Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Seven

Gunton now draws his work to a close. He begins with a nice summary:
1. Metaphor can produce knowledge;
2. The cross is meaningfully understood as sacrifice, justice, and victory;
3. This generates and fits with Christian dogma.

But this, he says, leaves one large problem: "the fact that language takes shape, remains alive, in a community of speech" (173). Gunton is wanting to make the previous chapter's abstractness concrete in this chapter, aptly titled, "The Community of Reconciliation."

But which community reconciles? In what community does Christian language live? Gunton offers two answers: Western culture or the church. Obviously there is overlap, but Gunton wishes not to let the church off the hook by evidencing a culture that has remnants of Christian language and practice. Instead, he presses the point: If Jesus is victorious, what community should we expect to find?

Gunton wishes for linguistic renewal in the church: This means that biblical language must be used again and again in conversation; it must infiltrate the way we think. We must think in new words. We must think in new metaphors of justice, sacrifice, and victory. (How appropriate in a day of war.)

The church already has practices that help us think in terms of these metaphors. First, communion thinks in terms of cleansing. But this 'thinking' must include living. "The end of baptism is...the actuality...of a new form of existence" (185). The judgment that Christ undergoes makes possible a favourable judgment for those baptized.

The community of faith also makes possible full implementation of atonement in the "space" of forgiveness. Forgiveness makes possible a person's acceptance in a community where further transformation--healing and growth--is possible.

I close this series of posts with one of Gunton's beautiful (there are several) theological statements:

"Human community is the gift of the God who is himself communion. The church is called to be the echo of the very being of God, and is enabled to be so as it is taken up in worship into the life of the Trinity."

Next up will be Kevin Vanhoozer's, "Is there a Meaning in this Text?"