Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Six

Gunton now examines atonement in light of a Triune God. He sums his argument, thus far, succinctly. First, all the metaphors are formed in relationship. They can all be understood as the "expressing in human language the significance of the life of a man, born, crucified, risen and ascended, as at once coming from God and bearing upon the life of all humankind" (143). Second, the relation is not simply between humanity and God, but between God and all of creation. The relatedness is also metaphorical, as language that relates. The metaphors don't just express the relation; they are the relation, opening new possibilities for relating.

Gunton then asks two questions:
1. Who is this relating God?
2. What kind of world is this?

First, God's act in Christ is not simply interventionist, but is consistent with his entire history of acting. The work of God in Christ is new and unparalleled, but is continuous with God's action of creation and rescue in the Old Testament. God's is always victorious, just, and sacrificial.

Second, the creation of God has a purpose. It is not created a "static and perfect whole." This means that atonement is prelapsarian. So, is atonement to right something that went wrong or to continue creation? Gunton believes that either of these options poses a threat for metaphors, but believes the incarnation takes its form because of the fall and works the end of creation. (I don't quite understand Gunton's point here.) Metaphors are also to be understood from the far side of the cross. Victory could not be seen prior to resurrection.

Third, Gunton asks what Jesus' relationship is to humanity. Is he a substitute, a representative, or some combination? Gunton urges that Jesus' life also be exemplary. An objective picture of atonement cannot come at the expense of a subjective one. However, subjective pictures can sometimes trivialize evil. God must do the work of cleansing, freeing, and ordering.

So, substitution or representation? Gunton likes both. "Jesus is our substitute because he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves" (165). What Jesus does 'for us' includes, but is not fully described as 'instead of.' And as representative, we are found in Christ before God.

Gunton now flips the argument backward: The fact that God creates in Christ means that his atonement has universal significance and in the resurrection means that, concretely, the world is changing, being drawn to its end by the power of the Spirit. The world becomes just; the world is cleansed; evil is conquered.

Gunton then hints at where his next chapter is headed. To keep atonement from being strictly abstract, there must actually be an accomplishment of atonement. There must be a space where justice, victory, and sacrifice are realized. This, of course, is the church--"the place where the reconciliation of all things is from time to time anticipated" (170).

Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Five

Gunton turns his final chapter on atonement models to sacrifice. Is Jesus a sacrifice? How are we to understand this metaphor of Jesus' death?

Gunton follows Mary Douglas in arguing that sacrifice is about keeping things in order. Sacrifice works to purify and cleanse those things that got out of order. (Here Gunton notes that our own concern with cleanliness might not simply be rational!) This means that while the previous metaphors of justice and victory might at first seem to be most appropriate, sacrifice can still strike a deep chord for contemporaries.

Sacrifice is already a metaphor in the Old Testament: God's desires a broken and contrite spirit as a sacrifice. Paul uses it as a metaphor in Romans 12, too. This doesn't mean that sacrifice as a metaphor isn't real; it means that Christ tells us what sacrifice really is.

Gunton doesn't see the sacrifice of Christ in punitive terms. It is a free act of Jesus. It is also a gift of God. God sends his Son. There is both reception and loss, being giving and free action in the sacrifice.

Gunton then mentions Calvin's metaphor of the temple. Because the temple, the center of sacrificial practice, is a place to draw close to God, Christ has now accomplished this in his death. Flesh is devoted as a temple to God in the ascension of Christ. Gunton emphasizes the fact that the covenant established here deals with the heart, to bring transformation by the death of Christ. The cleansing work of this sacrifice is deep and penetrating.

Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Four

In Chapter Four Gunton examines the Cross as God's Justice. He first points out that the cross' metaphors have some overlap. The cross as justice is no different because Satan's has a legal role in the biblical story, as the accuser--the prosecuting attorney. His defeat, Gunton notes, means that "God is not to be identified with abstract legal justice" (84).

The idea of legality in the cross is old--Tertullian and Cyprian both talk about it--but it achieves a significant status with, of course, St. Anselm. Here, the image is of a feudal lord overseeing a society whose honour is affronted. To maintain order in the society, the honour must be restored, or satisfied, or the lord is not lord and the society becomes unjust and irrational. Anselm simply draws out this analogy to a universal scale. God is universal ruler whose honour is challenged and must be restored. The death of Christ offers a worthy penalty to God to restore his honour and justice. What is often neglected in caricatures of Anselm's work is that what deteriorates is the society--in which the lord's subjects live. If his honour is not restored, their society runs amok and they suffer. The restoration of God's honour is as much in the interest of the underlings as the lord. The honour of God is restored by God's own gift of the Son.

Gunton notes that the idea that salvation is remission of penalty is a weakness here. Further, it feels as though the cross is external to us; it is removed, even cosmically, from real life.

Gunton then explores the justice of God, which he roots, not in abstract pictures, but in the covenant with Israel.

Finally, he explores two twentieth century theologies. First, P.T. Forsyth and his idea that the cross is what justifies God, is explored. Putting the cross at the center of World War 1 theology, re-immersing it in real life context, is Forsyth's aim. Second, Gunton looks at Barth's notion of Jesus as the judge judged in our place. Jesus replaces us in the seat of judgment, but we are also there, as sinners, with him. In the death of Jesus, our sin is put to death. God's justice reveals our sin, bears it in Jesus, and destroys its power.

Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Three

In Chapter Three, Gunton addresses the metaphor of victory for the cross. Here we see the benefit of metaphor in advancing knowledge and refection on seemingly disparate objects, as a cross could never have been seen as a victory in the first century for the one who died on it.

Gunton begins by affirming that the victory of the cross is both human and divine. The ministry of Jesus is the divine victory over sickness/death/demonic, ushering in the Kingdom of God. The fact that the combination of physical and spiritual is seen in this victory only continues the tight connection between Old and New Testaments, where physical saving from Egypt follows the mythological victory of God at creation, brooding over the deep.

Gunton then explores the language of demons. After the New Testament, the early church becomes more comfortable in speaking of The Devil, an individual being that Jesus conquered by the cross. We see the development of the ransom theory, with Gregory of Nyssa's notion of the fishhook. Gunton says that this is an example of a metaphor being taken too literally to become a myth. He notes that Paul's language of principalities and powers is about earthly powers, but one's that "cannot be described in everyday empirical terms" (65). (Gunton also includes "the law" as a metaphorical way of referring to human religious bondage for Paul; I think he's wrong, but I think he's stated quite well the wrong position. Of course, this is published before the NPP starts taking off.)

The question is whether or not demonic language needs to be demythologized or whether it is irreducibly metaphorical. Gunton opts with the latter: evil and demons is a metaphor necessary to describing the irrationality of evil that captures the momentum it builds and its control over people. So, the New Testament can describe political powers as created good, but also becoming demonic. The cross is a victory over the demonic because it is the conclusion of Jesus' life and ministry refusing to exercise his power demonically; refusing to engage violence with stronger violence. The cross is the final confrontation of Jesus' life with the demons that waged war against him, with him refusing to fall under their influence.

This means that victory, the metaphor, doesn't just change our picture of the cross, but that it itself is changed. What is true victory? It "is the kind of thing that happens when Jesus goes to the cross" (79).

Actuality of Atonement: Chapter Two

Gunton believes that metaphor pervades language thoroughly. To offer a strict definition, then, would likely exclude some fine uses of metaphor. However, the basic gist in which he operates is that a metaphor takes a term belonging in one context and applies it in another, specifically in speech and communication.

This, however, goes against the rationalistic idea that truth can only be "utterly clear and distinct." But metaphors muddy the waters (at first) and, therefore, could not achieve truth on rationalistic terms. Gunton, citing advances in physics, notes that metaphor played a significant role in advancing knowledge. He mentions Descartes' idea to treat nature as if it were a machine and the idea of the 'field.' This means that metaphors are not only permissible, but necessary to advance knowledge because it changes and creates new language.

Gunton then moves on to asking the difference between literal and metaphorical words. He does not believe in the idea that words mirror reality, and so asks how words can accurately communicate. The answer: indirectly. Words do not capture reality without remainder. However, because words do not perfectly capture reality, metaphor is even more appropriate, since its communication is always indirect. Therefore, metaphorical language can be quite accurate, measured by how well it helps humans to interact with the world. In other words, "Does language (or the metaphor) work?" is the question.

Metaphors work by their ability to join the disparate ideas. But words themselves, which metaphors require, shape, and change, are objects of interaction with the world. Because they help us relate with the world, they are relative. Because metaphors relate disparate notions, metaphors themselves are relative (meaning they make things relate), which brings us back to the start of the circle that metaphor is an instance of the harmony that exists between language and the world. This means that the line between objective and subjective is beginning to blur: the objective world is captured and communicated by subjective language, which itself is subjective, but because of this, captures what the world is to humans. Gunton believes that one need not choose between objectivity and subjectivity because there really is a world that really is related to with words.

For the theologian, this is useful, because metaphors admit both the reality of God and his distance from them. The first metaphors that Christians used captured this fact when they applied different metaphors to the cross, grounding their theology in history, but taking it beyond sheer historical fact to describe God's work to repair broken relationship. This, again, affirms the value of metaphor because if linguistic changes advance knowledge, so does the flip side apply: changes in reality result in change in language. Metaphor was necessary, then, to capture the change God accomplished in Jesus' life, death, resurrection, ascension. The three metaphors Gunton explores that describe the cross are victory, justice, and sacrifice.