

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This quotation follows the New Revised Standard Version, but substitutes “justice” and “just” for “righteousness” and “righteous.” Subsequent scriptural quotations will follow the NRSV.

Thinking Relationally Most fundamentally, human beings must be irreducibly related to one another and to all of creation. As a direct consequence of this interrelatedness, it is possible for an agent at a particular nodal point to have cascading effects, whether positive or negative, that touch on the entirety of created reality. This logic is the starting point for all the major figures in the tradition of atonement theory, and my readings of those figures will focus on the way they develop or depart from this basic relational schema. As I will attempt to demonstrate in the next chapter, all the major representatives of the various schools of liberation theology approach the question of atonement from a social-relational perspective, and if I can demonstrate that that is what key traditional figures have been up to as well, then I will have made those figures available in a way that they may not have been before. Yet this project goes beyond yet another rereading of the tradition and also beyond an attempted rapprochement between the tradition and what liberation theologians “just happen” to be doing, because I am convinced that Christianity must be interpreted through a social-relational lens if it is to make a difference in the modern world—and that is in fact the core reason why liberation theologians are led toward such thought-patterns. I came to this conviction from two sources. First, I have been a student of that strain of contemporary European philosophy that has become ever more insistent on the link between theology and politics. Based on Carl Schmitt’s famous claim that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,”8 many thinkers in the continental tradition have increasingly sought to undercover the religious genealogy of ostensibly secular political forms. Toward the end of his career, for example, Jacques Derrida was particularly concerned to trace the theological roots of modern concepts of national sovereignty.9 Giorgio Agamben has also recently undertaken an investigation of the Christian concepts of God’s “economy of salvation” and providential governance of the world, attempting to show that the 8

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Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues:Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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The Politics of Redemption modern liberal-democratic state has inherited them as models. (As Agamben somewhat ironically remarks, this inheritance was handed down “without the benefit of an inventory.”10) Jean-Luc Nancy has called for a “deconstruction of Christianity” as a particularly urgent next step in the deconstruction of the Western tradition—but even his more “purely philosophical” approach is conceived as a response to globalization.11 All these thinkers are critical of the ways that Christianity has shaped the modern world, but at the same time see in Christianity rich resources for transformation, and all advance a social-relational mode of thought. Second, I have been deeply shaped by the movement in German theology that has followed the wake of Karl Barth’s decisive break with classic Protestant Liberalism, a break precipitated by a cataclysm that rendered impossible the alliance that had previously obtained between theology and Western “progress.” Both of these widely divergent groups of thinkers implicitly agree on one point: if Christian theology is to have a future in the modern world, it must be first of all a critical discourse. My approach in this book, then, is an attempt to be accountable to three not entirely separate points of reference: liberation theologies, the Christian tradition, and the modern world as represented by its philosophers. The means by which I seek to bring these three together is precisely a social-relational mode of thought. In my second chapter I will seek to demonstrate that liberation theologians have consistently relied on a socialrelational mode of thought, while in the third I will attempt to show that remaining faithful to the tradition necessarily entails breaking with the individualistic ways in which it has been interpreted in the modern era.The goal of these two chapters will be to stake out a space for a social-relational approach to the 10

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Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2007), 302. (My translation.) See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); The Creation of the World: Or, Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); and Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Michael Naas, and Pascale-Anne Brault (New York: Fordham, 2008).

Thinking Relationally atonement that nonetheless draws on the tradition, a possibility that is presently underrepresented as the field of atonement theory is dominated by tradition-rejecting social-relational thinkers and tradition-affirming individualistic thinkers. I will then proceed to my readings of representative figures from the tradition, attempting to trace the outlines of the socialrelational ontology their texts presuppose. In each chapter, I will primarily focus on close readings of the texts, but once my initial reading is established I will also draw on a variety of philosophical and social-theoretical resources—pairing Irenaeus with Hegel, Gregory of Nyssa with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Anselm with Nietzsche, and Abelard with Judith Butler and Andrew Sung Park—with the goal of clarifying or amplifying what is going on in the text itself. I will conclude by trying my hand at sketching a plausible contemporary atonement theory, using what I have found in the traditional texts and the philosophical themes that resonate with them. I have chosen this course first of all because developing a full ontology will require much more than simply reading a handful of texts from the tradition: for now, I can only point toward the basic outlines. More fundamentally, however, it is my conviction that Christian theological speculation must both begin from and return to reflection on the work of Christ.12 That is part of my motivation for starting with the question of atonement, rather than the more clearly social-relational doctrine of the Trinity—namely, that it represents what one might call first-order reflection on the gospel message itself, allowing formal categories to emerge from the inner logic of Christ’s work. 12

To my mind, this is where the Radical Orthodox ontology of hierarchy and participation fails—for all its claims to a traditional pedigree, it loses its moorings in the gospel and becomes an end in itself, to the point where one suspects that for the Radical Orthodox authors, the answer to the timeless question “Why did God become human?” is “In order to give us a slightly nuanced version of Neo-Platonism.” Developing an alternative theological ontology more fully grounded in the gospel narrative is to my mind an urgent task. For my critique of Radical Orthodoxy, see Adam Kotsko, “‘That They Might Have Ontology’: Radical Orthodoxy and the New Debate,” in Political Theology 10.1 (2008): 115–24. That article also contains some of the initial seeds of the present book, namely, the recommendation of Jean-Luc Nancy and the recognition of a necessary link between atonement and solidarity.

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The Politics of Redemption Before I can undertake any of the tasks I have set for myself, however, I must clarify what I mean by social-relational and individualistic styles of thought. I will be doing so in dialogue with the two traditions of thought that have done the most to shape my understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the modern world: post-Barthian German theology and modern European philosophy. For the sake of economy, however, I will not attempt to map out both fields in their entirety but will focus on two representative figures: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jean-Luc Nancy.13

“Religionless Christianity” and Community In his Letters and Papers from Prison,14 Bonhoeffer famously declares that the age of “religion” has ended and that a “religionless” Christianity must be developed. Taken in isolation, this statement could seem incorrect on any number of levels. For example, the resurgence of religion on the contemporary global scene would render it premature at the very least. More broadly, Bonhoeffer’s claim can seem to simply replicate a common trope in Christian rhetoric, whereby some other group of Christians (often Roman Catholics) are caught up in mere “religion,” while one’s own group is full of authentic believers. This same move is duplicated 13

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I choose these two out of many other possibilities in part out of convenience—first of all because both are clearly concerned with questions of community, but also simply because Bonhoeffer’s work is relatively well-known and because Nancy’s operates on a very formal level and can therefore provide some initial orientation without unnecessarily predetermining the course of my investigation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Enlarged Edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald Fuller, et al. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), German text: Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, vol. 8, ed. Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, Renate Bethge, and Ilse Tödt (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag: 1998). For my most important sources, I will be providing the citations of all original texts consulted along with the translations, as applicable; unless otherwise noted, parallel page numbers will be provided only when I alter the translation or insert the author’s original words in brackets.

Thinking Relationally among the growing number of basically secular people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” and in fact it may well be inherent in the concept of religion as such. As Jonathan Z. Smith points out, religion “is not a first person term of self-characterization.”15 In context, however, Bonhoeffer may be an exception to Smith’s generalization—he claims that Christianity as it presently exists is religious and risks total irrelevance if it continues to be so. The best way to understand what Bonhoeffer means here is to recognize from the outset that his definition of “religion” is idiosyncratic and narrow.16 In addition, it is somewhat unclear—in part because he is writing to his close friend Eberhard Bethge and in the beginning seems to simply assume Bethge will know what he is talking about. The closest he comes to a positive definition of “religion” in these writings is in his explanation of what a “religious,” as opposed to “religionless,” interpretation of scripture entails: “it means to speak on the one hand metaphysically, and on the other hand individualistically.” Another hint comes shortly hereafter, when he argues for the necessity of a religionless interpretation: “Hasn’t the individualistic question about personal salvation almost completely left us all?” Further on, implicitly explaining his particular use of the term “metaphysical,” he says: It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic pietistic ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.17

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Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269; qtd. in Taylor, After God, 5. Thomas Altizer, for example, offers a salient objection: Bonhoeffer and other advocates of “religionless Christianity” are working with a concept of religion that is too narrowly focused on Christianity. See The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 31–40. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 286.

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The Politics of Redemption “Religion,” in Bonhoeffer’s sense of the term, abstracts the believer from the world in favor of the beyond. What’s more, it is individualistic, focused on the “individualistic question about personal salvation”—salvation, one assumes, precisely from the world. In short, it seems fair to characterize it as essentially the drama of the soul with its God, a drama for which everything else falls into indifference. Even in the absence of Bonhoeffer’s explicit use of the term “individualistic,” then, it seems clear that “religion” is a highly individualistic style of thought, focused on the individual soul and dismissive of the value of relationships other than that with God. In light of this connection of “metaphysical” and “individualistic” thought, one can understand his critique of two of his older contemporaries: Bultmann and Barth. This critique is perhaps unfair or at least oversimplified, which is understandable given that he is writing a letter rather than a formal academic article, but it gets at an important problem. The notion of a “religionless interpretation” of Christianity might easily remind one of Bultmann’s approach of “demythologizing” the Bible in order to get at the deep existential truths it expresses. Yet Bonhoeffer is basically dismissive of this method: “Bultmann’s approach is fundamentally still a liberal one (i.e., abridging the gospel), whereas I’m trying to think theologically.”18 At the same time, he also rejects Barth’s approach, which starts with the criticism of religion, but then proceeds to “a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all.”19 In light of Bonhoeffer’s generally anti-liberal stance, his rejection of Bultmann’s approach is perhaps not surprising. At the same time, according to a prominent mode of thinking in contemporary theology, the alternative to Bultmann is precisely something akin to Barth’s approach: the answer to a narcissistic individualism is submission to a greater authority, most often “the church” understood as the repository of revelation. Yet Bonhoeffer seems to be saying that both must equally be rejected. 18 19

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Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 285. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 286.

Thinking Relationally This is because both stay within the religious scheme of “the soul and its God,” simply cutting off one half of it. Bultmann keeps the part about the soul while Barth keeps the part about God— neither fully escapes. This basic framework helps to contextualize what is perhaps the most forceful aspect of Bonhoeffer’s critique of “religion”: his rejection of the “religious” focus on sin and weakness. Here Bonhoeffer’s rhetoric reaches an almost Nietzschean pitch: “Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they scent luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They set themselves to drive people to inward despair, and then the game is in their hands.”20 Where in modern times humanity has become ever more self-reliant and eager to take responsibility for its actions, Christian apologists attempt “to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of ‘God,’”21 that is, to convince them that no matter how happy they think they are, they are really miserable sinners. Though this approach has deep roots in the Western Christian tradition’s fascination with original sin, growing out of Augustine’s daring reinterpretation of St. Paul and reinforced by Luther’s reappropriation of both, Bonhoeffer sees this contemporary apologetic technique as rooted in the relegation of religion to the “private” sphere in modern liberal states: “The displacement of God from the world, and from the public part of human life, led to the attempt to keep his place secure at least in the sphere of the ‘personal,’ the ‘inner,’ and the private.” As such, in practice this approach has become a rather sordid affair: And as every man still has a private sphere somewhere, that is where he was thought to be the most vulnerable. The secrets known to a man’s valet—that is, to put it crudely, the range of his intimate life, from prayer to his sexual life—have become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral workers. In that way, they resemble . . . the dirtiest gutter journalists . . . . In the one case, it’s social, financial, or

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Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 326. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 326.

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The Politics of Redemption political blackmail and in the other, religious blackmail. Forgive me, but I can’t put it more mildly.22 Again echoing Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer claims that the basic attitude at work here is the resentment of the vulgar crowd toward someone superior. One might think, then, that he would prefer to replace a morbid version of Christianity with a more life-affirming one that accepts human excellence at face value—in William James’s terms, to replace the religion of the “sick soul” with the religion of “healthy-mindedness.”23 Once again, however, such a move would not be radical enough.The basic metaphysical and individualistic structure of “religion” would remain in place, but filled out with slightly different content.24 Though Bonhoeffer does seem to have a basic sympathy for the secular world over against “religion,” his concern as a theologian is more than simply creating a version of Christianity that would be up to date or “relevant” in a changing world. His claim is more radical: a “religious” stance actually obscures the core of the gospel. In order to really get at this core, he claims, it is necessary to get rid of one of the central assumptions of “religion,” namely, God’s omnipotence. The virtue of the modern world is that it has understood that we must live etsi deus non daretur (“as if God were not given”), and in this respect, it is

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Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 344. In light of these comments, it is interesting to reflect whether the resurgent “fundamentalisms” are “religious” in Bonhoeffer’s sense of the term. Many are of course fixated on the regulation of sexual life, but it seems to me that this concern is situated within a broader agenda of reshaping public life in such a way as to make it conform to the supposed will of God—that is, the ultimate goal of the more radical sects is to actualize a certain idealized concept of society rather than to save individual souls one by one. This political ambition is precisely what makes such movements so dangerous—were they merely “religious” in Bonhoeffer’s sense, they would represent a kind of harmless hobby that their members happen to enjoy. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1982). Perhaps the best example of a movement that is “religious” in Bonhoeffer’s sense while also being generally positive in outlook is the so-called prosperity gospel.

Thinking Relationally fundamentally in line with what Bonhoeffer understands to be biblical Christianity: Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s [sic] religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness.25 The goal of developing, or reclaiming, a “religionless Christianity,” then, is not to seek acceptance from a “world come of age,” but to allow oneself to be rejected by that world, a world that has rejected God as well. At this point, an obvious question is what “religionless Christianity” looks like. On this front, Bonhoeffer’s prison writings do not provide much guidance—even in the case of his attempt to specify a “religionless interpretation” of scripture, he leaves us without any concrete examples. However, I believe that a plausible answer to that question can be found in the answer to a closely related question: What gives Bonhoeffer such confidence that there is a “religionless Christianity” waiting to be found beneath the wreckage of “religion”? He never seriously asks if Christianity as such is now impossible—he even claims that “the world’s coming of age is no longer an occasion for polemics and apologetics, but is now really better understood than it understands itself, namely on the basis of the gospel and in the light of Christ.”26 Christianity is not simply to be retrofitted in order to find some place in the non-religious environment. Instead, the fall of religion represents an opportunity for Christianity to finally come into its own, as though there were something in Christianity that was pushing back against the individualist-metaphysical religious 25 26

Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 361. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 329.

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The Politics of Redemption framework. It seems to me that the only way to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s confidence on this front is to assume that this non-religious “something” is in fact what had been his central preoccupation from the very beginning of his all-too-brief career as a theologian: Christian community.27 Viewed retrospectively, Bonhoeffer’s project in his first dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, can be read as an attempt to escape from the logic of what he will later call “religion.” Throughout the course of his investigation, which critically appropriates the best of German social theory in order to specify the sociological structure of the church, he is attempting to steer between the same poles he rejects in his later critiques of Bultmann and Barth: individualism and authoritarianism. One can see this double rejection at work in his use of the Hegelian concept of objective spirit, which denotes the objectivity or already-there-ness of the community from the perspective of any member.28 On the one hand, he wants to develop a Christian concept of objective spirit in order to preserve some kind of order and continuity in the Christian community. On the other hand, he decisively rejects Hegel’s equation of the objective spirit of the Christian community with the Holy Spirit, which would be tantamount to a divinization of the church as institution.True community requires some particular articulation, yet it equally requires that the order 27

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His two most significant works on this front are of course his first dissertation, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), German text: Sanctorum Communio: Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, vol. 1, ed. Joachim von Soosten (Munich: Christian KaiserVerlag, 1986); and Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (San Francisco: Harper, 1954). Elsewhere I have put forward an argument for the basic continuity of Bonhoeffer’s work, centered on the role of the Hegelian concept of “objective spirit” in his thought. See Adam Kotsko, “Objective Spirit and Continuity in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Philosophy and Theology 17.1–2 (2005): 17–31. There I suggest that it would be fruitful to trace the career of other concepts from the dissertations through his entire corpus as well. Here my basic approach is the same, but I am focusing on something much more obvious than Bonhoeffer’s continued preoccupation with “objective spirit” or any other particular concept: his concern with community as such. For a more detailed explanation of the place of this concept in Hegel and Bonhoeffer, see Adam Kotsko, “Objective Spirit and Continuity,” 19–24.

Thinking Relationally be recognized as fallible, as serving the community rather than demanding service. What is needed, in short, is a form of community that clears the way for its members to be in real relation among themselves, rather than simply gathering together a cluster of individuals who share only a relationship with God or with the church conceived as an authoritative institution. Such a communal form is not simply an adjunct to the gospel, it is the gospel: “The church is God’s new will and purpose for humanity” revealed in Christ.29 What’s more, this will is not some extrinsic mandate that God has arbitrarily decided upon, but is intrinsic to God’s own life as Trinity: “In order to build the church as the community-of-God in time, God reveals God’s own self as Holy Spirit.The Holy Spirit is the will of God that gathers individuals together to be the church-community, maintains it, and is at work only within it.”30 In Bonhoeffer’s thought, then, we find an argument for the necessity of social-relational thought in theology as well as a model for the deployment of social-relational thought as a kind of acid to dissolve a particular set of individualistic thought-patterns (“religion”). At this point, however, it is still necessary to specify on a more formal level what social-relational thought entails. For help in this task, I now turn to a thinker whose work seems to me to provide a good indication of what Bonhoeffer’s project would look like if extended to the ontological level: contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy.

Ontology and “Being-with” Bringing together Bonhoeffer and Nancy may initially seem arbitrary, but there are some genealogical connections between the two. For instance, Nancy relies heavily on Heidegger and Hegel, figures who are major points of reference for Bonhoeffer in Act and Being and Sanctorum Communio, respectively.31 In addition, 29 30 31

Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 141. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 143. Emphasis in original. Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd and Hans-Richard Reuter, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996).

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The Politics of Redemption there are some definite homologies between their projects. Perhaps the most striking is found in The Inoperative Community,32 where Nancy’s first essay on community is followed by a discussion of myth—a discussion in the midst of which he cites Bonhoeffer, albeit in passing.33 More broadly, Nancy’s long-standing interest in the question of community has, in recent years, been accompanied by a growing sense of the necessity of a “deconstruction of Christianity,” a project that is in many ways analogous to Bonhoeffer’s attempt to find a “religionless Christianity.” Ultimately, however, the most important justification for bringing the two thinkers together is the degree to which Nancy’s formal approach helps to clarify and expand upon what Bonhoeffer is doing. One illustration of Nancy’s helpfulness, which also serves as a good way into his particular style of social-relational thought more generally, is his answer to a question that is still outstanding in the discussion above. As we’ve seen, for Bonhoeffer there are two poles to the logic of “religion,” poles that could be called, based on his discussion of Barth and Bultmann, revelation and relativism, or else authoritarianism and individualism. It is clear that for Bonhoeffer these two poles must both be rejected together. In a common-sense view, however, they are opposites—what is the connection? A possible answer is found in Nancy’s political analysis in The Inoperative Community. There he argues that liberalism and totalitarianism share in common “the metaphysics of the absolute for-itself—be it in the form of the individual or the total State.” In more formal terms, this entails “also the metaphysics of the absolute in general, being as ab-solute, perfectly detached, distinct, and closed, without relation.”34 For Nancy, the metaphysics of the absolute is an attempt to efface a more fundamental relationality, an attempt that always necessarily fails.This failure is evident even in the notion of absoluteness itself: as Nancy points out, “to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone 32

33 34

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Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), French text: La communauté désœuvrée, 3rd ed. (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999). Nancy, Inoperative Community, 160, n. 7. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 4 (translation altered, FT // 17–18; emphasis in original).

Thinking Relationally in being alone—and precisely this is contradictory” because it implies comparison.35 Community, here conceived fundamentally as relationality, pushes back against the imposition of absoluteness: Excluded by the logic of the absolute-subject of metaphysics . . ., community comes perforce to cut into this subject by virtue of this same logic. The logic of the absolute sets it in relation: but this, obviously, cannot make for a relation between two or several absolutes, no more than it can make an absolute of the relation. It undoes the absoluteness of the absolute.36 One must keep in mind here that this logic of relationality is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is not the case that we have somehow lost our authentic communal roots and must get back to them, nor that we must give up our rightful individual prerogatives in the service of a morally superior community. Rather, Nancy is saying that we simply are always-already in community, always-already in relationship. Strictly speaking, then, my phrase “social-relational thought” is a tautology—all thought is necessarily social-relational, even styles of thought that seek to eliminate all relation. For Nancy, we are quite simply stuck with relationality. Yet despite the fact that all attempts to efface relationality always ultimately fail, they have very real consequences. For example, liberal individualism issues in capitalism as the realm of equivalence and exchange, which from Nancy’s perspective has had more or less obviously destructive effects. Perhaps less controversial would be a negative assessment of the absolutization of the nation in fascism. Nancy’s real concern, however, is not with such comparatively easy targets, but rather with attempting to diagnose the failure of communism, which he calls, following Sartre, “the unsurpassable

35 36

Nancy, Inoperative Community, 4 (translation altered, FT // 18). Nancy, Inoperative Community, 4. Here one also thinks of Laurel Schneider’s deft analysis of the anxiety that necessarily accompanies the “logic of the one” in Beyond Monotheism.

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The Politics of Redemption horizon of our time.” The most important reason for this status, he claims, goes beyond Sartre’s own meaning: the word “communism” stands as an emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization; and finally, more simply and even more decisively, a place from which to surmount the unraveling that occurs with the death of each one of us . . . .37 It is this latter ambition that is more problematic from Nancy’s perspective, because it leads to an absolutization of the human essence. Nancy argues that this move is not a subsequent betrayal of Marx’s thought, but actually stands at the heart of his project from the very beginning. As such, Nancy can say that “it was the very basis of the communist ideal that ended up appearing most problematic: namely, human beings defined as producers (one might even add: human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work.”38 Here one might draw a parallel to Bonhoeffer’s critique of the “religious” form of Christianity, which effectively absolutizes sinfulness as the “essence” of humanity. As Nancy’s parenthetical indicates, however, the problem is the more general attempt to define the human essence, and indeed to define the essence of community as being necessarily human. A more radical thought of community must extend to everything that exists, without isolating and absolutizing humanity as such, however humanity is defined.39 As is arguably the case for virtually 37 38 39

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Nancy, Inoperative Community, 1. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 2. Emphasis in original. Nancy does suggest that the Marxist decision to privilege human labor has a certain inner necessity: “A community presupposed as having to be one of human beings presupposes that it effect, or that it must effect, as such and integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essence of humanness . . . . Consequently, economic ties, technological operations, and

Thinking Relationally all leftist political thinkers in the wake of communism, Nancy has difficulty specifying the concrete political consequences of this stance on more than a very formal level—and even if he did have a clear solution, the aspect of his thought that is more immediately relevant to the present discussion is his further ontological speculation, most notably in Being Singular Plural.40 One benefit of the latter work is greater clarity. Already in The Inoperative Community, Nancy had expressed some serious misgivings about the term “community,” wondering if it might be inextricably tied to the form of humanism that he was opposing.With this in mind, he maintained a classically “deconstructive” stance toward the term, recognizing its dangers and yet retaining it in order to effect a certain displacement within the Western intellectual tradition. In addition, much of his investigation in the title essay of The Inoperative Community is couched in terms of a reading of Georges Bataille’s concept of sacrifice. In Being Singular Plural, by contrast, he adopts a different approach of, for the most part at least, directly saying what he means. What emerges, however, is not so much a philosophical system as a series of fragmentary, overlapping meditations on particular concepts and themes. Simply developing a vocabulary is already a challenge, because language—here thought in terms of the address itself rather than a content to be transmitted—“does not easily lend itself to showing the ‘with’ as such, for it [the ‘with’] is itself the address and not what must be addressed.”41 Nevertheless, the task is important because Heidegger, one of Nancy’s primary authorities, had claimed in Being and Time that “being-with” [Mitsein] is co-originary with “existence” [Dasein, “being-there”].

40

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political fusion (into a body or under a leader) represent or rather present, expose, and realize this essence necessarily in themselves. Essence is set to work in them; through them, it becomes its own work” (Inoperative Community, 3; emphasis in original). On a formal level, then, the effort to define and actualize the human essence culminates in the definition of humanity as precisely that effort itself. In this sense, communism would represent the most extreme version of humanism. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), French text: Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996). Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xvi.

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The Politics of Redemption Yet just as, in terms of the above reading of Bonhoeffer, Christianity covered over its communal aspect by imposing the individualistic frame of “religion,” so also Heidegger backed away from his original insight by falling back into what Nancy above called the “metaphysics of the absolute”—analyzing the lone “authentic” subject resolutely facing down death on the one hand and the “authentic” people seizing its historical destiny on the other.42 In order to show how Nancy attempts to avoid this pitfall, I will focus on two key aspects of his argument: his explanation of the title phrase and his use of the term “sense.” First, the title: Being Singular Plural, or in French, être singulier pluriel. In his elucidation of this phrase, Nancy first points out the indeterminate syntax. It is not a complete sentence, and it is unclear which, if any, of the words is to be taken as a noun. Être is the infinitive form meaning “to be,” but French infinitives are also frequently used as nouns. In addition, as in other Romance languages, adjectives in French can be substantives. For Nancy, this indeterminacy is a way of indicating the mutual implication of the three terms.The apparent contradiction between “singular” and “plural” is resolved, or at least attenuated, by recourse to the etymology of the word “singular.” The Latin word from which “singular” derives is singuli, an adjective meaning “one by one.” Interestingly, singuli—as is evident from its form—appeared most frequently in the plural. Nancy capitalizes on this to declare that the singular is always-already in the plural, because the singular “designates the ‘one’ of the ‘one by one.’”43 Yet this “‘one’ of the ‘one by one’” is the only “one” there is, because the “one” can never be indicated except by reference to the “more than one.” A pure “one” with no reference to the plural would not be “one” at all—indeed, wouldn’t “be” at all. But by the same token, this “singular” that only finds its place in the “plural” is not simply dissolved into an undifferentiated mass. The singular is really singular precisely in its being-with other singular beings—not simply 42

43

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For a more detailed exposition of the relationship between Heidegger and Nancy on this question, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “The Unbearable Withness of Being: On the Essentialist Blind Spot of Anti-Ontotheology,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 32 (translation altered, FT // 52).

Thinking Relationally the generic being-with of juxtaposition, but each time in a singular way. To emphasize the fact that the singular being is not simply absorbed into an undifferentiated mass, Nancy points out the spacing between the words “being singular plural.” Simple spaces allow Nancy to avoid the subordination that other punctuation marks would imply and thereby to avoid predetermining the precise relationships among the terms44—yet it is nonetheless the case that any particular reading of the terms will necessarily place them in a particular relationship. The terms aren’t simply randomly juxtaposed: they are with each other, they appear together. One could say that their coappearance has some meaning to it, and this wouldn’t be completely foreign to Nancy’s intention, as the French word sens—which can denote “sense” or “meaning”45—is one of the key words of Nancy’s philosophy. Despite this polysemy, it seems clear that Nancy leans more toward sens as “sense” than as “meaning.” Staying with our example of the phrase “being singular plural,” were one to seek its “meaning,” one would most likely have in mind something outside the phrase (such as the intention in the writer’s mind) that the phrase points toward. But seeking its “sense” connotes more of a philological enterprise, as when one reads some ancient text and tries to construe the grammatical relationships among the terms so as to give the most satisfactory “sense.” Though one should not push this contrast too hard, the “sense” of the phrase seems to indicate a meaning that arises out of the phrase itself, more than a meaning that would be pointed toward or intended. The “sense” of a phrase has a certain closeness to the text, almost a physical or tactile quality—and of course the English word “sense” also operates in the register of physical sensation, a quality it shares with the French sens. In this respect, sens and “sense” overlap considerably with the German Sinn, which plays 44

45

One can get at a similar insight by linking the three terms together using a hyphen, which is “a mark of union and also a mark of division, a mark of sharing that effaces itself, leaving each term to its isolation and its beingwith-the-others” (Being Singular Plural, 37). It can also mean “direction,” but Derrida claims that Nancy does not use it in this sense in his book on Nancy, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 57.

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The Politics of Redemption a prominent role in Heidegger’s thought in the compound word Seinssinn or the phrase Sinn von Sein, both customarily translated into English as “the meaning of Being.” Whether or not it was Heidegger’s intention in using the term Sinn, Nancy places special emphasis on the sensory and especially tactile dimensions of sens or “sense,” which allows him to think the (meaning or) sense of Being in a very bodily way—and not only in terms of human bodies. There is sense to the particular relationships among inanimate objects and among animals and among humans, as there is in the various relationships among the singular members of these groups. As Nancy says, “We would not be ‘humans’ if there were not ‘dogs’ and ‘stones.’” This is because of the way that we live with animals and stones, and the way that the animal-like and the stone-like (bone) live in us. For this reason, Nancy says that the world “is not so much the world of humanity as it is the world of the nonhuman to which humanity is exposed and which humanity, in turn, exposes”46—and so, he is able to use “we” and “us” in the broadest possible sense, to include the human, the animal, the inanimate. This is not simply a matter of sheer juxtaposition or leveling-off: the human relates to the non-human differently than vice versa, most notably in language; and of course the relationships among humans have a different sense than those among animals, and so on. Even this talk of “having” sense may ultimately be misleading, however, as Nancy begins the main text of Being Singular Plural with a fragment titled Que nous sommes le sens, which can be translated “We are Sense.” The translators of the English edition translate it as “We are Meaning,” for an understandable reason: in this section, Nancy is addressing the widespread feeling of a “loss of meaning” or sens in our postmodern world. This bemoaning of the loss of meaning does indeed have a meaning, but a “meaning” that is nothing other than Nancy’s concept of “sense”—that is, this discourse of the loss of meaning “brings to light the fact that ‘meaning,’ used in this absolute way, has become the bared [dénudé] name of our being-with-one-another. We do not ‘have’ meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning [i.e., sense]—entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no meaning 46

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Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 18.

Thinking Relationally other than ‘us.’”47 This doesn’t mean that we make up the “content” that Being in general indicates or “means,” but rather that we—again, in the broadest possible sense—are “sense as the element in which significations can be produced, and circulate.”48 One could say, then, that we are where sense happens—but that sense isn’t something separate from “us.” Rather, it is precisely sense as the concrete and always singular relationships that constitute our being-with that makes us this specific “us” rather than simply “a cloud of juxtaposed beings.”49

A Social-Relational Reading of Atonement Theory Bringing together what I have found in Bonhoeffer and Nancy, then, it is now possible to specify the formal characteristics of a social-relational style of thought. First, social-relational thought starts from relationships. Second, it undoes the opposition of particular things and the relationships they enter into—particular things (singularities) are constituted through their relationships. Third, this style of thought moves beyond both the New Age platitude that “everything is connected” and the pop-culture “chaos theory” motif of relationality giving rise to pure unpredictability (the fabled butterfly changing weather patterns on the other side of the world) in seeking out the specificity and structure of the relationships among singularities—their “sense,” in Nancy’s terms. Finally, while recognizing the particularity of relationships among humans, it situates humanity within a broader relational scheme. Now by contrast, an individualistic style of thought does not exclude all relationship. Instead, it begins with particular individuals (both human and non-human), relegating the relationships among them to secondary status. This subordination of relationship can also lead to a tendency to minimize the number of relationships acknowledged, by means of an absolutization of 47 48 49

Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 1 (FT // 19). Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 2 (translation altered, FT // 19). Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 39.

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The Politics of Redemption a single entity—usually God—whose value or meaning is taken to be self-grounding or self-evident, undetermined and fundamentally unaffected by outside relationships. My use of the term “individualism” is therefore idiosyncratic, referring not specifically to the tradition of individualism in modern political thought but rather to a broader style of thought—a style of thought under which modern individualism does, however, fall. One of the most extreme examples of this tendency can be found in G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology.50 There Leibniz puts forward the notion that the created universe is made up of monads, which are completely impervious to any influence from any other monad. Each monad contains in principle the entire universe, albeit the entire universe as seen from a particular perspective.They are harmonized with one another by the only entity who can influence them, namely, God—that is, the relationship of all monads to God replaces the more intuitive mutual relationships we would assume to exist. The story is similar with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The ultimate destiny of human souls is not determined by their interactions with others, but rather by God’s sovereign decree declaring each individual to be either elect or reprobate. These individual lives are then directed in ways that testify to God’s justice or his mercy, his wrath or his love, depending on the perceived match or mismatch between each person’s moral worth and destiny. More everyday versions of individualism are centered on the belief that each person’s choices are ultimately determinative of the course of his or her life. A person’s social context might be taken into account, but only as mitigating circumstances to be factored into a judgment based on good or bad choices. In such a view, the individual transcends all the relationships in which he or she is entangled and can freely determine what relationships to continue, discontinue, or begin.51 50

51

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G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology, in Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991). A hierarchical ontology may appear to escape from individualism insofar as God’s goodness or being is mediated to the individual by others at a higher ontological level, but the tendency is toward individualism: the scheme is centered on some absolute, and the relationships, though multiplied, are all unidirectional—the ontologically “higher” being is not determined by the

Thinking Relationally The two atonement theories that have proved to be most influential for the modern West, namely, the penal-substitutionary model inspired by Anselm and the moral influence model inspired by Abelard, are mainly understood within an individualistic framework. In the case of moral influence, the one man Jesus is held up as a model for each individual to imitate in order to obtain salvation. In the case of the penal-substitutionary theory, Jesus is presented as paying off some type of debt incurred by humanity as a whole—yet only particular individuals, whether determined by the decree of predestination or their own free acceptance, will be able to cash in on this offer of debt forgiveness. The starting point is two particular individuals—whether Christ and the believer, or the indebted sinner and God—who are then brought into a more or less extrinsic relationship in the process of the Incarnation. It is extrinsic because, on the one hand, it is unnecessary: the believer can imitate Christ or not; the debtor can cash in on God’s offer or not. On the other hand, the way in which this relationship has been achieved seems arbitrary, at least to some degree. God could just as easily have pointed out some exemplary human being as become him; and despite Anselm’s tightly argued attempt to ground the Incarnation in universal reason, it remains unclear why the public execution of a poor Galilean was the means chosen to pay off humanity’s debt.52 A framework that renders the Incarnation seemingly random or arbitrary should be viewed with suspicion, at least by theologians. The goal of this project is to be an initial step toward demonstrating that a social-relational approach to the question of atonement is necessary to provide a plausible and convincing account of why God became human. Along the way, I hope also to show that the individualistic framework not only renders the Incarnation

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lower one. A fully social-relational scheme dispenses with the absolute center and asserts the mutual co-determination of all beings. In short, a hierarchical ontology is perhaps “between” a fully individualistic and a fully socialrelational ontology, but only insofar as it introduces a bit more relationality into a basically individualistic scheme. In my view, the narrative logic of the ransom theory is not as prone to this critique—God intervenes in a way that respects the structure of the world as it stands at the time of that intervention.

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The Politics of Redemption unnecessarily “mysterious,” but that it even fails to get at what is going on in the texts it is ostensibly helping to interpret— meaning in this context the patristic and medieval texts that reflect on the inner logic of Christ’s work. For now, however, I turn to the rich contemporary dialogue on atonement among various theologies of liberation, in order to show that their major representatives are all drawn toward a social-relational approach.

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Chapter 2

Questioning Atonement

My first step in situating my project is to bring my concerns into dialogue with the mainstream of contemporary discourse on the atonement, which has mostly been critical of the tradition. My approach will be to draw out certain threads from feminist and womanist theology, which have been the primary locus for the renewed contemporary interest in atonement, then compare them to other representative liberation theologians. My goal will be to demonstrate that a social-relational style of thought is at work in all the theologians discussed.Then, through an investigation of the work of Jürgen Moltmann, I attempt to demonstrate that a critical theological stance and a social-relational style of thought go hand in hand.

Feminist and Womanist Perspectives For feminist and womanist theologians, the central problem with the dominant atonement theory is that it valorizes suffering as redemptive and models unconditional obedience as the way of salvation. The basic insight that theology carries over into practice is then applied at the fine-grained level of the individual household or romantic relationship. The relationship between God the Father and his Son who saves the world through his obedience even to the point of death maps out onto asymmetrical intimate relationships—the abused woman or child identifies with the obediently suffering Son, while the patriarchal authority figure is identified with the Father. In effect, the traditional theory of atonement amounts to what Rita Nakashima Brock calls a “theology of child abuse.”1 This model of atonement represents 1

Brock, Journeys by Heart.

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The Politics of Redemption more than just a disturbing parallel with the logic of abuse— Brock’s book, along with many other feminist critiques of atonement, includes harrowing accounts of women and children who understand their abuse in explicitly Christological terms and of abusers who legitimate themselves in those same terms. Crucial contributions to this critique have stemmed from womanists and other feminist theologians of color. Virtually all have highlighted the fact that the logic of redemptive suffering and obedience plays out across axes other than gender, such as race, class, and sexual orientation—factors that white feminist theologians, the majority of whom have been middle class, have tended to underemphasize and in some cases ignore. Black women have long asserted the multivalent nature of oppression over against any attempt to privilege one particular type of oppression as the most fundamental, since they have historically borne and continue to bear the burden of oppression across axes of sex, race, and class. This “triple jeopardy” also complicates efforts at liberation: as Jacquelyn Grant has shown, black women have been torn between feminism and black liberation movements, facing sexism from black male leaders and racism among white feminists.2 The most specific challenge to the dominant theory of atonement from within womanist theology has come from Delores Williams. Moving beyond the general critique of redemptive suffering and obedience, Williams has shown how most accounts of Christ’s work strongly echo the structure of the specific form of oppression most characteristic of black women’s experience, namely, surrogacy.3 Under slavery, black women experienced coerced surrogacy, including doing “men’s work” in the fields, 2

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Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response, American Academy of Religion Academy Series no. 64 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).This theme is reiterated throughout the womanist theological literature. For a summary of her basic argument, see Delores S. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit A. Trelstad (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006). In Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), Williams discusses the issue at much greater length, with specific reference to the biblical story of Hagar.

Questioning Atonement working as wet nurses and “mammies” to white children, and serving as sexual surrogates. After slavery, black women had a certain degree of room to maneuver, but the roles society left open to them were in most cases the same as they had filled under slavery, resulting in an ostensibly “voluntary” surrogacy—the tasks remained unchanged, but black women had, at least in principle if not always in practice, the option of leaving situations that became intolerable. With this oppressive structure in mind, Williams turns to the Christian tradition and finds that most often, Jesus represents the ultimate surrogate figure standing in the place of someone else: sinful humankind. Surrogacy, attached to this divine personage, thus takes on an aura of the sacred. It is therefore altogether fitting and proper for black women to ask whether the image of a surrogate God has salvific power for black women, or whether the image of redemption supports and reinforces the exploitation that has accompanied their experience with surrogacy.4 Williams’ answer to this question is clear: no theology that models and valorizes the very mode of oppression that black women have been forced to bear can be liberating for black women. All three of these points of criticism—redemptive suffering, obedience, and surrogacy—converge on one point: the devaluation of human agency. Most would agree that human agency denotes self-directed action, and traditional approaches to atonement have undermined both aspects of that definition. The valorization of suffering and obedience prescribes a passive rather than active stance, while the notions of obedience and surrogacy undercut self-determination. In this sense, the dominant atonement theory reinscribes the passive, obedient, instrumental roles traditionally forced upon women and is therefore diametrically opposed to feminist goals. Beyond that, it contradicts the womanist emphasis on full human flourishing.Though obedience and suffering could be considered strategic concessions to further the overriding womanist goal of survival in certain situations, viewing them as positive ends in themselves would clearly be contrary to the goals 4

Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience,” 28.

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The Politics of Redemption of womanist theology. This is especially true, of course, in the case of the cross, where his obedience and his surrogate role come together to deprive Jesus of his very life. In view of this problem, Williams is finally constrained to say, “There is nothing of God in the blood of the cross”5—a position shared by most feminist and womanist theologians. JoAnne Terrell is an interesting quasi-exception. In Power in the Blood?, Terrell argues against the notion of sacrifice—that is, against the notion that God requires blood, including Christ’s blood—and proposes that we instead view the blood of Christ and indeed of all martyrs as a sacramental sign, one that testifies to the value God places on human life and brings us in contact with the person whose just path was cut short by violence. Such a view is tantamount to replacing the valorization of passive suffering with an unconditional assertion of agency: “Jesus’ sacrificial act was not the objective. Rather, it was the tragic, if foreseeable, result of his confrontation with evil.This bespeaks a view of Jesus and the martyrs as empowered, sacramental witnesses, not as victims who passively acquiesced to evil.”6 In this way, Terrell takes seriously the intuitions of the black church about the importance of Christ’s blood, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of traditional ways of construing that importance—the value of suffering is not inherent or selfgrounding, but lies rather in what that suffering points toward, that is, the project of liberation within which it is situated. Even in suffering and death, Christ and the martyrs remain active, and the specific sign of their death, blood, testifies to that very activity. As such,Terrell’s work can be considered a thoroughgoing attempt to reclaim Jesus’ agency, an attempt that characterizes most feminist and womanist Christology. In Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether provides a paradigm for such an approach.7 Arguing that he was a kind of activist and social critic in the tradition of the biblical prophets and that “the criticism of religious and social hierarchy characteristic of the early portrait of Jesus [in the synoptic gospels] is remarkably parallel to feminist criticism,” 5 6

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Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience,” 32. JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in African American Experience (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 142. Emphasis in original. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983).

Questioning Atonement Ruether sees Jesus as empowering the oppressed, particularly “women of marginalized groups,” through his work.8 His ministry is explicitly anti-patriarchal: Jesus as liberator calls for a renunciation, a dissolution, of the web of status relationships by which societies have defined privilege and deprivation. He protests against the identification of this system with the favor or disfavor of God. His ability to speak as liberator does not reside in his maleness but in the fact that he has renounced this system of domination and seeks to embody in his person the new humanity of service and mutual empowerment. He speaks to and is responded to by low-caste women because they represent the bottom of this status network and have the least stake in its perpetuation.9 Overall, then, Jesus’ ministry amounts to a performative “kenosis of patriarchy,”10 and Jesus’ baptism represents the fact that the “redeemer is one who has been redeemed,” meaning that “those who have been liberated can, in turn, become paradigmatic, liberating persons for others.”11 Jesus is not the isolated liberator “in himself,” but is part of a longer chain of redeemed redeemers, whose efficacy is measured by the degree to which he empowers others to be redeemers in turn. In this immediate context, Ruether does not refer to the death of Christ as such, and later theologians in this trajectory tend not to give his death a positive significance. Williams is representative here. Her overall scheme of the importance of Christ is similar to Ruether’s, emphasizing the Kingdom of God theme and adding that the resurrection is proof that “God has, through Jesus, shown humankind how to live peacefully, productively, and abundantly in relationship.”12 The cross, however, speaks not to Jesus’ mission as such, but rather to the depraved response of humanity to that mission: “The image of Jesus on the cross is the image of human 8 9 10 11 12

Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 135–6. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 137. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 137. Emphasis in original. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 138. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience,” 32.

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The Politics of Redemption sin in its most desecrated form,” representing everything that Jesus stood against.13 Other thinkers take a similar approach. Already we have seen that for Terrell, the cross “was the tragic, if foreseeable, result of his confrontation with evil,”14 though the sacramental significance of his blood overcomes the malign intentions of his murderers. Brock claims that Jesus’ death “is evidence of the power of patriarchy to crush life,”15 joining a broad range of feminist theologians who view the cross as something like a “reality principle” illustrating that when challenged, oppressive power really does fight back with all its strength. Overall, for feminist and womanist critics of atonement theory, the pattern is clear: the cross must be understood not as the goal and meaning of Jesus’ life, but as a subordinate moment that must be interpreted in terms of that life as a whole. That means rejecting the traditional notion of the cross as a sacrifice that satisfies the terms of a transaction with God and instead putting Christ’s life and death alike into the concrete political context in which he lived. By means of this reinterpretation, a theology that challenges the claims of oppressive powers can replace one that reinforces them.

Theology and Social Theory One helpful point of reference for understanding the feminist and womanist critiques of atonement theory is the enterprise of ideology critique. In the Marxist tradition of social criticism, the term “ideology” most often refers to the set of false beliefs that help to legitimate and maintain certain relationships of domination by blinding people to the underlying social structure.16 The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser made a crucial contribution to the study of ideology when he clarified that 13 14 15 16

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Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience,” 31. Terrell, Power in the Blood?, 142. Brock, Journeys by Heart, 95. The term has also come to be used in a general sense to refer to any consciously held set of beliefs, so that capitalism and Marxism, patriarchalism and feminism, white supremacy and black nationalism, and so on, are all equally “ideologies.” This usage has some justification, but I believe it is best to focus on the negative definition to begin with.

Questioning Atonement ideological beliefs are not simply held in people’s minds, but are always necessarily embodied in their actions.17 Though most ideology critique focuses on the bourgeois ideology that underwrites capitalism, the Marxist tradition has tended to regard religion as the very model of ideology. Marx himself famously declared religion the “opiate of the masses,” highlighting religion’s compensatory role for oppressed persons who are unable or unwilling to engage in the always risky struggle to change the reality of their situation. Althusser’s reworking of the Marxist tradition of ideology critique also uses Christianity as his key example. In a sense, then, feminist and womanist critics of atonement are providing a detailed account of a particular form of religious ideology. Their focus on real-world effects, which theologians of a more apologetic bent might dismiss as an extrinsic “abuse” that does not reflect on the doctrine’s truth-value,18 perhaps locates them more specifically in the Althusserian tradition. In addition, the comparison with Marxist ideology critique helps to bring out an aspect of these writings that is always present though not always explicitly thematized: social analysis tending toward the development of a full-blown social theory that includes both descriptive and normative elements. Much of the work here is descriptive in nature, but it also includes other materials that fall somewhere along the axis of anthropology, social theory, and even ontology. Brock arguably casts one of the widest nets, with her use of object-relations theory and feminist social analysis and her development of an ontology of “erotic power,” but even the most empirically minded writers in this tradition have some 17

18

See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). For a more detailed analysis of Althusser’s mode of ideology critique, see Adam Kotsko, Žižek and Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 21–5. An interesting example of this phenomenon is Daniel M. Bell, Jr.’s “Only Jesus Saves:Toward a Theopolitical Ontology of Judgment,” in Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (eds.), Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). In his reading of Anselm’s atonement theory, he makes frequent, almost incantatory use of the phrase “read rightly,” an apparent attempt to naturalize a very optimistic and even counterintuitive reading that explains away all the undesirable aspects of Anselm’s argument.

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The Politics of Redemption implicit account of the social structure of the context out of which they write and its relationship to theology. Also as in Marxism, they offer a counterpractice to the ideologically informed practice they critique—but it is here that they also go beyond traditional Marxism and develop a new theology, primarily based on the gospels, that serves as kind of “critical ideology” to accompany that counterpractice. The mainstream of left-wing critical thought—represented by such thinkers as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek19—has only recently begun to recognize the necessity of this final step. To formulate the procedure of these feminist and womanist engagements with atonement theory in broad terms, then, a critique of an “ideological” theology is accompanied by something at least tending toward a social theory, and the end result is the development of a new, critical theology. I have derived this basic paradigm initially from feminist and womanist theology because they have led the way in rethinking “atonement theory,” but many other modern attempts to grapple with the question of why God became human have taken a similar shape. To show that this is the case, I will first discuss approaches to the question of atonement from two perspectives that are foundational for feminist and womanist theology, namely, Black and Latin American liberation theologies as represented by the work of James Cone and Leonardo Boff, respectively. I will then turn to two more contemporary theologians who cannot as easily be classified under a single heading, Wonhee Anne Joh and Mark Lewis Taylor. James Cone’s theology is resolutely grounded in his context, on two levels: first, his own context in the black community and second, the black community’s own context of white racial oppression within the United States. These two points of reference are explicitly cited on virtually every page of his seminal God of the Oppressed.20 In part, he takes this stance because he takes seriously Feuerbach and Marx’s critique of religion as ideology 19

20

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Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) and Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). See also my Žižek and Theology, particularly ch. 3, “The Christian Experience.” James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, revised ed. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997).

Questioning Atonement as well as the impossibility of a purely “objective” perspective: “There is no place we can stand that will remove us from the limitation of history and thus enable us to tell the whole truth without the risk of ideological distortion.” At the same time, however, Cone is convinced that we must try to get at something “that is not reducible to our own subjectivity” and that that very “trans-subjective ‘something’ is expressed in story”—in his case, the story of the African-American community.21 The Bible is an important source for Cone, but he embraces the black church’s tradition of selective reading: In view of their social situation of oppression, black people needed liberating visions so that they would not let historical limitations determine their perception of black being. Therefore when Christianity was taught to them and they began to read the Bible, blacks simply appropriated those biblical stories that met their historical need . . . . The one theme that stood out above all other themes was liberation, and that was because of the social conditions of slavery.22 Nevertheless, he argues that the black reading manages to get at the truth of scripture in a way that the white reading does not. One might expect that a white reading, coming out of the white story, would produce equally valid, if different results, but there is one problem with that supposition—white reading is not motivated by an honest assessment of the white story, but rather by an active forgetting of that story. The difference between oppressor and oppressed is not simply that of different social conditions as such: the role of the oppressor incites and even requires his willful ignorance of the social reality that underwrites his privilege.23 Presumably, if a white person undertook a thorough-going analysis of the social structure— something that is not completely impossible, as Cone’s frequent 21 22 23

Cone, God of the Oppressed, 93. Cone, God of the Oppressed, 55. Cone shows the black community to be aware of this dynamic through his many citations of folk stories involving trickery—the self-aggrandizement that accompanies power makes white people easy to fool.

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The Politics of Redemption references to Marx suggest—then he or she would wind up concluding something similar to Cone, namely, that Jesus “is black because he was a Jew.” That is to say, they would recognize the strong parallels between Christ’s own situation as a Jewish peasant living under Roman rule and that of blacks in America and therefore perceive Jesus as a liberatory figure bringing hope to the oppressed in both those contexts. Instead, white theology is dominated by abstraction, granting abstract authority to the Bible while missing its key message and reducing the Christian life to a matter of abstract internal dispositions with no relation to actual social conditions. I believe that this distinction between the white and black mind-set can be mapped out onto the distinction between an individualistic and social-relational style of thought. Blacks have an epistemological advantage because they are essentially forced to be aware of the oppressive social structures under which they live, while whites have the luxury of ignoring their own role in oppression and chalking everything up to individual choices. This can be seen even in everyday political discussion. Though there are exceptions, blacks tend to discuss their disadvantaged position in terms of social realities like racism, while whites are more likely to believe that a critical mass of blacks unaccountably winds up making “poor choices.” Thus it seems that Cone follows in the observed pattern of approaching the meaning of the Incarnation from a social-relational perspective as opposed to an individualistic one. As one would expect from a Latin American liberation theologian, in Leonardo Boff ’s Passion of Christ, Passion of the World24 social analyses and commitments are front and center. From the outset, he defines his method as “elaborat[ing] on a threefold experience”: that of “political, economic, and cultural oppression,” of “liberation movements,” and of “resistance.”25 In the light of the context of oppression out of which he works, his concern is “the detection of the mechanisms that led Jesus to rejection, imprisonment, 24

25

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Leonardo Boff, Passion of Christ, Passion of the World:The Facts,Their Interpretation, and Their Meaning Yesterday and Today, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988). Boff, Passion of Christ, 1–2.

Questioning Atonement torture, and a shameful crucifixion,” with the goal of showing that “this dénouement was a result of a commitment and a praxis that threatened the status quo of his time.”26 Believing that the gospel writers did not have much concern for political liberation,27 Boff devotes roughly half of his text to a reconstruction of the historical situation and message of Jesus, coming to the conclusion that Jesus rejects “the structure that constitutes the mainstay of our world: power as domination”28 and promotes an alternative sociality outside the logic of domination. Jesus’ suffering on the cross, therefore, could not have been the goal of his mission, but was instead the predictable result of a confrontation with the powers that be—a confrontation aimed at relieving the world of the cross of suffering and injustice. Founded on this understanding of Jesus’ mission, Boff ’s penultimate chapter lays out a ten-point guide to preaching the cross “in this world that cries for deliverance from the cross.”29 The key points here are community and solidarity, along with a willingness to suffer in the struggle against suffering, yet again underlining Boff ’s insistence, shared with the feminist and womanist theologians discussed above, that the cross must be viewed as a crime rather than as something directly pleasing to or willed by God.30 As in the cases already investigated, Boff ’s analysis of Christ’s social and political context and of his own context leads to a twofold result: the overturning of the traditional model and the development of a critical, community-based alternative. Turning now to younger theologians, one particularly helpful example is Wonhee Anne Joh.31 Though Joh uses postcolonial theory and Julia Kristeva’s version of psychoanalysis, the main thrust of her argument is found in her intervention into debates among Korean psychologists and theologians around the concept

26 27 28 29 30 31

Boff, Passion of Christ, 2. Boff, Passion of Christ, 7. Boff, Passion of Christ, 15. Boff, Passion of Christ, 129. Boff, Passion of Christ, 3. Wonhee Anne Joh, The Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006).

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The Politics of Redemption of han.32 Han refers to the bitterness, or in Park’s terms, broken heartedness, born of oppressive circumstances. Joh nuances this account by making note of the two kinds of han: won-han and hu-han. In very basic terms, won-han denotes the passive suffering of han, while hu-han represents an angry outburst that aims for vengeance.33 Identifying the cycle of won-han and hu-han as masculine, Joh appropriates the concept of jeong-han, which is mostly associated with women. What is most interesting to Joh about jeong-han is that “love and aggression co-exist . . . jeong-han could be likened to a release of a long sigh by the person who has experienced han while a person experiencing won-han might articulate and demand justice.”34 While many Korean thinkers associate jeong-han with simple resignation, Joh attempts to rehabilitate the concept in the face of the destructiveness of hu-han, which she associates with such acts as the terrorist attacks of 9/11.35 In place of resignation, Joh claims that jeong-han is characterized by “empathy . . . generated through one’s recognition of han in others”—even those not immediately recognizable as oppressed.36 With this renewed concept of jeong-han in hand, Joh concludes her investigation by elaborating a “Christology of Jeong.”37 Even aside from the intrinsic interest of her analysis of the concept of han—a concept that I have become convinced should be an integral component of any contemporary doctrine of sin— Joh’s work, like that of other Korean theologians, is exemplary because of the degree to which the analytical concepts grow as it were “organically” out of the Korean experience.This tendency is particularly evident among minjung theologians, who explicitly attempt to develop a liberation theology but whose consciousness of the oppressive North Korean regime has rendered unavailable the

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33 34 35 36 37

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For a representative study of this concept from a theological point of view, see Andrew Sung Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993). Joh, Heart of the Cross, 20–2. Joh, Heart of the Cross, 22. Joh, Heart of the Cross, 24. Joh, Heart of the Cross, 26. Joh, Heart of the Cross, ch. 5.

Questioning Atonement Marxist categories typically used by other liberation theologians.38 Of course, no liberation theology has deployed any particular body of social theory as a “ready-made” store of knowledge— all have undertaken a critical reappropriation and in many cases made original contributions to the theoretical traditions from which they draw. The use of Korean concepts, however, and particularly Joh’s intervention into the established terminology drawn from the Korean experience remind us that social description and social theory cannot be sharply divided but rather grow out of each other. A similar pattern can be discerned in Mark Lewis Taylor’s The Executed God.39 In contrast to many of the theologians discussed thus far, Taylor starts with Christ’s death. Defying the tendency toward spirituality, Taylor claims: It is time to confess forthrightly that in Jesus of Nazareth, God suffered not just death but execution: a statesanctioned execution supported by religious officials. To call Jesus’ death execution is to renew our awareness of the official terror that crucifixion was. Jesus’ life, as bound up with God’s life, receives its distinctive stamp because of the way he suffered state-sanctioned killing.40 Like the other theologians, he links his understanding of Christ, specifically of his death, to the contemporary context, beginning with American prisons. For Taylor, prisons are not an isolated aspect of the American scene, but are closer to being an organizing principle of what he calls an imperial “theatrics of terror”—that 38

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40

For representative texts, see the anthology Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, ed. the Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1981). James Cone’s preface to this volume is a vivid reminder of the cross-fertilization among so-called identitarian theologies, which conventional wisdom would consign to their own individual “ghettoes.” Here as in so many areas (perhaps most notably literature), it is the mainstream Western white males who are most afflicted by intellectual “ghettoization.” Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001). Taylor, Executed God, 4.

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The Politics of Redemption is, the manipulation of various images and performances that help to maintain imperial power. The ever-expanding network of prisons, which Taylor repeatedly likens to the Soviet gulags, and the increasingly militarized police serve purposes far beyond simply enforcing laws. On the one hand, they serve to separate “undesirables” from the more elite portions of the population “by moving aside the social junk from the places the elite likes to inhabit and by controlling and seeking to eliminate social dynamite.”41 This function of protecting private wealth from potentially destructive forces became even more urgent in the face of exploding inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, and even more perniciously, prisons serve to create and consolidate a criminal or “predator” class that then justifies further punitive action. The reality is that prison is not at all rehabilitative; in fact, “prisons transform some people into animal-like, destructive forces that later wreak havoc on neighborhoods outside.”42 The result is a vicious circle in which politicians gain support from a frightened population by vowing to get tough on crime—yet that very toughness serves only to exacerbate crime, thereby justifying further toughness, and so on. Taylor sees a similar logic at work in the Roman Empire, but he is more interested in outlining Jesus’s particular mode of resistance. He begins by outlining the Galilean ethos, which he characterizes as one of “resistance to empire.”43 Galilee was an important crossroads but had a long tradition of independence, and so controlling the region was a perpetual challenge for the Romans. He emphasizes that this resistance was not a simple oppositionalism: Galileans did not have the luxury of standing in some pure nonimperial space, so as to fight the empire. As is the case with many subordinated people, Galileans also had to adapt to the imperial ethos even while resisting it . . . . This should not lead us to place accommodation on equal footing with resistance. No, resistance is what encompasses 41 42 43

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Taylor, Executed God, 61. Taylor, Executed God, 62. Taylor, Executed God, 72.

Questioning Atonement accommodation in the Galilean ethos. Accommodation is but a necessary feature of resistance. Some modes of accommodation are cowardly capitulations to oppression; often, however, they are strategies that have resistance as their aim.44 The overarching principle of this resistance by means of strategic accommodation is the very center of imperial power: theatrics. To combat the imperial theatrics of terror, the early Christians developed a theatrics of counterterror, emphasizing parody and creativity. Examples of this include Paul’s reappropriation of imperial terminology and Jesus’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem. These actions tend to be non-violent, but Taylor does not elevate non-violence to the level of a guiding principle, subordinating it instead to “artful and adversarial performance . . . . I embrace nonviolence not so much as an end in itself, therefore, but as a means toward artfully and most effectively confronting imperial power with genuine alternative ways of living.”45 Violence may be necessary under certain circumstances, he concedes, but nonviolent modes of engagement are more likely to be both surprising and sustainable. Clearly, then, Taylor fits within the general scheme seen so far, but he seems to me to take a valuable additional step by showing the ways in which Jesus responds creatively to the social structure of the world as it actually exists. Though the emphasis is on the theatrics of counterterror, implicit in Taylor’s scheme is the notion that theatrics is a terrain somehow shared between empire and resistance—a terrain that will not simply disappear in the event that empire finally crumbles, but will be filled out by performances that incite creativity rather than fear.That is to say, human sociality as such seems to be structured according to something like theatrics, and that basic structure can be directed toward either good or bad ends. This latter point is central to my argument, and it is encouraging to me that a work implicitly based on that insight has managed to bring out the parallels between Jesus’ situation and ours in such rigor—going beyond the vague observation that 44 45

Taylor, Executed God, 73. Taylor, Executed God, 109.

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The Politics of Redemption both situations are characterized by “oppression”—and to provide such a detailed account of the relevance of early Christians’ specific mode of resistance.

A Case Study: The Question of Redemptive Suffering At this point, it is possible to draw some parallels between the texts investigated thus far and what I have drawn from Bonhoeffer and Nancy. On the one hand, all the texts clearly make use of a social-relational style of thought. In addition, the three steps that I have extracted by analogy with Marxist ideology critique—the critique of “ideological” theology, the use of social theory, and the development of a new critical theology—broadly characterize Bonhoeffer’s project as I understand it. The key difference on this front is that Bonhoeffer and Nancy tend to be much less concrete in their social analysis, although descriptive elements are of course not completely absent for either. In addition, both Bonhoeffer and Nancy share a clear normative ethical-political charge with the work of these liberationist, feminist, and womanist theologians, which motivates their analysis and critique of the dominant power relations. This element fits well with the tradition of atonement theory insofar as they start from the assumption that something has gone wrong, but a social-relational approach must—following the liberationist, feminist, and womanist approach—identify that “something wrong” on a social and political level rather than on an individualistic one.This normative and political stance will play a major role in my readings of the traditional texts. Another point where liberationist, feminist, and womanist theologians go beyond Bonhoeffer can be approached through the ambivalence attendant on characterizing these theologians as critics of “individualism.” Given the passivity that the patriarchy demands of women, it is understandable that feminists would be reluctant to characterize their critique of the dominant atonement theory in terms of “individualism.”46 In addition, I think it is safe 46

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This is less the case with regard to womanist theology, which is much more focused on community than is classical white feminism.

Questioning Atonement to say that the “individualism” Bonhoeffer critiques is the very opposite of the healthy self-affirmation that feminist and womanist theologians wish to cultivate—it is an “individualism” that in its most extreme form becomes an obsessive self-denigration, effectively blinding the religious subject not only to the surrounding social reality but to the subject’s own positive qualities as well. Despite his clear consciousness that community is the condition of possibility of any truly responsible action, it may appear that Bonhoeffer is not able to affirm agency to the same extent as feminist and womanist theologians can, given his emphasis on suffering along with God, allowing oneself to be excluded from the world with God, and so on. Here the logic of redemptive suffering is perhaps still at work. I agree with the need to reject the notion of redemptive suffering, but since I am using Bonhoeffer as a primary source, it is important to demonstrate, if possible, that the valorization of redemptive suffering is inconsistent with his overall social-relational scheme rather than simply excluding it on extrinsic grounds. What does the notion of redemptive suffering mean? Traditionally, it has meant that suffering is inherently valuable— either as a means of expiating sins, here thought solely in terms of disobedience to God and therefore able to be “made up for” through abstract suffering having no concrete connection to the damage caused by the offense itself, or as a means of storing up merits. To me, this treatment clearly echoes the logic of individualism, which minimizes the number of relationships that count as relevant and which works by an absolutization that render certain realities inherently or self-referentially meaningful in abstraction from any context. It puts forth an image of suffering as to be valued without regard to context, simply because God values it—and of course the reason we care what God thinks in this regard is not because God is particularly convincing, but simply because “God says so!” To get at the effect that an individualistic approach to suffering can have on a theological project, I believe that it is helpful to proceed not by directly analyzing Bonhoeffer but by looking at a theologian who purports to develop the implications of some of Bonhoeffer’s fragmentary insights at the same time as he, like me, aspires to be accountable to liberation theologies of various 43

The Politics of Redemption stripes: Jürgen Moltmann. I will begin with a discussion of Moltmann’s Crucified God,47 then assess a major critique of that work from an author already discussed, Leonardo Boff. Finally, I will investigate the ways that Moltmann’s thought subsequently develops in The Way of Jesus Christ.48 One of the most striking differences between Moltmann’s The Crucified God and the texts that I have examined thus far is how much more straightforwardly “theological” it is, in the sense of being preoccupied with traditional theological categories. The book does come out of concrete social circumstances: Moltmann’s “disappointment at the end of ‘socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia and the end of the Civil Rights movement in the USA, and at what I hope is only a temporary halt in the reforms in the ecumenical movement and the Catholic church . . . .”49 Yet for Moltmann, social analysis must remain a subordinate moment: The criticism of the church and theology which we have been fortunate enough to experience, and which is justified on sociological, psychological and ideological grounds, can only be accepted and made radical by a critical theology of the cross. There is an inner criterion of all theology, and of every church which claims to be Christian, and this criterion goes far beyond all political, ideological, and psychological criticism from outside. It is the Crucified One himself.50 The shift here from the factors, both political and ecclesiastical, that prompted the book to the “criticism of the church and 47

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49 50

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Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God:The Cross as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), German text: Der gekreuzigte Gott: Das Kreuz Christi als Grund und Kritik christlicher Theologie (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1972). Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Mary Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), German text: Der Weg Jesu Christi: Christologie in messianischen Dimensionen (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1989). Moltmann, Crucified God, 2. Moltmann, Crucified God, 2 (translation altered, GT // 8).

Questioning Atonement theology” is indicative of one major difference separating Moltmann from many of the other theologians under review in this chapter: though politically conscious, he is very much a theologian of the church, and his primary social analysis is centered there. By contrast, many of the others have in mind some particular disadvantaged group whose situation casts a particular light on the church and its doctrine, lending their theology a kind of “insider-outsider” stance with regard to the actual existing Christian community. Moltmann’s critique of hitherto existing theology is clear: it has failed to come to grips with the cross. This emphasis places Moltmann squarely within the tradition of the theology of the cross, which overlaps with and yet is not identical to atonement theory. The latter is inherently a more holistic enterprise—even the dominant theory, which is frequently criticized for its overemphasis on the cross, normally places some importance on Christ’s birth, at the very least—that aims at some kind of explanation. The theology of the cross, by contrast, is somewhat more elusive. Vítor Westhelle presents it not as a positive body of propositions but rather as a certain swerve or twist that interrupts theological discourse: “it is neither a theology among others nor a doctrine but a way of doing theology; it does not cancel any other theology but brings a provoking, ironic gesture.”51 Moltmann’s approach is more forceful, insofar as he calls his readers to “abandon the traditional theories of salvation which have made the way the cross is spoken of in Christianity a mere habit.”52 He is particularly dismissive of the notion of the cross as a sacrifice, because in such an understanding, “what was unique, particular, and scandalous in the death of Christ is not retained, but repressed and destroyed.”53 In order to get at this repressed element, Moltmann undertakes, like the feminist and womanist theologians already surveyed, to understand the social, religious, and political context of the life and in particular of “the historical trial of Jesus.” 51

52 53

Vítor Westhelle, The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 110. Moltmann, Crucified God, 33. Moltmann, Crucified God, 43.

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The Politics of Redemption By far the majority of Moltmann’s attention, however, is taken up with the development of a new theology that incorporates the scandal of the cross into the life of God, decisively rejecting the traditional Christian claim that God cannot suffer. His motivation is a fundamentally social one: “a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved.”54 As for so many theologians of the last century, for Moltmann the cross reveals the solidarity of Christ with the oppressed, and is concerned with developing a theology that takes that into account requires a suffering God— meaning, in effect, that God the Father suffers in solidarity with the Incarnate Word. In a sense, then, one might say that the crucified Christ takes the place of the oppressed community that serves as a point of reference for other theologians, with the traditional “ideological” theology covering over the reality of Christ’s oppression and God’s solidarity with him. Thus all three elements uncovered in the approach of feminist and womanist theology are essentially present, though of course with significant differences in emphasis and different concrete proposals. In particular, the social analysis is a subordinate element, and its relationship to the theological speculation that makes up the bulk of the work is not entirely clear beyond the very general notion of God’s solidarity with the world, in particular human suffering. Boff ’s critique of The Crucified God must be set in contrast to his analysis of previous theological interpretations of Christ’s death. Despite his insistence that the cross must never be viewed as an end in itself or an “independent theological theme,”55 Boff ’s reading is basically sympathetic as he traces what amounts to a genealogy of the emergent sacrificial understanding of the cross in the earliest Christian communities. His reading of the later tradition is more critical, but he still manages to find points worth saving, or in the case of Anselm, at least acknowledges the limits his context imposed on his thought. In the context of such evenhandedness, however, his treatment of Moltmann is jarringly 54

55

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Moltmann, Crucified God, 222. Here Moltmann is playing on the word teilnahmslos, which means “impassive” in normal use—hence the straightforward translation would be a tautology: “A God who is incapable of suffering is an impassible being”—but which etymologically means something like “lacking taking part” (GT // 208). Boff, Passion of Christ, 79.

Questioning Atonement vituperative—descending even to a comparison of his theology with “the baleful vision of Nazism.”56 What is going on here? Though his critique of Moltmann does get at something real, I interpret the disproportionate harshness to a displacement of energy from his relatively mild critique of traditional atonement theories to his critique of Moltmann. His objection is, perhaps strategically, centered on the very point where Moltmann most departs from the tradition, the question of the suffering of God: Who dies on the cross? The victim is Jesus the Son of God. And so the cross, and death, are bonded to the being of God . . . . God is subject and object alike. God crucifies and is crucified. God crucifies the Son, cursing him and rejecting him. And the Son dies an abandoned God. God suffers the death of the Son, in the pain of love.57 In essence, Boff is accusing Moltmann of reinscribing what Brock calls the “theology of child abuse,” but perhaps with the twist that the abuser gets to say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Obviously this result is contrary to Moltmann’s intentions, and to some degree Boff ’s characterization is inaccurate.58 Yet to the extent that Boff ’s critique is accurate, it is damning. What went wrong? As I note above, Moltmann’s social analysis is not closely integrated into his theological project in The Crucified God. This is particularly true of his setting of the contemporary scene, but I would argue that it is ultimately also the case with his analysis of the concrete circumstances leading up to Christ’s crucifixion. The problem here is that Moltmann sets up the cross as an a priori brute fact, the inclusion of which into any determinate scheme is a betrayal. Thus the problem with the traditional atonement 56 57 58

Boff, Passion of Christ, 113. Boff, Passion of Christ, 105. Most notably, Moltmann argues that God was not the agent of Christ’s death, but only of his abandonment to death. It is only this abandonment that renders Christ’s death possible, however, and to the extent that it was an inevitable outcome of his abandonment, it seems difficult to absolve God of responsibility for Christ’s death. Especially in the heat of a polemic, a failure to maintain this arguably very narrow distinction is understandable.

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The Politics of Redemption theories is that they attempted to domesticate the cross, not through giving it an incorrect meaning, but through giving it any determinate meaning at all. Moltmann, by contrast, elevates the cross to an intrinsically incomprehensible and transcendent mystery: indeed, he makes it an integral part of the inner life of God, essentially ending the search for reasons.Yet the reason for Christ’s historical death seems eminently simple: his preaching and other activities posed a threat to certain entrenched interests; it is unfortunately the kind of thing that happens all the time.The cross is an extremely important aspect of Christ’s life, arguably even a point that no interpretation of that life’s significance can afford to ignore, yet it is precisely a moment in that life, even if a culminating moment. It has a context within which it finds its meaning. Moltmann’s removal of the cross from its relationship to Christ’s life—from the web of persons and structures in which it becomes understandable as the outcome of Christ’s life—is what leads him to his unwitting repetition of the basic pattern of the traditional theology. It also explains why his analysis of his contemporary setting seems disconnected. After all, in Moltmann’s scheme, every human context, including even Christ’s own, is not only disconnected from the transcendent mystery of the cross, but must actively reject it. Centering his theology on an a priori nonrelational kernel thus seems to keep Moltmann from developing a new theology that truly escapes the terms of the traditional “ideological” theology, despite his obvious intention to do so. Both his failure to truly relate his theology to his particular context and his failure to undo the traditional theology converge on one point: put in the most schematic terms, it is his absolutization of a particular element, leading to his failure to think in a thoroughly relational way. It seems clear that Moltmann’s intent was in fact to produce a relational theology, and so it is not surprising that in his later work, he succeeds in doing so. In The Way of Jesus Christ, Moltmann situates Christology within a complex web of relationships, interpreting Christ through the lens of Jewish messianism, the contradictions of the modern world, and his solidarity with the poor, in relation to God, humanity, and all of nature—all in a thoroughly integrated way. This procedure is not merely an implicit result, but a conscious goal of his entire systematic 48

Questioning Atonement theology, in which The Way of Jesus Christ finds its place and in which Moltmann began by developing “a social doctrine of the Trinity in the . . . context of a metaphysics of community, process, and relation.”59 Contending that “salvation is whole salvation and the salvation of the whole, or it is not God’s salvation,” Moltmann explicitly critiques the individualistic tendencies of modern theology: In a society which has declared “religion” to be “a private affair,” the salvation Christ offers can be presented as the private salvation of the individual soul if, and only if, Christianity assents to this confining of the religious question to “the human heart [Innerlichkeit des Menschen],” emancipated from social ties. But then the economic, social, and political sins of human beings which have led to this personal isolation and spiritual loneliness are left without liberating criticism and without the saving hope of the gospel.60 Later he explicitly ties this apolitical Christianity to a kind of unwitting apologetics for oppression: “This theology fits without conflict into the requirements of the ‘civil religion’ of modern society. As the ‘civil religion’ of that society, it ministers to its educated and ruling classes, but not to its victims [den Opfern].”61 The way out of this dead end is “an emphatically social christology.”62 Yet his analysis does not stop at human sociality, but extends to nature as well, as the unacknowledged ground of human history and being. This is true also of his account of suffering: “Jesus suffers [his torments] in solidarity with others, and vicariously for many, and proleptically for the whole suffering creation.”63 Suffering itself, however, is here not absolutized but rather submitted to an overarching cosmic redemption. What’s more, where in The Crucified God Moltmann had pointed to 59 60 61 62 63

Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, xv. Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 45 (translation altered, GT // 63). Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 63 (GT // 82). Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 71. Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 152.

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The Politics of Redemption suffering as the point of God’s solidarity with us, here his vision is greatly expanded: History is what takes place between God and human beings, human beings and God. History, we might say, putting it generally, is the community of human beings and nature, and the community of the humanity-andnature relationship with God [die Gemeinschaft des Mensch-Natur-Verhältnisses mit Gott]. It is a community in contradictions and correspondences, in expectations and in disappointments.64 In other words, there is no single point of solidarity between God and humanity, but an entire complex of historical relationships, both positive and negative, joyful and suffering. So we have seen that suffering is de-absolutized—but perhaps surprisingly, this takes place in the context of a de-absolutization of God himself. If we are to understand Christology through the relational lens he supplies, then, “we have to give up the notion of centrism altogether. If history is interaction and interplay, then the alternative never arises: are human beings the subject of history, or is God?”65 What has happened between The Crucified God and The Way of Jesus Christ? Moltmann attributes the shift to his development of a thoroughly Trinitarian Christology, one that gets past the duality of Father and Son by way of the Spirit.66 One could read Moltmann’s scheme in The Crucified God as one in which Christ as Son stands in for suffering humanity, and God’s suffering with the Son constitutes God’s relatedness to humanity. Everything else fades into the background in the face of this mysterious fact. The basic structure of the argument, then, would tend more toward what I have called an individualistic style of thought. The absolutization of the cross leads to an absolutization of suffering as the bond between humanity and God. By contrast, in the later work, the Holy Spirit introduces a new set of relationships that 64 65 66

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Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 245 (translation altered, GT // 268). Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 245 (translation altered, GT // 268). Moltmann, Way of Jesus Christ, 152–3.

Questioning Atonement then results in a proliferation of relationality. To generalize, then, one might say that any form of absolutization, even in a context where an author fully intends to think relationally, begets more absolutization, whereas the introduction of further degrees of relationality begets more relationality. By the time of The Way of Jesus Christ, Moltmann appears to have come to a logical endpoint in this regard, refusing even to absolutize God. Returning to Boff ’s critique, then, we might say that Boff has pinpointed precisely what Moltmann must discard—and ultimately does discard—in order to fulfill his intention. Moltmann can thus serve as a model for two tendencies in Bonhoeffer. The early Moltmann represents a reading of Bonhoeffer wherein he views suffering as good simply because commanded by God—in other words, absolutizing suffering. The result of this path is a theology that, while different in significant respects from the traditional one, nevertheless shares its individualistic shape. The later Moltmann, by contrast, provides a model for contextualizing suffering, both historically and theologically. It is possible that this latter approach is implicit in Bonhoeffer’s prison writings: Bonhoeffer may simply be recommending the path of suffering as a concrete political strategy within the secular world or claiming that historical reality is such that suffering is always going to be a component of the church’s experience. Insofar as he would have followed the early Moltmann’s path, however, I believe it is fair to say that it would constitute a betrayal of the social-relational scheme that culminates in the prison writings. To that extent, it seems that one can view his valorization of redemptive suffering—insofar as he is absolutizing it as an intrinsic good—as a contradiction within his social-relational scheme, one that would undermine it if not dealt with. On the other side, we can say that the rejection of redemptive suffering is not an idiosyncratically feminist or womanist theme, but a natural outcome of the social-relational style of thought that characterizes the mainstream critical discourse on atonement today. Thus one of the defining traits for my social-relational reading of my patristic and medieval sources will necessarily be the complete absence of any notion of redemptive suffering as an interpretive key. Now I do not mean to be understood as implying that any of the theologians discussed here were 51

The Politics of Redemption motivated by a merely formal coherence in rejecting the notion of redemptive suffering—clearly all of them are driven by deep moral concerns. What I have been trying to demonstrate through my investigation of liberation theologies and investigation of redemptive suffering is simply that the social-relational style of thought they are all using goes together with the critical stance and liberatory goals they have set themselves. There is an inner necessity at work: social-relational thinking goes hand in hand with the quest to get behind an individualistic and ideological theology—that is, one that obscures social reality and thus helps to perpetuate the status quo—and to discover in the gospel message a challenging, critical word.

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Chapter 3

Reclaiming the Tradition

In the previous chapter, my goal was to demonstrate that socialrelational thinking—ranging from descriptive social analysis to social theory, theological anthropology, and in some cases ontology—was a major feature in the mainstream of contemporary discourse on atonement theories. In both their critical moves and their positive proposals, the theologians surveyed consistently challenged individualistic modes of thought and brought forward social-relational ones. The use of this style of thought, however, is not an end in itself for these thinkers. Their rejection of the dominant atonement theory, most notably, is not motivated directly by its individualistic structure, but rather by the violence it justifies among the oppressors and the passive acceptance of suffering it inculcates among the oppressed. This moral purpose accounts for the fact that most of the authors surveyed did not thematize social-relational thought as such and instead simply put it to work. This chapter will mostly be taken up with two works that respond to this mainstream critical discourse: J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement and Hans Boersma’s Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross.1 As is clear from their titles, these authors go along with the theologians already discussed in tying together violence and atonement. Nevertheless, there are also significant differences. Perhaps most importantly in terms of situating my project, both attempt a kind of return to the tradition in the wake of the contemporary critiques. Such a move is not unprecedented in the liberation-oriented literature. Feminist theologian Darby Ray, writing before either Weaver or Boersma, already proposed 1

J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001) and Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).

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The Politics of Redemption turning to the patristic ransom motif as a potential source of insight.2 For the most part, though, critics of atonement theory have rejected the tradition altogether. Even the moral influence theory, under which Weaver and others typically class contemporary atonement theories,3 often comes in for critique as valorizing suffering. Instead of attempting to reappropriate the tradition, these theologians have generally preferred to return to the New Testament, and primarily the synoptic gospels, to develop their own alternative positions. Another significant difference is that both Boersma and Weaver address the question of violence in general, without regard to any specific situation of oppression. I do not object to such an approach in principle—after all, my own project is, when compared to most of the contemporary work addressed in the previous chapter, very abstract and formal. Nevertheless, in both cases I believe that their respective stances toward violence are symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the way that the tradition of atonement theory has been schematized in modern theology. Since the publication of Aulén’s Christus Victor,4 theologians have normally taken his threefold typology as a given fact, even if they have sometimes supplemented it with additional subtypes. Theologians who have wished to reaffirm or reappropriate the tradition have taken one of two approaches: either pick one type to defend over against the other two or else attempt a synthesis drawing to some degree on all three types.Weaver and Boersma are among the most recent

2

3 4

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See Darby Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1998). Though Ray would seem to be a good dialogue partner with Weaver and Boersma, I am not discussing her work in this chapter for two reasons. First, the majority of her book is taken up with lengthy discussions of the feminist and liberation literature surrounding atonement, that is, with the methodological questions of how one can justify addressing atonement at all and of how to bring together feminist and liberation perspectives. Second, when she does address traditional atonement theories in her own voice, she limits herself essentially to the ransom theory, and that in a tentative and experimental mode. See The Nonviolent Atonement, ch. 5. Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1931).

Reclaiming the Tradition representatives of those two trends, with Weaver selecting one and Boersma drawing on all three. I cannot deny Aulén’s achievement in breaking the impasse in discussions of atonement by reintroducing patristic themes alongside the perennial debate between Anselm and Abelard. Nevertheless, his work has a serious flaw: it comes at the problem from an individualistic viewpoint, focused only on the relationship between God and human beings. He completely bypasses the anthropological, social-theoretical, and ontological questions that I propose to investigate in the present study. Both Weaver and Boersma follow him in this respect, though in different ways: Weaver, due to a suspicion of “Greek philosophical concepts,” actively rejects ontological investigation, whereas Boersma relies on a largely unelaborated individualistic ontology. This chapter will address these three authors in reverse chronological order: Boersma, then Weaver, and finally Aulén. My hope is that by pointing out the problems created by these attempts to reclaim the tradition, the need for my alternative approach will become more clear.

Violent Hospitality: Boersma Calvinist theologian Hans Boersma’s response to the dominant critique of the atonement tradition is simple: he admits that the tradition is violent, but rejects the notion that “violence is, under any and all circumstances, a morally negative thing.”5 In this he believes he has the support of the mainstream of the Western Christian tradition: Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin “all agreed that under certain circumstances acts of violence—such as war— are not only permitted but are required as acts of love.”6 Boersma does not simply assert that the violence of the tradition is a brute fact that we must accept, however. Instead, he tries to demonstrate its inner necessity, relying on two basic strategies: (1) extending the definition of violence to include things not intuitively classed as

5 6

Boersma, Violence, 43. Boersma, Violence, 43.

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The Politics of Redemption violent and (2) defining God’s action in the world as “hospitality,” which has a necessary link to violence in Boersma’s view. The first view can easily be dismissed as a simple logical fallacy. Countering the opinions of advocates of non-violence, including Weaver, Boersma includes under the heading of “violence” vastly more than pacifists do. His initial move is a common-sense one. Drawing on a definition of violence as “any act which contravenes the rights of another [or] causes injury to the life, property, or person of a human being, oneself, or others,”7 Boersma calls for an acknowledgment that verbal and emotional abuse can at times be even more damaging than physical abuse. Presumably Weaver and others would not object to this claim. Then Boersma takes it a step further and asks, “When I physically restrain my wife from crossing the street because I suddenly see a car speeding around the corner, am I acting violently?”Weaver—and I assume virtually all native speakers of English—would say no, but Boersma believes this is inconsistent. Moreover, he disagrees with the pacifist advocacy of “active nonphysical resistance (economic boycotts, strikes, etc.) or positive physical or nonphysical coercion,” like Boersma’s example of restraining a heedless pedestrian.8 Over the course of his argument, it becomes clear that his definition of violence is becoming diluted to the point of encompassing all force of any kind and, arguably, any type of interaction at all. Using this counterintuitive definition of violence, which includes many things pacifists advocate and many others they could not possibly object to, Boersma wishes to claim that their rejection of violence is incoherent.Yet he has never dealt with their objections to what they claim is violent. His misstep is clear: one cannot rightly claim to win an argument through a unilateral change in definitions. I believe there is more at work in Boersma’s definition of violence than a simple logical error, however, and one way to get at that is through an analysis of his other primary argumentative strategy: his use of the notion of hospitality. From the perspective of my project, this move may seem promising—not only does 7

8

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Boersma, Violence, 44, citing Donald X. Burt, Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 162. Emphasis in original. Boersma, Violence, 45.

Reclaiming the Tradition “hospitality” seem to indicate some form of social-relational thought, but his analysis of the concept draws on important figures in the intellectual genealogy of Jean-Luc Nancy, namely, Jacques Derrida and, secondarily, Emmanuel Levinas. What he actually takes from Derrida and Levinas, however, is extremely limited.9 For Derrida, the word “hospitality” elicits the hope of an absolute hospitality that would be all-inclusive, yet he sees that in the world in which we live, any concrete practice of hospitality is going to have to be accompanied by exclusion—I cannot let literally everyone into my house—or, in Boersma’s terms, “violence.” Therefore, when he defines the divine intention toward the world as one of “hospitality”—something that his readers will presumably agree is good—Boersma is simultaneously making a case for the sad necessity of “violence.” Boersma goes to considerable trouble to make sure that he comes out disagreeing with these two “postmodern” philosophers, which sometimes leads to distortions of their arguments. For instance, he complains that their insistence on “absolute hospitality” as the only hospitality truly worthy of the name means that they “cannot see past our narcissism and see the practice of hospitality for the loving activity that it is.”10 Derrida is of course well aware that conditional hospitality is real hospitality, indeed the only hospitality we actually have.11 Derrida’s ethical thought is entirely structured around the tension between a hyperbolically pure or absolute version of whatever ethical concept he is analyzing— hospitality, the gift, forgiveness, or what have you—and its concrete instantiation. The challenge is to avoid both despair and cynicism by recognizing the validity of the hope represented by the impossible version of the ethical concept and expanding the concept’s purview in practice as far as possible without extending it to the

9

10 11

It’s unclear to me what specific argumentative work the reference to Levinas is achieving for Boersma, since he seems to equate the two for all practical purposes, apparently taking Derrida’s critical reappropriation of Levinas as a simple presentation of Levinas’s thought. Boersma, Violence, 144. See, for example, Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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The Politics of Redemption point of its self-undermining or self-destruction.12 In fact, if Boersma is in substantial disagreement with Derrida on any point, it is precisely on the definition of absolute hospitality as nonexclusive. Boersma claims that in the eschaton, God will institute an order of absolute hospitality, yet he dismisses out of hand the possibility of universal salvation.13 Thus even eschatological hospitality will be accompanied by, if not explicitly predicated on, exclusion. Nevertheless, he purports to share Derrida’s definition of absolute hospitality, claiming only that Derrida’s overemphasis of that definition leads him to demean concrete hospitality. Much more important than his arguable misuse of what he takes from Derrida and Levinas is what he ignores. Symptomatic here is his characterization of the significance of the Other in Levinas’s thought: “The face of the other places me under the ethical obligation of responding with hospitable love . . . .”14 Leaving aside the question of whether Levinas would ever use the word “love” in such a way, Boersma’s description entirely omits the profound pathos of Levinas’s argument. Where is the disruptive character of the Other’s inbreaking? Where is the notion that the Other puts the self into the accusative case, turns the self into (logically) dependent object rather than controlling subject? One could ask similar questions of his treatment of Derridean hospitality. Boersma gladly seizes on the paradox of hospitality and exclusion, while completely ignoring what one might call the originary hospitality that precedes the self, the idea that the host needs the guest and the guest defines the host, as suggested by the French word hôte, which can mean both guest and host. 12

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14

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For a helpful guide to Derrida’s later ethical thought, see Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). For instance, he says, “I am not convinced that Irenaeus in fact holds to such a ‘physical’ soteriology, which would logically lead to a position of universal salvation” (Violence, 123). At this point, Boersma could note that Irenaeus explicitly embraces the notion of eternal damnation in Against Heresies or could make a more general argument against universal salvation. Instead, he does neither, indicating to me that for him universalism is a self-evidently unacceptable conclusion. Why this should be so for a theologian who defines God as the God of hospitality is far from obvious. Boersma, Violence, 29.

Reclaiming the Tradition It is understandable that Boersma would feel uncomfortable with such notions, given that he is defining God as hospitable and clearly does not want to disrupt the traditional concept of God by suggesting that humans as guests determine God in some way. Yet he doesn’t account for this aspect of Derrida and Levinas’s thinking at all, even on the level of human-to-human interaction. Instead, we are presented with a scenario in which a preconstituted self encounters a clearly external other, and then chooses whether to fulfill his or her obligation to show “hospitable love.” His definition of violence, with its focus on rights and integrity, reflects the same basic atomistic individualism. In addition, his examples point toward a basically ahistorical view of “rights.” One can see this logic at work in his claim that a boycott or a strike is violent insofar as it causes “harm.”15 It is unclear to me on the face of it that either one, particularly a boycott, actively causes harm— rather, it seems that both actions merely deprive the business owner of some anticipated benefit, specifically patronage of the store or labor power.The only way to construe this as active harm is to assume that the business owner necessarily has a perpetual right to those benefits, simply by virtue of having enjoyed them in the past. The end result of this line of reasoning is that any change in the status quo is necessarily violent—in every actual existing situation, all individuals have a presumptive right to continue to enjoy whatever social benefits they happen to enjoy and can therefore declare any negative change to be violent.Violence becomes all-pervasive—indeed seems to become identical to life itself—and therefore disappears as a moral category. It is difficult to imagine any concrete social analysis resulting from such a stance,16 much less a transformative practice. One might suspect that this is simply a matter of Boersma getting caught up in the heat of a polemic. That is not the case, however. At every step of his argument, Boersma’s position is 15 16

Boersma, Violence, 47. The closest Boersma comes to concrete social analysis in this book is a paragraph in which he derides the notion that the decreased prosperity and opportunities of “Generation X” compared with the previous generation constitutes “suffering.” He then proceeds to speculate that perhaps “the experience of true suffering would open us up to the possibility that suffering may have redemptive value” (Violence, 230).

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The Politics of Redemption clear: violence is necessary “both because of creational limitations and because of the influence of sin.”17 The emphasis is consistently on the former rather than the latter, as is clear from the first sentence of his epilogue, where the reference to sin drops out altogether: “all acts of hospitality in history share in the limited and conditional character of creation and require, as such, some degree of violence.”18 For Boersma, then, God must use divine violence in the plan of redemption not simply because of the contingent emergence of sin, but because the very structure of creation requires it. That structure, as we have seen, is one of atomistic individualism.19 Though he hopes for absolute, and therefore presumably non-violent, hospitality in the eschaton, his scheme makes it very difficult to imagine how such a thing would work, even setting aside his non-universalism. Will human beings cease to be limited and conditional in the eschaton? If not, how will God’s relationship to them be anything but violent, unless perhaps Boersma is envisioning a total stasis? Or will God simply institute a radically new ontology, unimaginable to us in our present state, in which that logic does not apply? If God is able to do so (which God presumably is for Boersma), then why did God not structure creation according to a non-individualistic, non-violence-requiring ontology in the first place? In short, in Boersma’s scheme, God freely and willfully created a violence-requiring world that necessitated a violent form of redemption, and so it is difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that Boersma’s God actually desires violence—indeed, no other explanation is possible, given Boersma’s clear embrace of the voluntarist Calvinist concept of God. Far from debunking or even coherently responding to the critiques of the violence 17

18 19

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Boersma, Violence, 92. In this specific context, Boersma is talking about the impossibility of absolute hospitality rather than explicitly addressing the necessity of violence, but since non-absolute hospitality requires violence, it amounts to the same thing. Boersma, Violence, 257. He does make some gestures toward a more social view of things, emphasizing the importance of the election of Israel as a nation as well as the role of the church, but particularly in the latter case he still seems to fall within the framework of Nancy’s “metaphysics of the absolute”—replacing individualism with authoritarianism rather than a genuinely social-relational scheme.

Reclaiming the Tradition inherent in traditional atonement theory, then, Boersma proves their point in the most hyperbolic way possible. Just as in Nancy’s “metaphysics of the absolute,” atomistic individualism is accompanied by authoritarianism, in this case an authoritarianism that asserts that we must ultimately accept the necessity of violence simply because God is God. Despite my obvious disapproval of Boersma’s work, I must concede that on a purely formal level, he is making a move that I have argued is crucial: linking together the questions of atonement and ontology. The difference, however, is that I am attempting to develop an ontology out of the tradition’s broad understanding of the underlying structure of Christ’s work.This stance is motivated by a conviction, shared with Karl Barth and many other theologians throughout history, that God’s work in Christ is not an afterthought—God created the world for the sake of the Incarnation. From this I take what I believe to be a very logical step and assume that God created the world in such a way as to be open to the saving work he intended in Christ. For Boersma, the procedure seems to be different. He first posits a particular structure of creation, namely, an individualistic one necessitating the use of violence. Then, in a secondary move, he claims that God’s saving work must include the use of violence if it is to respond to the way creation actually is. His individualistic ontology does not seem to be based on what he finds in the work of Christ, but instead on his understanding of concepts like finitude, conditionality, hospitality, and violence, which together amount to an implicit ontology developed independently of his understanding of atonement. One indication that this procedure cannot be right is his approach to Irenaeus. Though he claims to be drawing on Irenaeus as a key source and even defines—rightly, in my view—Irenaeus’s notion of “recapitulation” as the formal structure underlying all atonement theories, Boersma is consistently dismissive of Irenaeus’s conviction that violence has no place in a Christian concept of God. As we will see in a later chapter, God’s non-violence is a major structuring principle precisely for Irenaeus’s account of the saving work of Christ. Thus, for Boersma to mobilize Irenaeus in an argument for the necessity of divine violence is counterintuitive at best. Such an approach seems to indicate that for Boersma all the important 61

The Politics of Redemption questions have already been answered at the level of ontology and approaches to atonement that do not rely on that ontology are simply not taken seriously. In contrast, I propose to start with the question of what Christ’s work tells us about the ontological structure of creation, in the hope that the results will in turn enrich our understanding of that work.

Narrative, Not Ontology: Weaver In The Nonviolent Atonement, Mennonite theologian J. Denny Weaver embraces the contemporary critique of the atonement tradition and attempts to develop his own account starting from the premise of a non-violent God. Though his project grows out of his context as a member of a peace church, he believes that his approach is fundamentally in agreement with the main proposals in black, feminist, and womanist theology, and in fact he goes to great lengths to demonstrate this agreement. In terms of sources, what he adds to the mainstream of contemporary critiques is an account of New Testament writings other than the synoptic gospels, most notably the book of Revelation. In this regard, he is part of a broad trajectory within twentieth-century theology, which has tended toward viewing more and more of the New Testament writings through a political lens. For instance, Boff claimed that although the New Testament was manifestly nonpolitical in intent, it contained certain indications that would allow us to discern the political significance of something like the “historical Jesus.” Later authors went further and took the gospel narratives, or at least some of them, as being directly political. With Weaver, the circle expands to include essentially the entire New Testament and, at least implicitly, certain strains of the patristic writings as well. Weaver does not deal at length with patristic authors, instead taking for granted Aulén’s “classical” or “Christus Victor” theory of the atonement and demonstrating its importance for understanding the New Testament. At the same time, he extends Aulén’s model, supplementing its perceived failure to address the entire story of Christ’s life and the political circumstances in which it arose. He calls this augmented atonement theory “narrative 62

Reclaiming the Tradition Christus Victor.” His approach leads him to undertake considerable social analysis, situated primarily in a reading of Revelation that attempts to demonstrate that the final book of the New Testament is concerned to present the empire—which Weaver equates with the “devil” of the classic theory—as in principle already defeated and to put forward the Christian community as the form of human sociality with a real future. On the contemporary side, Weaver does not undertake a significant amount of original social analysis, but he does relate “narrative Christus Victor” to the social analyses present in the black, feminist, and womanist theological traditions. The basic frame of Weaver’s theory is the conflict between Christ and the powers of evil. The resurrection represents God’s victory over and rejection of evil, but that victory must be appropriated by human beings to have a real effect: The resurrection as the victory of the reign of God over the forces of evil constitutes an invitation to salvation, an invitation to submit to the rule of God. It is an invitation to enter a new life, a life transformed by the rule of God and no longer in bondage to the powers of evil that killed Jesus. For those who perceive the resurrection, the only option that makes sense is to submit to the reign of God. Christians, Christ-identified people, participate in the victory of the resurrection and demonstrate their freedom from bondage to the powers by living under the rule of God rather than continuing to live in the power of the evil that killed Jesus. Salvation is present when allegiances change and new life is lived “in Christ” under the rule of God.20 The patristic motif of persuasion is clearly at work in this description, as is the notion of a transformed practice as the true meaning of salvation. One cannot enter into this practice of salvation directly, however. First one must “identify with sin . . . . In particular, we need to acknowledge our enslavement to the powers that killed Jesus, to confess our place on the side of those 20

Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 45.

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The Politics of Redemption who opposed the reign of God.”21 Weaver is emphatic that both of these confessions go together: “Being a sinner means to acknowledge our identification with those who killed Jesus and our bondage to the powers that enslaved them.”22 Again, as we will see in a later chapter, this emphasis is consonant with the patristic sources from which Aulén derived the Christus Victor theory that Weaver is expanding upon. Unlike with Boersma, then, his starting presuppositions do not force him to explain away major parts of the part of the tradition he is drawing on. The problem from my perspective is not so much anything that Weaver does, but what he does not do. While the addition of “narrative” to Christus Victor is salutary insofar as it takes into account Christ’s ministry and political context, it seems to have the side-effect of confining Weaver to a more purely descriptive level, with no real interrogation of the anthropological, socialtheoretical, or ontological foundations for the phenomena he is describing. Furthermore, from his justifiable suspicion of “Greek philosophical, ontological categories” that presuppose “a world picture of a hierarchical universe,”23 he appears to draw the unwarranted conclusion that philosophical or theoretical approaches as such are always problematic. The result is that certain types of questions are never asked. For instance, exactly why is it that our enslavement to evil powers carries along with it an identification with those very powers? The link between the two is not simply intuitive, and given that link’s importance to Weaver’s concept of sin, some type of explanation would be helpful. Other, broader questions also present themselves: how exactly did evil come to have sway over all of humanity? Yes, the devil chose evil and misled Adam and Eve, but why should that effect persist beyond them? At one point, Weaver claims that “narrative Christus Victor” allows us to see social structures as sinful because the role of the devil “removes the structures of the social order from God’s ordering and makes them human creations.”24 Yet how is it that human beings are able to create such evil-propagating social structures? 21 22 23 24

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Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 75. Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 75. Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 92. Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 214.

Reclaiming the Tradition Simply leaving those types of questions unaddressed is problematic enough, but the mind-set that leads to that omission also seems to affect Weaver’s positive argument as well. I do not wish to repeat Boersma’s mistake of defining violence overly broadly, but Weaver’s lack of attention to the structure of creation and of human sociality arguably leads to a kind of unilateralism that is foreign to the tradition’s insistence on divine persuasion. For instance, arguing against Carter Heyward’s reappropriation of Abelard’s moral influence theory, Weaver says: for narrative Christus Victor the resurrection signifies that the order of the cosmos has been determined, that the reign of God has been revealed as ultimately established whether or not rebellious human beings recognize it. And for those who do, the resurrection is a revelation of the true power of the cosmos. And it is the future culmination of that order of God which provides the eschatological dimension of our life within history and thus makes clear why it is indeed worthwhile to suffer with the oppressed in the name of the reign of God.25 First, this passage presents God’s work as a kind of outside imposition on the world. God has done his work, objectively—we simply take it or leave it.Those who take it are expected to live differently from those who don’t, but the ultimate validation of that lifestyle is the eschatological horizon rather than any notion that that lifestyle actually makes sense within the world as we know it. The tendency of the argument is Marcionite, in the sense of seeming to posit some foreign God come to rescue us from the evil god’s creation. Surely it is not Weaver’s intention to take such a position, but his failure to think through the ontological implications of his argument allows him to drift in that direction.The solution, in my view, is to assume that some more fundamental structure underlies both the order of evil and the order of salvation—that is, the same structure that allowed evil to propagate itself once it arose is what allows God to intervene in such a way as to reverse that propagation. Such a position opens the door to a more nuanced understanding 25

Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, 154.

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The Politics of Redemption of, for example, the importance of a non-violent form of community, one that does not rely so heavily, if implicitly, on an argument from (God’s) authority. Instead, one might say that the violent rule of evil represents creation’s self-destruction, while the non-violent order of salvation represents healing. This insight might then be able to take into account the social-theoretical insight into the importance of “soft power” or persuasion for even the most oppressive regime—the created social order simply cannot sustain unrestrained violence, so that even the violent must rely primarily on non-violence in the long run. Whatever concrete form the argument would take, however, it would arguably be more persuasive, both in structure and in effect, than Weaver’s, which seems to offer relatively few ways in for anyone who does not already embrace the authority of the Christian narrative.26

Divine Unilateralism: Aulén Both Weaver and Boersma take their lead from Aulén’s classic typology of three atonement theories: the classical or Christus Victor model, the objective Anselmian model, and the subjective Abelardian or Liberal Protestant model. Boersma attempts a synthesis of the three, aligning them with the Calvinist notion of Christ as prophet, priest, and king, while Weaver follows Aulén’s strong advocacy of the Christus Victor model over against the others. Despite their sharp differences, however, both Boersma and Weaver take something much more fundamental from Aulén, something that might be called his attitudinal stance toward the problem of atonement. It cannot be denied that Aulén assembles the relevant data on the question of atonement generally and particularly on the main patristic themes—the importance of divine persuasion, the Irenaean notion of recapitulation, the existence of evil powers opposed to God, and the ransom paid to the devil.Yet it also cannot be denied that Aulén’s argument is in some respects idiosyncratic. Its two distinguishing features are 26

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This is an area where Weaver, for all his non-violence, is arguably more authoritarian than Boersma, who makes explicit allowance for instantiations of true hospitality outside the Christian community.

Reclaiming the Tradition an absolute insistence on divine unilateralism in the atonement and the rejection of anything like a rational system. As should be clear, Boersma and Weaver have inherited these idiosyncratic traits along with the basic typology, with both emphasizing divine unilateralism and Weaver explicitly rejecting a philosophical or theoretical approach. The result is that although all three authors look to the Christus Victor model as a way out of the impasse of Abelard versus Anselm, subjective versus objective, they are nonetheless unable to escape from the individualistic framework that underlies that endless debate. Without a social-relational framework, the patristic voices cannot really make themselves heard—and this is the case even for Aulén, who presents himself as the strongest possible advocate of the patristic view. Throughout Christus Victor, Aulén is insistent that the key question we need to be asking about any atonement theory is whether “it represents the work of Atonement or reconciliation as from first to last a work of God Himself, a continuous Divine work.”27 Nowhere, however, does he clarify exactly why this should be the key question. Such an emphasis seems particularly strange for a thinker in the Christian tradition, which has consistently claimed that our salvation required God to become fully and truly human. Aulén criticizes Anselm’s theory as presenting a “discontinuous” divine action because Christ qua human makes the offering to God,28 which would seem to be the one area where Anselm is most unequivocally in harmony with the patristic tradition. After all, the entire goal of classical orthodoxy was to make some sense of the idea of Christ as fully God and fully human, precisely because both elements are absolutely necessary to the Christian concept of salvation.The last of the major Christological heresies (aside from iconoclasm) were monothelitism and monergism, against which it was asserted that Christ must be understood as both willing and acting in a fully human way, in harmony with the divine willing and acting. Aulén’s rhetorical gambit seems to be to present the Christus Victor theory as more objective even than the objective theory,

27 28

Aulén, Christus Victor, 21. Aulén, Christus Victor, 22.

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The Politics of Redemption but it is unclear to me why a more “objective” theory should be self-evidently desirable. Beyond that, his peculiar sense of “objectivity” seems to lead him in a docetist direction—something that Boersma rightly points out.29 More importantly for the present argument, his insistence on the “objective” leaves him within the same individualistic polarity of God versus humanity that underwrote the endless controversy between the objective and subjective theories. Concretely, this means that Aulén is finally unable to incorporate in a meaningful way the primary motifs of the patristic approach into his presentation of the Christus Victor theory. For instance, he rightly notes the importance of what one could call a kind of “soft” dualism, which gives some provisional integrity to evil forces opposed to God without making them ontological principles equal to God as in Manichaeism. Yet why does the existence of that evil structure matter if the action is entirely on God’s side? Why could God not simply sweep them away without this elaborate plot of the Incarnation? On a more formal level, the divine unilateralism renders the patristic notion that God works through persuasion incoherent—what distinguishes persuasion from coercion if not its non-unilateral character? These types of inconsistencies might not be problematic from Aulén’s perspective, however. He holds up the apparent contradictions in the classical view as arguments in its favor. He points out several incoherencies—for example, the logic of Irenaeus’s position seems to point toward universalism, yet he embraces the notion of eternal damnation—and in each case, one is told that it demonstrates the patristic theory’s freedom from the chains of rationality, which Aulén aligns with law as opposed to grace. He complains that in modern scholarship on patristic atonement imagery, “No serious attempt is made to penetrate behind the outward form to the underlying idea.”30 Yet for him the “underlying idea” is somehow extra-rational: “Every attempt to force this conception into a purely rational scheme is bound to

29 30

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Boersma, Violence, 188–9. Aulén, Christus Victor, 27.

Reclaiming the Tradition fail; it could only succeed by robbing it of its religious depth.”31 Indeed, one begins to suspect that the “underlying idea” is ultimately nothing but the divine unilateralism—an idea that Aulén puts forward as a postulate from the very beginning of his investigation. In a sense, then, Aulén faces the same problem as Boersma, in that for both, all the most important questions are in principle answered before a close examination of the texts begins and therefore both wind up pointing out and yet failing to incorporate the primary insights of the patristic scheme. Since both are approaching the question using an individualistic framework, that provides a prima facie justification for using a non-individualistic, socialrelational style of thought to investigate the atonement tradition. Moreover, given the gaps and seeming contradictions in Weaver’s account, one can see the value in expanding the question beyond the relationship between God and humanity to include the structuring principles of creation and human sociality as reflected in the work of Christ. Given the pervasiveness of social-relational approaches in the critical mainstream of contemporary theological discourse on the atonement, there would then appear to be compelling evidence, both positive and negative, that my project is at least a worthy experiment. The proof, however, can only be in the results.When compared to the attempts to reclaim the tradition in this chapter, one key measure of my success must be the degree to which I am able to incorporate the dominant motifs of the patristic approach to the question of atonement into a coherent scheme and therefore let it stand out in its full distinctiveness. An additional goal would be to give some account of how the competing Anselmian and Abelardian theories were able to arise, while remaining open to the idea that these theories actually enrich the patristic account in certain ways. Since I have said that Aulén’s book, for all its idiosyncrasies, does assemble the most relevant evidence on this question, I will take up the four primary figures that he presents as foundational for each of the views, devoting one chapter to a close reading of texts from each: Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, 31

Aulén, Christus Victor, 173.

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The Politics of Redemption Anselm, and Abelard.32 In each case, my focus will be on what each author is telling us, whether explicitly or implicitly, along the axis ranging from theological anthropology through to social theory and ontology, with reference to relevant philosophical texts. I will then conclude my study by using the insights gleaned from my readings to develop a tentative sketch of an atonement theory that foregrounds anthropological, social-theoretical, and ontological concerns, in an effort to demonstrate that such a focus enriches our understanding of Christ’s work.

32

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Using two patristic sources is necessary not only because I am privileging the patristic view, but also because Irenaeus and Gregory seem to me to have significantly different emphases even as they share the same basic framework. In addition, while an investigation along these lines of later figures, most notably Luther and Calvin, is tempting, I believe that the most important thing for the moment is simply to be clear on what are widely agreed to be the most important initial expressions of each view.

Chapter 4

Irenaeus

From the perspective of a social-relational investigation into the major atonement theories, it is a promising sign that so many of the primary texts—Irenaeus’s Against Heresies,1 Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechism, and Anselm’s Why God Became Human—are written explicitly for the use of others. Of course no text is written in complete isolation, but in each of these three cases, the author is responding to a particular need, whether it be a friend’s difficulty in responding to those who challenge Christian teachings, the need to provide catechists with appropriate ways to instruct and persuade their students, or, in the case of Anselm, the simple desire of his students and friends to read and propagate what he is working on. To that extent, these texts that attempt to answer the question of why God became human are also attempting to make themselves available and useful to the community within which they are situated, explicitly aiming, in various degrees, at real-world effects—and seeking to be transparent about the means by which they intend to produce those effects. What’s more, the two patristic examples are both intended as resources for persuasion, which is itself a central aspect of their understanding of atonement in specific. Irenaeus, writing in the late second century as bishop of a remote Christian community that had recently been devastated by persecution, is primarily responding to what modern scholars 1

The basis for my English quotations will be Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and Cleveland Coxe (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1885), which is presently the only full translation into English of this massive work. I will revise the translation as appropriate, following the Latin and Greek text in Irenaei Opera, vol. 1, ed. Adolphus Strieren, (Leipzig: Weigel, 1853). All subsequent references to Against Heresies will be in-text, following the standard divisions.

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The Politics of Redemption call Gnosticism, and simply on the level of method, the contrast between Irenaeus and his opponents (at least as he presents them) could not be clearer.2 Where the Gnostic teachers promise secret knowledge to the initiated, Irenaeus is committed to making things public—and that means first of all publicizing ideas to which he is absolutely opposed (1.pref.2).3 Where the Gnostics present themselves as fonts of heavenly knowledge, Irenaeus openly admits his own weakness, specifically his lack of rhetorical training (1.pref.2–3). Finally, where his opponents see themselves as containing a divine spark that makes them strangers in this world, Irenaeus writes out of a desire to help those for whom he feels responsibility in this world. Indeed, it is precisely this desire to help that seems to me to lead to the capacious character of his work. He begins with the modest desire to present the Gnostic teachings as they are in one book and undertake logical disproofs in a second (1.pref.3), but decides to move on to scriptural proofs of all his previous arguments (3.pref), which finally come together into a positive presentation of all major themes of what Irenaeus regards as true Christian belief—all in an effort to be as helpful as possible. What started as a guide to refuting Gnostic teachers, then, evolved rather haphazardly into the first comprehensive presentation of what would come to be orthodoxy. While this is, as I have said, promising on the performative level, it also means that the text presents some difficulties on the practical level. First, as is natural in a work almost certainly composed over the course of several years, there are some inconsistencies. Some interpreters 2

3

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While I acknowledge the possibility that Irenaeus has in certain respects misrepresented his opponents, my goal of understanding Irenaeus’s own position means that for me the Gnostic positions presented are only significant insofar as they are the positions Irenaeus is rejecting. Therefore, although I recognize its importance, I will bracket the historical question of Irenaeus’s accuracy for the purposes of the present chapter. John C. Peckham highlights the fact that Irenaeus’s goal in advancing the authority of scripture, tradition, apostolic succession, and so on, is to secure the public character of the gospel over against Gnostic claims to secret knowledge. See “Epistemological Authority in the Polemic of Irenaeus,” in Didaskalia 19.1 (2008): 59, 68. In fact, Peckham admits that Irenaeus’s polemic purpose means that a conclusive answer to his presenting question of the exact relationship among the authorities Irenaeus cites is impossible (69).

Irenaeus have seen so many inconsistencies that they have despaired of viewing the Against Heresies as a unified work at all, contenting themselves instead with tracking down Irenaeus’s sources. More recently, scholars seem to have tended toward viewing the work as a more or less unified whole, but even so, the sheer heterogeneity of the text—descriptions of several Gnostic systems, logical disproofs, scriptural disproofs, positive developments of doctrine— and its apparently haphazard organization force the interpreter to do major reconstructive work, bringing together often widely separated passages in an attempt to discern Irenaeus’s view on a given topic. The danger here is creating a kind of pastiche of Irenaeus, just as he accuses his Gnostic opponents of doing and even demonstrates using passages from Homer (1.9.4).4 One could also fall prey to another habit Irenaeus attributes to the Gnostics: starting from questionable interpretations of obscure passages and essentially free-associating on that basis, rather than beginning with what is both central and clear. Since some selectiveness is inevitable, especially in a single chapter focused on a particular goal, the best procedure seems to be to follow the method Irenaeus himself suggests: starting from what is most obvious.5 On the level of his critique of Gnosticism, it seems to me that the primary theme is the identity of the creator God and the redeemer God, while on the level of his own positive theology, it is arguably the notion of salvation as recapitulation. My goal in this chapter will be to demonstrate the underlying connection between these two themes and relate them to the question of a social-relational ontology. That is, I wish to show that the specific ways Irenaeus talks about the structure of the created world, and above all the structure of the human race, serve as the logical foundation for his account of salvation as recapitulation. In order to make that argument, I will need to elaborate other key Irenaean themes, including his continual 4

5

Eric Osborn draws attention to this passage in Irenaeus of Lyons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159, in the context of a broader discussion of an oft-overlooked aspect of Irenaeus—his use of parody. This methodological stance is drawn from Osborne, Irenaeus, who believes that the obvious includes four concepts—intellect, economy, recapitulation, and participation—through which the non-obvious aspects of Irenaeus’s text must be interpreted (20–2).

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The Politics of Redemption insistence on unity (one God, one savior, one human race, etc.), his defense of the value of the physical world and particularly the human body, and his emphasis on persuasion over against violence as God’s way of working in the world. What will emerge is an account of creation, redemption, and eschatological fulfillment as, in Aulén’s words, “the work of God Himself from start to finish,”6 yet a work whose sense is grounded not in a divine unilateralism but rather in a social-relational ontology that God establishes and participates in.

Redemption as Recapitulation I will begin by explaining Irenaeus’s basic account of atonement. As I have said, it is centered on the concept of recapitulation, which brings together notions of repetition, summing up, and fulfillment. In a move perhaps suggested by the insistence of some Gnostics that the (evil) creator God made the world both in ignorance and at the end of a long chain of events caused by the ignorance of other cosmic beings, Irenaeus insists that all created reality is taken up into a single divine plan or economy, represented in the threefold movement of creation, Incarnation, and eschatological fulfillment. We can see the basic shape of Irenaeus’s concept of recapitulation in the concluding paragraph of Against Heresies, which itself recapitulates the central arguments of the treatise: For there is the one Son, who accomplished [perfecit] the Father’s will; and one human race [unum genus humanum] also in which the mysteries of God are wrought [perficiuntur], “which the angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:12); and they are not able to search out the wisdom of God, by means of which his handiwork [plasma], confirmed and incorporated with his Son, is brought to perfection; that his offspring, the First-begotten Word, should descend to the creature [facturam], that is, to what had been molded [plasma], and that it should be contained by Him; and, on 6

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Aulén, Christus Victor, 102.

Irenaeus the other hand, the creature [factura] should contain the Word, and ascend to God, passing beyond the angels, and be made after the image and likeness of God. (5.36.3) The Incarnation is a crucial moment in the overall plan of bringing creation, here represented above all by humanity, to perfection, a divine work that still awaits its completion in the eschaton.7 What is perhaps most remarkable about this summary, at least from the perspective of later Christian tradition, is that the problem of sin is not so much as mentioned. The reason for this is that for Irenaeus, the Incarnation is not finally about sin. Rather, the Incarnation was part of the plan all along, repeating and fulfilling the act of creation in which the Son acts, along with the Spirit, as one of the Father’s “hands” (5.16.1) as well as the subsequent interventions of the Son into history (4.10.1)—beginning already in paradise (5.15.4). The end result is the perfection of the “one human race” (5.36.3), but this is not a perfection that amounts to a simple restoration of an earlier state. In one of several scriptural interpretations that are initially puzzling to modern readers, Irenaeus claims that Adam and Eve were in some sense not fully developed when they were originally created. His precise meaning is not clear, though his claim that they did not initially understand the idea of procreation because “it was necessary that they should first grow up [adolescere], and then multiply from that time onward” suggests a prepubescent age (3.22.4). Later tradition has accustomed us to assume that Adam and Eve sprang into being as fully formed adults, reflecting the presupposition of a perfect condition subsequently lost.Yet for Irenaeus, it is simply impossible for created things to begin in a perfect state: created things must be inferior to him who created them, from the very fact of their later origin; for it was not possible for things recently created to have been uncreated. But inasmuch as they are not uncreated, for this very 7

Here the Latin translation provides a nuance that was likely absent in the original Greek text, as the verb perficio, to perfect, is literally an intensive form of facio, to make, whereas the underlying Greek term was likely a form of teleioun.

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The Politics of Redemption reason do they come short of the perfect. Because, as these things are of later date, so are they infantile . . . . It was possible for God himself to have made humanity perfect from the first, but humanity could not receive this perfection, being yet an infant [neˉpios—meaning literally unable to speak]. (4.38.1) The impossibility of making a perfect being from the start is not a fault in God (4.38.2), but an opportunity for God to show God’s goodness by setting humanity on a path of ever-greater perfection. As a result of the saving work of the Father through the Son and Spirit, humanity grows gradually toward the point of participating in God: “But being in subjection to God is continuance in incorruptibility [aphtharsias], and incorruptibility is the glory of the uncreated One” (4.38.3). Elsewhere Irenaeus clarifies that even communion with God is not a static endpoint, but a situation of continual growth: “we hope ever to be receiving more and more from God, and to learn [discere] from him, because he is good and possesses boundless riches, a kingdom without end, and measureless instruction [disciplinam immensam]” (2.28.3).8 For Irenaeus, then, all the later tradition’s attempts to bring together the order of nature and grace are simply unnecessary: creation is the first step toward the eschatological perfection of grace, not a perfect state that grace must restore. All this is not to say that sin is not a serious problem, yet Irenaeus’s account of sin and its relationship to the Incarnation differs significantly from the mainstream of the later tradition, or at least its Western branch. The most notable difference can be seen in the motivations behind the initial fall of both the devil and humanity. Where the Western tradition eventually found itself forced to attribute both to a kind of unfathomable motiveless malignancy, for Irenaeus both make perfect narrative sense: Satan falls when he becomes jealous of humanity’s central place in God’s creative plan (5.24.4), and he was able to deceive Adam and Eve 8

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In keeping with this motif, Jeff Vogel has argued that sin for Irenaeus is fundamentally haste, which works against the patient development that God’s plan requires. See “The Haste of Sin, the Slowness of Salvation: An Interpretation of Irenaeus on the Fall and Redemption,” in Anglican Theological Review 89.3 (2007): 443–59.

Irenaeus successfully because their immaturity and inexperience made them vulnerable targets. In place of a kind of radical refusal of God’s goodness that in works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost can even come to seem principled in its own way, sin initially enters the world through bitterness and wounded pride. Further, its effect in humanity is not total depravity, but simple confusion and fear, to which God’s response is from the very beginning merciful. For example, Irenaeus downplays the curses that God pronounces against Adam and Eve: But man received, as the punishment of his transgression, the toilsome task of tilling the earth, and to eat bread in the sweat of his face, and to return to the earth whence he was taken. Similarly also did the woman receive toil, and labor, and groans, and the pangs of parturition, and a state of subjection, that is, that she should serve her husband; so that they should neither perish altogether when cursed by God, nor, by remaining unreprimanded, should despise [contemnerent] God. (3.23.3) There are real consequences for Adam and Eve—indeed, they appear to want there to be consequences, as illustrated by their free choice of uncomfortable fig leaves as clothing (3.23.5)—but Irenaeus’s emphasis is on the positive: humanity will work for its own survival, of which procreation is a crucial part. Human disobedience does introduce death into the picture, but even death appears in a positive light in the immediate context: Wherefore God also drove humanity [eum] out of Paradise and transported humanity far from the tree of life, not envying humanity [ei] the tree of life, as some dare to say, but pitying humanity so that it would not remain forever a sinner, nor that the sin which surrounded humanity [eum] should be immortal, and evil interminable and irremediable. But he set a bound to humanity’s sin, by interposing death, and thus causing sin to cease . . . . (3.23.6) Note here that even when discussing the punishment of Adam and Eve, Irenaeus views humanity as a unit and refers to it in the 77

The Politics of Redemption singular. The devil is not so fortunate. He bears the full brunt of God’s curse, and in fact Irenaeus draws a parallel between the curse of Genesis and Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats in order to assert that “eternal fire was not originally prepared for humanity, but for the one who beguiled humanity, and caused them to offend—for the one, I say, who is chief of the apostasy, and for those angels who became apostates along with him” (3.23.3). For humanity, then, we find gentle correction and safeguards against their total self-destruction, and for the devil, eternal hellfire. For all its benefits under the circumstances of sin, however, death is not a positive thing in itself and is in fact the very opposite of God’s final intention for humanity. From one perspective it is a necessary emergency measure, but from another perspective it is an illegitimate ruler over humanity, just as the devil becomes humanity’s tyrant—and in fact, Irenaeus jumps back and forth between death and the devil as the chief enemy of humanity. Thus the Incarnation comes to have the goal not only of fulfilling the original creation, but of setting humanity free from death and the devil. Here the concept of recapitulation allows Irenaeus to achieve what Aulén views as the greatest merit of the patristic model of atonement, namely, thoroughly integrating the Incarnation and redemption. On the one hand, the Incarnation of Christ simply taken in itself brings God into a much more intimate relationship with humanity, accustoming humanity to God and—as I will discuss in greater detail—also God to humanity. On the other hand, the actual course of Christ’s life constitutes a kind of negative recapitulation of human sin, replacing disobedience with obedience and defeat by death and the devil with decisive victory over both. For Irenaeus, Christ is the summing up of all humanity (3.16.6), the exemplar of the fully mature human being in ever-increasing union with God (4.32.2–3). To achieve this goal, it is sufficient for Christ to live through all the major divisions of a human life in order to sanctify them—including, contrary to the later view that he lived only into his thirties, old age (2.22.4).9 However, Christ comes not to a 9

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To prove this point, Irenaeus relies on both an oral tradition that he claims stems from the Apostle John—who himself was supposed to have lived over

Irenaeus human race that has enjoyed steady growth in maturity, but a human race damaged by sin and subject to death. Hence he undergoes death, not to sanctify it, but to defeat it. Irenaeus describes the process:“Recapitulating in himself the whole human race from the beginning to the end, he has also recapitulated its death” (5.23.2). Christ’s death stands in for all particular human deaths, and his resurrection overcomes them all, “thus granting humanity a second creation [secundum plasmationem] by means of his passion, a creation out of death” (5.23.2). Similarly, Christ must submit to the bondage to which Satan subjected all humanity, in order to defeat that bondage by showing up the devil as an unjust ruler. Irenaeus is clear that the defeat of Satan is only fully valid if humanity defeats him, and as we have seen, Christ recapitulates humanity as a whole. Christ then takes the additional step of subjecting Satan himself to permanent bondage in order to guarantee humanity’s freedom—a step that is, again, only justifiable on the part of humanity itself, whom Christ sums up (5.21.3).

One Human Race In its broadest outlines, Irenaeus’s account of the atonement is a further development of Paul’s contrast between the first and second Adam as expressed in the Epistle to the Romans: Adam causes a problem for all of humanity, and Christ solves that same problem. What is not immediately clear, however, is exactly how it is that Christ is able to take on a role akin to that of the first human being. The answer lies in Irenaeus’s understanding of the nature of the “one human race [unum genus humanum] in which the mysteries of God are wrought” (5.36.3). In order to get at this understanding, it is helpful first to contrast it with the Gnostic approach, which divided the human race in two respects. First, 100 years (2.22.4)—and John’s gospel. Drawing on the Jews’ complaint that Christ claims to have seen Abraham despite not yet being 50 years old (John 8.57), Irenaeus argues that they would not have used the figure of 50 years unless Jesus was in fact approaching that age (2.22.6). I find this argument persuasive, but at present can only speculate about the interpretive opportunities that open up if we allow the possibility that the Gospel of John intends to present us with a much older Jesus than we are accustomed to.

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The Politics of Redemption they divided the individual human being into two aspects, the body and the soul, which they presented as having been forced together despite their essential incompatibility—in a familiar formulation, one can say that for the Gnostics, the body is the prison of the soul. Second, on the basis of this division within the individual, they divided the human race into two camps, one bodily and irredeemable and one spiritual and automatically redeemed, sometimes supplementing this scheme with a third class that could go either way. For those in the spiritual camp, the world as we know it is a foreign land from which they will be rescued by a God superior to the creator God. Ultimately, this logic leads the Gnostics to divide the person of Christ similarly, attempting to separate his spiritual nature from the body, making the body at best a vehicle and in some cases a mere illusion. Irenaeus unites what the Gnostics divide. On the level of the individual, he argues that the body is the instrument of the soul and the soul is the body’s animating principle (2.23.4), but on the other hand, the soul is decisively the soul of its own particular body. For this reason, transmigration of souls is impossible (2.23.1–3), and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus tells us that after death, the soul maintains the shape of its body (2.24.1), as if in mourning for it. Finally, the eschatological consummation crucially includes the resurrection of the dead, the reuniting of body and soul. More broadly, the human being, though in part spiritual, cannot be imagined without a material environment in which to act (5.36.1). The material world serves as a means of discipline, bringing human beings closer and closer to perfection, yet the end result of that discipline is not the escape from the material world, but the enjoyment of a superabundant material world (5.35.1). Spiritual and physical remain distinctive realities, and the spiritual even has a certain priority, yet the physical never becomes dispensable—human existence is precisely the bringing together of the two. This means that, unlike in the Gnostics scheme, for Irenaeus all human beings are fundamentally equal, made up of the same “stuff.” The extent to which their worth differs is determined through their action in the world (see, for example, 2.30.2), not through the possession of a divine seed denied to others. 80

Irenaeus This emphasis on the irreducible bodiliness of humanity does more than simply assert the equality of all, as important as that is. To begin with, it implies an anthropology wherein each individual is itself defined by the coming together of two distinct realities in relationship.10 From the perspective of a social-relational ontology, then, the human race is not made up of indivisible monads—it is relational “all the way down.” Beyond that, for Irenaeus there is something necessarily public about the body, meaning that the body is what puts us into contact with the outer world in which our actions can have real consequences. For the Gnostics and related schools of thought that value the soul, there is a sense in which what is most fundamental to the human being is monadic in nature, incommunicable to others and oriented ultimately toward some higher principle outside the world as we know it (e.g., the Platonic Good or the Gnostic God beyond the creator)— which is to say that Gnosticism, as Irenaeus presents it, is an individualistic system of thought.This individualism is what allows at least some of the Gnostics to say that some people, regardless of their apparent moral worth, are inherently good or evil, that is, related either to the good God beyond the world or the evil creator God.11 For Irenaeus, this is simply non-sense. Moral goodness is determined by deeds (2.30.2), and “it is manifest that those acts which are deemed just are performed [perficiuntur] in bodies” (2.29.2). Indeed, even God’s greatness is shown forth through mighty deeds (2.29.3–5), which include both the creation of the physical and spiritual world and subsequent acts within the same realm of creation where human beings act.

10

11

Here one might also think of the relationship between male and female, which Benjamin H. Dunning has shown to be a much more complex and ultimately unresolved question for Irenaeus. See “Virgin Earth, Virgin Birth: Creation, Sexual Difference, and Recapitulation in Irenaeus of Lyons,” in Journal of Religion 89.1 (2009): 57–88. Irenaeus says that Simon Magus, whom he claims is the father of all heresies (1.23.1), allowed his followers to do whatever they wanted (1.23.3)—a stance he attributes to several contemporary Gnostic teachers as well. Whether his account is historically accurate or not, it is clear that for Irenaeus, minimizing the importance publicly visible morality in favor of an inherent goodness logically entails a license for destructive real-world behavior.

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The Politics of Redemption So far it might seem that Irenaeus is thinking in individualistic terms of moral worth, but particularly in the context of his account of atonement, it is clear that bodily human beings can act in the physical world in such a way as to affect other human beings— not merely incidentally but decisively. This implies that there is a fundamental solidarity of human beings, a network of relationality within which particular persons can play especially crucial roles. The key examples here are of course Adam and Christ. Their particular roles in this structure can be seen in the following illustration: If a hostile force had overcome certain enemies, had bound them, and led them away captive, and held them for a long time in servitude, so that they begat children among them; and somebody, showing compassion to those who had been made slaves, should overcome this same hostile force; he certainly would not act equitably, were he to liberate the children of those who had been led captive from the sway of those who had enslaved their parents, but should leave the parents, who had suffered the act of capture, subject to their enemies. (3.23.2) Certainly this passage reflects the fact that one of the key relationships among human beings is their biological relatedness. Yet unlike the later Western tradition, which will make birth the site of transmission for a kind of moral brokenness, the accent here is on the socio-political relationships transmitted via childbirth, in this case the condition of slavery or subjection to a foreign power. Adam’s unique role as father of all humanity is what allows for humanity as a whole, including subsequent generations who apparently have nothing to do with Adam and Eve’s choice of sin, to be born into slavery to the devil and death. That very same relatedness is what allows Christ to release all of humanity through his invalidation of humanity’s bondage, thereby displacing Adam as representative of the human race. Since the problem and the solution both presuppose that humanity is somehow “one,” it seems clear that the freedom Christ grants must extend not only, as Darby Ray would have it, 82

Irenaeus “to the souls of those who follow Christ,”12 but to all humanity, including Adam as the original man from whom all humanity springs. No spoil must be left for the devil, lest his defeat be only partial, and this goes most especially for the devil’s original victim. To put it differently, the “one human race” (5.36.3) is all alike held captive by death and the devil. In consequence, then, it seems to me that one is constrained to say that to invalidate death and the devil’s claim is to invalidate at once the claim over all of humanity. The fundamental solidarity of the human race is what allowed humanity’s bondage to arise, and it is also the reason that Christ’s salvific act can and indeed must apply to the entire human race— and so death and the devil really are defeated, not just for Christ’s followers, but for everyone. As I will discuss, Irenaeus does not ultimately embrace universal salvation, but to me it is clear that his account of the stakes and process of salvation points inescapably in that direction. It cannot be a matter of particular individuals being set free, as the Gnostics would have it—such a scheme would fail to make sense of the way the universal bondage arose in the first place. If all humans are in bondage because they are irreducibly related as bodily beings, then the solution to that problem must reflect that interrelatedness.

The Principle of Persuasion It is here that we can begin to see the importance of God’s non-violence as a structuring principle for his account of the atonement—rather than, as Boersma would have it, a more or less dispensable “emphasis.” As elsewhere, it is helpful to look at the Gnostic position that Irenaeus is rejecting in order to contextualize his positive claims. In characterizing the Gnostic system of salvation, he says again and again that the Gnostic redeemer God is stealing away property that belongs to another (e.g., 4.33.2). Thievery, for Irenaeus, characterizes the devil, not God, but that is not simply because humanity really does belong to God. If it were a matter of property rights, it would make sense 12

Ray, Deceiving the Devil, 121.

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The Politics of Redemption for God simply to snatch humanity back from death and the devil. By contrast, Irenaeus puts forward the principle of persuasion, which means first of all the rejection of violence or coercion. Here Irenaeus shares in the fundamental conviction of virtually all patristic authors, clearly summarized by the Epistle to Diognetus: “When God sent Christ, he did so as one who saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God.”13 Although later thinkers such as Origen will explicitly address the role of persuasion in creation and God’s continued governance of the world, Irenaeus and most others share with the Epistle to Diognetus a focus on the Incarnation as the pinnacle of God’s use of persuasion. A good explanation of how this works can be found near the beginning of the final book of Against Heresies: the Word . . . , redeeming us by his own blood reasonably [rationabiliter], gave himself as a redemption for those who had been led into captivity. And since the apostasy dominated us unjustly and, though we by nature belonged to the omnipotent God, alienated us against nature, rendering us its own disciples, the Word of God, powerful in all things and not defective with regard to his own justice, justly turned against that apostasy and redeemed from it those who were his own, not with force [non cum vi], as the apostasy had obtained dominion over us at the beginning when it insatiably snatched away what was not its own, but by means of persuasion [secundum suadelam], as became a persuasive God [Deum suadentem], who does not use force to get what he desires, so that neither should justice be infringed upon, nor the ancient handiwork of God go to destruction. (5.1.1) The first point to note here is the contradiction between force and persuasion. As I’ve noted, from a common-sense perspective, it seems fair enough for God simply to snatch humanity away 13

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Epistle to Diognetus 7.5, in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations of Their Writings, 2nd ed., trans. J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).

Irenaeus from its unjust captors, but that would be contrary to the divine nature: God would become another tyrant—perhaps a legitimate one in some sense, but a tyrant nonetheless. Second, acting in a persuasive manner means addressing the situation of the world as it actually is, from within, rather than imposing upon it from without. Even though humanity’s subjection is unjust, it remains a fact that must be dealt with, using strategy rather than brute force. Immediately after the section quoted above, Irenaeus returns to a point already discussed, namely, that the goal of the Incarnation is that of “imparting [deponente] God to humans through the Spirit and, on the other hand, attaching [imponente] humanity to God by his own Incarnation, and to bestow upon us at his coming incorruptibility durably and truly, by means of communion with God” (5.1.1). Persuasion, then, is not an end in itself or some kind of moral principle God has arbitrarily adopted, but is rather a means to the end of a “durable and true” relationship to humanity. The question that remains is how one might understand the connection between these two points. Here it is perhaps helpful to recall Hegel’s analysis of a relationship founded not on persuasion but on violence, the famous master-slave dialectic.14 Hegel stages a scene between two isolated men, each seeking the other’s recognition through a battle to the death—which is to say that their relationship is predicated on the potential destruction of one of them.The master of course does not follow through on the threat of death, since that would destroy the possibility of the desired recognition. Instead he secures the other’s submission, resulting in an asymmetrical situation of “one being only recognized [the master], the other only recognizing [the slave].”15 What’s more, this relationship brings about alienation for both partners, with the slave alienated from his own labor, since it is done for the master, and the master alienated from any relationship to the world other than that of consumption, which amounts to the same destruction he threatens to visit on the slave. Ultimately, the master not only 14

15

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford, 1977), 111–19, German text: Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2006), B.IV.A. Hegel, Phenomenology, 113.

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The Politics of Redemption fails to gain the recognition he sought—the slave can no longer be viewed as his equal—but is also simply left behind as the slave becomes the real motor of history. In short, a relationship based in the negation of the other leads to the negation of the self as well. With this counterexample in mind, we can turn to persuasion. As defined by Irenaeus, persuasion starts by acknowledging the situation of the other in its specificity. Neither abstracting a particular quality of the other (his potential as a source of recognition), nor threatening to destroy the other, persuasion proceeds “reasonably” (5.1.1). When I use persuasion I attempt to use shared points of reference as leverage not simply to get the other to go along with me, but to bring it about that my position and goal actually become the other’s position and goal as well. On a very obvious level, then, persuasion joins people together— and even if I take the initiative, we join together as collaborators and thus at least in principle as equals. A contrast that can help clarify the equality inherent in persuasion is the scenario of a boss ordering around subordinates. Unlike in a situation of persuasion, the boss may actively conceal her reasoning in order to prevent subordinates from overthinking things and throwing off her plan. Over time, a kind of retrospective persuasion might take place as the subordinates come to realize that the boss is usually right and obedience is therefore the best bet. The situation is not one of violence, therefore, but it never becomes one of anything like real equality—instead a gulf opens between the inscrutable boss and the humble subordinates. What might have developed into a collaborative relationship that could have ultimately enriched the boss’s own thinking thus becomes one characterized by dependence, and the boss is deprived of any real companionship in the process. Now we can see why God uses persuasion in relationship to humanity—after all, the goal of creation is for God and humanity to enter into ever more intimate relationship (2.28.3; 4.38.3), which both violence and unilateral command militate against. The contrast between the Gnostic God and the Christian God thus goes beyond that between a usurper and a rightful owner. God goes a step beyond abstractly asserting his property rights because it is not fundamentally a matter of property. God does not come into the situation as an owner who is able to dispose of 86

Irenaeus goods unilaterally, but as a participant in the human condition— that is, as a human being who stands in relation to all other human beings—because God belongs with humanity and humanity belongs with (and not simply to) God. Sin arose to disrupt that relationship by subjecting humanity to a usurping tyrant, but it is precisely by submitting provisionally to the tyrant’s claim that God sets humanity free. God reveals the tyrant as a usurper by entering into full solidarity with the entirety of the human condition as it actually exists at the time of his intervention—even including the slavery and death that arose contrary to God’s original intentions. This characterization of God’s relationship with humanity clearly goes beyond the literal meaning of persuasion as a means of getting others to agree to one’s own position or goal. Persuasion is a starting point for thinking about a relationship characterized by mutuality. This is not to say that this concept of persuasion can be detached from persuasion’s everyday meaning: its use in theological reflection is grounded in the reality of Christian practice, which at least in the patristic era proceeded by means of persuasion and required the renunciation of violence. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a danger in overliteralism on this score—not the danger of somehow missing God’s redemptive use of violence, as for Boersma, but the danger of not fully thinking through the implications of the use of persuasion as a model. Specifically in the case of Irenaeus, an implicit overliteralism about the concept of persuasion leads to a clear contradiction: while the entire logic of his system tends toward the idea of a universal salvation, he nevertheless asserts that the devil, his demons, and certain of his human followers will be eternally damned.16 If violence, in contrast to persuasion, indicates a separation, then the act of damnation is the ultimate violence, cutting off the damned not only from God but from the human race and created world of which they are a part. One could attempt to mitigate the apparent attribution of violence to God by claiming that damnation is ultimately self-inflicted, but why would a God who became incarnate and submitted to death in order to undo the devil’s violent seizure of 16

As we will see, Anselm will later put forward a plausible reason why God cannot save angels by means of a method similar to the Incarnation.

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The Politics of Redemption the human race, a God who, as we will see, for Irenaeus exists from all eternity precisely as a saving being, simply give up on one of his creatures? The answer seems to be rooted in Irenaeus’s profound frustration with his Gnostic opponents. Though he does show a certain degree of respect for Basilides’ intellectual integrity (2.16.2; 2.35.1), his opinion of the other teachers is uniformly negative: simply put, they are culpably stupid. Irenaeus is convinced that simply presenting the Gnostic views as they really are will lead any thinking person to reject them as a matter of course (1.pref.2), yet there remains the stubborn fact that someone had to invent such transparently non-sensical ideas in the first place. Irenaeus attributes various motives to them—they might be attempting to defraud their followers, or to justify their own licentious lifestyles,17 or to find some way to be regarded as important—but one thing is absolutely clear to him: these people are unpersuadable, completely impervious to reason. For Irenaeus, this unpersuadability is all the more culpable since, as he emphasizes, the gospel has been publicly proclaimed by a church that spreads throughout the world. In fact, he claims that since the Incarnation, God’s wrath has become an even greater danger, reversing the normal stereotypes of the Old and New Testaments: “in both Testaments there is the same righteousness of God displayed when God takes vengeance, in the one case indeed typically, temporarily, and more moderately; but in the other really, enduringly, and more rigidly: for the fire is eternal, and the wrath of God which shall be revealed from the face of our Lord . . . entails a heavier punishment on those who fall into it” (4.28.1).The basic attitude seems to be that if people cannot accept the gospel, then there is simply no hope for them—and that would hold all the more for people who not only are willfully ignorant but also mislead others. 17

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An extreme example is Marcus, whom Irenaeus presents as seducing wellbred women through his teachings (1.13.3) and in some cases using an ancient equivalent of the date-rape drug on them (1.13.5). Irenaeus compares him to the Antichrist (1.13.1) and claims he may well be demon-possessed (1.13.3). Such behavior is not without parallels among modern “cult” leaders, but it seems unlikely to me that Marcus’s behavior could be so flagrant and known widely enough for Irenaeus to have heard about it without some form of law enforcement or freelance retribution coming into play.

Irenaeus The model here seems to be the devil, who originally misled humanity and for whom the eternal fire of hell was originally intended (3.23.3). Clearly this is a demonization of his opponents in the most literal sense, but I would argue that it can also be read as a kind of “Gnosticization” of the devil. Both the devil and the Gnostic teachers are liars; both lead others astray; both are apparently unpersuadable and therefore without hope. Yet the Gnostic teachers as well as the devil are, in themselves, part of the good creation of God (4.41.1), even if their deeds are damaging. How can God, the savior of the “one human race,” leave them aside, subjecting them to the worst possible violence for all of eternity? Irenaeus seems to view both through the all-too-human lens of a man who has immersed himself in a literature that he takes to be unrelentingly stupid. One cannot help but sympathize with his attitude—even if some readers of Against Heresies find the Gnostic systems fascinating, doubtless all of us have at some time or another come across a claim or argument that strikes us as so deeply wrong that it’s impossible to imagine someone being persuaded by it. Although we often are tempted to make that judgment prematurely and in self-serving ways, it does seem to be the case that there are people who are, at least in certain connections, impervious to reasoned argument. This is where a less literal view of persuasion is crucial, because it leads to the recognition that the point of persuasion is first of all a rejection of violence and that there are non-violent tools and strategies other than reasoned argument. God himself makes use of them in Irenaeus’s own account. For instance, God restrains humanity’s self-destructiveness by allowing us to die, something that, while not in line with God’s intention, is nevertheless consistent with our status as finite and composite beings. The means used are not intrinsic goods, but are required by the actual situation, which persuasion in a patristic (or at least Irenaean) mode must be immersed in and effectively respond to. Surely a God of infinite wisdom and patience can devise creative strategies for persuading even the most stubborn and hardened human being— and perhaps the devil as well.This latter possibility is embraced by Gregory of Nyssa, to whom I will turn in the next chapter. What remains for the current investigation is a sketch at the ontology 89

The Politics of Redemption toward which the interplay of recapitulation, unity, and persuasion in Irenaeus’s account of the atonement points.

The Togetherness of God and Creation Thus far it may appear that Irenaeus is not a promising resource for my attempt to displace the God-humanity polarity, given that his account is so overwhelmingly focused on humanity. This apparent focus is not simply an artifact of my own presentation: as Steenberg points out, Irenaeus’s extant works “are wholly devoid of direct quotation or allusion to Genesis 1:6–25,” the verses that describe the creation of the non-human world.18 More than that, within the context of Irenaeus’s interpretation of the “fall narrative,” non-human aspects of creation—namely, the snake as the devil’s vehicle and the ground itself—are mentioned only as the objects of God’s curse (3.23.3). The logic of recapitulation would appear to have kept Irenaeus from seeing anything in the creation story that does not touch directly on the eventual salvation of humanity through the Incarnation. Yet the logic of recapitulation also ties together the economy of salvation with all aspects of creation—including the non-human—in the most unexpected way. For Irenaeus, recapitulation is a structuring principle of history, linking together events in a complex network of non-identical repetitions. This principle sometimes lends his argumentation a “time warp” character. Thus, for example, the non-human aspects of creation get the most attention not during the actual discussion of creation, but during the discussion of the Incarnation and history’s eschatological fulfillment. Though his focus is obviously on humanity, Irenaeus highlights the role that plants and animals play in the Incarnation: For doing away with the effects of that disobedience of humanity which had taken place at the beginning by the occasion of a tree, “he became obedient unto death, 18

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M. C. Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 91 (Boston: Brill, 2008), 92.

Irenaeus even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), rectifying that disobedience which had occurred by reason of a tree, through obedience upon a tree. (5.16.3) For in the same way the sin of the first created man receives amendment by the correction of the Firstbegotten, and the coming of the serpent is conquered by the harmlessness of the dove, those bonds being unloosed by which we had been fast bound to death. (5.19.1) In his account of the eschatological fulfillment, it is clear that the created world will continue to be real and material, in part simply because Irenaeus is convinced that humans will be resurrected to real material bodies and need a material environment in which to live: “For since there are real men [in the resurrection], so must there also be a real establishment, that they not vanish away among non-existent things, but progress among those which have actual existence” (5.36.1). This is part and parcel of Irenaeus’s consistent affirmation of the goodness of the material world over against his Gnostic opponents, which leads him to claim that “neither the substance nor the essence of the creation is annihilated,” because “the one who has established it is faithful and true”—the only thing that will be removed is the damage caused by the advent of sin (5.36.1). That means that the plants and animals and all other creatures that were part of God’s original creation will find their place in the new heaven and earth as well. It is here that Irenaeus broaches the possibility, at least implicitly, of the material world standing in something other than an instrumental relationship to humanity, that is, of created things receiving the benefits of Christ’s recapitulatory work also for their own sake. In discussing the well-known idea that in the eschatological kingdom, the lion will lay down with the lamb and eat straw (instead of meat), Irenaeus concedes that there is some validity to an allegorical reading of the passage as referring to animal-like humans, but insists that nevertheless in the resurrection of the just, the words shall also apply to those animals mentioned. For God is rich in all things. And it is right that when the creation is restored, all the animals should obey and be in subjection to humanity, 91

The Politics of Redemption and revert to the food originally given by God (for they had been originally subjected in obedience to Adam), that is, the productions of the earth. But some other occasion, and not the present, is to be sought for showing that the lion will feed on straw. And this indicates the large size and rich quality of the fruits. For if that animal, the lion, feeds upon straw, of what a quality must the wheat itself be whose straw shall serve as suitable food for lions? (5.33.4) The note of instrumentality is still present, as it is stated that animals will be subject to humanity. Yet God’s generosity clearly goes beyond humanity, creating exceedingly nutritious straw—a food humans do not eat—to feed newly gentle lions—an animal that provides humans with no obvious benefit. However subordinate a moment in his argument this passage may be, it shows that Irenaeus sees God’s grace as directed ultimately toward all of creation. In saving all of humanity, God also saves the entire created world, including those aspects of it that have no immediate relationship to humanity. It appears, then, that Irenaeus’s account of the atonement assumes some kind of connectedness not only among human beings but also between humanity and creation, a connectedness which Irenaeus expresses by means of the logic of recapitulation. In keeping with my attempt to find in the atonement tradition some form of social-relational ontology, I will attempt to go into more detail in explaining how these various connections work, by means of an exploration of what Irenaeus is getting at with his emphasis on unity: one God, one savior, one human race. This emphasis is at the center of Irenaeus’s polemic against the Gnostics, with their ever-proliferating levels of Aeons. In contrast with the Gnostics, Irenaeus can initially seem to be asserting a fairly straightforward monotheism of a kind that was common among many schools of thought in the ancient world. In fact, Osborne points out that many of Irenaeus’s arguments against the Gnostics have strong parallels in Plotinus, “who had no interest in Christian authority,” and on this basis claims that “the challenge of Gnosticism was against a culture, not a church.”19 Both Plotinus 19

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Osborne, Irenaeus, 62.

Irenaeus and Irenaeus have the same core objections to Gnosticism: “proliferation of first principles and denigration of the physical world.”20 Both use similar arguments to refute these two Gnostic teachings, pointing out the Gnostic tendency toward infinite regress and claiming that if the physical world were the product of ignorance, that ignorance would have to extend all the way to the first principle as well.21 I am not convinced, however, that these commonly shared logical arguments finally get at what is really at stake for Irenaeus in the battle against Gnosticism. Osborne believes that the reader of Irenaeus must focus on the areas where he is making a clear argument,because his“images and aphorisms”are“too exuberant.”22 In practice, this approach leads Osborne in many cases to collapse what is unique about Irenaeus into a “Platonic paradigm” shared by the broader culture and picked up, as it were, by osmosis.23 Now one would certainly admit, for example, that Irenaeus agrees with virtually everyone in the ancient world that infinite regress is illogical and deploys that argument as a bludgeon against his opponents. Yet at the same time, there is much in the common culture of the ancient world with which Irenaeus disagrees—and much in Christian teaching that the ancient world violently rejected, as the bishop of a martyr church would clearly see. Irenaeus claims that the Gnostics had developed a kind of pastiche of various common philosophical positions to sound more credible to the inadequately educated, meaning that in the last analysis, it was the Gnostics who were simply telling people what they want to hear (2.14.7–9). By contrast, he asks why the church would be persecuted if it simply held to common opinion (3.12.13). Irenaeus’s self-description is of course not the final word: it is possible that he shared more with his culture than he was, or even could be, conscious of. At the same time, his oppositional stance lends some prima facie plausibility to the notion that Irenaeus’s more fundamental patterns of thought will be found to differ significantly from the “common sense” of the 20 21 22 23

Osborne, Irenaeus, 44. Osborne, Irenaeus, 44–6. Osborne, Irenaeus, 24. Osborne, Irenaeus, 17.

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The Politics of Redemption ancient world, including the particular instantiation of that “common sense” that a “Platonic paradigm” would represent. The key to understanding Irenaeus’s concept of unity in particular, it seems to me, is not his general cultural milieu, but rather his own clear statements in Against Heresies. Just as consistently as he asserts the value of unity, he opposes it to the Gnostic tendency to divide things that belong together. They divide the one creator God into a seemingly ever-growing multitude of Aeons; they divide the one savior into two or more separate entities; they divide the body and the soul by claiming that only the soul is of value; they divide the human race into various classes, the highest of which ultimately does not belong to this world at all. By contrast, Irenaeus puts forward a concept of unity as the bringing together of things that are different and yet belong with one another. One of the clearest examples is his account of the relationship between the body and the soul, already described above, in which two clearly distinct things together form the unity of the human person. The unity that is in question, then, at least on the level of the created world, is not the kind of unity that submits everything to an overarching principle, but rather the unity of togetherness—what Nancy might call being-with. In principle, this view is not incompatible with what one could call the ambient monotheism of the most prestigious Hellenistic discourses, which would posit a transcendent and fully selfsufficient God in whom all things participate.Yet Irenaeus takes a step further and even includes God within this social-relational framework by presenting God as always-already for the created world. This understanding of God stems from his nascent Trinitarianism, which posits the Son as eternally coexisting with God the Father. In a statement that, according to Steenberg, is “perhaps among the more controversial of Irenaeus’s statements of God’s nature [and] represents a manifestation of circular logic at which most first-year students of philosophy would balk,”24 Irenaeus claims that “inasmuch as [the Son] preexisted as saving [praeexisteret salvans], it was necessary that what might be saved should also be made, in order that the being who saves should not 24

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Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation, 34.

Irenaeus exist in vain” (3.22.3). What is interesting here is the emphasis on the Son precisely as a saving being.25 A created world that needs saving cannot simply be the outworking of God’s nature, or rather it is the outworking of God’s nature only insofar as God requires a really distinct entity in order to actualize his saving power. God and creation belong together, then, but in such a way that they have to grow closer. Time and again, Irenaeus claims that the Incarnation has significance for God as well as humanity: the Son becomes incarnate “that he might accustom [assuesceret] humanity to receive God, and accustom [assuesceret] God to dwell in humanity” (3.20.2, emphasis added), using the same verb in both cases to emphasize the mutuality.The Spirit participates in the Incarnation for the same reason: “wherefore he did also descend upon the Son of God, made Son of Man, becoming accustomed [assuescens] together with the Son to dwell in the human race, to rest with human beings, and to dwell in the workmanship of God” (3.17.1). Having acted as God’s “hands” in the creation of the world (5.6.1, among many other places), the Son and Spirit are already to some degree accustomed to working with matter, but the process of the Incarnation tightens God’s bond with creation, allowing God and humanity, in a very charming image, to get used to each other. This togetherness reaches such a point that Irenaeus is able to say, in a statement that would shock many Western Christians, “There is none other called God by the Scriptures except the Father of all, and the Son, and those who possess the adoption [nisi Patrem omnium et Filium et eos, qui adoptionem habent]” (4.pref.4). Humanity, and by extension all creation, grows ever closer to God, ultimately participating in the inner life of a God who is always-already characterized by self-differentiation. The eschatological fulfillment thus represents an ever richer togetherness or being-with of God and creation, in which God has a certain priority as the eternal creator, yet creation maintains its own dignity and necessity. Creation exists for God, but God exists always for creation—neither would be what they are without the 25

In Il Regno e la Gloria, Agamben discusses the tension in the Christian tradition between the notion of a transcendent and self-sufficient God and the specifically Christian idea of a God who exists only for his saving work, centering his analysis on the concept of economy. Irenaeus is a key figure in this discussion (see 45–9).

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The Politics of Redemption other, yet they remain always distinct.26 This is the ultimate unity for Irenaeus: one togetherness of God with his creation and creation with its God. It is this togetherness, this being-with, that for Irenaeus motivates the atonement, and accordingly it is an implicit social-relational ontology that gives his account its sense.

26

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In this early church father, then, we find a scheme in many ways similar to the later work of Moltmann, which is perhaps unsurprising given that both attempt to develop a holistic view starting from Trinitarian presuppositions.

Chapter 5

Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–394) writes in a very different situation from Irenaeus, on at least two levels. On the political level, Irenaeus was the head of a beleaguered community on the periphery of the empire. In contrast, Gregory was among the first generation of theologians to live in a Roman Empire where Christianity had not only been legalized (by means of the Edict of Milan in 313), but also provided with imperial patronage—represented most famously by the first ecumenical council at Nicea in 325, but also more ominously by Constantine’s use of military force against the schismatic Donatists in 316. By the time Gregory came to write the text I will be considering in this chapter, the “Great Catechism,”1 that imperial patronage had shifted to outright imperial enforcement, beginning with the Emperor Theodosius I declaring Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire in 380 and convening the First Council of Constantinople in 381, in which Gregory himself was involved, in order to reaffirm Nicea.That political situation plays into Gregory’s rhetorical situation in at least one obvious way: unlike Irenaeus, he is faced not with vocal and apparently influential opponents, but with those wishing (or feeling compelled) to join the Christian community and needing instruction. 1

I will be using the following translation, occasionally amending as appropriate: Gregory of Nyssa, “An Address on Religious Instruction,” ed. and trans. Cyril C. Richardson, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954). I am relying on the Greek text provided, with facing French translation, in Discours Catéchétique, ed. and trans. Raymond Winling, Sources Chrétiennes series (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2000). Due to the widely varying length of the traditional numbered paragraphs, in-text references will include the paragraph number followed by the page number in the English translation. As the titles of the two translations indicate, this text is known by several names; I am sticking to “Great Catechism” for the sake of simplicity.

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The Politics of Redemption As a result, his text displays the primary traits that distinguish a direct attempt to persuade from the kind of battles between intellectual foes that are always ultimately staged for the benefit of undecided third parties: a sympathetic tone and a certain degree of candor about the obstacles to accepting one’s own position. The method of the “Great Catechism” stands firmly in the patristic tradition of persuasion. Gregory begins by proposing that “the same method of teaching . . . is not suitable for everyone who approaches this word. Rather must we adapt instruction to the diversities of religion [kata tas toˉn threˉscheioˉn diaphoras]” (pref/268).2 One must seek out the presuppositions of each religion that are most sympathetic to Christian doctrine and begin one’s argument with those points “so that the truth may finally emerge from what is admitted on both sides” (pref/269). He mentions a range of possible dialogue partners, including Jews—whom he supposes will be relatively easy to convert due to their shared belief in the scriptures (§4/274)—and various sects of heretics, but he devotes the majority of his energy to demonstrating a possible line of argument that will convince Greeks, who undoubtedly form the majority of potential converts. What is perhaps most remarkable about Gregory’s approach is his high degree of optimism about how much of Christian doctrine he can, with relative ease, persuade Greeks to accept. One could read the text as taking two initial passes at the task, using three key presuppositions. First, he is able to use commonly shared presuppositions about God to get as far as the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (pref/269–§3/274). Second, he draws on the widely shared beliefs in a skillful designer of the universe (§5/275) and in the division of human nature into sensible and intellectual parts (§6/278–9) in order to get to the creation and 2

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The English translation uses “religion” and cognates for at least three separate Greek words—threˉscheia (meaning something like “religious worship”), eusebeia (piety), and kateˉcheˉseas (instruction; cf. catechism). Here the French translators are more precise, and I will be following their usage. Though it is far from the center of my interest in this context and I do not intend to pursue the argument explicitly, I suspect that separating out these terms will significantly complicate the English translators’ apparent presupposition that Christians of this period viewed themselves as part of a “religion” among other “religions.”

Gregory of Nyssa fall. I assume that most modern theologians would decline even to attempt to get that far into what we might today call “revealed” as opposed to “natural” theology armed only with pure reason. Nevertheless, in both cases Gregory comes up against a stubborn obstacle. After his first pass, he says: Neither Greek nor Jew, perhaps, will contest the existence of God’s Word and Spirit—the one depending on his common ideas [koinoˉn ennoioˉn], the other on the Scriptures. Both, however, will equally reject the plan [oikonomian] by which God’s Word became man, as something incredible and unbefitting to say of God. (§5/275) His second pass stumbles at the same place: One who has followed the course of our argument up to this point will probably agree with it, since we do not appear to have said anything unbefitting a right conception of God. He will not, however, take a similar view of what follows . . . . I refer to the human birth, the advance from infancy to manhood, the eating and drinking, the weariness, the sleep, the grief, the tears, the false accusations, the trial, the cross, the death, and the putting in the tomb. (§9/286–7) Gregory shows a certain reluctance in attempting to overcome this severe obstacle, suggesting at one point that humans should not presume to dictate to God the method of salvation (§17/294) and then that the extraordinary success of Christianity should convince everyone sufficiently that the Incarnation happened and render less urgent the attempt to understand why it did (§18/295–§19/296).3 3

Such an argument in favor of the Incarnation has a long pedigree, but it is interesting to note a subtle difference between Gregory’s argument and many of those made previous to him—the emphasis is much more on the note of Christianity’s “conquest” of paganism and Judaism than on the moral superiority of Christians (as it was in Origen’s Against Celsus and Athanasius’s Against the Nations).

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The Politics of Redemption Gregory does press onward, but his argument is, to me at least, somewhat difficult to follow—which is understandable, since he is basing his organization on what can be most securely built out from his commonly shared starting points about what it is fitting for God to do rather than on the inherent logic of his subject. Thus though his argumentation in this relatively brief manual is not as scattered as that of Irenaeus’s vast tome, it nevertheless seems to me that the connections among the main points of Gregory’s account of atonement are not as immediately clear as those in Irenaeus.4 Rather than follow the order of Gregory’s own exposition, then, I will follow a procedure similar to that used in the previous chapter, starting with what is most obvious and working outward from there. In the case of Gregory’s account of atonement, what seems to me to be most emphatic and developed is, despite his starting points, not the compatibility of Christ’s redemptive act with what most people believe about God, but rather its compatibility with the nature of humanity, thought as a single unit. In that context, he is talking primarily about the resurrection, but he returns again and again to Christ’s birth as essential to the efficacy of redemption. My goal here will be to demonstrate that a social-relational ontology similar to what I found in Irenaeus is at work in Gregory’s account of the atonement as well.5 Taking that as a starting point, I will address 4

5

This comparison indicates to me that, for all Irenaeus’s frustration with the Gnostics, they may well have been more helpful dialogue partners than the average pagan Greek. In light of the history of dogma, that would not be surprising, since most of the positive developments were forced by “heretics,” that is, people who viewed themselves as insiders to the Christian community but interpreted the gospel in ways that seemed (to those who would later be viewed as orthodox) not to work on some level—and the Gnostics at least tried to develop some understanding of the Incarnation, putting them much more on the “inside” compared to people who were baffled by the very concept. In this, my approach will be different from that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), which attempts a synthetic view drawn from Gregory’s full range of writings. Though I do refer briefly to Gregory’s treatise on creation in what follows, I am for the most part “bracketing” his other theological or philosophical writings in order to get at what a consideration of the Incarnation in specific implies on the ontological level. The ontology that Balthasar finds in Gregory’s entire body of work

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Gregory of Nyssa in turn two points that seem to me to be less clearly integrated into Gregory’s account: the relation between humanity’s sensible and intelligible natures and the famous narrative, rich in Aulén’s “grotesque imagery,” of the deception of the devil. In both cases, there are elements of Gregory’s argument that initially seem to contradict the social-relational logic I am arguing is necessary to make sense of atonement, and I will attempt to resolve those apparent contradictions or, at the very least, to account for them, which in the latter case will lead to a political interpretation of the devil’s rule based on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony.

Birth and Resurrection The atonement theory advanced in the “Great Catechism” can be read as in many respects a variation on Irenaeus’s, but there is one central difference: for Gregory, the focus is almost entirely on sin. The idea of continual progress toward God is not entirely absent, and like Irenaeus he bases that possibility in the inherently changeable nature of created things. Changeableness opens up the possibility of a fall into evil (here thought as privation), and that is in fact what happened historically in the case of human beings, but “if [a created thing] acts according to its nature [kata physin], this continual change is for the better” (§8/286). At least in the seems to me to be broadly compatible with my findings here, however, particularly his claim that the central fact of Christian revelation, what it adds over and above Gregory’s pagan philosophical sources, is something “radically social” (134). I will also be leaving aside what has been a major guiding light in the scholarly literature on Gregory, namely, his apophaticism. Martin Laird’s recent study Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge, and Divine Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), however, has indicated that even Gregory’s mysticism must be understood in what I would call a social-relational way. Noting that for Gregory, “something of God has the capacity to make itself cognitively useful” despite God’s unknowability (132), Laird coins the neologism “logophasis,” by which he means the way in which “as a fruit of apophatic union with the Word (logos), the Word expresses (phasis) itself through the deeds and discourse of the one whom the Word indwells” (155)—in other words, the end result of mystical experience is an outgoing movement by which the Word’s work is propagated.

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The Politics of Redemption “Great Catechism,” however, there is no sense that the Incarnation was the plan all along and that, given that sin had in fact intervened, it could also serve to take care of that problem. Part of this may be due to his audience: if he sees them as completely incredulous at the very idea of Incarnation, then it makes sense to assume that they will be even more incredulous at the idea that such was God’s eternal plan. As difficult as it is for them to believe that God would become incarnate, it is not as difficult to believe that the Incarnation was necessary as a solution to the problem of sin, a problem he assumes everyone will recognize in principle (§5/277). Gregory’s explanation of how sin arose is simple and familiar: by a free choice of the will, human beings turned away from the good and therefore toward evil, and now they are damaged in such a way that they cannot move back toward the good on their own. I will be returning in later sections to aspects of Gregory’s scheme that seem to me to be more problematic—namely, his one-sided focus on the body as the locus of sin and the role of the devil. For now it is enough to note that the solution to sin, on the level of the individual, is some form of dissolution of the human person that will allow for purification, followed by the restoration of that person in his or her newly purified form. Gregory uses a variety of metaphors to explain this necessity, including the following: Suppose [a clay pot] has been treacherously filled with molten lead, which has hardened and cannot be poured out. Suppose, too, the owner recovers the pot, and being skilled in ceramics, he pounds to pieces the clay surrounding the lead. He then remolds the pot, now rid of the intruding matter, into its former shape and for his own use. (§8/283) As I’ve said, his initial focus here is on the body, as shown by his continuation of the illustration: In the same way the Creator of our vessel, I mean our sentient and bodily nature, when it became mingled with evil, dissolved the material which contained the evil. And 102

Gregory of Nyssa then, once it has been freed from its opposite, he will remold it by the resurrection, and will reconstitute the vessel into its original beauty. (§8/283–4) The means by which the dissolution of the body is brought about is death, which Gregory like Irenaeus views as a merciful dispensation of God (§8/283): speaking of the animal skins provided by God as symbolic of death, Gregory says, “He who heals our wickedness subsequently provided [Adam] with the capacity [dynamin] to die, but not to die permanently” (§8/283). The soul is not excluded from the damage of sin—“soul and body are observed to share together in evil,” since “by means of both of them wickedness is translated into action” (§8/284)—but as a non-composite entity it cannot be dissolved in the same way as the body and requires some other method of purification, which Gregory will later say involves the alternative of baptism or fire (§35/317).6 It should be clear, though, that salvation is not salvation from the body, but salvation also for the body, or more properly salvation of the diverse yet unified human person consisting of body and soul. Though Gregory does not say it explicitly, one can say that death dissolves the human person rather than simply the body, insofar as it separates body and soul. This dissolution is the first step in God’s salvific plan. Since it has appeared in both of the authors discussed so far, it seems appropriate to pause briefly and consider how the imposition of death fits into the overall patristic pattern of thought. One of Gregory’s primary challenges in the “Great Catechism” is to demonstrate not only that the Incarnation is not unworthy of God, but to answer a question that Anselm will also face: “Why, then, if God loved the human race, did he not wrest it from the 6

Though the last few paragraphs of the “Great Catechism” initially seem to contradict the idea that this “fire” is purgative in its effect and ultimately aimed at salvation, I believe that we can read them as simply indicating that the cleansing awaiting those who reject the easier path of baptism are real and painful in a way we cannot presently experience (§40/325)—the difference from familiar earthly torments being one of quality rather than duration. Thus Gregory would be using a kind of scare tactic, though he is only threatening his audience with a painful cleansing process and not with eternal and irrevocable damnation.

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The Politics of Redemption opposing power and restore it to its original state by some sovereign and divine act of authority? Why did he take a tedious, circuitous route . . .? Could he not have remained in his transcendent and divine glory, and saved humanity by a command . . .?” (§15/291). In terms of the patristic understanding of persuasion, such a command would count as a “violent” rather than “persuasive” or reasonable intervention, and both Gregory and Irenaeus are concerned to show that a violent approach is incompatible with God’s character and that the Incarnation is a persuasive intervention. In this context, it seems plausible to ask whether the imposition of death was a “violent” sovereign command— although such a question is unlikely to occur to many due to our common-sense acceptance of death as unavoidable. I think that there are two initial points that arguably keep it from being violent. First, Gregory places great emphasis on the fact that all created things are “necessarily of a mutable nature [trepteˉs phuseoˉs]” (§21/297), so being subject to death presumably isn’t any more contrary to the nature of humanity qua creature than is humanity’s act of turning away from the good—that is to say, it fits within the ontology God established among creatures in the broadest terms. Second, the imposition of death is portrayed as an emergency measure. Even though it is contrary to God’s original intention for humanity, it is instituted only in the service of the fulfillment of that original intention, and so it does not represent a permanent change in human nature.What’s more, unlike so many emergency measures imposed by earthly rulers, death has a clear endpoint: the resurrection. Gregory’s account of the resurrection is the part of the “Great Catechism” that most clearly reflects the implicit social-relational ontology I am attempting to uncover in the atonement tradition. By becoming human and being resurrected, Christ in principle brings about the resurrection of humanity as a whole: Not from another source, but from our lump of dough [ek tou heˉmeterou phurama]7 came the human nature which 7

The French translators point out the parallel between this use of dough imagery and Gregory’s later comparison of the Eucharist to yeast: “And what is this remedy [for the poison of sin]? Nothing else than the body which

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Gregory of Nyssa received the divine [ho theodochos anthroˉpos]. By the resurrection it was exalted along with the Godhead. In the case of our own bodies the activity of one of our senses is felt throughout the whole organism that is united to it. In just the same way, seeing that our nature constitutes, as it were, a single living being, the resurrection of one part of it extends to the whole. By the unity and continuity of our nature it is communicated from the part to the whole. (§32/310) By virtue of coming as a particular human being, Christ is able to affect humanity as a whole. As with Christ’s salvation of the unum genus humanum in Irenaeus, Christ’s work for Gregory works on two levels: primarily that of genus in the sense of category or type, and secondarily that of genus in the sense of race. Here his perceived audience pushes him to explain the connection between the two senses much more clearly, insofar as Gregory seems to envision his Greek interlocutors objecting even more to Christ’s birth than to his death. He embraces the notion of the basic equality of human beings, the idea that they are made of the same “stuff ”—though this idea is not foregrounded in the same way since Gregory is not arguing against anyone who would claim otherwise—and he is emphatic that Christ needed to be “united with us in all our characteristics [idioˉmatoˉn]” in order to cleanse our entire being (§27/304). What he makes more explicit than Irenaeus is the fact that one of those shared characteristics is precisely to have been born. Against those who claim he could have taken on human form without undergoing birth, Gregory says, Whence, then, did he who was coming to us have to take up his abode in our life [bioˉ]? “From heaven,” is perhaps the reply of someone who despises the method of human birth as something shameful and disgraceful. But in heaven there was no human nature, nor was the disease of evil prevalent proved itself superior to death and became the source of our life. For, as the apostle observes, a little yeast makes a whole lump of dough like itself. In the same way, when the body which God made immortal enters ours, it entirely transforms it into itself ” (§37/318).

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The Politics of Redemption in that transcendent life . . . how could our nature be restored if it was some heavenly being, and not this sick creature of earth, which was united with the divine? (§27/305) In other words, to be one of us, to be part of our “one lump of dough,” means in part to have entered the world by the same means as we all do: birth. Here it is clear that Christ’s participation in human interrelatedness is necessary for salvation to make sense. Though birth in its current fallen form isn’t unreservedly positive for Gregory, he does view it as aimed at the same goal as the resurrection—overcoming death: [Those who denigrate birth] fail to realize that the whole anatomy of the body is uniformly to be valued, and that no factor which contributes to the maintenance of life can be charged with being dishonorable or evil. The whole organic structure of the body is devised for a single end, and that is to preserve the human race [anthroˉpinon] in existence. (§28/306) It is customary to view the reproductive organs as shameful, but Gregory argues that in the long run they are even more useful than the organs that simply serve our present convenience, since they guarantee humanity’s future. He concludes this line of thought with a striking image: “by the generative organs the immortality of the human race [anthroˉpoteˉti] is preserved, and death’s perpetual moves against us are, in a way, rendered futile and ineffectual” (§28/307). The emergency measure of death is not only overcome in resurrection, then, but continually overcome through the intervention of reproduction. This is not to say that birth is an emergency measure as well—if so, then it would seem that a significant aspect of human interrelatedness would itself be only a symptom of sin. Gregory does have a certain degree of suspicion about the current regime of lust-based reproduction and claims in his On the Making of Humanity8 that reproduction 8

Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Making of Man,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 5, ed. Henry Wace (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1892). Parenthetical references refer to standard textual divisions.

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Gregory of Nyssa regulated by marriage was a reaction to the fear of death (17.1), but he follows that up by saying that if not for sin, humanity would’ve reproduced in the same way angels do (17.2). This notion of angelic reproduction is somewhat idiosyncratic—most theologians have tended to assume that God created a fixed number of angels one by one—but by referring to reproduction at all, Gregory seems to be pointing toward some kind of mechanism, however enigmatic its details may be, by which humans would come to be by means of other humans, rather than, for example, being individually created out of nothing. In addition, based on the principle that whatever was found in the original state will be found in the eschatological kingdom, he leaves open the possibility that reproduction, albeit not by means of the sex organs, will continue even after the restoration of all things.9 That restoration is emphatically a matter of both body and soul. What was dissolved for the sake of purification—both the body itself and the union of body and soul—will be restored in such a way as to make a future dissolution impossible. Though the resurrection started with the one man Jesus Christ, the irreducible interrelatedness of humankind means that it cannot stop there: rather, Christ conjoined the intelligible and sensible nature on a larger scale, the principle of the resurrection extending to its logical limits. For when in the case of the man in whom he was incarnate the soul returned once more to the body after the dissolution, a similar union of the separated elements potentially passed to the whole of human nature [eis pasan teˉn anthroˉpineˉn physin], as if a new beginning had been made. (§16/294) The underlying logic is similar to that of Irenaeus’s recapitulation: Christ’s resurrection repeats the initial creation of humanity out of its disparate elements, effectively “rebooting” the human race. Yet this is only possible because Christ has fully participated in the condition of humanity as he found it—including both birth and 9

For more on Gregory’s views on sexuality’s relationship to sin, see Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 73.

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The Politics of Redemption death. It is here, more than in the finitude of humanity, that God’s emergency measure of death finds its justification: This is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to death, and of the resurrection of the dead. He does not prevent the soul’s separation from the body by death in accordance with the necessity of nature [anankaian teˉs physeoˉs].10 But he brings them together again by the resurrection. Thus he becomes the meeting point of both, of death and of life. In himself he restores the nature which death has disrupted, and becomes himself the principle [archeˉ] whereby the separated parts are reunited. (§16/294) Despite being restrained by the pressure of an audience that balks at the very idea of the Incarnation, Gregory echoes and even extends Irenaeus’s bold claims about the mutual participation of humanity and God, making God, at least in the eschaton, the very glue that holds together each human being.

Sensible and Intelligible Though a certain strain of the argument culminates in an intimate relationship among God, the body, and the soul, it should be clear from the discussion of reproduction that Gregory’s attitude toward the body is not unreservedly positive. He is particularly suspicious of sensible pleasure, and in fact the role of the virgin birth in his account of the Incarnation is largely to assure his audience that Christ’s birth was not unworthy of God: “in God’s case, the birth did not have its origin in weakness [pathous], neither did the death end in weakness [pathos]. For sensual pleasure did not precede the birth and corruption did not follow the death” (§13/289). 10

Obviously this reference to “the necessity of nature” makes it seem that death is not an “emergency measure” after all. I have gone with the idea of death as “emergency measure” because it receives greater emphasis in Gregory’s text, but this seems to be an example of what Balthasar was thinking of when he asked, “Does he not too often give contradictory responses with regard to the fundamental themes of his philosophy?” See Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 17.

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Gregory of Nyssa The parallel here is interesting, insofar as Gregory is trying to draw a distinction between weakness in the sense of creaturely changeableness and weakness in the sense of moral failing, arguing that only the latter is unworthy of God (§16/292). It is not immediately clear how physical decomposition after death can be considered a moral failing—yet the same might equally be said about experiencing the pleasure that naturally accompanies sex. Since centuries of Christian moral teaching have rendered the idea that sexual pleasure is inherently problematic at least recognizable if not convincing, this pairing may seem to be an obvious mismatch, but I think it is at least plausible to see the parallel as consisting in the fact that for Gregory, both lust-based reproduction and physical decay are reactions to sin. Here one can see the beginnings of considering sin itself to be a kind of physical affliction that puts us in a situation where we can’t help but sin—as exemplified by the fact that the advent of death creates an urgent need to reproduce, but the sexual pleasure that accompanies reproduction is nonetheless somehow sinful. In terms of Gregory’s parallel, then, one can say that since Christ did not participate in the sinful aspects of our being, first of all our origin in sinful pleasure, there was no need to go so far as to dissolve his body into its constituent elements before the resurrection. Only a short logical step is needed in order to go down the road of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which Anselm will develop with characteristic rigor: namely, the doctrine that lustbased reproduction actively causes the child to be born in a state of moral weakness. Gregory does not take that step, perhaps simply because he doesn’t need to: the “problem” that is transmitted by birth is, as I will discuss in the next section, humanity’s bondage under the devil. Nevertheless, he goes a long way down the road toward identifying bodiliness as the privileged locus of sin. Part of this may be due to what he takes to be a shared assumption of Christianity and Hellenistic thought, beyond the simple division of human nature into sensible and intelligible parts: the inferiority of the sensible part, which even entails an active danger to the intelligible part.This denigration of the sensible is clear in his reading of the Genesis account. Defending it from those who would see it as a myth, Gregory says, “It is not a fanciful story [mythoˉdes dieˉgeˉsis]; but our very nature [physeoˉs] makes it convincing” (§6/278)—“our 109

The Politics of Redemption very nature” here referring to the union of the sensible and the intelligible. In his initial account, he is at pains to emphasize that neither the sensible nor the intelligible “fails to share in the divine fellowship” (§6/279), a point I will return to.Yet when he comes to explain the fall narrative, the onus falls almost entirely on the sensible nature as the source of sin. In a kind of prelude to his exposition of the Genesis account, for example, he says, “To indulge some pleasure we mingled evil with our nature, like some deadly drug sweetened with honey” (§8/282). Later in the same chapter, he explains in more detail what he means: Now the cause of this dissolution is clear . . . . Appropriate to sensation is what is thick and earthly. But by nature the intellect is superior to and transcends the movements of the senses. Hence, since our judgment of the good went astray by the prompting of the senses, and this departure from the good produced a contrary state of things, that part of us which was rendered useless by partaking in its opposite is dissolved. (§8/283) In essence, the fall into sin is the fault of the sensible nature—even if, as I will discuss, the devil prompted humanity in its fall. This claim comes in the midst of an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis account, and the evidentiary standards for such interpretations are somewhat loose. Nevertheless, if the starting point for his allegorical reading is the division between sensible and intelligible, the more intuitive reading is one in which the two natures acted in concert, perhaps even with the intelligible taking the lead. After all, the devil is essentially offering Eve knowledge and likeness to God (who is not a sensible creature). The only sensible temptation present is that of eating the fruit, which is admittedly described as “good for food” and “a delight to the eyes,” but also more enigmatically as “to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3.6). This seems to mean that the obviously sensible element in the story has an intellectual component, even if it is difficult to understand how a piece of fruit might look wise-making. One could take the traditional route of identifying Eve with the sensible nature and Adam with the intelligible and noting that Eve ate first, but then one is faced with the stubborn 110

Gregory of Nyssa fact that Eve was motivated precisely by a desire for knowledge. All this is of course not to attempt to settle once and for all the best allegorical interpretation for one of the most contentious passages in scripture, but rather simply to show that given Gregory’s starting point, his interpretation is non-obvious and one-sided— that is, it appears to be granting too much to a Platonic discourse that denigrates the body and not enough to what might be termed a “Christian” discourse that makes the body integral to the process of salvation. Balthasar’s assessment of this bias in Gregory’s thought is harsh. In response to another text of Gregory’s displaying the same pattern, he says, “Here we find the same spiritualism as in Origen, which, when pressed to the limit, would destroy in its foundations the whole meaning of Christianity.” In contrast to some later thinkers, however, he claims, “In the work of the great Doctors [including Gregory], such destruction is impeded by that profound catholicity that fortunately often keeps them from following the logic of their thought right to the limit.”11 I would push Balthasar’s claim further, at least for the “Great Catechism”— by the end of his argument, Gregory has totally overthrown any basis for “spiritualism,” precisely for the sake of the defense of the Incarnation that his suspicion of the body was supposed to render more palatable for his audience. Gregory approaches the problem from a number of angles. One that I have already addressed is his distinction between creaturely changeableness and moral weakness, only the latter of which is unworthy of God (§16/292). By the same token, he argues for the fittingness of the Incarnation based on the commonly shared belief in God as creator: “But if we affirm that he had contact with our nature [physeoˉs], which derived its original being and subsistence from him, in what way does the gospel proclamation fail to have a fitting conception of God?” (§16/292). Both of these arguments are essentially negative and could still perhaps work within a frame where the sensible was viewed as inherently suspicious. Later, however, he makes the bold move of rejecting the idea that the intelligible nature is any more worthy

11

Balthasar, Presence and Thought, 178, n. 29.

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The Politics of Redemption of God than the sensible. Arguing against those who object to Christ’s birth in an earthly human body, he says: For to one who is so narrow-minded as to define God’s majesty from its inability to share the properties of our nature, his union with a heavenly body rather than an earthly would not detract less from his dignity. For every created thing is equally inferior to the Most High who, by reason of his transcendent nature, is unapproachable. The whole universe is uniformly beneath his dignity. For what is totally inaccessible is not accessible to one thing and inaccessible to another. Rather does it transcend all existing things in equal degree. (§27/305) In other words, whatever may seem to be the case from our perspective, from God’s point of view there is no hierarchy of worth among created things. All the elements come together to form an “inward harmony” in which “the bond of concord is nowhere broken” (§6/278) and therefore “no part [of creation] fails to share in the divine fellowship” (§6/279). The pinnacle of this creation is thus not a solely intelligible and non-sensible being such as an angel. Instead, in order to reflect this “inward harmony” of the entire created world, God produces in humanity a blending of the intelligible and the sensible, just as the account of creation teaches. For God, it says, made humanity by taking dust from the ground, and with his own breath planted life in the creature he had formed. In that way the earthly was raised to union with the divine, and a single grace equally extends through all creation . . . . (§6/279) This blending of sensible and intelligible is reflected in Gregory’s doctrine of the sacraments, where baptism corresponds primarily to the soul and the eucharist to the body. Baptism is of course not without its bodily elements—for instance, he claims that the wetness of the water parallels the wetness of semen and thus betokens the new birth (§33/313) and that submersion and resurgence is an imitation of Christ’s death and resurrection (§35/315). Gregory 112

Gregory of Nyssa emphasizes the fact that baptism uses an utterly common element to bring about its effect, to demonstrate how freely available salvation is (§35/317). Perhaps more interesting, however, is his account of the eucharist. Arguing that the body needs to be transformed as much as the soul, Gregory claims that in the eucharist Christ is really present and “when the body which God made immortal enters ours, it entirely transforms it into itself ” (§37/318). The natural objection to this idea is how Christ’s finite body can feed such a large number of people, returning on such a frequent basis. Gregory’s solution to this problem is clever and in my mind quite satisfying. He begins by noting that the human body depends entirely on food for its sustenance and “does not owe its life to its own subsistence” (§37/319). If Christ was fully human, then his body too must have depended on food, since “he did not innovate on [human] nature [physei]” (§37/320). Since bread becomes the body through ingestion, there is a sense in which bread is already virtually the body.This readiness of bread to become Christ’s body during his earthly life means that it is equally ready to become Christ’s body for us now (§37/320)—and the same, of course, applies for the wine, mutatis mutandis. As in the case of Irenaeus, Gregory’s focus is resolutely on the salvation of humanity.Yet in Gregory one can also see even more clearly the interrelatedness between humanity and the rest of material creation, both living (specifically plant life in the case of bread and wine) and non-living (the dirt from which humanity springs). Indeed, the same material created things that provide humanity with natural sustenance also serve as means of salvation. This mutual implication of humanity and the material creation is even clearer in On the Making of Man, where he presents God as providing everything necessary to humanity in a kind of act of hospitality. The connection between humanity and the other intelligible beings is perhaps less concretely developed, though as we will see there does appear to be a connection between the salvation of humanity and of certain rebellious intelligible beings. Whatever may be the particular mode of interrelatedness among specific created beings, however, for Gregory at least some connection is present in the bare fact of createdness: “All created things, by virtue of the fact that they equally proceed from nonbeing into being, are essentially akin” (§39/323). Despite his 113

The Politics of Redemption sympathy for Platonic discourses, then, Gregory’s attempt to think the Incarnation appears to lead him to a social-relational ontology that includes humanity and both the sensible and intelligible aspects of non-human creation in a web of relationality. Thus although Gregory does not make this claim explicitly in the “Great Catechism,” it seems fair to say that insofar as the Incarnation and resurrection mean the salvation of all of humanity, they imply the salvation of all creation as well.

Dealing with the Devil All that remains for the present chapter is an investigation of perhaps the most controversial aspect of Gregory’s text and of the patristic theory of atonement in general: the notion of Christ as paying some kind of ransom to the devil. In Irenaeus, it was clear that the devil and death, as parallel though not identical tyrants, had to be defeated, albeit in a non-violent way, in order for humanity to be saved. Yet the mechanism remained unclear. In the “Great Catechism,” Gregory tries to fill in the details. Centering on the metaphor of slavery, he claims that by allowing themselves to be misled by the devil, the first humans were essentially selling themselves into bondage. Once such transactions are complete, “neither [those selling themselves] nor anyone else can reclaim their freedom, even when those who reduce themselves to this wretched state are nobly born” (§22/299)—and implicitly, the same holds for their progeny as well, insofar as Gregory believes that all of humanity is together held under the devil’s tyranny. Believing like Irenaeus that a violent seizure of humanity is contrary to God’s persuasive nature, Gregory does note one possible non-violent solution: “no law stands in the way of his buying back humanity’s freedom, if he wants to” (§22/299). God must simply figure out some price that the devil will find acceptable, and the transaction can go forward. The key to finding an acceptable price can be found in the devil’s own previous behavior. In Gregory’s account, the devil was an angel “appointed to maintain and take charge of the region of earth,” and he was

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Gregory of Nyssa present for the creation of humanity, whose exalted state sparked the devil’s envy: In [humanity] was the divine excellence of the intelligible nature, an excellence blended with a certain ineffable power [i.e., the image of God]. In consequence that angelic power [the devil], which had been given the government of earth, took it amiss as something insufferable that, out of the nature subject to him, there should be produced a being to resemble the transcendent dignity. (§6/279) Consequently the devil devised the plan to lead humanity astray and assumed lordship over them. With this history in mind, Gregory believes one can “make a reasonable guess about his wishes”: We argued at the beginning that he envied man his happiness and closed his mind to the good. He begot in himself the darkness of wickedness, and sickened with the love of power . . . . What, then, would he exchange for the one in his power, if not something clearly superior and better? (§23/299) This superior prize is Christ, whose miraculous birth and signs of power are, for Gregory, unparalleled in human history and who therefore seemed to the devil to be “a bargain which offered him more than he held” (§23/300). The twist, however, is that since Christ is God, the devil simply cannot rule over Christ. By exchanging humanity for Christ, the devil winds up with nothing. The devil naturally would never agree to this, and so Christ must appear as a mere human being to prevent the devil from knowing he’s getting more than he bargained for. Here Gregory uses a famous fishing metaphor: “as it is with greedy fish, [the devil] swallowed the Godhead like a fishhook along with the flesh, which was the bait” (§24/301)—in other words, the Incarnation was, from the perspective of the devil, a classic bait and switch. Gregory initially justifies this deception with the principle that turnabout is fair play, but then goes

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The Politics of Redemption a step further, claiming that by acting in this way, God “benefitted, not only the one who had perished, but also the very one who had brought us to ruin” (§26/303). A bit further on, he repeats this basic parallel: Christ “freed humanity from evil, and healed the very author of evil himself ” (§26/304). In addition to setting all of humanity free by virtue of human interrelatedness, Christ also leverages the devil’s illegitimate yet real relationship to humanity to bring about the devil’s own salvation as well.12 Thus it seems to me that Gregory is more optimistic than Irenaeus about the possibilities for “persuasive” or non-violent strategies beyond rational debate, and that optimism is matched by his hope for the salvation of the devil. By the end of the patristic era, the main points of Gregory’s scheme, which were adopted and developed by later theologians as well, had come to seem unacceptable. Thus, for example, in the eighth century John of Damascus, the great synthesizer of Eastern patristic thought, replaced Satan with death and introduced motifs of sacrifice that are absent in Gregory and Irenaeus: And so for our sake He submits to death and dies and offers Himself to the Father as a sacrifice for us. For we had offended Him and it was necessary for Him to take upon Himself our redemption that we might thus be loosed from the condemnation—for God forbid that the Lord’s blood should have been offered to the tyrant! Wherefore, then, death approaches, gulps down the bait of the body, and is pierced by the hook of the divinity.13 Given that he’s using the same metaphor as Gregory, it would seem that the use of deception is not the primary complaint, but rather the idea of a payment offered to the devil. As I will discuss in the next chapter, later in the West, Anselm will also, for his own reasons, significantly downgrade the devil’s role in the midst of 12

13

Darby Ray interprets this move in explicitly political terms that help to expose its contemporary relevance: “God’s response to evil is to expose and dramatize the violence and greed at its root, allowing the force of its own avarice to discredit it . . . . ” (Deceiving the Devil, 124). John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, in Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958), III.27.

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Gregory of Nyssa developing his own hugely influential atonement theory. For now, it is clear that already in John of Damascus, the motif of persuasion is slipping from its central role, and it seems to me that the nature of the objection, namely, that God should offer anything to the devil, indicates that the mind-set that underwrote Gregory’s account is becoming increasingly incomprehensible. After all, it’s not as though God is simply paying a price to the devil—getting him to accept Christ as ransom is part of an overarching plan that ultimately undercuts the devil’s power from within. The problem, in short, seems to be the idea that a power other than God could come to rule over humanity in a way that is, if not strictly legitimate, at least in some sense real. Gregory’s account of how the devil’s rule could come about is both elliptical and metaphorical, but it seems to me that a key to understanding it is the idea that humanity “sold itself into slavery”—that humanity in some sense consented to and acknowledged the devil’s authority. This element of acknowledgment brings Gregory’s text into contact with the mainstream of modern political theory, which even in its most despot-friendly mode (as in the work of Hobbes) relies on the concept of the consent of the governed. A major contemporary development of democratic political theory can be found in the work of post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who has analyzed the ways in which power in society crystallizes around certain representative figures or institutions as a result of an ongoing struggle and negotiation rather than a once and for all “social contract”—an analysis that I believe is particularly helpful in understanding the role Gregory is claiming for the devil here. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,14 Laclau, writing with Chantal Mouffe, traces the genealogy of the concept of “hegemony” in Marxist theory. The term “hegemony” initially designated moments when the purportedly natural historical progression from capitalism to communism was disrupted because a particular class was not yet ready to take on its role. It was widely acknowledged that no class can undertake any major historical role alone: rather, the leading class must be the leader of an alliance among several classes and therefore take up the demands of all. 14

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York:Verso, 2001).

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The Politics of Redemption A key historical example of this phenomenon can be seen in Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, where the proletariat took on the bourgeoisie’s “natural” role of bringing about a democratic revolution because the bourgeoisie was insufficiently developed at the time.The fact that this slippage of roles can occur at all of course naturally calls into question the whole idea that there exists any “natural historical progression,” and Laclau and Mouffe ultimately claim that every leading political agent— whether centered on a particular economic class or some other grouping—is actually taking on what one might call an “unnatural” task, since there are no natural tasks they could be doing. In short, all power is hegemonic, undertaken in the absence of a sufficiently developed alternative. The beginning of political strategy, then, has to be the acknowledgment that no political actor can claim inherent justification, an acknowledgment that seriously challenges key Marxist claims about the historical role of the proletariat and the controlling role of the economy “in the last instance.” In keeping with this insight, in his recent book On Populist Reason,15 Laclau attempts to probe the necessary conditions for both the exercise and the breakdown of hegemony. Though I can’t do justice to his rich and detailed argument in a brief summary, it seems fair to say that the key to maintaining hegemony is to meet one’s subjects’ demands (i.e., their perceived needs) to a sufficient degree that the unmet demands will not themselves crystallize around another political agent that can then threaten to overthrow the existing hegemonic ruler. Here again, the democratic revolution in Russia is a valuable illustration. In order to bring about that revolution, Lenin was determined that the worker’s movement had to become the point around which all the complaints against the tsar crystallized, meaning that as much as possible, they had to be aware of all those complaints and fighting on all oppressed groups’ behalf.16 No regime can fully satisfy all its subjects’ 15

16

Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005). As the title indicates, Laclau shifts his terminology from “hegemony” to “populism” in this work; for simplicity of exposition, I am keeping it constant. See V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done? in Essential Works of Lenin: “What is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Dover, 1987) for his extensive list of concrete examples.

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Gregory of Nyssa perceived needs, of course, if only because different subjects’ demands will sometimes be incompatible.The key to maintaining power is to make sure that the unmet demands are diffuse enough to keep another leader from emerging—this strategy allows the ruler’s power to seem self-evident, insofar as no plausible alternative exists. There is a sense, then, in which all political leaders are giving their subjects what they want, or at least enough of what they want. With this scheme in mind, one can begin to see how a newly sinful humanity might actually accept the devil’s rule more easily than God’s. Most notably, many of the perceived needs of sinful humanity—for the fulfillment of greed, for the exercise of violence and dominance—could be much more easily met by someone like the devil than someone like the persuasive God of the patristic literature. Indeed, with desires warped by sin, humanity might perceive God as a heartless tyrant were he to violently overthrow the devil and begin ruling directly. The rule of the devil is “real,” then, a fact to be reckoned with, insofar as sinful humanity and the devil somehow fit each other and so are allied with one another. God’s strategy of subverting the devil’s power from within might thus appear to be two-pronged, simultaneously undermining the devil by causing him to overreach and healing humanity in order to bring about new desires incompatible with the devil’s rule. Such a process can’t take place all at once—once the alternative power center (in this case Christ) is established, the balance of power must slowly shift, and that is one way of reading the patristic authors’ confidence that the spread of Christianity even in the face of persecution demonstrates the gospel’s truth. The world is not redeemed all at once, but it is in their view approaching a critical mass. On the other hand, as Gregory says in response to those who object that the world does not seem sufficiently redeemed,“it is possible for evil to have been struck a mortal blow, and yet for life to be harassed by its vestiges” (§30/308). Although they appear to be powerful now, the follower of Christ acts in confidence that the devil and his followers are essentially “deadenders.” My interpretation of the devil’s “hegemony” over humanity is of course not the last word, but the possibility of such a reading 119

The Politics of Redemption indicates to me that Darby Ray, along with many liberation theologians, is right to see the ransom theory of the atonement as a great resource for non-violent resistance movements.17 Nevertheless, I do have certain objections, at least to Gregory’s account, all of which are centered on the question of relationality. For Gregory, the problem of humanity’s slavery to sin is transmitted via the network of relationality (represented by birth), the ultimate solution of resurrection is possible because of that very network of relationality, and indeed the network of relationality extends salvation to the rest of creation as well—implicitly in the case of the sensible elements and explicitly in the case of the rebellious intelligible elements (represented by the devil). Yet the explanation of the ransom strategy proceeds as though it is necessary for Christ to be other than the human race and therefore somehow exchangeable for the human race. Every atonement theory reflects this insider/outsider tension to some degree—at the very least because Christ is God as well as human, and in many cases also because the virgin birth allows for some other form of exceptionality—but at this crucial point, Christ’s status as “insider” is reduced to the minimal role of providing him with a disguise in order not to scare off the devil (§23/299). It is possible to read this as a simple contradiction, but I would propose that we could also read it in terms of a series of gaps in Gregory’s argumentation, inviting the reader to complete the picture in terms of the clear relational logic of the rest of the text. The key gap is exactly when Gregory sees this purported “exchange” as taking place, or indeed the “offer” of Christ in exchange for the devil. There does not seem to be any space in the gospels for such negotiations to occur, and Gregory does not supply his own alternative narrative. I would argue, then, that we are to understand the acceptability of Christ as a price to be implicit in the devil’s previous behavior, rather than envisioning the devil agreeing to it after some kind of negotiation—that is, given that the devil has a lust for dominance, he will necessarily 17

Ray, Deceiving the Devil. Ray has undoubtedly made a major contribution simply by opening the door for a wider range of theologians to take the ransom theory seriously as a political resource, yet it is a shame that her book contains only a brief final chapter offering some initial suggestions about the significance of ransom as such.

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Gregory of Nyssa find a powerful individual like Christ an especially attractive prize. This interpretation gives more significance to Christ’s shared humanity as a “bait” as well: the devil is accustomed to exercise dominance over human beings. Viewing the devil as parallel to some form of government, one might assume that in most cases, his dominance is mostly implicit, since most governments do not pay attention to particular individuals unless some exceptional situation arises, such as a crime being committed or some kind of lawsuit or other request brought forward. Yet the attractiveness of Christ will make the devil especially eager to exercise explicit dominance over him, as indeed the gospel narratives portray him doing in the form of the temptation in the desert. Since Christ won’t submit voluntarily, the devil goes the route of the Hegelian master in threatening him with death in the form of the crucifixion, but even then Christ won’t submit and so the devil kills his rebellious subject, which represents the devil’s fatal overreach.18 The advantage of this scheme is that Christ’s participation in the fundamental solidarity of the human race is active at every point: the devil exercises dominance over him qua normal human being (albeit a particularly interesting or attractive one), and the devil’s overstretch of attempting to exercise dominance over Christ qua God results in the invalidation of his claim over the humanity of which Christ is an integral part. Assuming that my reconstruction here is a plausible way of filling in the gaps in Gregory’s argumentation, one might ask what kept Gregory himself from making those connections explicit. One possibility is his political situation, where the emperor had allied itself with the church. I am not proposing that Gregory consciously “toned it down” in order to please his imperial patrons, but the sharp reversal from previous conditions of persecution might have made unavailable to Gregory any clear idea of a political ruler as enemy. Some initial evidence in favor of this interpretation is that Irenaeus—whose community had experienced persecution but who argued forcefully that God and not the devil was the 18

Although Gregory like so many other theologians of his time does not seem to know quite what to do about the shame of the cross, he is clear on one point: it is a visible, and one might then say also public, death (§32/311)— which means that Christ can also serve as a public rallying point for rejecting the rule of the devil.

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The Politics of Redemption origin of government19—was nevertheless able to propose that the infamous number 666 might refer to a word indicating the Romans as rulers of the world.20 Yet one hesitates to dismiss the influence of Gregory’s political situation as all bad, since it may well have been his perception that Christianity was transforming the Roman empire that in part made it possible for him to contemplate the salvation even of the devil. In retrospect, one might even look back at the tensions of this unique moment—when early patristic thought was still a forceful influence, yet the political situation seemed to be moving in some kind of redemptive direction—as particularly fruitful for the development of atonement theory. By contrast, in the next chapter, I will be analyzing an atonement theory whose primary features seem to me to reflect, at least in part, the collapse of those tensions.

19 20

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.24.1–3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.30.3.

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Chapter 6

Anselm

The argument in Anselm of Canterbury’s Why God Became Human1 is one of the best known in the history of Christian theology. The account of humanity’s insurmountable debt to God, incurred through sin and payable only through the voluntary death of a sinless God-man, has exercised a huge religious and cultural influence, due in large part to its logical elegance. Anselm himself summarizes his argument as follows, showing clearly how it integrates the two natures of Christ and the problem of sin as conceived in the West: This debt [of sin] was so large that, although no one but man owed it, only God was capable of repaying it, assuming that there should be a man identical with God . . . the life of this man is so sublime and precious that it can suffice to repay the debt owed for the sins of the whole world, and infinitely more besides. (CDH, 2.18) It is also one of the most critiqued arguments in the history of Christian theology. As I’ve indicated in previous chapters, I agree with the majority of the critiques brought forward by contemporary theologians, and I believe my investigation can help to reinforce and clarify those critiques. At the same time, my approach means that I can touch upon those critiques only 1

English citations from treatises of Anselm will follow the translation found in Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and Gillian Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), with occasional modifications. Latin citations stem from F. S. Schmitt, ed., Anselmi Opera Omnia, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1936–1968). In-text references follow standard textual divisions, with titles abbreviated as follows: Why God Became Human (CDH), On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (CV), and On the Fall of the Devil (CD).

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The Politics of Redemption indirectly, and I will be beginning with a question that may seem irrelevant to those thinkers: the precise relationship between Anselm and his patristic forebears. Throughout the modern period, Anselm’s theory has often been treated as a definitive break with the patristic approach to atonement, whether for good or (as in Aulén) for ill, and there is a definite initial plausibility to such a view.The distance separating Anselm from the patristic authors is considerable, and not only on the temporal level. The many centuries separating Anselm (ca. 1033–1109) from Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa saw the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire and the rise of the feudal system, along with the emergence of a distinctively Latin form of theology based above all on the thought of Augustine. With a few notable exceptions, intellectual life in Europe had entered into a kind of holding pattern, and Anselm’s work appears in retrospect as one of the first steps toward an intellectual revival that would come to its full flowering in high scholasticism. In a context characterized by a heavy reliance on authority, Anselm’s approach of attempting to demonstrate the truths of revelation through the use of reason alone appears to be a radical break—and there is every indication that the initial reception of his work was enthusiastic, to the point that his contemporaries were reportedly stealing and distributing early drafts of Why God Became Human (CDH, pref.). Aulén views this reliance on rationality as one of the most serious problems with Anselm’s view, but it is arguably one of the areas in which he most clearly returns to the spirit of the patristic authors: Gregory felt himself able to derive an impressive array of Christian doctrines from widely shared logical assumptions, and although Irenaeus is much more reliant on the authority of scripture and the nascent catholic tradition, he defends this very reliance on that authority through reasoned argument. Anselm is certainly more ambitious than Gregory insofar as he believes he has found a convincing argument for the necessity of the Incarnation and death of Christ, but he nonetheless seems to me to be in fundamental continuity with Gregory’s approach.2 More importantly for my purposes, the 2

Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams, in their Anselm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), argue that Anselm’s general method, as revealed in the

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Anselm “logic” or ratio that Anselm finds in the Incarnation is in key respects similar to the social-relational logic I have found in Irenaeus and Gregory: the propagation of sin and redemption are only possible because of the fundamental solidarity of the human race.3 Thus, though I agree with Aulén that it is a mistake to view the patristic authors as simply anticipating Anselm’s argument,4 I believe he goes much too far in presenting Anselm as a complete

3

4

Proslogion, is that of “faith seeking understanding”: “The first chapter of the Proslogion both represents and enacts the humility, obedience, and spiritual discipline that are necessary for discovering the reason of faith. No unbeliever can achieve such discovery, but a patient, honest, and ‘moderately intelligent’ unbeliever can follow and appreciate the demonstration or defense of the reason of faith that is discovered by the faithful believer” (24). His method in Cur deus homo appears to me to be considerably more bold and self-assured, though Visser and Williams are far from alone in attempting to conform it to the “faith seeking understanding” formula—see, for instance, Dániel Deme, The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), who even evinces a certain amount of anxiety on the topic of Anselm’s remoto Christo (knowledge of Christ being excluded) principle: “Yet is it possible for a believer, even for a moment, to pretend that he is void of any knowledge about Christ? Is this possible intellectually? Is this legitimate morally?” (20). It is beyond the scope of my argument to decide this question one way or another, but I suspect that much of the perceived necessity to make sure that Anselm isn’t “really” trying to work from “pure reason” reflects an anachronistic reading of Anselm in terms of the later nature/grace debate— whereas for Anselm reason just is the Logos, without any real bifurcation between natural and revealed theology. Deme agrees with this emphasis, though I find his account of what motivated Anselm’s reliance on human solidarity unconvincing: “The priority of the ‘collectivistic’ perspective in a systematic approach to Christology and anthropology, in contrast with the emphasis on the individual, is necessary in order to maintain the nature of dogmatics as a discipline conducted from the platform, and for the sake, of the Church” (30; emphasis in original). This emphasis on the church seems to me to be entirely absent from the Cur deus homo and indeed from virtually all of Anselm’s systematic works, and Deme’s insistence on the role of the church seems to undercut the very solidarity he’s highlighting: “the person of Christ in his redeeming mission relates to fallen mankind collectively. Man stands before him as part of a larger whole—either standing under the protective ‘wings’ of the Church, or as a part of the outcast human race” (30). Here as elsewhere, Deme’s “theological” reading of Anselm threatens to become eisegesis. Aulén, Christus Victor, 24.

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The Politics of Redemption break with the patristic scheme. Instead, I propose that one needs to read Anselm’s theory as a particular development within that scheme, in some cases narrowing it or departing from it, and in others contributing positively to it. More specifically, I hope to show that the places where Anselm departs from the patristic theory of atonement are the places where he also departs from the social-relational ontology that underwrites that theory and begins to move toward an individualistic ontology. This is not to say that Anselm’s thought is fully individualistic by any means, only that he begins to move in that direction. One illustrative contrast is the scope of the relational network through which sin and redemption are propagated. The patristic authors both conceive of a kind of “overflow” in which the redemptive act centered on the human race spreads beyond humanity, both to the material world (most explicitly in Irenaeus) and the angelic hosts (as in Gregory). Yet even though Anselm sees the redemption of humanity as underwritten by a social-relational logic, its effects apply solely to humanity. He not only fails to consider even the possibility that Christ’s act could redeem the fallen angels, but also explicitly rejects the idea that God could redeem the angels through becoming one of them because the angels do not stand in the same kind of network of relationality with one another (CDH, 2.21). In a complementary move, Anselm rejects the notion that the devil should receive any type of payment, even a provisional one, which has the effect of once again restricting the focus to the relationship between humanity and God alone and of removing any consideration, even metaphorical, of the political structure of human relatedness that the devil represented in the patristic literature. It should be emphasized that neither of these moves is at all controversial by the time Anselm is writing. Though Gregory’s unimpeachable orthodoxy on other fronts helped him to avoid condemnation for his view, the possibility of salvation for Satan and the other demons was decisively rejected in the mainstream of orthodoxy. Similarly, the notion that God should acknowledge any claim made by the devil came to seem self-evidently wrong. All these reasons indicate to me that we should view Anselm’s theory not as a radical innovation, but as a powerful and influential articulation of some long-standing intuitions about the perceived 126

Anselm inadequacies in the patristic account. Hence one could say that Anselm is a particularly important index of certain trends in Christian thought.Yet this recognition makes careful attention to the details of Anselm’s arguments in Why God Became Human and related texts all the more important, so that one can gauge the often subtle shifts his work represents and also solidifies. Accordingly, I will begin my investigation with what Anselm shares with his patristic forebears and then turn to his differences from the patristic scheme and their consequences, focusing on the ways in which Anselm still presupposes the social-relational ontology found in the patristic authors even as he begins to move away from it.

Variations on a Theme In order to get a handle on where Anselm sticks to and departs from the patristic approach to atonement, it may be helpful to begin by laying out the basics of that approach as it appears in Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa. Leaving aside the question of whether the Incarnation was in some sense the plan all along, both authors agree that Christ’s work solves two problems that arose as a result of human sin, subjection to death and bondage under the devil. These problems arose for different yet related reasons. By disobeying God and obeying the devil, the first humans sold themselves into bondage to the devil, and God imposed the emergency measure of death in order to restrain sinful humans’ self-destructiveness. Both of these conditions are universal in scope because of the fundamental unity of the human race, which both authors put forward as a principle without showing a great concern to specify the nature of the link among human beings. There is some attention given to childbirth, but primarily as a matter of transmitting the socio-political status of subjection to the devil—not yet transmitting something like “original sin.” God’s intervention in Christ is persuasive or non-violent insofar as it responds both to the nature of the human race and to humanity’s present condition. In both cases, Christ must act “from within,” and that means becoming a member of the human race and living through every aspect of human life from birth to death. 127

The Politics of Redemption In his resurrection, Christ overcomes death and points forward to the final resurrection of all, which is seen to follow naturally from the resurrection of Christ qua singular and prototypical human being. Through his death on the cross, Christ somehow invalidates the claim of the devil to rule over humanity, with the effect again extending in principle to all human beings. Irenaeus will elsewhere embrace the notion of eternal damnation for some, but both authors rely on an underlying logic of unity and universalism when they are focusing specifically on the work of Christ—because humanity is one, Adam can act in such a way as to render all human beings subject to death and the lordship of the devil, and similarly Christ can act to set all human beings free from both. In both authors, the redemptive act centered on humanity also affects non-human aspects of creation, due to the relationship in which they stand to humanity. For Irenaeus, non-human creation is necessary as an environment for bodily humanity, while for Gregory the devil’s relationship to humanity leads to his redemption through the act by which Christ undercuts his rule. To put it in the most schematic terms, then, in the patristic theory of atonement, the unity of humanity leads to a universal and twofold bondage (to death and the devil), and Christ’s redemptive act mobilizes that unity in order to undo both forms of bondage at once in a way that is “persuasive” or non-violent in a broad sense.5 Anselm retains this basic framework, most importantly the core principle of the unity of the human race. This principle comes to the fore at pivotal moments in Why God Became Human. For instance, discussing the fact that the first humans’ sin affected the whole human race, he says: Now, the whole nature of the human race was inherent in its first parents [humana natura tote erat in primis parentibus]; human nature was as a result entirely defeated in them 5

The unity of humanity seems to me to be the missing piece of Aulén’s argument—he continually says that the patristic theory unites the Incarnation and the redemption, but the unity he has in mind is God’s continuous and unilateral action. If the arbitrary will of God is the only thing uniting the two, that strikes me as more of a simple juxtaposition than an actual unification, an impression that is only reinforced by his polemic against rationality.

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Anselm with the consequence that it became sinful—with the exception of one man alone, whom God knew how to set apart from the sin of Adam, just as he knew how to create him of a virgin without the seed of a man. In just the same way, human nature would have been entirely victorious, if they had not sinned. (CDH, 1.18) In order to make up for this fault, humanity “needs to conquer the devil through the difficulty of death, and in so doing sin in no way” (CDH, 1.22), but he cannot do this since “because of the man who was conquered, the whole of humanity is rotten, and, as it were, in a ferment with sin” (CDH, 1.23). On the other hand, the savior must come from the same race [genus] founded by Adam, or else “he will not have an obligation to give recompense on behalf of this race, because he will not be from it” (CDH, 2.8). The reasoning behind this requirement is as follows: For, just as it is right that it should be a human being who should pay recompense for the guilt of humanity, it is likewise necessary that the person paying recompense should be identical with the sinner, or a member of the same race [eiusdem generis]. Otherwise, it will be neither Adam nor his race who will be making recompense on Adam’s behalf. Therefore, just as, starting from Adam and Eve, sin has been engendered in all human beings, similarly, no one except these two themselves, or someone descended from them, has an obligation to pay recompense for the sin of humankind. As they themselves are not able to do so, it is necessary that the person who is to do this will be descended from them. (CDH, 2.8) The underlying logic is familiar by now: because of the interconnectedness of human beings, one human being can act in such a way as to affect all others, for good or for ill. This is the core insight that gives Anselm’s account of the Incarnation its sense. With regard to the fundamental solidarity of humanity, Anselm does not merely reprise the patristic approach, but attempts to extend and clarify it in at least two ways. The first is through his 129

The Politics of Redemption emphasis on the reproductive link, which he treats in much greater detail in On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, the sequel to Why God Became Human. There he responds to a question that he believes he did not answer adequately in the former text: “how God assumed a sinless human being from the sinful mass of humanity [quomodo deus accepit hominem de massa peccatrice humani generis sine peccato]” (CV, pref.). Anselm again claims that “because the whole of human nature [tota humana natura] was contained in Adam and Eve, and nothing of it existed outside them, the whole of human nature was weakened and corrupted” (CV, 2) and he attempts to understand how this corruption could be spread to subsequent human individuals in terms of his understanding of reproduction. Obviously Anselm did not have access to the findings of modern science, and so his approach seems strange to us. For instance, he seems to believe that the will of the male partner directly affects the will of the child (CV, 7), reflecting the widespread premodern view that the male is the active agent and the woman is a passive receptacle. Another example of this male-centered view of reproduction is his claim that “it cannot be denied that infants were in Adam when he sinned” (CV, 23).6 More broadly, he espouses a view reminiscent of the Lamarckian theory of evolution, which allows for the inheritance of acquired characteristics: “If human nature had not sinned, it would have been propagated as God had made it: thus after its sin it is propagated according to what it has made of itself by sinning” (CV, 2). Whatever the inadequacies of Anselm’s concrete theory here, however, he is moving beyond the patristic authors, who viewed Irenaeus’s “one human race” or unum genus humanum more strictly in terms of a “category” or “type” than in terms of a biologically united “race”—both are more concerned with the social consequences of birth, and although Gregory places a great emphasis on the importance of Christ’s birth, he seems to view “having been born” more as a commonly shared characteristic of human 6

Here Anselm may have some scriptural basis for his claim. Discussing Abraham’s payment of tithes to Melchizedek, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: “One might even say that Levi himself, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, for he was still in the loins of his ancestor when Melchizedek met him” (Hebrews 7.9–10).

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Anselm beings than as something that establishes a concrete link. In addition, though I will discuss some of the problems in the specific ways Anselm develops it, the insight that bondage to sin distorts our will or desire is one that I will be returning to in my final chapter. The second extension is less thoroughly developed, but to my mind perhaps more interesting. It comes up in the context of a discussion as to whether the Virgin Mary was preserved from sin, a course of action Anselm views as the most fitting for God to take. Anselm shares with the patristic authors the conviction that it would be inappropriate for God simply to forgive sins by fiat, which the preservation of Mary before Christ’s salvific act would seem to represent. He comes to the conclusion that a kind of “time warp” is involved: Mary’s sinfulness was either forgiven or preempted due to Christ’s saving act. Yet he arrives at this solution only after delineating a general principle that the power of Christ’s work “extends to those who were absent either geographically or temporally [vel loco vel tempore]” (CDH, 2.16). This mention of geographical absence is tantalizing, as its apparent presupposition that being present to witness Christ’s death was somehow ideal is the only connection in Anselm’s text with the patristic emphasis on the public nature of Christ’s death. Yet his focus here is on the temporal side. As Christ’s action is aimed at restoring God’s purpose for humanity, a humanity that existed in complete abstraction from Christ would be purposeless, and so Anselm is constrained to say that “since humankind was first created, there has never been any time devoid of some person connected with that reconciliation without which all humankind was created in vain” (CDH, 2.16)—the most important of whom was, for Anselm, the Virgin Mary.7 To an extent, this argument is simply a variation on Irenaeus’s logic of recapitulation, but it seems to me to generalize the possibility of relationships that span vast spatial or temporal distances while still carrying a certain ontological heft. I will be returning to this principle in my final chapter. 7

It seems likely to me that the traditional view, not attested in all the gospels, that the Virgin Mary was present at the crucifixion led Anselm to emphasize the temporal over the geographical aspect here.

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The Politics of Redemption

Displacing the Devil The unity of the human race is not the only thing Anselm shares with the patristic authors—he also clearly embraces the notion that death is a result of sin and that Christ’s work must not be carried out by fiat. The particular significance of these aspects of his scheme is, however, best understood in relation to the single greatest change that Anselm introduces: the displacement of the devil from his role as a “substantial” oppressor alongside death. I say “displacement” rather than “removal” for two reasons. First, Anselm does give the devil a role, albeit a significantly downgraded one of subjecting humanity to temptation or more general “harassment” [vexatio] (CDH, 1.7). He is aware of the patristic view that “God, in order to set humankind free, was obliged to act against the devil by justice rather than mighty power,” which he characterizes as something “we are in the habit of saying” (CDH, 1.7). He rejects the patristic view, but replaces it with the idea that it is more appropriate for humanity “to defeat in return the one by whom humanity had been defeated” (CDH, 2.19). Hence undercutting the devil remains a goal of Christ’s work, but a distinctly subordinate one. The second reason for calling it a “displacement” has more momentous consequences for Anselm’s argument: the “slot” formerly occupied by the devil remains a part of the overall framework, to be filled by different agents at different times. Once one recognizes this, it becomes clear that Anselm follows the patristic scheme to a surprising level of detail. For instance, with the devil reduced to a supporting player at best in the drama of sin and salvation, the most obvious agent of Christ’s death becomes humanity, or at least particular human beings. This creates a possible problem. As I will discuss in more detail, one of the earliest steps in Anselm’s chain of reasoning is that any offense against God is of infinite magnitude, since God is infinite (CDH, 1.13). Surely murdering God counts as an offence, so it would seem that humanity would only compound its debt through the very act that was supposed to satisfy it. To solve this problem, Anselm mobilizes the theme, found in Gregory of Nyssa, of Christ’s humanity as a kind of disguise, but in this case, it serves to allow Anselm to claim that humanity’s sin in killing Christ was committed in ignorance and 132

Anselm therefore forgivable: “For no member of the human race would ever wish to kill God, at least no one would willingly wish it, and therefore those who killed him unknowingly did not fall headlong into that infinite sin with which no other sins can be compared” (CDH, 2.15). Clearly Anselm cannot use every aspect of his traditional theme—for instance, he would view it as monstrous to claim that God was purposely enticing humanity to kill Christ—but its very presence in the argument reflects the fact that humanity is here taking on the role that was previously reserved for the devil. The devil’s more basic role in the patristic scheme is of course that of the tyrant who has unjustly seized humanity. For Anselm, there is a sense in which humanity itself, despite the apparent paradox, can be seen as taking on this role. The possibility comes up in a discussion of the traditional role of the devil and draws an explicit parallel between humanity and the devil. Justifying his rejection of the idea that the devil has any kind of valid claim over humanity, Anselm says: supposing that the devil, or humanity, were his own master, or belonged to someone other than God, or was permanently in the power of someone other than God, then perhaps one could justify speaking in [the traditional] terms. However, given that neither the devil nor humanity belongs to anyone but God, and that neither stands outside God’s power: what action did God need to take with, concerning, or in the case of, someone who was his own, apart from punishing this bond slave of his who had persuaded his fellow-bond slave to desert his master and come over to join him . . . ? For they were both thieves, since one was stealing his own person from his master at the instigation of another. (CDH, 1.7) One might connect this passage with the idea that “after its sin [human nature] is propagated according to what it has made of itself by sinning” (CV, 2)—a “making of itself ” that Anselm, following Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, makes a matter of the will—to try to flesh out the shape of humanity’s self-enslavement, but Anselm does not develop this theme in detail. Instead, the 133

The Politics of Redemption primary agent filling the devil’s role is the only other meaningful agent available in Anselm’s scheme: God himself. As this claim may be somewhat jarring, I should be clear. My point here is not to say that Anselm straightforwardly presents God as an oppressive ruler. Naturally the role undergoes considerable mutation when held by God rather than the devil, just as it does when held by humanity. I also do not intend to claim that Anselm consciously cast God in a role based on the traditional role of the devil in patristic atonement theories. Instead, I would argue that the inherent logic of his subject matter leads him, once he has downgraded the devil, necessarily to place God in an analogous role. To get at why this is, it may be helpful to think about what it would have looked like if Anselm had simply removed the role of the devil rather than displacing the devil from it. What would have remained was humanity’s bondage to death alone as the problem that the Incarnation solves—and indeed, later Eastern theology has tended toward that claim. Yet it seems obvious that there is much more going wrong in the world than the fact that people die. Violence, greed, lust for domination, and even simple callousness are historical constants that can sometimes make death seem to be a welcome relief. That was precisely the role of death for Irenaeus: an act of mercy to restrain the self-destructiveness of a human race that had allied itself with a malicious power. That very alliance provided an explanation for how human sin was universal in scope, by analogy with the common practice of viewing a social or political status, such as enslavement or subjection to a particular ruler, as transmitted by birth: since the father of all humanity had subjected himself to the devil, all his descendents (i.e., all subsequent human beings) are also subjected. Once the devil’s rule has been stripped of any real explanatory weight, however, human sinfulness is no longer a matter of being subject (albeit initially voluntarily) to an evil power, but instead becomes a matter of being in the wrong before God, or in Anselm’s terms, of being in debt to God.The inheritance of debt from one’s parents is a familiar feature of many human cultures, and in fact Anselm appears to interpret the patristic authors as claiming that humanity owed a debt to the devil that God was in some sense obligated to repay in order to set humanity free (CDH, 1.7). 134

Anselm In rejecting this view, Anselm effectively transforms humanity’s indebtedness from something that is provisionally recognized as part of the actually existing situation in which God’s strategy must work into something with much greater ontological weight. Now one must recall here that God’s recognition of the devil’s claim in the patristic theory was oriented toward undercutting all justification for that claim. As John of Damascus, Anselm, and countless other post-patristic theologians seem to be unable to recognize, the entire strategy proceeds from the assumption that the devil’s claim has no ultimate validity—the point is to undercut the devil’s claim, not to actually pay it. By contrast, once we assume that God is in the business of exacting payment for debts incurred, then that debt must ultimately and really be paid: the abolishment of that system of debt, parallel with the abolishment of the devil’s rule, is no longer an option once it is a matter of the divine nature. Further complicating the picture is the fact that debt to God is not simply a debt but, by definition, a moral failing. Hence death becomes not a future-oriented corrective or purifying measure as in Gregory, but a punishment. Yet a problem arises here. The Christian tradition has always maintained, virtually without exception, that moral failing can only be a matter of the individual will—for example, that is the principle that underlies Irenaeus’s rejection of the Gnostic teaching that certain individuals or even gods can be “inherently” good or evil in abstraction from their own willful deeds.The inheritance of a social or political status, or even of indebtedness, unwillingly or through no fault of one’s own is, however regrettable, at least familiar and comprehensible. Yet how can one inherit the condition of being in the wrong before God unwillingly, the condition of being morally blameworthy through no fault of one’s own? That is the circle Anselm attempts to square with the doctrine of original sin.

Original Sin and Its Avoidance Anselm’s solution to this apparently insoluble problem is ingenious, and more importantly for my purposes, it depends on the most fundamental level on the solidarity of the human race, particularly 135

The Politics of Redemption the form it takes in the reproductive link.8 Here he draws upon the Augustinian concept of original sin, which puts forward the idea that the “excessive” desire experienced during sexual intercourse results in a kind of distortion in the child.9 In On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, he combines this concept with the conviction that only the will is susceptible to moral judgment and the commonly shared concept of evil as privation, allowing him to formulate the following principle: “justice is uprightness of will kept for its own sake, and injustice is nothing but the absence of justice that should be there” (CV, 5). Every rational being owes it to God to possess justice, and failing to possess it is therefore morally blameworthy. Early on in his argument, he refers his readers to his treatise On the Fall of the Devil in order to learn exactly what this means.There he develops a kind of duality of the will. On the one hand, there is the prerational or animal will, which simply wills happiness and is logically, if not temporally, prior to the will toward justice or rectitude (CD, 12). The animal will, shared with all living creatures, is neither just nor unjust, as one can see from the fact that we don’t hold animals morally responsible for their actions (CD, 18). Above and beyond this will, God gives rational creatures a rational will, which should govern over the animal will and, more importantly, be aligned with the divine will (CD, 14). A metaphor that Anselm does not use but I have found helpful in understanding this concept is that the rational will must be properly attuned to the divine will. When a creature disobeys, however, the rational will is detuned and therefore begins to serve the animal will (i.e., the creature’s own perceived advantage) rather than the divine will. The will can only receive the proper initial tuning from God—“Before receiving justice, in fact, no one is just 8

9

Visser and Williams portray Anselm’s argument here as much more tentative than most areas of his work (Anselm, 241), but I believe they downplay its centrality to his system, which Deme rightly points out: “If we are not linked to one origin in our sinfulness, but trespass only individually, our salvation cannot be secured by one representative. If we do not share in Adam’s disobedience, we do not share in Christ’s living sacrifice either” (Christology of Anselm, 54). Here he cites the passage arguing that angels cannot be saved by an angelic version of Christ because they are not biologically related in the way humans are (CDH, 2.8). See, for example, City of God, book 13, ch. 3.

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Anselm or unjust and, after having received it, no one becomes unjust unless he willingly abandons justice” (CD, 18)—and once the will is out of tune, the creature cannot retune it. With regard to the devil, Anselm develops a complex argument that essentially has the devil preemptively refusing the gift of justice, as it were in the very moment of his creation.Yet it is not the case that God is to blame for the devil’s morally deficient condition (cf. CD, 20), because God really did make a good-faith effort to give his gift of original justice to the devil: the devil’s “not accepting to hang on to what he abandoned is not because God did not give it, but God did not give it because he did not accept it . . . . The will to retain is not always prior to the will to abandon” (CD, 3). The very fact that Anselm feels constrained to attribute this nearly inconceivable motiveless malignancy to the devil is symptomatic of his narrowing of the scope of relationality. In the patristic theory, the devil was appointed to oversee humanity and fell as a result of his jealousy of God’s profound love for humanity. This account may seem to be overly mythological, but it is perfectly comprehensible. The removal of any substantial link between humanity and the devil, however, means that it apparently does not even occur to Anselm that the devil’s fall can be a matter of anything but the relationship between God and the devil alone. Since it is difficult to see how the devil could possibly have had any motivation to rebel against God even before being fully created, his motivation would apparently be rebellion as such. It seems fair to say, then, that Anselm’s narrowing of the relational field winds up replacing a perfectly understandable explanation of the devil’s fall with one that seems almost random. Here the disadvantages of pulling back from a fully socialrelational understanding are clear: one ends up omitting factors that are necessary to make sense of things. In the case of human beings born under conditions of sin, the picture is slightly different. However incomprehensible his motive may have been, the devil did willfully choose to rebel, and the angels who follow him freely chose to do it as well.This “oneby-one” scheme for angels appears to be necessary for Anselm because “angels are not of one same race [eiusdem generis] as human beings are”—a fact that also renders their redemption through an angelic version of the Incarnation impossible (CDH, 2.21). 137

The Politics of Redemption As I already discussed above, for Anselm “the whole of human nature [tota humana natura] was contained in Adam and Eve,” meaning that “the whole of human nature was weakened and corrupted” and is now “propagated according to what it has made of itself by sinning” (CV, 2). After sin “human nature was left with the obligation of possessing, whole and unadulterated, the justice which it had been given, and with the obligation to make satisfaction for having abandoned it” (CV, 2).Yet sin has left it unable to meet that obligation: Human nature [humana natura]10 alone does not have the strength to make satisfaction for sin or to recover the justice it abandoned: “the body which is corrupted burdens the soul” [Wisdom 9.15], especially at times when it is particularly weak, for example in infancy and in its mother’s womb, while the soul cannot even discern what is just. It would therefore seem inevitable that human nature should be born in infants with the obligation of making satisfaction for the first sin, which it has always had the potential to avoid, and with the obligation to possess original justice, which it has always had the power to keep. (CV, 2) In short, “human nature [in all humans born of Adam] does not have the potential . . . to procreate just children” (CV, 26). If Adam had not sinned, “those whom he begot by operation of nature and the will [operante natura et uoluntate] would have been just from the moment that they had a rational soul,” but since “Adam declined to be subject to the will of God,” “the property of generation, though it remained, was not subjected to his will, as it would have been had he not sinned” (CV, 10). Anselm here seems to combine two explanations for original sin. One is simply that human nature has been damaged and each subsequent human individual (save Christ) is an instance of the corrupted nature rather than the original nature. Added to that is the idea that it is somehow Adam’s faulty will, as expressed in the 10

The translator here supplies the antecedent to Anselm’s pronoun; I am in turn supplying the Latin antecedent.

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Anselm reproductive act, that causes his descendents’ wills to be mistuned. Now Anselm has already established that justice is “uprightness of will kept for its own sake” (CV, 5), or in my metaphor a properly tuned will. If all human beings start with an unjust or mistuned will and cannot attain a properly tuned or just will apart from God’s intervention, then they are necessarily unjust. Obviously the individual did not choose to have a flawed will, but Anselm argues elsewhere that the will qua will has “no other cause by which it is force or attracted, but [to be] its own efficient cause, so to speak, as well as its own effect [sed ipsa sibi efficiens causa fuit, si dici potest, et effectum]” (CD, 27)—in other words, there is no “metawill” by which one wills to will, only a single will. Since the will is, as the mainstream of the Christian tradition agrees, the site of moral responsibility, the damaged condition of post-sin human beings can be viewed as a moral problem rather than a simple flaw because it is a matter of the individual’s will. Nor is original sin somehow less serious than the sins we normally think of as willful: “all infants are equally unjust, because they have none of the justice which it is each person’s duty to have” (CV, 24), and that injustice subjects them all to damnation (CV, 22). Both the devil and post-sin human beings, then, are trapped. They are both in a state such that they cannot even meet their basic obligation of obedience to God, much less make up for the debt already incurred through disobedience. For the devil, there is simply no way out in Anselm’s view—the fact that angels are not a “race [genus]” like humanity makes it impossible for anyone else to pay his debt on his behalf, and he cannot do it himself (CDH, 2.21). By the same token, the structure of the human race makes it at least conceivable that some form of vicarious satisfaction might be able to satisfy some or all human beings’ debts. As I noted above, Anselm believes that it would not work for God to create a new and sinless human being out of nothing, because then that human being, despite belonging to the same category as all other human beings, would not belong to Adam’s race (CDH, 2.8). Yet the distortion of every child’s will through the process of reproduction seems to mean that every actual existing human being will necessarily start off “in the hole.” One possible solution would seem to be to forgive some particular human being’s original sin by fiat to give him or her at least a fighting chance, but the 139

The Politics of Redemption basis of Anselm’s entire argument is that God cannot properly forgive by fiat lest sin seem to “resemble God” in being “subject to no law” (CDH, 12).11 The only thing that will work is to preempt the initial distortion of some individual’s will. Drawing again on the widely shared belief that the male is the active partner in reproduction and therefore the distortion of the child’s will stems from the involvement of a sinful male will, Anselm concludes that God can form a human being who has Adam’s state of “original justice” while still belonging to Adam’s race by means of the virgin birth, with God as his “just father” (CV, 20).12

Making the Payment The virgin birth thus constitutes Anselm’s variation on the patristic theme of Christ as a kind of “reboot” of the human race, which Gregory locates in the resurrection and Irenaeus appears to locate in Christ’s life and work generally speaking. Had Anselm not displaced the devil, the simple fact of Christ becoming incarnate may logically have been sufficient for redemption, but even a humanity rebooted in Christ must face down the debt incurred by Adam’s initial sin, a debt that for Anselm God cannot cancel lest sin appear to escape from God’s rule. Though Christians in the West, in large part thanks to Anselm, often take for granted the connection between sin and some form of debt, previous chapters 11

12

This claim is interesting in light of Schmitt’s arguments about the theological origins of the concept of sovereignty in Political Theology, where the sovereign is somehow both inside the law (as its executor) and outside (as the one who decides the “state of exception” when the law no longer applies). Schmitt does not seem to envision the possibility of a sovereign being constrained not to make use of his sovereign prerogatives lest someone else seem to be equally sovereign. The virgin birth also has the beneficial side-effect of demonstrating that God is able to create human beings in all logically conceivable ways: in addition to creating a human being of either sex out of nothing (Adam) or out of both a man and a woman (the normal procedure), God can create a woman out of a man alone (Eve) and finally a man out of a woman alone (Christ) (CDH, 2.8). This type of observation is incidentally an example of what makes Anselm such a pleasure to read even when one doesn’t agree with him: it is clear that he is carried away by the sheer pleasure of thought for its own sake.

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Anselm show that such a connection is not universal in Christian theology. In the patristic view, sin requires some combination of purification and liberation, and at least in Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa, satisfaction is basically absent. Anselm’s use of the concept of honor has led some interpreters to suppose that his view of sin as requiring some form of satisfaction stems from his feudal context—yet presumably all theologians throughout history had at least some familiarity with rulers who demand obedience and punish the disobedient and who seek to preserve their honor and avoid shame.13 Many scholars, including Aulén and Pelikan,14 now agree that the real source of this idea was the system of penance.15 As Pelikan explains, “the most obvious and immediate source of the idea [of satisfaction] would appear to be the penitential system of the church, which was developing just at this time. The earliest of Latin theologians had already spoken of penance as a way of ‘making satisfaction to the Lord,’ and the term ‘satisfaction’ had become standard.”16 The medieval period saw a high degree of standardization in penances for various sins, something which a monk like Anselm would be especially aware of. Now since Christ begins and remains in a state of original justice, he does not owe any form of satisfaction, but rather only the basic obedience God demands of everyone. Despite the common understanding of Anselm’s argument, he does not claim that Christ is performing a vicarious satisfaction. Instead, he draws on another ecclesiastical system that is essentially common to both East and West: a baseline of obligations for the everyday believer, coupled with opportunities to exceed the requirements and gain 13

14

15

16

An interesting investigation of honor as something like a universal human category comes from William Lad Sessions, whose “Honor and God,” in Journal of Religion 87.2 (2007): 206–24, is particularly helpful insofar as he analyzes honor as a fundamentally social concept. I will be arguing further on, however, that Anselm’s particular use of honor is tantamount to what Sessions calls “the pitiful desire to be flattered by one’s inferiors” (214). Aulén, Christus Victor, 102, and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 3: The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 143. In fact, it seems plausible to me that Anselm uses the political imagery because his goal is ostensibly to respond to the objections of unbelievers, who obviously would not subscribe to Christian views on penance. Pelikan, Growth of Medieval Theology, 143.

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The Politics of Redemption greater merit. Anselm explicitly uses the example of someone taking a monastic vow, albeit couched in more general terms of “a vow about holy living” (CDH, 2.5).The problem requiring the intervention of a God-man rather than a normal sinless human being was that an offense against the infinite God is necessarily infinite, meaning that no finite human being could make satisfaction for it—but by the very same principle, the merit accrued by the infinite God-man is itself infinite. Had he been an ordinary sinful human being, Christ’s death would have had no merit, but his sinless state makes his death voluntary and thus meritorious in much the same way as a monastic vow is. As a result, his death not only gives him infinite merit, but makes him the first human being ever to accrue any merit for himself: No member of the human race [nullus . . . homo] except Christ ever gave to God, by dying, anything which that person was not at some time going to lose as a matter of necessity. Nor did anyone ever pay a debt to God which he did not owe. But Christ of his own accord gave to his Father what he was never going to lose as a matter of necessity, and he paid, on behalf of sinners, a debt which he did not owe . . . . Nevertheless, he gave his life, so precious; no, his very self; he gave his person—think of it—in all its greatness, in an act of his own, supremely great, volition. (CDH, 2.18) Anselm’s account of the way Christ’s merit comes to be applied to humanity shares with Gregory’s account of the defeat of the devil a lack of emphasis on the solidarity of the human race, insofar as Anselm stages a kind of transaction between the Father and Christ rather than claiming that Christ’s merit applies to all humanity “automatically.” Yet this scene brings out another intriguing parallel with the patristic ransom model, insofar as Christ’s flesh seems in a sense to fool the Father, who wants to reward Christ for his meritorious act but then as it were “discovers” that Christ as the eternal Son already has everything the Father has. Hence the Son is able to designate another recipient for his reward, namely, sinful humanity (CDH, 2.19). Again, the effect isn’t automatic. Instead, God sets up a kind of 142

Anselm fund on which all human beings are entitled to draw, and Anselm declares that “God rejects no member of the human race [nullum hominem] who approaches him on this authority” (CDH, 2.19). Yet despite the apparent individualism of this account, Anselm’s later claims that the devil could not be redeemed through Christ’s act nor through a similar act by a God-angel indicates once again that the possibility of Christ’s merits being applied to sinful humanity depends ultimately on the solidarity of the human race rather than on Christ’s arbitrary designation of a recipient for his reward (CDH, 2.21). At its core, then, Anselm’s account of the atonement is still social-relational. However, the lack of any possibility of an “overflow” of Christ’s salvific benefits to the rebellious angels and the displacement of the devil from any meaningful role in the drama of redemption both represent a narrowing of the scope of relationality and therefore a shift toward individualism. This same shift is visible in Anselm’s treatment of creation. Departing from Irenaeus’s vision of a redeemed creation as the necessary environment for resurrected humanity, Anselm instead claims that God’s goal in creating humanity was to fill out the heavenly city—in part to make up for the number of angels who had fallen (CDH, 1.17) and in part to fill slots designated originally for humans (CDH, 1.18). Anselm holds firmly to the resurrection of the dead, believing that “if a human being is to be restored in perfection, he ought to be reconstituted as the sort of being he would have been if he had not sinned” (CDH, 2.3), but he does not appear to draw the logical conclusion that a body needs a physical environment to move about in. Even more problematic are some hypothetical remarks he makes when discussing the infinite weight of even the smallest sin, given that it is committed against the infinite God. Positing a situation in which God had ordered one not to look in a particular direction, Anselm first claims that there is nothing in all creation of sufficiently great value to oblige one to disobey God. Then he intensifies the problem, asking, “what if it were necessary either for the whole universe and whatever is not God to perish and be brought to nothing, or for you to do this thing, such a little thing, against the will of God?” His conclusion is that it is preferable for the universe to be destroyed, indeed even “an infinite multiplicity of universes,” rather than disobey God in a matter 143

The Politics of Redemption that seems to have basically no concrete effect (CDH, 1.21).17 Presumably, Anselm accepts the entire scope of Christian morality, including love of neighbor, but this hypothetical exercise indicates that in the last analysis sin is only between the human being and God, and everything else can be completely disregarded.

“Out of Love of the Debtor?” Thus even though he relies upon the social-relational structure of humanity, Anselm is already very close to a strict humanity-God polarity.“Within” the human race, a social-relational logic obtains, but neither that logic nor the redemption it underwrites overflow beyond the boundaries of the human race.The result is that despite the very real pleasure attendant upon reading his texts due to his obvious and overflowing enjoyment of the intellectual task, Anselm’s thought, at least on the topic of atonement, ends up being quite claustrophobic.18 Anselm is of course not conscious of this fact—clearly he views Christ’s satisfaction of our unpayable debt as an occasion of joy and gratitude. Understanding the way in which things might not be as they seem in that regard would provide a key example of the negative consequences of veering from a social-relational toward an individualistic scheme, but it requires perhaps a more jaundiced eye than Anselm’s. For that I believe it is helpful to turn to Nietzsche, the second essay of whose Genealogy of Morals can be read as a critique, perhaps not of Anselm directly, but certainly of the Western Christian culture for which Anselm’s argument was so formative.19 17

18

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Deme argues that the effect of human sin on the rest of creation is implied by “the damaged order and beauty of the universe” in the wake of sin (Christology of Anselm, 59). This may be so, but he provides no evidence that for Anselm it is a “two-way street,” such that the restoration of humanity means the restoration of the entire universe—for example, if Anselm really did believe that, then the exclusion of angels from any possibility of salvation would be incoherent. One could say the same of his account of the fall of the devil, which stages an almost incomprehensible confrontation between God and the devil, radically devoid of any context. Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” second essay of Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann

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Anselm Nietzsche’s essay concerns itself with the origin of the phenomenon of guilt or bad conscience, and he starts from the concept of making promises, a phenomenon he initially situates in the economic realm.20 He moves quickly to the claim that the moral concept of guilt finds its origin in the economic concept of debt—a connection suggested by the dual meaning of the German word Schuld.21 Already this is an uncanny parallel, since Anselm’s argument depends in large part on a connection between indebtedness and moral blameworthiness.22 Nietzsche then turns to the concept of punishment, arguing that the reason that some form of punishment or suffering can be accepted as compensation for an unfulfilled promise is because of “the pleasure of being allowed to vent [one’s] power upon one who is powerless . . ., the enjoyment of violation”23—implicitly anticipating the claim of many critical theologians that a God who demands suffering must be pictured as taking some kind of pleasure in violence. From this point, he traces the development of the concept of debt along two trajectories. On the one hand, the political order develops as an impersonal mechanism for exacting punishment,24 while on the other hand, increasing social restraint leads individuals to direct the impulse toward cruelty and punishment inward, resulting in

20 21 22

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(New York: Modern Library, 1992), German text: Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991). Citations refer to the English page numbers, followed by standard section numbers. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 493; §1. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 498; §4. Visser and Williams acknowledge this dual meaning while urging the reader of Anselm not “to be tempted to think that Anselm regards justice as a kind of commercial exchange in which God acts as a rather obsessive auditor who insists that the books be balanced down to the last farthing” (Anselm, 225)— yet Anselm’s text encourages this impression, particularly in his discussion of choosing obedience to God in some trivial matter even if it means the destruction of an infinite number of universes. They note elsewhere that Anselm accepts in principle the idea of an argument from fittingness or beauty while attempting another route for the sake of his hypothetical unbelieving audience (Anselm, 214, 219). If that’s the case, then an objection to Anselm’s text based on what seems like an unfitting or ugly picture of God is surely fair game. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 501; §5. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 508–9; §10.

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The Politics of Redemption the feeling of guilt.25 Nietzsche then discusses the emergence of the concept of a god out of the feeling of indebtedness to the ancestors,26 a feeling that only grows as the state becomes larger and more powerful and reaching a fever pitch in the establishment of empires: The guilty feeling of indebtedness to the divinity continued to grow for several millennia—always in the same measure as the concept of God and the feeling for divinity increased on earth and was carried to the heights . . . the advance toward universal empires is always the advance toward universal divinities.27 By the time Christianity enters the scene, Nietzsche claims that humanity’s feeling of indebtedness had reached such a high level that it seemed impossible ever to pay it off—certainly the situation that Anselm envisions Christ responding to. In a passage filled with pathos, Nietzsche describes the emergence of the Christian attempt to end the entire economy of debt: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of a final discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility; the aim now is to turn back the concepts “guilt” and “duty”—back against whom? There can be no doubt: against the “debtor” first of all . . . . Finally, however, they are turned back against the “creditor,” too.28 This creditor can be conceived in several ways: as the human race’s “primal ancestor who is from now on burdened with a curse,” as the natural world thought as a realm of demonic activity, as “existence in general, which is now considered worthless as such.”29 25 26 27 28 29

Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 520–1; §16. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 524–5; §19. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 526; §20. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 527; §21. Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 528; §21.

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Anselm All of these elements find their place in Anselm’s argument, with the sin of Adam and the denigration of the created world. Yet there is one more step to take, back to God, who can be conceived as a person, as a responsible party, as someone who can do something to solve the problem once and for all. What the Christian God does is, in Nietzsche’s mind, both surprising and frightening: suddenly we stand before the paradoxical and horrifying expedient that afforded temporary relief for tormented humanity, that stroke of genius on the part of Christianity [Geniestreich des Christentums]: God himself sacrificed himself for the guilt of mankind [Gott selbst sich für die Schuld des Menschen opfernd], God himself made payment to himself [Gott selbst sich an sich selbst bezahlt machend], God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself—the creditor [Gläubiger] sacrificed himself for his debtor, out of love (can one credit that? [sollte man’s glauben?]), out of love for his debtor!—30 The tone here is close to the enthusiasm Anselm displays in the following passage (already quoted above): “Nevertheless, he gave his life, so precious; no, his very self; he gave his person—think of it—in all its greatness, in an act of his own, supremely great, volition” (CDH, 2.18). Yet there is already a hint of impending disappointment, even aside from the explicit declaration of horror, in the sheer proliferation of self-reference. We are told that it is “out of love for his debtor” that God acts, but God’s actions are seemingly all directed toward God, as indicated by the huge number of reflexive pronouns. Nietzsche’s next section can be read as a kind of “morning after,” describing essentially the emergence of Christian asceticism: that will to self-tormenting, that repressed cruelty of the animal-man made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the ‘state’ so as to be tamed, 30

Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 528; §21 (translation altered).

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The Politics of Redemption who invented bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked—this man of the bad conscience has seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture to him.31 In short, the result of God’s payment of humanity’s debt can only be an infinite compounding of that debt, the exaggerated assignment of an infinite weight to even the slightest sin. Historically, one can see that the system of penance in the West, the means by which human beings could “cash in” on God’s gracious offer, too often exacerbated the feelings of guilt it was supposed to calm, resulting ultimately in the explosion of the Reformation. Yet even then, the only solution was to reach back behind the “bureaucracy of grace”32 to the initial blanket payment God made in Christ.That is because there is simply no way out of the economy of debt once God becomes the creditor. Even after Christ’s superabundant fund of merit has been established, the debt economy is not abolished—God is still fundamentally a God who exacts payment, even if his demands have been fulfilled. What’s more, the reflexivity of God’s act of mercy in Nietzsche should bring our attention to the fact that in Anselm’s argument, that act of mercy, providing the means by which sinful humanity could make up for violating God’s honor, was motivated at bottom not by God’s love of humanity—indeed, that theme is virtually absent from Anselm’s argumentation—but by God’s love of honor, one might even say by God’s desire to save face by fulfilling the

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Nietzsche, “Guilt,” 528; §22. This phrase was suggested by the following sentence from Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005):“A Kafkaesque universe of grace is specifically present in Christian dogma, just as a Kafkaesque universe of law is present in Judaism” (123). (Since Kafka’s preoccupation with bureaucracy was what Agamben had in mind here, I misremembered “Kafkaesque universe” as “bureaucracy.”)

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Anselm original plan of the heavenly city.33 In Anselm’s scheme, human beings at least have each other, but the outgoing and loving God of the patristic account who desires relationship with humanity has been replaced by a God who is remarkably self-involved, trapped in a problem of his own devising. Perhaps even more than the polarity of God and humanity, God’s own existence is deeply claustrophobic. One might say, then, that the shift away from a social-relational scheme and toward an individualistic one is not simply bad for our relationship to creation or to one another—it’s bad for God as well.

33

It is possible to read Anselm’s exclusion of love from consideration as a concession to the unbeliever, who presumably would find it difficult to believe that love is a key attribute of God, but Visser and Williams point out “the surprisingly small role that charity plays in Anselm’s writings . . . even in the letters he seldom speaks of the role of love in behavior without interpreting it in terms of obedience and submission” (Anselm, 210).

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Chapter 7

Abelard

By general consensus, the last major paradigm shift in atonement theory can be found in the work of Peter Abelard (1079–1142), whose “moral influence” model has bequeathed to modernity the perpetual debate between Anselm and Abelard, objective and subjective.Yet in this area as in so many others, it is difficult to gauge the precise scope of Abelard’s achievement and influence. That his contribution should be in many ways so enigmatic is strange, because he is on a personal level one of the medieval figures we know best. His life story is tumultuous. He is perhaps best known for his doomed love affair with Heloïse, which provided posterity with a famous exchange of love letters but resulted in Abelard’s forcible castration by her family. On the intellectual level, his path was also rocky—known as a brilliant and perhaps arrogant thinker, he was dogged by controversy, including an official, if irregular, condemnation as a heretic. It is for good reason that his autobiography was titled The History of My Calamities. Despite his notoriety and reputation for brilliance, however, Abelard’s actual body of work has received surprisingly little attention. This is especially true of his theology. None of his three “theologies” are available in English, for example, and only a brief passage from his Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans has been translated, consisting of the locus classicus for the “moral influence” theory and some of the exegesis that comes before and after.1 1

This translation is found in the Library of Christian Classics volume A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966). To my knowledge, Abelard’s full commentary on Romans has never been translated into any modern language. I will be following the Latin text found in Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica, vol. 1, ed. E. M. Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis series, vol. 11 (Turnholt: Brepos, 1969). In-text references will be indicated with “ER,” followed by the page number of the edition. For the Ethics, I will be

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Abelard To some extent, this selectiveness is justified on the question of atonement, simply because of a lack of material. There has been a tendency to treat the short discussion in the Romans commentary as a full-blown theory of the atonement parallel to Anselm’s Why God Became Human, but Abelard himself considered it only an initial indication of a position that would be worked out in more detail in his Tropologia (ER 118)—a work that has not come down to us and may never have been completed. As his three theologies were all taken up with the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of God more generally and do not address the question of Incarnation directly, his commentary on Romans is thus, despite the avowedly provisional nature of his remarks there, essentially the only witness to Abelard’s thinking on atonement. It also provides the only extended discussion of the first Adam/ second Adam schema, which I have argued is the basic structure underlying all atonement theories and which in Abelard’s medieval context immediately brought to mind the doctrine of original sin.2 The editor of the standard anthology in which the discussion of the atonement is translated also includes some supplementary passages from the Ethics, presumably because of Abelard’s reputation as a theorist of “moral influence,” but ironically the extant text of the Ethics is almost entirely about sin, with only a few brief paragraphs of the second book on virtues surviving. The Romans commentary therefore remains basically the sole source for the questions animating the present study—namely, what it is about the structure of creation and particularly of humanity that gives the Incarnation its sense and efficacy. If one starts, however, with the common view of Abelard’s theory, which supposes that he views Christ as a model for the believer to follow, even the study of this one text may seem overkill. Such a view is fairly intuitive and straightforward, after all, and it would seem not to require many presuppositions more complex than human

2

using the text and translation in D. E. Luscombe, ed., Peter Abelard’s Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). In-text references will be indicated with “Eth,” followed by the page number of the translation; in each case, the Latin text should be understood to appear on the facing page. Though Abelard wrote a commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis, it ends abruptly in the middle of the exposition of Genesis 2.25 (“And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed”).

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The Politics of Redemption beings’ ability to identify and imitate admirable people.Yet when one looks at the section of the Romans commentary that might be said to make up for the lack of a discussion of virtue in the Ethics, that is, the commentary on Romans 12–15, the idea of emulating Christ is notable for its virtual absence.3 It does come up, but most of the time only because it is directly suggested in Paul’s own text—the only times Abelard volunteers the idea are in his remarks on blessing one’s persecutors, where he pairs Christ and Stephen (ER 279), and on the necessity of paying taxes (ER 285). Paul punctuates his moral exhortations with calls to imitate Christ, which would seem to give Abelard license to unpack the ways in which Christ exemplified certain moral principles if he were inclined to do so. Yet in certain places, Abelard even seems oblivious to the idea of Christ as a model, as when he uses Paul’s claim that “Christ did not please himself ” (Romans 15.3) as a jumping-off point to discuss the relationship between the divine and human wills in the Incarnation (ER 312–13) rather than making the obvious connection between Christ’s behavior and that recommended by Paul to the “strong” in their behavior toward the “weak.” Much more often, Abelard cites Christ’s commandments as a kind of moral law, reflecting his belief that both the Old and New Testaments are tripartite in nature, containing law, history, and exhortations (ER 41). In stark contrast to the opinions of many liberal Christians who claim him as a precursor, Abelard views the gospels primarily as law-like, while the epistles serve as moral motivators (ER 42)—or in other words, Christ is the law-giver, Paul the inspirer. If Abelard is not putting forward Christ as a model, then exactly what is his “moral influence” theory doing? To try to answer that 3

Rolf Peppermüller, whose Abaelards Auslegung des Römerbriefes, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, n. s., vol. 10 (Munster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1972), is arguably the most thorough study of the Romans commentary available, claims that the imitatio Christi is a major theme in Abelard (97)—but cites essentially the same evidence that I do here. The difference here may be simply one of context: I am arguing against a received reading that would have it that Christ’s example is a pervasive and characteristic theme in Abelard, while Peppermüller is simply arguing that imitating Christ is more important to Abelard than participating in Christ through the sacraments. (All translations from Peppermüller are my own.)

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Abelard question, I will begin by laying out Abelard’s view of the atonement, which I will read as a supplement to Anselm’s, wherein he maintains the same basic scheme while clarifying that God explicitly acts “out of love of the debtor”—that is to say, God’s act is aimed not so much at satisfying the debt as at eliciting love. From the perspective of my investigation, Abelard’s account does develop the social-relational implications of the Incarnation in interesting, if fragmentary, ways, and I will attempt to develop some of the implications of his argument. Yet as important as Abelard’s own account of the atonement is, on many levels his questions are more revealing, as they provide a fascinating glimpse into the individualistic thought-patterns that were beginning to render the social logic implied by the Incarnation unintelligible. Accordingly, I will conclude by turning to Abelard’s critiques of the patristic and Anselmic views, focusing in the latter case on his critique of the doctrine of original sin, which takes place in the context of his exposition of Paul’s first Adam/second Adam schema. I will argue that Abelard approaches these theories using an individualistic logic that makes both positions simply incomprehensible to him. From the perspective of my project, therefore, Abelard is less important as the originator, or at least inspiration, of one of the two atonement theories that would come to monopolize the modern debate than as an index of the speed with which individualistic thought-patterns were driving out socialrelational ones already in the development of early scholasticism. Even if both Anselm and Abelard maintain to some degree the social-relational logic implied by the Incarnation, both take part in the trend away from those thought-patterns and toward the individualism in terms of which their own theories would eventually be rearticulated.

What is Abelard’s Atonement Theory? The primary source for an investigation of Abelard’s atonement theory is the famous passage from the second book of the commentary, a “quaestio” that follows his exegesis of Romans 3.24–26: they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward 153

The Politics of Redemption as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. The question Abelard asks is an obvious one, though it is not put in an obvious way: “what is this redemption of ours in Christ? Or in what way does the Apostle say we are justified in his blood, we who seem to be worthy of greater punishment, since we wicked servants did the very thing [id commisimus iniqui servi] because of which the innocent Lord was killed?” (113). It is important to give the proper weight to every word here. First of all, I am departing from the standard translation, which reads, “we are the wicked servants who have committed the very things for which our innocent Lord was slain.”4 This translation reflects the general idea that “Jesus died for our sins,” yet that thing that we are supposed to have committed is denoted by a singular pronoun.5 What’s more, we “seem to be worthy of greater punishment”—greater, presumably, than the punishment already attached to the initial act—because the death of Christ is somehow a consequence of that act, a kind of “fallout.” It is almost as though we should have known that committing that deed would result in the “innocent Lord’s” death. This sense of connection is reinforced in the next sentence: “the first thing to be asked about seems to be by what necessity God assumed a human being in order to redeem us by dying according to the flesh . . .” (113–14). He first turns to a critique of the patristic view, to which I will be returning in a later section. Suffice it to say for now that Abelard rejects the notion that Christ’s death was in any sense necessary to set human beings free from the devil—although in a later passage he does say that Christ frees us from the reign of the devil (210), it is, as for Anselm, very much a subordinate point, as it were something that he does along the way to another more important goal. 4 5

A Scholastic Miscellany, 280. Emphasis added. According to the editorial apparatus, this reading is not contradicted by any of the extant manuscripts.

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Abelard Abelard then begins a series of questions that have seemed to be directed against Anselm’s theory of the atonement.6 The questions are quite penetrating and would need to be addressed by any attempt to account for the saving role of Christ’s death. At the same time, if we read them as rhetorical questions that are meant to skewer Anselm’s theory, it seems fair to conclude with Weingart that “his reading [of Anselm’s Why God Became Human] is superficial, naïve, and very uncharacteristic of his own penetrating insight.”7 For one thing, many of the questions are ones that Anselm answers, including Abelard’s first: “In what way does the Apostle say that we are justified or reconciled to God by the death of his Son, to God, who must be angrier at humanity in proportion as humans sinned more greatly in crucifying his Son than in transgressing his first command in paradise by eating one fruit?” (116). Anselm has an answer for this, on two levels. First, on the level of the act itself, he believes that Christ’s killers did not know he was the Son of God and therefore are not culpable for “killing God.”8 Second, on the question of sin in general,Anselm is clear that only original sin implicates the entire human race—subsequent sins are imputed only to the individuals committing them.9 Perhaps more significantly, however, Abelard himself supplies answers to this question in his Ethics, answers that are similar to Anselm’s but are arguably more radical. Referring to the act of killing Christ, Abelard draws on his definition of sin as “consent to what is not fitting,” which amounts to “contempt of God” (Eth 5). Insofar as the persecutors of Christ and the other martyrs were doing “what they believed to be pleasing to God” and therefore clearly weren’t 6

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Richard E. Weingart, in The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abailard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), points out that “the probability is high that Abailard had a direct acquaintance with the Cur Deus Homo. Anselm is the only contemporary master whom he mentions by name in his systematic treatises, and there is textual evidence to suggest that he had read some of Anselm’s other writings . . . .” (89). Weingart, Logic of Divine Love, 90. Rolf Peppermüller goes further and claims that the absence of the motif of “satisfaction” in Abelard’s critique renders it highly unlikely that he was thinking specifically of Anselm’s argument (Abaelards Auslegung, 92). Anselm, Why God Became Human, 2.15. I discuss this above in connection with the patristic “bait and switch” motif; see page 115. Anselm, On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, 24.

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The Politics of Redemption acting in contempt for God, “we cannot say that they have sinned in this” (Eth 55). Later he takes it a step further: And so we can say that those who persecuted Christ or his disciples, who they thought should be persecuted, sinned in deed [per operationem—that is, it was “objectively” the wrong thing to do], yet they would have sinned more gravely in fault [per culpam] if they had spared them against their own conscience. (Eth 67) Thus in place of Anselm’s concern to mitigate the persecutors’ sin, Abelard paradoxically claims that their actions actually led to a lower amount of sinfulness overall. Abelard is able to make this claim because of one of the key distinctions of his ethical thought, the distinction he finds in the scriptural use of the word “sin,” which can refer to sin properlyso-called (“contempt of God or consent to evil”), to the “penalty of sin,” and to Christ as the sacrifice for sin (Eth 57). These first two senses can become quite detached from each other, to the point where the “penalty of sin” becomes something more like simple “being subject to punishment” in abstraction from any actual wrongdoing. This usually occurs in discussions of the practical necessities of human society, where it can sometimes be necessary to punish lesser crimes more greatly or even to punish unintentional sinners (who are not guilty of sin in the strict sense) for the sake of setting an example to guarantee public order or to serve some other purpose (Eth 39).This principle can even extend to those who are factually innocent, as when a judge cannot rebut the testimony of false witnesses and so is constrained to find an innocent man guilty (Eth 39–41). The reason this kind of mismatch can happen is that humans “do not judge the hidden but the apparent, nor do they consider the guilt of a fault [culpae reatum] so much as the effect of a deed [operis . . . effectum]” (Eth 41). By contrast, God is able to judge intentions, which are for Abelard the sole realm of sin properly-so-called. With regard to these true sins, Abelard is at one with his medieval contemporaries in assuming there exists an economy of satisfactions, though he parts ways with many of them by claiming that the church administers this economy without properly having authority over 156

Abelard it (Eth 113–19). That is to say, there is a certain objectivity to the satisfaction required for each sin, a standard set up by divine justice, and church officials can only hope to point their charges in the right direction. There are two regimes, then, which overlap in some respects but are ultimately separate: that of interior sin and satisfaction and that of exterior deed and punishment. What is perhaps initially surprising is that original sin actually falls under the latter regime. Believing it to be non-sensical to attribute sin in the proper sense of evil intention to infants (Eth 23)—that is, being unwilling to follow Anselm in “squaring the circle” of how one can be morally culpable through no fault of one’s own—Abelard limits original sin to “the general curse . . . by which everyone is subjected to damnation because of the fault [cupla] of his parents” (Eth 21). He makes the same point in the Romans commentary, where he uses the first Adam/second Adam schema as the occasion to discuss “that old quarrel and interminable question of the human race” regarding original sin (ER 163). Drawing again on the multiple sense of the word “sin,” he concludes that since intention is absent, original sin must refer “more to the penalty of sin . . . than to the guilt of the soul and contempt for God” (ER 164). I will investigate Abelard’s ideas on original sin from multiple angles in future sections.What is important for now is to note that for Abelard, there is a way out of this curse: tapping into Christ’s saving death by means of the sacraments. I have already highlighted the intimate connection between original sin and Christ’s death in Abelard’s questions. His own answers to these piercing questions seem to me to imply something like Anselm’s transactional scheme in order to make sense, but he envisions the connection between humanity’s fall and Christ’s death much differently from Anselm’s image of a calculating God who must save humanity in order to preserve the divine honor: It seems to us that we are justified and reconciled to God in Christ’s blood in that through this singular grace exhibited to us, that God’s Son took up our nature and, teaching us in every way, as much by word as by example [tam verbo quam exemplo], persevered to the point of death, binding us to Godself more closely through love, in order 157

The Politics of Redemption that, enkindled by the benefit of divine grace, our love truly would not fear enduring anything for God. (ER 117) Before encountering Christ, we live in fear, but the love Christ shows us produces a situation in which “we are filled with his love rather than fear in all things” (ER 118). Love begets love, driving out fear, and so we become friends rather than slaves (ER 53). Abelard’s loving God must be, however, to some extent still the calculating God of Anselm—the death must correspond to the curse of original sin somehow. Abelard does not work this connection out in detail, but if it is entirely absent, then the idea of Christ’s death being somehow for us, and therefore indicative of the greatest possible love (ER 118), loses its sense. After all, if I love someone, I don’t want that person to die. If a friend decided to submit to death arbitrarily and claimed it was “for me,” I would be confused and likely even angry rather than inspired. It’s only when my friend’s death is somehow necessary in order to save me from some dire threat that I am grateful for my friend’s sacrifice— indeed, that it makes sense as a sacrifice. In short, Abelard is not rejecting Anselm’s theory at all, and in fact by supplementing it with the motive of love, he actually delivers it to us in the form that will be much more normative for popular religiosity.10

Implications: Publicity and Han Insofar as Abelard is offering a version of Anselm’s theory, then, one would expect to see the same social-relational elements at 10

Nietzsche’s horror at what God does “out of love for the debtor,” then, would be more properly directed toward Abelard’s theory than Anselm’s. I should note that Peppermüller does not see any necessary connection between Abelard’s individualistic theory as laid out in this quaestio and the traditionally more collective theories—instead he sees Abelard’s doctrine of original sin as an attempt to preserve some connection with the tradition (119). I am portraying Abelard’s theological moves here as much more conservative and tentative and trying to read Abelard as at least attempting a basic coherence. Peppermüller himself provides some prima facie evidence to believe that the different moments in Abelard’s thought on atonement are actually interwoven, insofar as the school that followed him was able to maintain Abelard’s teaching more or less whole—something that would be less likely were it really made up of two ultimately unrelated moments (120).

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Abelard work. The two are in agreement, for instance, on the universality of the curse of original sin and its transmission through lustful reproduction (ER 173), and though Abelard does not break out of the God-humanity dyad in his account, he does arguably add greater mutuality through his emphasis on the elicitation of human love through the display of divine love in Christ.11 This latter aspect seems to me to be a clear improvement on Anselm, but it doesn’t go any further than what can already be found in Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa.12 In terms of further developing the social-relational scheme, then, Abelard’s insistence on divine love is not a very significant contribution. From this perspective, the aspect of Abelard’s thought that is perhaps most fruitful is his dual view of sin, drawing a distinction between the interior (sinful intention and satisfaction) and the exterior (sinful act and punishment). Specifically, I believe that close attention to the ways Abelard deploys this distinction can provide insight into the necessarily public nature of Christ’s ministry and especially his death and can also open up a space to make use of the Korean concept of han to help clarify the social-relational ontology that is emerging out of my investigation of the traditional atonement theories—and what’s more, I contend that these two apparently disparate topics must be understood together.13 11

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John Suggit provides an apt summary: “For Abelard wishes to explain how man [sic] can be enabled to make a truly free response to God’s action, so that man might be truly free, truly reconciled to God his Creator.” See “Freedom to Be: Peter Abelard’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” in Journal for Theology in Southern Africa 8 (1974): 31. Indeed, it’s plausible that Anselm only omitted the divine love as a motivation because he was trying to create an argument that would be convincing for non-believers. I should be clear from the outset that I regard this section as developing certain implications of Abelard’s underlying logic in a way that departs— more than the chapters on the other three figures have done—from Abelard’s own explicit views and conclusions. In the case of the public nature of Christ’s work, I am drawing on a handful of fragmentary suggestions that Abelard may not have intended to be read together. In the case of han, I believe I am on much firmer textual ground, but I am coming to conclusions that Abelard would regard as blasphemous. In a sense, then, this section can be regarded as looking toward my final constructive chapter, where I will take inventory of my findings thus far and attempt to draw them together in a plausible way.

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The Politics of Redemption I begin with the question of the public sphere. The term is of course anachronistic in this context, since what we now regard as the “public sphere” only came about as a result of certain developments in modern bourgeois society.14 My meaning here is broader, referring to the shared sphere of worldly action that was such a key component of Irenaeus’s account of the atonement or, in Abelard’s terms, to the sphere of actual deeds as opposed to the soul’s intentions. I have already pointed out that Abelard rejects the idea that infants can be culpable in any meaningful sense and so is constrained to align original sin with the exterior as opposed to interior sense of sin. Since Christ’s action is directed first of all toward the problem of original sin, one can only conclude that his action is also on the public side, as indicated by Abelard’s claim that Christ proceeded “by word and example” (ER 117). I have already said that Abelard does not seem to think of Christ’s “example” primarily in terms of providing a model to imitate. What is an example for Abelard, then? To try to get at this question, it is helpful to look at two other contexts in which Abelard talks about examples. One I have already discussed: for Abelard, the purpose of public punishment is not so much to provide satisfaction for the sin committed as to provide a kind of example for others. Perhaps the second book of the Ethics would have dealt with positive examples in connection with its discussion of virtue, but in the extant text, the examples are overwhelmingly negative and intended to inspire fear. This is clear in the following example: And why ought we sometimes to punish those whom we know to be innocent? For, consider, some poor woman has a suckling baby and lacks clothing adequate to provide for the little one in the cradle and for herself. And so, stirred by pity for the baby she takes him to herself to keep him warm with her own rags, and finally in her weakness overcome by the force of nature, she unavoidably smothers the one she clasps with the utmost love. “Have charity,” says 14

See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

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Abelard Augustine, “and do whatever you wish.” [That is, the woman acted out of love and therefore is not guilty of sin.] However, when she comes before the bishop for satisfaction, a heavy punishment is imposed upon her, not for the fault [culpam] which she committed but so that subsequently she or other women should be rendered more cautious in providing for such things. (Eth 39) Further on, Abelard generalizes the principle: These proceedings [in which sins are punished out of proportion to their seriousness] are in accordance not so much with the obligation of justice as with the practicalities of government, so as to ensure, as we have said, the common utility by preventing public injuries. Therefore we often punish the smallest sins with the largest penalties, . . . thinking with the wisdom of foresight how much trouble can arise if they are punished lightly. (Eth 45) At the risk of oversimplifying, then, it would appear that for Abelard, the governance of our shared sphere of action is achieved through mobilizing fear by means of examples—and furthermore, it is motivated not by the disinterested concerns of justice, but by fear of future bad consequences. The other primary discussion of an example occurs during Abelard’s exegesis of Paul’s remarks on Abraham in the fourth chapter of Romans. Initially, Abelard seems to be using the term “example” in a straightforward sense, pointing out that Paul is drawing on the Jews’ own tradition for a “manifest example” of someone who was justified apart from the law (ER 144). As the discussion goes on, however, the concept of “example” begins to accrue some unexpected properties. Commenting on the notion of Gentile followers of Christ being Abraham’s “true children,” Abelard says that the Gentiles are God’s children “by the example of faith rather than by the propagation of his flesh” (ER 146). Further down, he repeats the same basic idea, paraphrasing God’s words to Abraham: “So shall your offspring be, that is human beings generated for me by the example of your faith” (ER 148). Bringing together these two other uses of the word “example” with the “example” of Christ, a common feature seems to be the social function of “examples.” In the case of Abraham, his example 161

The Politics of Redemption is what brings the Gentiles into relationship to Abraham and the covenant God made with him—a relationship that for Abelard is very real. Examples serve to stabilize the social order by mobilizing fear, and Christ’s example forges a bond of love with sinful humanity, a bond that empowers us to act out of love rather than fear (ER 118). Taking the risk of systematizing these three uses of “example,” one might say that an example establishes and maintains a social bond or connection by means of which either love or fear is transmitted. Since our shared or public life is characterized by fear, then, the act by which a new bond based on love would be established needed to be public as well. One can draw a clear connection here to Mark Lewis Taylor’s notion of a theatrics of terror and a theatrics of counterterror,15 which I discussed in Chapter 2, but I would also suggest that placing Abelard’s notion of the “example” in dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity would be fruitful as well. Though her theory is initially concerned primarily with gender,16 she is clear from the beginning that it has broader political consequences, although it would have to be reworked in connection with each particular context. Staying simply at the level of parallels, however, the general idea that society ensures the normative performance of certain gender roles in part through the punishment of nonnormative performances that seem far out of proportion to the concrete harm they cause fits well with Abelard’s explanation for why unjust punishments must sometimes be carried out in order to inspire fear. With that in mind, one would then have to ask precisely what it is about Christ’s non-normative performance that both causes the social order to make an example of him and also makes him a kind of rallying point for a new kind of social performance grounded in love rather than fear. Fully fleshing out those political consequences would take me too far from Abelard’s own text, where the agent of fearsome punishment is not primarily the political or ecclesiastical authorities but rather God himself. Somewhat surprisingly, these punishments are only occasionally connected with the true internal sins that 15 16

See Taylor, Executed God. The locus classicus is of course Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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Abelard only God can judge (Eth 45). Indeed, for Abelard, sin properly so called is remarkably unproblematic—he has a great deal of confidence in the order of satisfaction and in the ability of individuals to do the proper satisfaction. As a result, despite the fact that he focuses the question of sin so radically on internal motivations, his writings are almost entirely free of the kind of soul-searching one normally associates with the theme of proper motivations—even his exegesis of Romans 7 lacks the existential angst that had been associated with the passage since Augustine and would erupt again in Luther, focusing instead on the problem of bodily urges that sometimes incline us toward sin (ER 207–8) and even concluding that Paul is consciously exaggerating to make sure his message hits home (ER 209). Much more problematic, however, is the notion of original sin. As noted above, Abelard believes original sin must refer “more to the penalty of sin . . . than to the guilt of the soul and contempt for God” (ER 164).17 This explanation actually comes after a series of piercing questions about how God can punish the innocent for the sins of others, questions in the style of the passage on the necessity of the cross. Having compounded the problem by clarifying that, yes, original sin is simply subjection to damnation before any fault is even possible, Abelard essentially gives up on any explanation. For instance, he claims that we must “absolve God from injury in the damnation of infants,” because God’s “dispensation of grace” is “overflowing as much in those infants as in others” who are saved (ER 169). Indeed, we must trust that God’s damnation of innocent infants is actually merciful insofar as he surely “foresaw a worse future” if the infants had been able to grow up, which would entail “torturing [cruciandum]” them with “greater punishments” (ER 170). In this light, we can see that their punishment is actually lighter overall, and so Abelard is able to say, “Well does God use this exceedingly light punishment of infants [hac mitissima parvulorum poena] for our correction, so that we will be made more cautious in avoiding our own sins, since we believe such and so many innocents . . . to be damned every day because of the sins of others” (170), namely, Adam and Eve. 17

Peppermüller puts it well: “original sin=original punishment” (Abaelards Auslegung, 106).

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The Politics of Redemption Over the course of this discussion, a pattern begins to emerge where Abelard’s attempts to justify the damnation of infants seem only to compound the injustice. For example, he claims that Adam and Eve “have been liberated from that same wrath [of God] by means of their own satisfaction” (ER 173), leaving open the question of why that sin should subsequently lead to the damnation of masses of future humans if it was “taken care of ” in what Abelard considers to be the normal way. God’s actions thus come to seem arbitrary, to the point where Abelard offers up the following example, apparently meant as positive: So indeed, I say, humans, by a certain dispensation based on the soundest counsel, can afflict the innocent as much as the guilty [nocentes] and not sin in this, as when, because of the malice of some evil tyrant, the good princes who ravage and plunder [depopulantes atque depraedantes] his lands are compelled to punish [nocere] the good faithful people who are subject to him and joined to him in property and not in mind, as the injury of the few elect is foreseen to be profitable for a greater number. (ER 172) In this account, the damnation of infants appears as a kind of “collateral damage.”Yet Abelard has explicitly rejected the notion that the devil has any kind of legitimate hold over humanity and claims that Adam, the other main candidate for the evil ruler, has already settled accounts with God, so the reader is left with an essentially unmotivated attack on a civilian population. The distinction between willful sin and original sin, therefore, amounts to the distinction between a relatively straightforward system of moral accountability and a condition of subjection to “punishment” in total abstraction from any recognizable standard of justice. Here one can draw a clear parallel to the distinction between sin and han, introduced to Western audiences by Andrew Sung Park’s The Wounded Heart of God. Park outlines this distinction as follows: throughout its history, the church has been concerned with the sin of people, but has largely overlooked an important factor in human evil: the pain of the victims 164

Abelard of sin. The victims of various types of wrongdoing express the ineffable experience of deep bitterness and helplessness. Such an experience of pain is called han in the Far East. Han can be defined as the critical wound of the heart generated by unjust psychosomatic repression, as well as by social, political, economic, and cultural oppression. It is entrenched in the hearts of the victims of sin and violence, and is expressed through such diverse reactions as sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, resentment, hatred, and the will to revenge.18 Park believes that han is much more widespread than sin, and the Christian tradition’s failure to recognize the distinction has led to an exaggerated concept of human depravity that completely erases the difference between oppressors and oppressed—after all, everyone is equally sinful from birth. Thus both Abelard and Park reject the Augustinian-Anselmic notion of an a priori culpability of every human being, and in both cases one could say that the basic motivating principle is that such a concept of original sin seriously compromises the ability to make meaningful moral judgments. Furthermore, both agree that the primary object of Christ’s work is to dispel the problem of han. I have admittedly given only a vague outline here, but the distinction between sin and han should be clear enough to be able to turn it back toward Abelard’s own work. As helpful as it is that Abelard’s struggle with the concept of original sin as a priori culpability opens up the possibility for introducing the concept of han, one cannot help but notice that the primary cause of han in Abelard’s text is not earthly oppressors, but God. Here Abelard is clearly inheriting a feature of Anselm’s theory that I uncovered in the previous chapter: the displacement of the devil, which leaves his slot in the scheme open. In Anselm, that slot is sometimes filled by humanity, but in Abelard, the devil’s role is almost exclusively played by God. As if to bring this point home, Abelard portrays the devil as a kind of subcontractor carrying out punishment duties on God’s behalf (ER 114–15). Indeed, God acts in overtly 18

Park, Wounded Heart of God, 10. My discussion of Anne Joh’s work in Chapter 2 fleshes out some further detail on the concept of han.

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The Politics of Redemption “devilish” ways in Abelard’s account, especially in light of the fact that the eternal damnation attached to original sin has no connection whatsoever to any actual culpability on anyone’s part, not even Adam and Eve, who are able to achieve the satisfaction for their sin by what Abelard regards as normal and unproblematic means. Thus while Abelard’s rejection of the traditional concept of original sin seems like a positive step, it nonetheless turns out to be a very destructive move within the terms of Anselm’s constricted version of the patristic theory. In fact, one could argue that it even winds up undermining another salutary feature of Abelard’s theory, namely, his emphasis on the divine love. How loving is it, after all, for God to submit to death in order to pay an exorbitant and apparently arbitrary penalty that God freely instituted? The whole thing comes to seem like a cruel put-on, a crazy scheme to endanger us in order to rescue us and gain our love. The progression from Anselm to Abelard on this front thus seems to me to be clear evidence that in order to make sense of the Incarnation, one needs a social-relational scheme that overflows the divine-human dyad, meaning first of all that the devil must have a substantial role. Though the motivation for displacing the devil is to show proper reverence to God, the end result is to turn God into a devil.

Predestination and Free Will In the previous chapter, I argued that Anselm’s restricted focus on God and humanity represented a move in an individualistic direction, although he still maintained a fundamentally social-relational view of humanity. I have pointed out some ways in which Abelard can be understood as suggesting further developments of the social-relational scheme, but extracting them required a certain degree of reading against the grain. That is because Abelard is fundamentally an individualistic thinker.19 That mind-set leads 19

Peppermüller agrees with this characterization of the Romans commentary. Contrasting it with the Theologia Christiana’s emphasis on the Trinity, he says: “In the Excursus [on atonement] of the commentary on Romans—as in general in the entire commentary—the approach is reversed: there the individual human being and his salvation stands in the center” (96). Later he

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Abelard Abelard to take a step beyond Anselm’s implicitly individualistic move of cutting back the scope of relationality compared to the patristic view: he even begins to break down the social-relational structure of humanity. He does this primarily in the questions that he asks of the patristic and Anselmic theories, which are based on the notion of predestination and free moral agency, respectively. While these two notions are from most perspectives diametrically opposed, on the formal level they are identical insofar as they envision God dealing with human beings on a strictly one-byone basis—the difference being that in the one case, God’s action is motivated solely by God’s own choice, while in the other, God’s action responds to individual human merit.Abelard is by no means unique in bringing together these two themes, which formed a tension that ran through the entire Western tradition that found its inspiration in Augustine. As Weingart says, Abelard’s use of predestination “has the character of an unreflective repetition of traditional teaching. There is evident Abelard’s indebtedness to Augustine and his dependency on the medieval interpretation of what was considered the Augustinian position, but no evidence of any distinctive contribution to that interpretation.”20 His contributions on the ethical front are of course much more creative, but it is perhaps this relative lack of reflection on predestination that allows him to deploy both themes on a more or less ad hoc basis. Abelard addresses the question of the devil’s supposed hold over humanity at the beginning of his “quaestio” on the necessity of the Incarnation. Having established that “the first thing to be asked about seems to be by what necessity God assumed a human being in order to redeem us by dying according to the flesh . . .” (ER 113–14), he then paraphrases a widespread view of how to get at that initial question: “from whom does he redeem us, who

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explicitly contrasts the “collective” ransom theory with Abelard’s individualistic theory: “What is important to him is primarily the individual human, not humanity” (119; emphasis in original). Weingart, Logic of Divine Love, 78. Peppermüller claims more specifically that Abelard’s doctrine of predestination is basically the same as that of Anselm (64), and he later argues that Abelard embraces only a limited predestination that means that “the individual herself becomes answerable for her predestination or reprobation” (174). If Peppermüller is correct, that only further solidifies the individualistic thrust of Abelard’s teaching.

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The Politics of Redemption holds us captive either through justice or through power, and by which justice he does he liberate us from that power?” (ER 114). Many of Abelard’s objections to the idea that God somehow pays the devil or is required to treat the devil justly are held in common with Anselm and many other theologians, but his opening argument is more distinctive: It is said that he redeems us from the power of the devil, who by the transgression of the first man—who subjected himself to the devil through willingly obeying—possessed his complete domination over us so to speak by legal right [iure quodam] and would always possess it unless a liberator came. But since he has liberated only the elect, how did the devil possess them in that [past] era . . .? (ER 114) He follows this by asking whether the devil had the power to torture Lazarus, as he assuredly does to torture the rich man. The argument is somewhat hard to follow as it stands, but I believe it becomes quite clear once one supplies an unstated premise that comes directly from the patristic theory: if the devil had any power over humanity stemming from Adam’s first disobedience, it would have to extend to all humanity, and salvation from that power would have to apply to all humanity as well. The problem is that on the one hand, Christ saves only the elect, while on the other hand, the devil’s power over the damned—as “jailer or torturer” (ER 115)—is to extend for all eternity. Since the devil has eternal power over the damned, then, it would follow that, according to the logic of the patristic theory, the devil would have eternal power over the elect as well—a position that is clearly absurd. In essence, Abelard is saying that for the patristic theory to work, the problem facing humanity and its solution in Christ would have to apply to humanity as a kind of unit. However, he knows from the doctrine of double predestination that God does not in fact act toward humanity as a unit, but rather as a set of individuals who are either saved or damned as God decides. It is telling in this regard that Abelard does not even explicitly state the more intuitive consequence of the patristic theory as he lays it out, namely, that all will be saved and the devil will have power over no one—it is as though it is so obvious that some will be 168

Abelard damned that the possibility of universal salvation doesn’t warrant mentioning. He then clarifies the true nature of the devil’s power over human beings: God allows him to punish certain human beings and can revoke that permission with regard to any individual or indeed the entire human race, at God’s sole discretion and without violating any principle of justice (ER 115).The principle underlying both the plan of salvation and the devil’s provisional power is therefore an individualistic one: God, based on God’s own inscrutable choice, deals with each individual on a one-byone basis.21 As I’ve said, Abelard is hardly alone in conceiving salvation in this way—Anselm is a predestinarian as well, and he devoted many treatises to the logical puzzles predestination engenders.Yet in Why God Became Human, Anselm never directly addresses predestination as such. He does seem to think that the benefits of Christ’s work are appropriated on an individual basis, but he is clear in that context that it applies in principle to all human beings. Presumably he would say that predestination affects who in fact takes advantage of Christ’s benefits, but predestination does not directly shape his thinking specifically on atonement. With Abelard, by contrast, predestination is taken as a given and Christ’s work is understood from that starting point, leading him to assert from the beginning that Christ’s work only applies to the elect. Individual predestination effectively undercuts the solidarity of the human race. I have already discussed Abelard’s rejection of the traditional notion of original sin as a priori culpability, which he bases on his ethical theory whereby culpability depends on free consent. He therefore replaces Anselm’s solidarity in culpability with a solidarity in subjection to punishment. Yet it appears that this solidarity is not based in any real ontological necessity. Abelard refers to the examples of Jeremiah and John the Baptist (ER 119, 174, 234) and the Virgin Mary (ER 174), who were sanctified in the womb, and of course he believes that Christ was born without sin as well. He interprets Paul’s claim in Romans 5.19 that “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” as leaving open the possibility for such exceptions, since Paul after all does 21

Peppermüller agrees that the upshot of Abelard’s critique of the patristic theory is that “God could have freed them sola jussione [by decree alone]” (90).

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The Politics of Redemption not say “all” were made sinners (ER 161). Abelard here is as far as possible from Anselm’s insistence that God cannot forgive by fiat and that even the preservation of the Virgin Mary must be conceived as paradoxically resulting from Christ’s future work. Just as in the case of the devil’s right over humanity, then, it appears that the curse of original sin applies to human beings solely at God’s discretion. Although for Abelard the exception of Christ and others means original sin is not properly universal, it seems clear that if it were, it would not be because of any ontological solidarity of the human race. On the other side, the liberation of certain individuals from this curse essentially opens up the possibility for them to pursue the ethical task of avoiding sin and cultivating virtue, with some assistance from Christ’s “example” insofar as it inspires love as the most fitting motivation for virtuous behavior (ER 118)—virtue here being understood exclusively as a matter of the motivations interior to the individual soul. Without placing an undue emphasis on Abelard in specific, I believe one can at least say that his reflections here are indicative of two strains in the medieval tradition that will later split into opposing camps, producing two different individualistic interpretations of Anselm’s satisfaction theory.22 On the one side, Christ’s saving work will be subordinated to the decree of double predestination as the means by which that decree is carried out. On the other side, Christ’s saving work will become a way of restoring the balance disrupted by the curse of original sin, allowing the individual to live a “normal” ethical life that otherwise would not be possible. In essence, then, Abelard’s work illustrates the fact that the medieval tradition contains the seeds of the perpetual conflict between a predestinarian and a pietist understanding of the atonement—two views that are sharply opposed on the level of content, but are both thoroughly individualistic on the level of form. 22

In this regard, one can say that Jean Porter’s observation about Abelard’s moral theory also holds, mutatis mutandis, for his view of atonement: “it is radical in the sense of going to the root of the . . . thought of his time, bringing its fundamental assumptions to light, and developing them with relentless consistency.” See “Responsibility, Passion, and Sin: A Reassessment of Abelard’s Ethics,” in Journal of Religious Ethics 28.3 (2000): 369.

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Chapter 8

Community and Related Questions

My readings of texts from the figures widely regarded as the most decisive in the development of atonement theory have revealed that all of them presuppose a social-relational logic that is ultimately based on Paul’s notion of the first and second Adam. Irenaeus provides the basic framework, presenting a socialrelational ontology that includes humanity, the created world, and even God as mutually determining. Given Irenaeus’s polemic against Gnosticism, he naturally emphasizes the physical world as the shared space of action and meaning. Gregory operates within a similar ontology, but his focus is much more on the relationship between humanity and the “spiritual” elements of creation, above all the devil. Anselm narrows the scope of relationality by excluding the devil from any substantial role and virtually ignoring the rest of creation, but still relies on a social anthropology to make sense of Christ’s work, emphasizing in particular our physical relatedness through childbirth. Abelard relies on the same logic as Anselm, returning to the patristic emphasis on God’s desire to create a relationship of mutual love between God and humanity and also providing grounds to reflect on the necessarily public nature of Christ’s ministry and death. At the same time, my investigation revealed that after the patristic period, there was a trend away from the fully socialrelational ontology seen in Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa. The most important step in this regard is the displacement of the devil and exclusion of creation, which leads to the establishment of a God-humanity dyad. This step is solidified in Anselm’s work. While Anselm manages to hold onto a social-relational concept of humanity, Abelard’s critiques indicate that Anselm’s fragile 171

The Politics of Redemption balance had proven unsustainable already in one generation. Abelard in turn points toward the two main options for interpreting Anselm’s satisfaction theory in an individualistic way—namely, the predestinarian route, which envisions Christ as the executor of God’s inscrutable decree of double predestination, and the pietist route, which sees atonement as fixing the problem of original sin in order to reopen the “normal” path of moral striving.

Recapitulation

Ransom

Satisfaction

Predestination

Pietism

A typology of atonement theories

With this trajectory in mind, I would venture a slight revision of the received typology, beginning by calling all the theories discussed in the previous four chapters “recapitulation” theories, insofar as they work within Paul’s first Adam/second Adam scheme. Within this overarching type, there are two subtypes. The first is the ransom theory represented by the patristic figures, in which redemption is played out among God, humanity, the devil, and all creation. The second is the satisfaction theory represented by the medieval figures, in which creation is essentially eliminated, the devil is displaced, and all roles in the drama are played by God and humanity. The predestinarian and pietist routes would be further subtypes under satisfaction, emphasizing the divine and human ends of the polarity, respectively. This typology of course leaves out the moral influence theory. Despite the commonplace, embraced by Aulén and many others,1 that puts forward Abelard as its father, it seems more accurate to say that such a theory does not arise until modernity, when there 1

Aulén, Christus Victor, 112–13. Remarkably, Aulén’s very brief treatment of Abelard does not cite a single text, outside of noting that Abelard quotes Luke 7.47: “Much is forgiven to them that love much” (112).

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Community and Related Questions was an attempt to rework the pietist position, with its emphasis on morality, in order to respond to a world for which the idea of a substitutionary atonement no longer seemed credible2—or to put it differently, when modern thinkers, most of them philosophers rather than theologians, tried to break out of the “drama of the soul and its God” and make the gospel once again relevant to their shared public life. Most of the theologians discussed in Chapter 2 fall under this rubric, and as I pointed out, they all work within a social-relational framework. When compared to the more or less individualistic advocates of what I am calling recapitulatory theories (represented by Boersma and Weaver), these moral influence theories have much to recommend them, above all their clear contemporary relevance and moral force. I have shown that recapitulatory theories can and indeed must be understood in a social-relational way, but that alone cannot demonstrate that recapitulatory theories have a future in the contemporary dialogue—after all, I could be providing little more than an augmented version of Weaver’s “thick description” of the tradition intended essentially for insiders, or even something like Boersma’s attempt to simply reassert tradition in the face of penetrating critiques. I hope that my use of social-theoretical texts both classic (Hegel, Nietzsche) and contemporary (Laclau, Butler, Park) as dialogue partners has already begun to show the potential for some continuing relevance of recapitulatory theories in modernity. In the next and final chapter, however, I will be going a step further by attempting to sketch out the basic outlines of a contemporary theory of atonement drawing on the insights gleaned from the patristic and medieval texts. My approach will be to begin by indicating the basic outlines of the social-relational ontology I have found to be shared among these texts. I will then present the problem humanity faces and its solution in Christ, with particular attention to the ways that the ontology helps to more clearly bind the two together. Yet before diving into this task, I will look at two theologians who fall outside the pattern of tradition-denying social-relational thinkers and tradition-affirming individualistic 2

This connection is perhaps clearest in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

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The Politics of Redemption thinkers: Karl Barth and Dorothee Soelle. Doing so will serve three purposes as I move forward to my constructive task. First, it will fill in a significant gap in the accounts of atonement explored so far: namely, the form of community that follows from the Incarnation. Second, it will provide a further demonstration of the tendency toward social-relational forms of thought in twentieth-century atonement theories. Finally, it will provide me with concrete models as I attempt to shift from social-relational readings of traditional texts to the constructive task of beginning to develop my own theory. Soelle in particular will provide guidance here, as she follows explicitly in the tradition of Bonhoeffer’s religionless interpretation. In short, this chapter represents my last preparations for the final constructive chapter.

An Outstanding Question It may initially seem counterintuitive to claim that the question of community is still outstanding after my readings of leading patristic and medieval thinkers.This is particularly true in the case of Irenaeus, who spends many pages laying out the form and importance of the catholic church. Even in Irenaeus, however, there is no explicit argument that the emergence of a historically particular community logically follows from the Incarnation. For Gregory of Nyssa and Abelard, one gets various claims that the sacraments are the way to obtain the benefits of Christ’s work, but the church as a particular social form does not explicitly enter the picture. Finally, for Anselm, it is simply a question (at least within the context of the Cur Deus Homo) of approaching God on the strength of Christ’s work. In all these cases, the object of Christ’s work is simply humanity as such—primarily humanity as a general category in the patristic authors and humanity as a biologically related species in the medieval authors—even if not all the authors are confident that every human being will or even can receive the benefits of that work. References to the institutional church or the sacraments seem more or less tacked on, reflecting the empirical form Christianity has taken rather than the internal logic of the Incarnation. That is to say, there is no attempt to

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Community and Related Questions “derive” the church as a particular community. It is perhaps telling in this regard that Anselm, who starts from the assumption that “nothing is known about Christ,”3 gets only as far as an abstract availability of Christ’s benefits to all humanity, with no reference to the logical necessity of approaching Christ through, for example, the sacramental rites entrusted to a hierarchical institution grounded in apostolic succession. The reason for this gap in argumentation may simply be that the church was too obvious an historical fact to these authors, particularly the ones writing after the Constantinian settlement.4 For Barth and Soelle, however, those assurances are no longer available. Barth launched a new theological era with his Epistle to the Romans,5 which represented a theological formulation of his break with the self-assurance of Liberal Protestantism in response to the mainstream theological establishment’s support for World War I. Dorothee Soelle’s Christ the Representative follows in the wake of Barth’s dramatic gesture and more specifically of Bonhoeffer’s reflections on the necessity of a religionless Christianity for a world come of age.6 Coming at the problem from very different starting points, both converge on a similar view: though the object of Christ’s work is ultimately humanity as such, that work initially and necessarily takes the form of a historically specific community. The way they get to that point and the conclusions they draw are instructive, and so I will describe Barth and Soelle’s views in turn.

3 4

5

6

Anselm, Why God Became Human, pref. Irenaeus of course writes under conditions of persecution, but he still more or less takes the particular form that the catholic church had taken by that point for granted and defends it not based on any kind of logical connection with the Incarnation but on such common-sense grounds as its historical continuity, its geographic spread, the consistency of its teaching, and so on. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). Dorothee Soelle, Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the “Death of God”, trans. David Lewis (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), German text: Stellvertetung: Ein Kapitel Theologie nach dem “Tode Gottes” (Berlin: KreuzVerlag Stuttgart, 1965).

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The Politics of Redemption

Predestination and Community: Karl Barth Karl Barth’s reformulation of the doctrine of predestination is found in the second volume of the Church Dogmatics.7 There his concern is emphatically not to ask, as I have throughout this book, what the work of Christ tells us about the structure of humanity and creation. He shares with all predestinarians a commitment to affirming God’s initiative and sovereignty in salvation. What prompts his critique of the classical doctrine, a critique that went far beyond his original intentions and even prompted some anxiety in him,8 is not that the doctrine is individualistic,9 but that it is not properly Christian—that is, it does not find its starting point in Christ. Barth’s argumentation on this point is exhaustive and complex, and I can only trace the outlines here. His basic contention is that the doctrine in its classical form places a gap between the God revealed in Christ and the God who mysteriously decreed double predestination.The problem with doing this is that it makes God’s revelation a revelation of something other than God, and therefore renders that revelation untrustworthy: How can we have assurance in our own election except by the Word of God? And how can even the Word of God give us assurance on this point if this Word, if Jesus Christ, is not really the electing God, not the election itself, not our election, but only an elected means whereby the electing God—electing elsewhere and in some other way—executes that which he has decreed concerning those whom he has—elsewhere and in some other way—elected?10 7

8 9

10

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, pt. 2, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), German text: Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. 2, Die Lehre von Gott, pt. 2 (Zürich: Evangelisher Verlag, 1946). Henceforth cited as CD II/2. Barth, CD II/2, x. He does acknowledge this problem, however: “The traditional doctrine of predestination of every school and shade has always begun with this problem [of the election of individuals], and has made no essential progress beyond it” (CD II/2, 306). Barth, CD II/2, 111. Barth here turns his attention to Calvin in specific: “The fact that Calvin in particular not only did not answer but did not even perceive this question is the decisive objection which we have to bring against

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Community and Related Questions In place of this view that subordinates Christ to the decree of predestination, Barth proposes that we understand Christ as the object of that decree: “According to Scripture, the divine election of grace is an activity of God which has a definite goal and limit. Its direct and proper object is not individuals generally, but one individual—and only in him the people called and united by him, and only in that people individuals in general and their private relationships with God.”11 Barth then goes a step further in claiming that we cannot understand this decree of election as only an act ad extra: “in himself, in the primal and basic decision in which he wills to be and actually is God, in the mystery of what takes place from and to all eternity within himself, within his Triune being, God is none other than the One who in his Son or Word elects himself, and in and with himself elects his people.”12 As a consequence of this doctrine of election, Barth ends up espousing a concept of God that is in many ways reminiscent of Irenaeus’s: “Under the concept of predestination, or the election of grace, we say that in freedom (its affirmation and not its loss) God tied himself to the universe [die Welt]”13—God’s election of Christ and of Godself in Christ is God’s election to be in necessary relation to creation, though Barth does not thematize the non-human element of creation in this context. The specific point of interest for me here is Barth’s repeated affirmation that the election of Christ necessarily entails the election of a people in Christ. This election of a people is determined first of all by Christ’s historical specificity: “The way taken by the electing God is the way of witness to Jesus, the way of faith in him. Included in his election there is, therefore, this ‘other’ election, the election of the many (from whom none is excluded) whom the electing God meets on this way.”14 Only after this election of a people can we speak of the election of individuals within that people—in other

11 12 13 14

his whole doctrine of predestination . . . . All the dubious features of Calvin’s doctrine result from the basic failing that in the last analysis he separates God and Jesus Christ, thinking that what was in the beginning with God must be sought elsewhere than in Jesus Christ.” Barth, CD II/2, 43. Barth, CD II/2, 76. Barth, CD II/2, 155 (GT // 169). Barth, CD II/2, 195.

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The Politics of Redemption words, the question of individual election, “which tradition has been far too eager to treat as the problem of the doctrine of predestination,” is actually the last question one comes to.15 The specific form this people takes is twofold, consisting of Israel and the church. Though much of what Barth has to say on the relationship between the two is perhaps questionable, or at least sometimes lacks the circumspection that many theologians would adopt after the full extent of the Holocaust became known, the motivation behind focusing on this twofold people is to clarify that God does not elect humanity as an abstract concept or merely as a biological species—in other words, does not elect whatever human being might possibly have come along—but elects this humanity, humanity in its concrete historicity. For Barth, this means above all humanity as mired in sin: It is the man who gave a hearing to Satan, who did not guard the frontier, who did not keep the divine commandment . . . . It was the man whose wife was Eve and first son Cain, who answered a long series of special visitations with an equally long series of fresh aggressions, who finally drove the Messiah of God to the cross . . . . And God has chosen this man and fellowship with this man in the election of Jesus Christ.16 Though the gender-exclusive language may be off-putting here, I leave it in order to emphasize the fact that Barth regards humanity as a singular object, even when he is talking about the actions of particular individuals—as in the patristic and medieval authors surveyed, the object of salvation is humanity thought as a historical unity. The task of the church in this context is to be “the circumference [Umgebung] of the elect man, Jesus of Nazareth,” the edge of the ever-expanding circle that approaches each human being with “the promise that he, too, is an elect man.”17 Though 15 16

17

Barth, CD II/2, 196. Barth, CD II/2, 164. The German term for “man” here is Mensch, which is the German equivalent to the gender-neutral meaning of “man” (as opposed to the strictly male Mann) and which is singular every time it appears here (GT // 179). Barth, CD II/2, 318 (GT // 350).

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Community and Related Questions Barth is reluctant to say so categorically, presumably because it would appear to limit God to a logical standard, the clear implication is that this circle will ultimately expand to include every actual human being: [God] loves the godless: not because they are godless; not because they seek to be free of him; but because he will not let them go; because in consequence they cannot really get rid of him. The concern of humanity must be: its eternal life in fellowship with God. This is [humanity’s] situation according to the revelation of the crucified Jesus Christ in his resurrection from the dead. This is what the elect community knows about [humanity].18 Yet this promise reaches each human being through an unfolding historical movement, which connects the world with the ongoing work of the concrete and particular person Jesus Christ: “As the church, the community . . . is the center and medium of communication [der Mitte und Vermittlung] between Jesus and the world, having its commission to all who still stand outside.”19 One can say, then, that the community of those faithful to Jesus Christ is the propagation of Christ’s work, its continued reality in the world. Just as the problem facing humanity, conceived by Barth as sin, was propagated through an unfolding history, so also is its solution in Christ. That solution enters into a situation in which the problem is universal and pushes back with the assurance that the solution’s scope will ultimately be universal as well. In Barth’s presentation, however, there is a persistent divine unilateralism that arguably undermines the importance of the community, making it seem like the arbitrary means Barth accused previous theologians of making Christ.20 Barth does finish this 18 19 20

Barth, CD II/2, 319–20 (translation altered, GT // 351). Barth, CD II/2, 239 (GT // 263). See in particular what follows one of the passages quoted above: “The community itself cannot elect him, and therefore make him one of the elect. The community cannot even make it clear to him that he is elected. Both these concerns belong to God alone. It is only by God’s own choice, only by God’s own revelation of this his own act, that the community itself came into existence and remains in existence” (CD II/2, 320).

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The Politics of Redemption part-volume with a consideration of Christian ethics, but again, his presentation is focused on God’s end. For all that Barth does to overturn the traditional doctrine of predestination, then, it remains questionable whether any doctrine of predestination can do justice to human freedom, can make freedom count. From the social-relational perspective I am advancing here, this question can be rephrased: if God does not in any sense “need” human beings to respond, if there is no question of reciprocity, then has God really willed irrevocably to be in relation with humanity?

Representation and Community: Dorothee Soelle It is clear that Barth recognized this problem, as the final extant fragment of the Church Dogmatics includes an argument against infant baptism on the grounds that human beings must respond to grace.21 The point of the “unilateral” divine will would then be precisely to engender a humanity graciously enabled to enter into a genuine relationship with God, meaning that it is finally not unilateral at all. Indeed, perhaps even in Church Dogmatics II/2 the divine unilateralism is not the last word but represents a kind of pedagogical hyperbole meant to emphasize the divine initiative. Whatever the intention, however, the danger in his initial unilateral presentation is that God is pictured along the lines of a master-slave relationship, with God claiming all human work as God’s own work—until ultimately humanity, like Hegel’s slave, moves along, leaving God behind. Dorothee Soelle writes in a context in which that seems to have happened already, the secular Europe that may embody something like what Bonhoeffer called “the world come of age.” It is a world characterized not by a selfassured atheism, but by an apprehension in the face of the “death of God”—a felt absence of God that is much more problematic than would be a simple conviction of God’s non-existence. Soelle’s Christ the Representative starts from the supposition that the “death of God” does not render Christ automatically irrelevant, but instead “forces us to seek a new and more accurate description 21

See Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 (Lecture Fragments), trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981).

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Community and Related Questions of the identity established in Christ.”22 The key word here is identity, which in the Western tradition has always denoted an “irreplaceability and unexchangeability” that is, however, “not given in advance [vorgegeben], but set as a task [aufgegeben].”23 The problem facing the modern seeker of personal identity is that everything in our world seems to push in the direction of the substitutability of all individuals. One role that God had played in the past was as a kind of “automatic” guarantor of personal identity, which is always “urgently in need of ” the recognition of “another outside of itself if it is to be recovered or attained.”24 Yet in retrospect one can see that this “automatic” identity was never really what was hoped for—it is purely inward, and if it needs no external authentication, it also needs no external actualization, which is the same as saying it need never become real and meaningful. The apparent opposites of a total substitutability and an absolute irreplaceability that carries no external consequences reveal themselves to be dialectically identical. What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Soelle argues that it is the concept of representation, which is also “one of the oldest” ways of referring to the work of Christ.25 While substitution is a permanent replacement that treats the person replaced “as unavailable, useless, or dead,”26 representation is “a temporary expedient” that is “limited to specific areas” such as business or child care.27 This provisional status is what preserves the represented person’s identity: To represent someone means therefore to assume conditional responsibility for him, in the hope that one’s decisions will meet with his approval; it being understood that the person represented may subsequently change what the representative did in the belief that it was what the one represented would’ve done himself . . . . A representative does not put himself in the other person’s place completely 22 23 24 25 26 27

Soelle, Christ the Representative, 12. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 33 (translation altered, GT // 38–9). Soelle, Christ the Representative, 33. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 13. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 21. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 20.

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The Politics of Redemption and absolutely. He plays a role and can play it well, but he has to realize that it is in fact a role.28 Soelle regards Christ as a more comprehensive representative than a business liaison or a foster parent. In a situation in which we are incapable of achieving identity ourselves, Christ’s role is to buy us the time necessary to achieve our own identity. Soelle affirms with the broader Christian tradition that this representative role must be “personal and voluntary,” but believes that much theology (including Barth’s) has militated against this view of Christ’s representation by making him into a permanent substitute; by contrast, Soelle contends that “it is a vital element in Christ’s existence as a person that his representation should be an unfinished and continuing relationship, and not something he exercises all at once by virtue of a distinct supernatural quality.”29 This is because “God is not content with our representative. Our representative speaks for us, but we ourselves have to learn to speak. He believes for us, but we ourselves have to learn to believe. He hopes when we are without hope, but that is not the end of the story.”30 The question that then arises is what exactly “the end of the story” is—what does it mean for us to exercise responsibility on our own? It means to follow Christ’s example of being a representative, both a representative of Christ in the world, continuing his work, and a representative of the world before God. The community of representatives is the church, the structure of which is directly determined by Christ’s provisionality: for the Church’s understanding of itself, everything depends on whether it recognizes the provisionality [Vorläufigkeit] of Christ. If Christ provisionally represents us before God, this means that the company of believers must also stand in for someone before God. For the Church, this someone can only be the world, which the Church 28 29 30

Soelle, Christ the Representative, 20. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 70. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 104. One might supplement Soelle’s account with Delores William’s critique of the surrogacy motif, which highlights the role of the replacement worker rather than the replaced one.

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Community and Related Questions represents before God. It does so provisionally, incompletely, conditionally, and for the time being. The Church is not a substitute with which God consoles himself for the loss of a world slipping from his grasp. On the contrary, where the Church really exists, God is assured of what is still future. The Church encourages God so far as the world is concerned, so that He does not give it up for lost but continues to count upon it. The Church exists wherever it emerges as the world’s champion, not as its accuser; as its true spokesman, not as its denigrator. It accordingly knows and promotes the interests of its client.31 Here one can see the same logic as Barth’s “ever-expanding circumference,” but the use of “the world” in place of “humanity” implies, more clearly perhaps than in Church Dogmatics II/2, that the scope of redemption may spill beyond the boundaries of the human race to include all creation—and the object of redemption is still, despite this blurring of boundaries, referred to in the singular. The other side of representation is knowing when to step aside, and so the church “effaces itself in everything which the world itself has meanwhile learned to understand and put into practice—in certain social tasks, for instance. The Church can conceive a world in which it has itself become superfluous.”32 The hoped-for future state in which the whole world has achieved a state of identity and entirely overthrown the depersonalizing forces of substitution is not the end of the story, however. There is one more step: we must, like Christ, represent God, so that God too can find identity. The way Soelle puts this is revealing: “the church is open towards the God who becomes identical with himself in the world.”33 This indicates that representation, although provisional, speaks to a permanent underlying reality: true identity is found only in relationship. A monadic identity, even one of heroic self-assertion, ultimately loses all meaning and collapses back into 31 32 33

Soelle, Christ the Representative, 112 (translation altered, GT // 149–50). Soelle, Christ the Representative, 112. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 112. “Sie ist offen für den Gott, der identish wird mit sich selber in der Welt” (GT // 150).

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The Politics of Redemption infinite substitutability. This principle applies also to God, resulting in a radicalization of the togetherness of God and the world found in both Irenaeus and Barth—a radicalization insofar as God actually needs us, “us” thought here in the broadest Nancean sense.

Religionless versus Demythologizing Interpretation For both Barth and Soelle, then, the church is to be conceived as a kind of “avant-garde” community, the concrete propagation of Christ’s work in history. Yet this community is not presented as existing over against something like the world, but as a necessary part of an outgoing redemptive movement, a movement whose scope is in principle universal because its object is finally singular. What’s more, both provide further evidence of the incompatibility of individualistic thinking with any convincing account of the atonement, through their internal critique of their respective branches of the satisfaction theory. Arguing from God’s side, Barth claims that the classical doctrine of predestination, which has never been able to get past the problem of individual election, turns Christ’s saving work into an arbitrarily chosen tool to bring about an outcome decided upon by completely different means. Arguing from the human side, Soelle claims that a thoroughgoing individualism would exclude the possibility of Christ playing the role of representative. The fact that for both the concrete effect of Christ’s coming is a community only serves to reinforce the basic point that the Incarnation calls forth a social-relational style of thought. Soelle’s work in particular holds further interest for my project, however, insofar as it is an explicit attempt to provide a “religionless interpretation” of atonement, along Bonhoeffer’s lines. While her account of representation is very abstract—and in fact the abstract nature of the concept of representation is partly what attracts her to it34—she nevertheless rejects the “demythologizing” approach, making her work a good illustration of the difference between a “religionless” and “demythologizing” reading. Both styles 34

Soelle, Christ the Representative, 13.

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Community and Related Questions of interpretation start with the acknowledgment that “religious” concepts like the traditional God or the soul have lost their meaning in the modern world. The demythologizer responds to this problem by cutting the offending elements out of the text, then interpreting the remainder—most often as reflecting the structure of human experience in ways reminiscent of Heidegger.35 The religionless interpreter, by contrast, leaves the mythological elements in place, interpreting the text as a whole from a religionless perspective. One clear example from Soelle is her stance toward the resurrection, which is a major stumbling block for many modern people. She doesn’t directly affirm it as a physical event, but interprets it as the hope for “the achieved identity of all,” a hope that motivated the early Christians to continue Christ’s representative work.36 One can say, then, that the demythologizing interpretation starts from a defensive position, assuming that modern readers will object and making concessions to them in advance. Religionless interpretation, by contrast, starts from the assumption that the theological text still has something to say to modern audiences but does not prejudge what that relevance will turn out to be. The results seem to me to be clear: the religionless reading is at least forceful and surprising, even when not finally convincing, while the demythologizing reading always runs the risk of being perceived as apologetic (in the everyday sense) and equivocating. My approach in attempting to sketch out a contemporary recapitulation-based atonement theory will be a religionless one. For example, it should be clear by now that I favor the original patristic framework as being the most thoroughly social-relational. A crucial part of that framework is the role of the devil, and I have argued that the tendency to displace the devil, represented by 35

36

Bultmann is often perceived as a kind of Heideggerian, but there is evidence that the influence was at least in part mutual. Aside from the fact that Bultmann was Heidegger’s senior colleague at the University of Marburg, Heidegger’s recently published seminars on The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), which indicate that his reading of Paul was formative in the period leading up to the writing of Being and Time, include frequent reference to Bultmann. Soelle, Christ the Representative, 126.

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The Politics of Redemption Anselm and Abelard, represents a serious misstep. Nevertheless, I can hardly assume that a contemporary audience—even an entirely Christian one—takes seriously the possibility that there really exists some fallen angel bent on the destruction of the human race. Therefore, I will be following the consensus among liberation theologians of various stripes, along with more recent interpreters like Weaver and Ray, of viewing the devil as representing some form of political power, while letting the devil’s place in the “mythological” text guide my understanding of politics as well. More generally, I will attempt to offer an interpretation that is plausible to readers who do not share with the mainstream of the Christian tradition metaphysical presuppositions such as the existence of the God described by the classical “omni” attributes, of the immortal soul, of an original state of innocence, and so on. Other tradition-oriented theologians may be skeptical of this approach as conceding too much to the secular world and perhaps even as incompatible with an appropriation of the tradition. My reason for taking this approach is based on more than a desire to be convincing to non-Christians, however. I am compelled, at least initially, to “go without” many of the explicit metaphysical presuppositions with which the tradition has tended to work because they are by now nearly indissociable from the irreducibly individualistic “drama of the soul with its God,” and I am convinced that a social-relational approach is absolutely necessary for making sense of the fundamental tenet of Christianity: that God became human in order to redeem the world. Keeping the God-and-soul schema of the Hellenistic world and trying to come up with a way to square it with that fundamental tenet may perhaps have had a certain justification in the past, appearing to be a self-evident step to many theologians and a necessary concession to cultural intelligibility to others. As should be clear by now, however, I am convinced it was, to be frank, never a good fit. It is long past time to discard that schema, purely in the interests of doing justice to the logic of God becoming human in order to redeem the world. For me as for Bonhoeffer and Soelle, then, a religionless reading is not an apologetic expedient but a theological necessity.

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Chapter 9

Politics of Redemption

The goal of this chapter is to provide a sketch of what a contemporary theory of atonement in the recapitulation tradition might look like. I should emphasize from the outset that in the present context, this can only be a sketch and cannot pretend to be a fully developed theory, which would require an entire book simply to put forward and would require multiple books’ worth of further research in order to ground rigorously. Here I hope only to give an initial indication of what it would mean to build out from the recapitulation tradition in a way that uses a social-relational style of thought on every level, from anthropology to social theory to ontology, and reflects the principles of religionless interpretation. As I have already discussed in Chapter 1 and then more forcefully in Chapter 8, for me social-relational thought and religionless interpretation necessarily go together. In addition, the goal of my readings of the major figures in atonement theory was to demonstrate that an appropriation of that tradition requires a social-relational style of thought. One can view this final chapter, then, as an attempt to complete the circle by demonstrating that religionless interpretation can be productive not just for the reading of scripture, but for the mobilization of unexpected resources from the later tradition’s reflections on core scriptural themes. I will begin by attempting to make explicit the social-relational ontology I have found in the patristic and medieval texts that are widely recognized as most formative for the development of atonement theory. This will mean foregrounding the ontological, social-theoretical, and anthropological concerns that in many cases are of secondary importance to the theologians surveyed and formalizing the implications of certain claims in ways that likely were not consciously intended by the original authors. More broadly, it will mean treating all of these figures as part of a more 187

The Politics of Redemption or less unified tradition in atonement theory, such that their own contributions can be judged as either developments of or departures from that tradition—an approach that I hope readers will find plausible in light of my readings of those core texts. I will continue to draw upon some of the philosophical sources that I have already put in dialogue with particular texts along with some others, but just as in my initial attempt to clarify the implications of Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity,” Jean-Luc Nancy will take a leading role here.The reason for this privileging of Nancy in the present context is simply that his categories— being-with, singularity, and so on—are so abstract and formal that they provide the minimum amount of “interference” when filled in with concrete content.1 As such, I will not be going beyond the aspects of Nancy’s thought that I have already explained in Chapter 1 under the heading “Ontology and ‘being-with.’” Having rendered explicit the basic outlines of the ontology implicit in the recapitulation tradition, I will then present a possible religionless interpretation of the ransom theory, with the goal of showing that foregrounding the ontological questions raised by the Incarnation can help theologians more closely articulate the problem facing humanity and its solution in Christ.

The Ontology The core principle is that of “being-with”: to exist is necessarily to be in relation. A being does not have some kernel or essence to 1

A question that might arise here is why I am using Nancy instead of Whitehead, especially given the similarity of many of my emphases to those of process theology. The answer is essentially that Whitehead brings along with him a significant amount of “baggage” that, while perhaps convincing on its own terms, would predetermine too much of my reading. Using Nancy allows me to clarify what I mean by social-relational as opposed to individualistic thought while allowing the role of God or of any other particular part of the scheme to emerge out of my interpretation of the traditional texts. I could of course get the general principle of relationality from Whitehead, but to avoid front-loading things I’d have to cut so much out of his system that it would then become questionable why I was claiming Whitehead at all. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).

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Politics of Redemption which relation is secondary, either logically or temporally. Rather, every being is a singularity made up of the distinctive ways that it relates to other singularities. These relationships are not simple juxtapositions, but are real and forceful even when they stretch across vast temporal and spatial distances, as Anselm and Abelard both indicate in their own ways. No being escapes this determination by relationship to other beings, because otherwise it (or whatever part of it is conceived as escaping the network of relationality) would fail to exist. The elimination of relationship therefore ends in destruction. The central example of this principle is humanity. Humanity stands at a nodal point in the universe, at a nexus of a rich variety of relationships. This is true at the level of the individual, as the patristic authors attempted to indicate by their rejection of a monadic soul and their insistence that the human being is the relationship between body and soul—that is, even the individual is relational “all the way down.” But my core principle means that body and soul can’t be conceived simply as two inert things that happen to be in relationship to each other. Instead, they are themselves singularities emerging from a network of relationships. The body means that humanity stands in necessary relationship to the physical world. We obviously need food, drink, and shelter to survive, but we also need some form of physical affection from human beings or other living things in order to thrive. New human beings come into the world through the physical process of reproduction, and death can be understood as a breakdown in the body’s ability to continue to relate to the physical world in a life-sustaining way.2 Yet this irreducible relationship of humans to the non-human world is necessarily a two-way street, which leads to a consequence that is less often thematized by tradition: human actions have a determinative effect on the non-human world, either destroying it or helping it to flourish.The role of the physical world in human life reflects a more general principle: to exist is to have a discernible effect. The physical world is where all effects ultimately “register” and is therefore the ground of reality. 2

Even death does not break the chains of relationality entirely, however, as decomposing bodies become part of the soil, providing nutrients for other life forms.

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The Politics of Redemption Abelard attests to this truth when he locates the drama of sin and salvation decisively in the shared physical world (as opposed to the realm of the monadic soul). The soul means that humanity stands in necessary relationship to the spiritual world. This concept is much less straightforward, and so I will be devoting considerable space to it. I interpret “spiritual” in the sense of the German Geist, which retains the more traditional meaning of “spiritual” but also refers to intellectual realities such as language, culture, law, and religion. Here my focus is on something like the Hegelian concept of objective spirit. I have already briefly discussed Bonhoeffer’s appropriation of this concept in Chapter 1, where I explained that it refers to a kind of deposit of cultural norms and practices that a given subject finds already existing independent of any particular person—to put it differently, social life somehow seems to have “a life of its own.” To try to get ahold of the notion of a social reality that exists with a certain degree of autonomy, it’s helpful to think of language. No one person or group of people consciously decided to create the English language, for example, although once a range of dialects with a sufficient family resemblance to be recognizable as the same language was already in existence, it became possible to attempt to standardize it. That is to say, a language always seems to preexist any given speaker, but it is possible to intervene in such a way as to change it. Governments can regulate standard usage, for example, and particularly influential people like celebrities can introduce new words or turns of phrase that others subsequently take up. More generally, usage drifts over time, for example, when words enter the language or else fall into disuse. Language determines how we speak, but how we speak also determines language. Another way to get at the notion of an autonomous social order would be to imagine what it would be like if things like language, customs, or laws didn’t exist: we would have to start from scratch every time we needed to interact with others. In such a state, people might find it expedient to agree upon certain norms, but consensus would be difficult if not impossible to reach if people didn’t already have some kind of common ground. In Bonhoeffer’s description of objective spirit, he says that even in encounters between two people, some form of objective spirit 190

Politics of Redemption comes to be,3 and more broadly, I advance the claim that human beings are always-already in the process of developing a spiritual order that governs their interactions—however, this aptitude turns out to be grounded in humans’ biological makeup, it is simply “there” from the beginning, always-already working to absorb a preexisting culture and trying to develop norms for unanticipated encounters. Mythically, the tradition expresses this point by claiming that the angel who would later become the devil was installed as an overseer by God even in the state of innocence. The spiritual realm can also be explained in terms of what many structuralist and post-structural thinkers have called the symbolic order, which covers the same basic conceptual territory as the Hegelian objective spirit but foregrounds the role of language as the most foundational cultural practice and as the structuring principle for other cultural fields such as mythology or cuisine. At the risk of oversimplifying, structuralists tend to view the symbolic order as governed by fixed principles, and poststructuralists highlight the fluid, conflictual, and self-undermining nature of the symbolic order. In my understanding of what I’m calling the spiritual realm, Slavoj Žižek’s synthesis of the Hegelian concept of objective spirit and the articulation of the symbolic order in the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been a decisive influence.4 A major controversy among interpreters of Lacan is whether his view of the symbolic order is structuralist (fixed) or post-structuralist (fluid and self-undermining). One of the most prominent adherents of the former view is Judith Butler, for whom Lacan is a major foil and who critiques Žižek’s appropriation of Lacan as falling into similar structuralist pitfalls.5 By contrast, I read Žižek as arguing for a fluid view of the symbolic order not entirely dissimilar to Butler’s own. The main difference between the two for me is that while Butler takes very seriously the inertia of previous cultural forms and the difficulty of making even 3 4

5

Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 97–8. I have analyzed Žižek’s view in detail in my Žižek and Theology (New York: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2008), particularly Chapters 1 and 2. On Lacan, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, passim, and on Žižek in particular, see Judith Butler, “Arguing with the Real,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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The Politics of Redemption very incremental changes, Žižek believes that there sometimes occur traumatic events that result in the destruction of a given social order and the founding of a new one. A particularly fruitful aspect of Žižek’s view for my purposes here is his frequent use of the term “the big Other” as a synonym for the symbolic order, indicating how we tend to speak in ways that imply that there is “someone” who is in charge of regulating our shared cultural life or that the social order as such is an agent that can “do” something. A good example of the big Other’s supposed action is when something becomes “official”—what is implied is that the big Other “recognizes” it. In terms of the ransom theory of the atonement, the big Other would of course be the devil. In short, the spiritual names the fact that humanity continually determines the form of its life together while being determined by it. Human life together may take a destructive form, as it in fact has, but it may also take a positive form. With this concept of the spiritual in mind, one can see that all relationships among human beings are both physical and spiritual. For example, the social function of kinship relationships far exceeds the simple fact of having been born to a particular set of parents. Kinship carries with it certain forms of loyalty or obedience, lays down lines of inheritance, regulates possible marriage pairings, and in some cases even determines who is the legitimate political ruler. The patristic authors indicated this double-duty aspect of kinship by highlighting the destructive socio-political consequences of being Adam’s progeny. However, even human beings’ relationships with the non-human world exceed the “merely” physical, as such necessities as eating and drinking become the site of cultural creativity. The world, then, is a network of physical and spiritual relationships of which humanity forms a nodal point. The world is not something given or static, but continually arises out of the interactions among the singularities that make it up, and here humanity plays a special role in that human beings are able to take conscious, self-directed actions in a way that other beings are not.The world, therefore, is always this concrete world—not a passive container but a historically determined articulation of being. Similarly, humanity is always this humanity—not an ahistorical essence

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Politics of Redemption but a concrete historical unfolding partly determined by free human action. I have already referred to the possibility of destructive actions and relationships, and I must now define them: an action is destructive when it attempts to isolate its object, and a destructive relationship is one that is produced and reinforced by such action. Insofar as a being only exists as a singularity determined by relationship, removing it from one of its constitutive relationships means destroying an aspect of what it is. This is not to say that change is inherently destructive. Change is positive when it enriches the relationships in which something stands. The model of positive change is enjoyment, here understood in both the straightforward sense and the legal sense of having the use of something without ownership. Enjoyment adds a fresh relationship, which may reconfigure already-existing relationships without negating them. By contrast, possession is a relationship that is predicated on the negation of other relationships.6 The word “God” names the purpose of the world, which is nothing other than that the world might be an ever-proliferating network of relationships characterized by enjoyment. Humanity stands in special relationship to God because of humanity’s special role in the world—humanity is that point at which it is determined whether or not the world is to fulfill the divine purpose. Despite humanity’s special role, there is no being in the world that fails to be in relationship with God, and God in turn is determined by God’s relationship to the world. This means that the world is something really other than God—in other words, it is by no means guaranteed that the divine purpose will actually be fulfilled. Insofar as being in relation means having an effect, one must say that the world really “pushes back” in relationship to God, above all in humanity, determining whether or not the divine purpose is to be actualized. Speaking within the terms of the narrative that regards God as an agent in a straightforward sense, God puts Godself at stake in creating the world. 6

I draw this distinction from my reading of Augustine’s De Trinitate, which I have laid out in “Gift and Communio: The Holy Spirit in Augustine’s De Trinitate,” Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming).

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The Problem: Possession and Rule I have already given a few indications of the stakes of religionless interpretation, most notably when I leave “in place” the idea of God as a more or less anthropomorphic agent but interpret the divine actions in religionless terms—for instance, God’s installation of the devil as an overseer. In this section, that methodology will necessarily come to the fore much more often, given that the tradition has organized its reflections on the problem facing humanity around the interpretation of the myth of creation and fall. In broad terms, that myth is as follows: Humanity finds itself initially in a situation characterized by free enjoyment—of the non-human world and of one another. Already the spiritual nature of humanity was in place, expressed by God’s assignment of the devil to oversee humanity’s development. Shortly after humanity emerged, yet at a historical moment that is distinct from that emergence, humanity chose a path contrary to the divine purpose of free enjoyment. Now in the modern world, it is very difficult to envision exactly when and where the state of original innocence might have taken place, and so I must go along with Wolfhart Pannenberg in asserting that theologians should simply give up the idea of an actual, historical state of innocence.7 What does the original state of innocence “mean,” then? I would suggest that fallen humanity represents “actual existing” humanity, which from the very beginning has behaved in a violent and possessive manner. The fact that God’s creation results in a humanity living in a state of free enjoyment with a benign spiritual overseer indicates not only that such is the divine intent for humanity—by asserting it as a real condition, the myth says that the divine purpose is a real possibility for humanity. Although the humanity we know is characterized by bondage to the devil—a notion I will be examining more closely—there is another potentiality at work as well. On the ontological level, this reading of the myth reflects the fact that relationality is ineradicable, which when applied to humanity

7

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 57.

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Politics of Redemption means that humanity’s role, namely, as a nodal point in the rich network of relationality that constitutes the world, always endures as long as humanity does. Humanity’s abandonment of its initial state is said to have been prompted in some way by the devil. I have consistently maintained the importance of the devil for atonement theory, but at the same time I have already interpreted the devil as a kind of stand-in for the spiritual (cultural and political) sphere rather than as a self-directed independently existing agent. This is one point where taking a religionless rather than demythologizing approach is crucial, insofar as it gives me access to the tradition’s description of the devil’s motives and actions without requiring me to interpret those motives and actions as pertaining finally to some particular “fallen angel.” Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa both provide an immediately comprehensible explanation for the devil’s action: seeing humanity’s special role in the world, the devil became jealous. It should be clear that jealousy is an attempt to establish possession, motivated by the idea of mutually exclusive relationships. In this particular case, the devil assumes that the high esteem in which God holds humanity is a threat to the devil’s own status.The devil therefore wishes to disrupt humanity’s relationship with God. Gregory of Nyssa contributes the insight that the devil found it intolerable that a subordinate of his should be held in higher esteem by God—that higher esteem presumably calling into question the devil’s power over humanity. Uniting the two moments, then, the devil determines to shore up his possession of humanity by disrupting humanity’s relationship with God. In place of the previous relationship of facilitating humanity’s full flourishing, that is, the previous relationship of enjoyment, the devil takes up a relationship of possession, which necessarily implies attempting to cut humanity off from other relationships. The devil accomplishes this by means of deception, indicating that if humanity had clearly understood the consequences of its actions beforehand, it would not have thrown in its lot with the devil. Nevertheless, once humanity has made its choice, even in the lack of full information, the choice is binding—indeed, as I suggested in my discussion of Laclau’s logic of hegemony in Chapter 5, humanity even enters into a kind of alliance with the devil. 195

The Politics of Redemption What is going on in this narrative? I suggest that one should interpret the devil here as a kind of inherent possibility of freedom, which humanity in fact actualizes. Here I am following the well-worn path of arguing that sin must be a possibility if we are to be truly free, but I am adding my own twist: if the world is to be truly other than God, if the world and God are truly to be in relationship, then God’s purpose for the world cannot be fulfilled automatically. If the logic of possession, which means the negation of relationship, were not a live option, then God’s hope for an ever-proliferating network of relationships would be undercut in one crucial point—for all the flourishing intraworldly relationships, the world would not be in true relationship with God.Viewing God as a straightforward agent, by eliminating the possibility of negating relationship, God would be negating God’s own relationship to the world and therefore Godself. Now before this destructive possibility was actualized, humanity could not have known its consequences—this accounts for the element of deception in the myth.Yet there is the further element of subsequent bondage. Humanity does not simply recoil in horror from the destruction it has wrought, but that destruction then becomes something that is somehow self-reinforcing. It becomes the structuring principle of humanity’s social existence, taking on “a life of its own.” Abelard characterizes the state of humanity under sin as one of fear, and I think that gets at the underlying logic here. A world in which relationship is negated and in which relationships become mutually exclusive is a world of scarcity and insecurity. Fear is the predictable reaction to such a world, but fear is also what creates the vicious circle, because fear becomes a motivation for further negation of relationship. Instead of occasions for enjoyment, others (human or otherwise) become threats. Rulers are able to capitalize on this fear, both allaying and causing it—and allaying the threats they themselves cause. Yet rulers themselves are subject to continual fear. Who is as paranoid as the authoritarian dictator? As I’ve already indicated in my discussion of Abelard, I would propose that this fear is what Korean theologians call han. The state of humanity under the bondage of the devil is the state of han. By contrast, sin is the active negation

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Politics of Redemption of relationship, which comes as an aftereffect of han. Oppressive rulers are the key examples of sinners, but they have their imitators, on larger and smaller scales, throughout the entire social order, even in social orders where the rulers are not overtly oppressive. These oppressive actions have as their consequence the reinforcement of han, which itself becomes the occasion for further sinful action.The reason such imitation takes place is that the narrowing of horizons that accompanies pervasive fear means that people most often view the status of ruler as the only escape from the condition of han, without realizing that the ruler is part the dialectic of han as well. There is therefore no need to specify a historical origin of humanity’s current state distinct from the emergence of humanity as such. The key point is that once it gets going, the logic of possession perpetuates itself. It creates its own reasons that outstrip its original occasion, which might be one way of interpreting the fact that in mythical terms, the vicious cycle of sin and han results from the violation of a seemingly small and arbitrary rule. It is in this light that one can grant some plausibility to Anselm’s more abstract account of the fall of the devil, which does justice to the fact that no particular cause seems to match up to how quickly and ferociously the han-sin dialectic metastasizes. What’s more, even Anselm’s paradoxical idea that the devil refused his creaturely status in the very moment of creation finds some purchase here, if we keep in mind that creatureliness means being inescapably in relation. The result is a condition of socially propagated social alienation, a social order that paradoxically binds us together by keeping us apart. That social order misshapes our wills, insofar as it partly determines all our choices by providing the frame of intelligibility in which we move, and it does so in such a way as to make us morally accountable for this state of affairs.This accountability for the most part is not on the level of active sin, as Anselm wanted to say, but on the level of a largely passive complicity. It warps our bodies as well, including the ways in which we reproduce—here understanding the “lust” that taints our sexuality not on the level of physical pleasure but on the level of a possessiveness that too often leads to outright domination. It warps our relationship to the non-human world, turning it into a deposit of raw materials

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The Politics of Redemption whose internal relationships, and indeed whose true relationships to us, we systematically ignore. And it undercuts our free selfdetermination, actively discouraging the kinds of actions and questions that might spur a thorough-going change by putting itself forward as self-evident and inevitable. In place of selfdetermination, we find ourselves subject to a destructive machine that perpetuates itself without anyone ever fully choosing it. All in all, bondage to the devil represents a thorough renunciation of humanity’s task as the nodal point of a network of relationality based in free enjoyment, above all insofar as it is a renunciation of humanity’s most important freedom—the freedom to consciously work out the form of our life together. We don’t renounce that freedom in a once and for all action but continually. Confronted with a world gone so horribly awry, God—again provisionally envisioned as a more or less anthropomorphic agent—seems to have several options. First, God could intervene by force and set things right. Yet a solution that relied on force would not respect the freedom of the world, represented by humanity, and would therefore undercut the reality of God’s relationship to the world. With that in mind, then, why could God not simply give up on humanity, turning God’s back on us once and for all? The problem here is even more radical. God can’t simply ignore humanity and maintain relations with the non-human world, because the human and non-human are irreducibly related. Rejecting any part of the world is rejecting the whole. If God were not in relationship to the world, God would not be in relationship to anything—and therefore God would fail to exist. In non-mythological terms, this means that if the divine purpose isn’t actualized freely, it isn’t actualized at all. The only option, then, is to intervene in a way that respects freedom, by means of what the patristic authors called “persuasion.” That means respecting the integrity of the world, not only as God created it, but also what it has become—a realm of bondage to the devil. Becoming human qualifies on both points, insofar as humanity is the nodal point of relationality and human beings are the ones who build and sustain the spiritual order. In short, the plan of the Incarnation reflects the fact that relationality cannot be eradicated, only corrupted—the potential of humanity to fulfill the divine purpose endures. 198

Politics of Redemption

The Solution: A Persuasive Fearlessness In Jesus Christ, the purpose of creation persuasively reasserts itself. Now Christ does not spring up suddenly and in isolation. He is born into a nation defined by a remarkable resilience in the face of the centuries of imperial politics that had wiped out so many cultures through violence and assimilation, a resilience founded in hope. The Jews were not alone in their hope—as Anselm says, there is never a period of history completely lacking in anyone who is linked to Christ’s work, and the Hebrew scriptures themselves attest to the existence of faithful Gentiles—but they were nonetheless exemplary in their refusal to worship the deified rulers of Rome, whom various apocalyptic writers would encode as the devil. More broadly, though, one could say that the experience of han itself represents a seed of hope insofar as it testifies to the fact that something has gone wrong and things are not as they should be. The question is, What made Christ persuasive? What made his life plausible as a ground for hope? On this front, my traditional sources offer little assistance, as they are notoriously unconcerned with the details of Christ’s life and ministry. Gregory of Nyssa and Abelard at least provide some initial starting points, however. In his narrative of Christ’s overthrow of the devil, Gregory claims that the devil found Christ such a desirable target because of his unprecedented power, as witnessed in his miracles. Abelard, speaking more generally, says that Christ’s example is one of love, which he places in opposition to fear, and adds that Christ elicits love in others. I propose to bring these two points together: the same thing that makes Christ such an attractive target for the devil is what allows him to elicit non-fearful love in others. Christ carries with him an authority that transcends the dialectic of han and sin. This authority is based in his radical openness to others, which cuts against the authority of willful self-assertion. Yet this openness is not a servile self-effacement—it is characterized by an active enjoyment that might be compared to Rita Nakashima Brock’s notion of “erotic power.” At the risk of repeating the mistakes of my predecessors, I do not intend to go into detailed scriptural exegesis here. Instead I will simply indicate the broad outlines of Christ’s ministry. 199

The Politics of Redemption Contemporary authors are right to emphasize that Christ reached out to the oppressed, but they are oppressed people of a particular kind—namely, those whose social status had impoverished their range of social connections.Women factor prominently, of course, but the test-case here seems to me to be the figure of the tax collector: though some tax collectors like Zacchaeus were very wealthy and therefore not “oppressed” on a prima facie level, their occupation made them traitors to their nation and therefore disreputable people. Christ’s healings and exorcisms fall into this general pattern as well. He reaches out to demoniacs whose deranged mental state hampered their ability to live in society, to people with conditions that made them “ceremonially unclean,” to people whose disabilities had left them hopeless—even to the dead, who are entirely cut off from the social body. Christ restores connections that have been cut off, yet he doesn’t repeat the logic of possession by trying to control those he encounters. He forgives sins, but is remarkably reticent about how the forgiven should behave in the future, reflecting how often “sin” functions as a stigma rather than a good-faith moral assessment. He is chastised for his self-indulgence, and in his interactions with others, he very often seems to be playing with them. His persuasiveness is therefore based not on rational argument, but first of all on his general way of being in the world—his simple willingness to be with people whom others shun or simply ignore, his evident enjoyment of them. His way of being does not end just with him, but spreads to others as a kind of “contagious sovereignty,”8 an empowerment that is predicated on empowering others rather than dominating them. Several of those he empowers are sent immediately to continue the work among their own people, implying that no explicit instruction is actually needed. His actual public teaching fits within this general pattern, mobilizing surprise in order to invite his readers to come to their own conclusion, a technique that is perhaps also motivated by the sheer pleasure that accompanies an unexpected narrative or discursive twist. Perhaps the clearest indication of Christ’s approach is the feeding of the multitude,

8

I owe this phrase to Theodore Jennings.

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Politics of Redemption where simple generosity and sharing result in a wholly unanticipated abundance. Christ is persuasive first of all because the way he lives is a plausible answer to the hope that underlies the experience of han, and this is also what makes him such a threat to the powers who depend on fear. The gospel narratives present Christ as being tempted by the devil, which can be read as an attempt by the powers to co-opt him—a natural reaction given that someone with such manifest charisma could be a valuable ally, shoring up the always fragile legitimacy of the powers in the eyes of the people. As a free agent, however, Christ represents a formidable challenge, systematically undercutting the fear on which power depends by undoing the divisions that keep people suspicious and vulnerable.When “soft power” fails, then, “hard power” is the only option that remains. At this point, it is crucial to focus on the concrete form that rule by fear had taken in the first-century Roman Empire. The Roman army deployed what Mark Lewis Taylor has called a “theatrics of terror” in order to subdue the rebellious masses of the periphery. The peak of this “theatrics” was crucifixion, which is arguably the most brutal and terrifying means of execution ever devised. After undergoing severe torture, victims were nailed to crosses and allowed to die by whatever means got to them first and subsequently left to rot and be eaten by wild animals. The message was clear—this is what happens to those who defy Rome—and the technique was remarkably effective, allowing a relatively small armed force to control a huge territory. Doubtless none of the actual agents involved in Christ’s death seriously intended to leave him alive, but it is helpful to read this encounter between Christ and the powers in terms of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, not least because the primary function of crucifixion was to deter future rebels. As I discussed in my chapter on Irenaeus, the future master’s goal would be undercut if the supposed fight to the death actually resulted in the future slave’s death—the actual violence serves not directly to force the slave to submit but to instill fear in him. Christ, however, never submits, and it’s not simply a matter of the fight getting out of hand: he also refuses to fight back. He refuses the entire dialectic. In so doing, he much more radically subverts the order of fear than if he had 201

The Politics of Redemption somehow raised an army to defeat Rome directly—he refuses the role of ruler, a role that the oppressed so often (and so understandably) view as the only way out of their situation, but that is actually directly generated by dialectic of fear. And he does all this openly and publicly, in the shared space of our life together, precisely because his mission is to open up the possibility of a radical overhaul of the form of that life. Christ does die in a public execution, and he does not conceal the suffering and despair that accompany death, any more than he studiously avoided the pleasures of the world. Under normal circumstances, this death would be yet another reaffirmation that the hopes he aroused were groundless, that any other way of life has no possible future. As I’ve said, this sense of inevitability is a crucial factor in the propagation of the world order symbolized by the devil. Yet something happened that convinced a group of Christ’s followers that death had not had the last word in this case. The biblical authors and the tradition have called this event the resurrection, and the gospels themselves present a confusing and contradictory set of accounts of how it might have played out on a physical level. Precisely what happened to convince the disciples that Christ had somehow overcome the bonds of death is less important, however, than what that conviction enabled: a continuation of Christ’s work by a dedicated and expanding core of followers. Instead of reinforcing the reign of fear, then, this crucifixion somehow inspired a new fearlessness, one that operates entirely outside the dialectic of fear and domination, or han and sin. This is the meaning of Christ’s unraveling of the devil’s claim—he strikes at the very heart of the Roman system of rule, the “theatrics of terror” that found its brutal culmination in the cross, and turns it into an occasion for defiance rather than fear. Christ’s followers attempted to create new forms of sociality that presupposed that Christ’s style of life had a real future, sharing goods and crossing boundaries (most notably that between Jew and Gentile). In extreme cases, followers met Christ’s same fate, yet these martyrs further empowered their communities just as Christ had, continuing his revolutionary work of undoing the social bond based on fear. From their simple acts of care to the extremes of martyrdom, then, these communities represented

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Politics of Redemption the continued reality of Christ in the world, the propagation of his effects. Their endurance and growth do not simply represent the possibility of a change in the spiritual order. Since the spiritual order is in part determined by human choices, they already are changing the spiritual order simply by continuing to exist. Although the evil powers continue to hold sway, their reliance on inertia and fear means that the mere existence of a courageous community built on consciously chosen relationships is already a crushing blow in itself. The follower of Christ therefore has faith that the followers of the devil are “dead-enders.” What’s more, the fact that what is at stake in this movement is not simply the “salvation” of individuals but the shape of our social life together means that, despite the danger of falling into heresy, one must embrace Gregory of Nyssa’s hope for the redemption of the devil. I have consciously avoided using the term “church” in the preceding paragraph. That is in part because it seems clear to me that not every group or institution putting itself forward as a church is actually a part of the avant-garde movement of Christ into the world—indeed, some are actively working against that movement. But a more important motivation is to undercut any kind of Christian triumphalism, which would make adherents of a certain doctrine, liturgical system, or institutional structure the automatic bearers of Christ’s mission in the world. The test of any person or group or movement’s relationship to Christ cannot be an inherent quality, nor can it be conditioned by the explicit claim of identification with Christ—it must be found in likeness of effect.Yet here again I draw on the possibility of real connections that span huge temporal and spatial distances: both before and after, I trust that there have never failed to be those who stood in some relation to the event that took place in Christ. A good measure of this confidence stems from the simple and unheroic nature of Christ-likeness: restoring connections, caring for wounded bodies, sharing goods, freely and unpossessively enjoying another person, refusing the temptation of fear. These things happen all the time, even in the state of bondage that we have not yet fully overcome. And so the follower of Christ remains confident that it can be overcome, and that the world of free enjoyment is the same

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The Politics of Redemption world in which we now live—as Walter Benjamin says, “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”9 There is still one point outstanding, and it is perhaps the most difficult to understand from a religionless perspective. Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, Abelard, and Barth all indicated, each in their own way, that the scope of redemption is at least in principle universal. It should be noted that for all these figures, the plausibility of the resurrection of the dead as the ultimate vehicle of redemption did not mean that this universality was without its paradoxes. The initial contradiction between human free will and divine predestination—even a predestination of all to salvation—has been widely recognized, and no attempt to reconcile the two has ever gained normative force. One early attempt comes from Origen of Alexandria, who devised a complex system whereby the world was continually “rebooted” and souls kept getting another chance until everything came out right in the end.10 Gregory developed an alternative, wherein there are two options: either get baptized in this life (the easy way) or endure purgative fires after death (the hard way).11 Gregory’s solution has the virtue of greater simplicity, but it’s difficult to understand how purgative fire can be construed as persuasive. In short, the conceptual apparatus associated with “religion” does not automatically solve the problem of universalism. I will suggest two options here, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is that universality should be considered a kind of regulative ideal in the Kantian sense—it can’t be fully actualized, above all because people die, but it should be the guideline for our action in the world. Another possibility comes from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”12 where he 9

10

11 12

Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 53. Origen of Alexandria, On First Principles, ed. Paul Koetschau, trans. G. W. Butterworth (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1936). Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechism, §40/324–5. Walter Benjamin,“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), German text: “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). Citations refer to section numbers.

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Politics of Redemption continually returns to the possibility that present redemptive action actually retroactively changes the meaning of the past. For instance, speaking of the responsibility of a historian, which he likens to the task of the Messiah, he says, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”13 Elsewhere, in perhaps the most quoted passage from the “Theses,” he claims: There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.14 Since he is speaking in terms of the historian, there seems to be more at stake than simply remembering the suffering that made the present achievements possible or other such commonplaces: there is an active attempt to keep the memory of the past alive, to allow their hopes to have decisive effects in the present. In terms of the ontology I’ve laid out, one might say that this is a kind of resurrection in itself, making even the dead “real” in the sense of having continued effects. Combining the two possibilities, one could say that our universalism should extend to the dead as well, trying to make sure no one is forgotten and no embers of hope in the past are overlooked. Compared to the hope of an actual resurrection, these ideas certainly seem like small consolation, but just as with the question of universalism, resurrection in itself doesn’t remove all the problems—after all, future redemption doesn’t undo past suffering. On a mythical level, the gospel writers seem to indicate this by their testimony that the resurrected Christ still bore the scars of crucifixion, one of the few points concerning the resurrection appearances where they are in agreement. It is perhaps appropriate that I conclude with an open question, since I have emphasized that this chapter represents an initial sketch rather than a full-blown atonement theory. Using the 13 14

Benjamin, “Theses,” §6. Benjamin, “Theses,” §2.

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The Politics of Redemption resources I have uncovered in the recapitulation tradition, I have articulated one possible contemporary approach that takes seriously the central claim of this study: that the same ontological structure that allows the problem facing humanity to arise and endure is also what allows Christ’s intervention to be effective. In terms of the ontology I have outlined, this means that the network of relationality that underwrites our socially propagated social alienation is also pregnant with the hope of achieving the divine purpose of a world characterized by free enjoyment. Christ’s wager was that this world can still attain to that purpose. Whether that will have been the case is now for us to determine, together.

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Index Note: Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Abelard are listed only when mentioned outside of their respective chapters.

Abelard, Peter 3, 7, 25, 55, 186 in Aulén 65–70 passim contribution to religionless interpretation of atonement 189–90, 196, 199, 204 and the moral influence theory 171–2, 174 Abraham 79, 130, 161–2 Adam and Eve 110, 192 first Adam/second Adam schema 3–4, 79, 82–3, 128–30, 139–40, 151, 153, 157, 171–2 immaturity of 75–7 repentance of 77, 164, 166 seduction and enslavement by the devil 64, 114–22, 195–8 see also death; original sin Agamben, Giorgio 5–6, 95, 148 Althusser, Louis 32–3 Altizer, Thomas J. J. 9 angels 74–5, 78, 112, 126 reproduction of 107, 126, 136–7 salvation of 139, 143–4 see also devil animals 22, 40, 136 redemption of 90–2 Anselm of Canterbury 3, 7, 25, 46, 55, 186 and Abelard 151–9 passim, 165–75 passim

in Aulén 66–71 passim contribution to religionless interpretation of atonement 189, 197, 199, 204 and original sin 103, 109, 116 anthropology see Adam and Eve; original sin Athanasius of Alexandria 99 “atonement theory” 1–7 passim, 26–70 passim, 104, 159, 170 moral influence 25, 150–1, 172–3 patristic or ransom 100–1, 114, 120, 124, 126–8, 134 penal-substitutionary 25 proposed new typology for 171–2 religionless interpretation of 184–206 see also Abelard; Anselm; Gregory of Nyssa; Irenaeus Augustine of Hippo 11, 55, 109, 124, 133, 161, 163, 167, 193 Aulén, Gustav 54–5, 62–70 passim, 74, 78, 101, 124–5, 128, 141, 172 Badiou, Alain 34 baptism 31, 103, 112–13, 180 Barth, Karl 6–16 passim, 61, 174–84 passim, 204 Basilides 88 Bataille, Georges 19

213

Index Bell, Daniel M. 33 Benjamin, Walter 204–5 Bethge, Eberhard 9 big Other 192 Boersma, Hans 53–61, 64–9, 83, 87, 173 Boff, Leonardo 34–7, 44, 46–7, 51, 62 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 8–23 passim, 42–3, 51, 174–5, 180, 184–90 passim Brock, Rita Nakashima 2, 27–8, 32–3, 47, 199 Bultmann, Rudolph 10–11, 14, 16, 185 Butler, Judith 7, 162, 173, 191 Calvin, John 24, 55, 60, 66, 70, 176–7 capitalism 17, 32–3, 117 communism 17–19, 117 community 8–15, 171–86, 199–206 Cone, James 34–6, 39 Constantine 97 Council of Constantinople I 97 Council of Nicea 97 Daly, Mary 1 death, as emergency measure 77–9, 103–4, 127–8 as punishment 135, 142 debt 135–49, 153 Deme, Dániel 125, 136, 144 democracy 6, 117–18 demythologizing 10, 184–5, 195 Derrida, Jacques 5, 57–9 devil, in Abelard 154, 168–70 in Anselm 128–9, 132–7, 148–9 in Gregory of Nyssa 114–22 in Irenaeus 82–3, 87–9

214

religionless interpretation of 185–6, 190–2, 195–8, 201–3 Diognetus, Epistle to 84 Donatism 97 Dunning, Benjamin H. 81 ecology 1 Edict of Milan 97 Eucharist 104, 112–13 fascism 17 fear 41, 158–62 passim, 196–203 passim feminism 27–34, 37, 42–6, 51, 53–4, 62–3 free will 135–40, 166–74 passim Gnosticism 72–4, 79–94 passim, 100, 135, 171 Grant, Jacquelyn 28 Gregory of Nyssa 3, 7, 69, 89, 171, 174 and Abelard 159 and Anselm 124, 127, 132, 141 contribution to religionless interpretation of atonement 195, 199, 204 Habermas, Jürgen 160 han (Korean term) 37–9, 159, 164–5, 196–202 passim Hegel, G. W. F. 7, 14–15, 85–6, 121, 173, 180, 190–1, 201 hegemony 101, 117–19, 195 Heidegger, Martin 15, 19–22, 185 Hellenism 94, 109, 186 Heloïse 150 Heyward, Carter 65 hierarchy 24 Holy Spirit 14–15, 50, 75–6, 85, 95, 99, 193

Index Homer 73 hospitality 55–61, 66, 113 ideology 32–5, 42–52 passim Irenaeus of Lyons 3, 7, 58, 61, 171, 174–7, 184 and Abelard 159–60 and Anselm 122–43 passim in Aulén 69–70 contribution to religionless interpretation of atonement 195, 204 and Gregory of Nyssa 97, 100–8 passim, 113–22 passim James, William 12 Jennings, Theodore W. 58, 200 Jeremiah 169 Jews 36, 48, 98–9, 161, 199 Joh, Wonhee Anne 34, 37–9, 165 John of Damascus 116–17, 135 John the Baptist 169 Kafka, Franz 148 Kant, Immanuel 173, 204 Kristeva, Julia 37 Lacan, Jacques 191 Laclau, Ernesto 7, 101, 117–18, 173, 195 LaCugna, Catherine 2 Laird, Martin 101 Leibniz, G. W. 24 Lenin,V. I. 118 Levinas, Emmanuel 57–9 Liberal Protestantism 66, 175 liberation theology 2–6, 26–54 passim, 120, 186 love of God 47, 55, 58–9, 103, 149, 171, 179, 199 in Abelard 153, 157–62, 166, 170 Luther, Martin 11, 70, 163

Manichaeism 68 Marcion 65 Marcus (Gnostic teacher) 88 martyrdom 39, 93, 202 Marxism 18, 32–4, 39, 42, 117–18 Milton, John 77 minjung theology 38–9 Moltmann, Jürgen 27, 44–51, 96 Mouffe, Chantal 7, 101, 117–18 Nancy, Jean-Luc 6–8, 15–23, 42, 57, 60–1, 94, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 11–12, 144–8, 158, 173 objective spirit 14, 190–1 ontology 8–15, 90–6, 188–94 Origen of Alexandria 84, 99, 111, 204 original sin 11, 109 in Abelard 151–72 passim in Anselm 127–39 passim Osborn, Eric 73, 92–3 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 194 Park, Andrew Sung 7, 38, 164–5, 173 Paul 3–4, 11, 41, 152, 161, 163, 169, 171–2, 185 Peckham, John C. 72 Pelikan, Jaroslav 141 Peppermüller, Rolf 152, 155–6, 163–9 passim Plotinus 92 Porter, Jean 170 predestination 166–72, 176–80 Radical Orthodoxy 1, 7 Ray, Darby 53–4, 82, 116, 120, 186 Reformation 148 religionless interpretation 8–15, 184–206 passim

215

Index resurrection 31, 63, 65, 179, 185, 202–5 in Anselm 143 in Gregory of Nyssa 100–14 passim, 120, 128, 140 in Irenaeus 79–80, 91 Roman Empire 40, 97, 122, 124, 201 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane 20 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 1–2, 30–1 Sartre, Jean-Paul 17–18 Satan see devil Schmitt, Carl 5, 140 Schneider, Laurel 2, 17 Sessions, William Lad 141 Simon Magus 81 sin see original sin Smith, Jonathan Z. 9 Soelle, Dorothee 174–5, 180–6 Steenberg, M. C. 90, 94 suffering 27–52 passim Suggit, John 159 symbolic order 191–2 synoptic gospels 3, 30, 54, 62

216

Taylor, Mark C. 1 Taylor, Mark Lewis 34, 39–41, 162, 201 Terrell, JoAnne 30, 32 Theodosius I 97 theology of the cross 44–5 Thomas Aquinas 55 totalitarianism 16 Trinity 2, 7, 10, 15, 49–50, 94–8 passim, 151, 166 Virgin Mary 131, 169–70 Visser, Sandra 124–5, 136, 145, 149 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 100, 107–8, 111 Weaver, J. Denny 53–6, 62–7, 69, 173 Weingart, Richard E. 155, 167 Westhelle,Vítor 45 Whitehead, Alfred North 188 Williams, Delores 28–32 Williams, Thomas 124–5, 136, 145, 149 womanism 27–34, 37, 42–6, 51, 53–4, 62–3 Žižek, Slavoj 34, 191–2