I don't think it will take me long to establish my credentials as a dilettante. This morning, I am going to collect evidence for the existence of a hitherto unknown family of Northwest woodpeckers, the the Cyranophagidae. I will put the picture on the blog. This evening, I will publish another post on the blog because it is, after all, Saturday evening and I can see a Saturday evening post becoming a tradition here.
A followup on "deep reading." I have nearly finished Playing the Enemy, the book on which the movie, Invictus, was based. I am enjoying the book a good bit and it isn't taking as long to "read" as you might think, because I am reading only the part about which I became curious when I saw the movie. If I get curious about the other half of the book, eventually, I will go back and read it. Eventually.
So. Teriology. Theologians use the word soteriology to refer the doctrine of salvation or to any kind of study that focuses on salvation. If any readers get access to this blog other than the fairly tight group of family and friends, I should probably specify that I am talking about Christian theology, that I am, myself, a Christian, and that I have had no training in theology at all since college.
I wrote an essay earlier this year--I'll post it to this blog if I can find a way to do it--on just what it was about the death of Jesus that provides "atonement," as Christians have claimed since the first century. Actually, that's why we call it the First Century. Writing that essay brought me up against the mystery of it. The near unanimity of Christians that there was an atonement (an at-one-ment with God) contrasts starkly with our inability to say of what character the atonement is or how it was brought about.
Obviously, I am not presenting myself as someone who has "the answer," but I do have a way of looking at it that seems promising to me. The idea is to look at what "live" and "die" mean by contrasting the Atonement and the Fall. If you think of it as a word study and if you eliminate everything between, it is easier.
The story goes that God told Adam and Eve that if they ate of the fruit of the tree at the center of the garden, the tree I call (whimsically) "the Tree of Moral Discernment," that they would surely die. The Hebrew there, I have been told, is "you will die die." But the First Lady believed the serpent instead, who told her that she would not die die if she ate the fruit, and further that God's demand that she abstain had been politically motivated. So they both ate. Not she and the serpent; she and her husband.
And they both died. In some way. If we could say in just what way they died, it would be a great help when, skipping everything between, we come to Atonement to say just how Jesus "came to life." We are not paralleling, remember, the death of Adam and the death of Jesus. We are doing what Paul did in 1 Corinthians 15: we are contrasting the death-giving death of Adam with the life-giving death of Jesus. We could say that God created humankind (Adam and Eve)to be spiritually attuned to Him (language note: I use "Him" as a neuter pronoun, as I was taught in elementary school, when gender is not a consideration in a given context; I use the capital H- because I am a monotheist). That "attunement," the one God intended and had counted on, died that day. Adam and Eve as the people God intended them to be that day, died.
Following the trajectory of this comparison, we come now to Jesus. Jesus felt, in the Marcan and Matthean accounts I have been following, completely abandoned by God. He died knowing himself to be a failure. He could very well have sued his Father for non-support. He could have taken the advice Job's wife gave him at what she thought was her husband's bitter end, to "curse God and die." But he didn't. He "lived, lived" at the crucial moment where Adam and Eve chose to "die, die." Where Adam chose disobedience, hoping for equality with God, Jesus chose obedience though God appeared to have failed him entirely.
Luke Timothy Johnson says that the common Pauline phrase pistis Christou may be translated either "the faith OF Christ" or as "faith IN Christ." If we follow the logic that connects the Fall to the atoning work of the cross, I see these as our two options. In the first, we look at the kind of faith Christ showed. We also know that being moved by that faith, Jesus' disciples revolutionized the world. (If you are wondering what happened to the resurrection, remember that we are working from Adam's choice to Christ's.) In the second, we trust that there was something about the death of Jesus that changed the condition of alienation we have endured since Adam. We aren't able to say what that was. We have evolved a series of metaphors that point in different directions: some, for instance, sacrificial, some juridical. But we use metaphors because we don't know how to say it the way an engineer would say it. That failure makes poets of us all.
So the question today is this: if you consider Adam's choice as a movement from union to alienation and Jesus' choice as a movement from alienation to union, does it help us understand what we are talking about when we say that something about the death of Jesus produced "at one ment" with God? It's a question to which everyone will have to produce his or her own answer. I'm not sure what my answer is yet, but I like the approach the question gives us.
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