Redemption 4

Gordon Kaufman, in a chapter about what theological language should do, made a distinction that has been important to me for a long time. He said that the words ought to mean what the Church has said they meant, or we won’t know how to fit them together. But they ought, also, to mean what they feel like, or we won’t know why we should pay attention to them.[1] Here is that passage.

All of this project about redemption, beginning when I learned that his parents had taken Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to redeem him back from God, has begun at the first of Kaufman’s poles. I have devised a simple physical and temporal model of “redemption” in Israel and have kept as many of the five categories alive as I could while pushing the model toward more metaphorical New Testament uses.

It’s time now to start at the other pole. If redemption is the explanation of an experience I have had, just how should the experience be described? Does “I once was blind but now I see” do the job? Should we say that we were living in the dark and then the light came? Should we say we were living a life we though was pretty good and then discovered Joy and the desire for Joy and everything was transformed? Should we say we were anxious and alone and then a Friend came—or maybe just a friend—and the anxiety went away and the aloneness with it.[2] Should we say we were living lives without meaning, then found out we were intended for something both significant and wonderful?

I could go on. But, so could you. Anyone who has read about the dramatic changes some a person’s life is familiar with the fact of change on this scale. On February 7, Bette and I heard a lecture on depression and the brain by a psychiatrist/neurologist who employs “deep brain stimulation.” She reported that once the surgeon had the probe placed just right, the patient said she felt she had been living for many years in a locked house with ten screaming children and “you just made the children leave the building.” Her life had been redeemed.

It wouldn’t be hard, either, to say that she had been “saved,” provided we remembered to “saved from what?” Looking at the list above, we could say saved from darkness or from Joylessness or anxiety and aloneness. Those all sound like human experiences to me. But once we place “saved” into the religious context, its meaning suddenly becomes clear—we know for sure what the speaker means—and at the same time, abstract and difficult. That’s why it is interesting, and might even be worthwhile, to start at the experiential end of the question.

At this point, pausing at the lip of a question that would take a book, not a blog, to answer, I want to put a few limitations in place. All I want to do here is ask some questions and then tell a story. The questions all have to do with the fundamental or inevitable character of blood sacrifice. It is perhaps a cheap point that God could have done all this differently than He did. The argument I am making is that there is nothing about the nature of God that requires blood sacrifice. But God chose Abraham and Isaac and Israel and the Children of Israel and redeemed them from slavery in Egypt. Animal sacrifice as “pleasing to God” grew up in the context of the covenant with this particular people. Had God chosen farmers or hunter-gatherers or whale hunters, it is reasonable to think that the particularities would have been different.

I say this not to complain about God’s chosen people and the rich history of the Covenant, but only to say that when God intervened in our history, it was a particular history he intervened in and a different culture would have recognized and honored His intervention through other institutions.

So let’s imagine that redemption is what needs to get done. There must be an intervention that moves the focal person from a bad place to a good place. We don’t need all five of the Israelite categories for this—the condition of slavery and a redeemer and a ransom and a slave master and the condition of freedom. We need only one, two, and five.

The story I have in mind is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The full citation is on the excerpt. Nan is the focal person and she moves from something like slavery to something like freedom through the intervention of Miss Matheson. I have included the whole story about Nan’s release here, but I can give you the three steps. Here is Step 1.

Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized… that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.

That will serve us as the condition of slavery. Now here is the intervention. Miss Matheson intervenes to change Nan’s condition in some way.

“Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable. It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,” Miss Matheson went on. “That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar—do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well-defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken.”

Nan understands and here is what happens as a result.

Nell could not bring herself to agree with what Miss Matheson had said; but she found that, after this conversation, everything became easy. She had the neo-Victorians all figured out now. The society had miraculously transmutated into an orderly system, like the simple computers they programmed in the school. Now that Nell knew all of the rules, she could make it do anything she wanted. “Joy” returned to its former position as a minor annoyance on the fringes of a wonderful schooldays. Miss Stricken got her with the ruler from time to time, but not nearly so often, even when she was, in fact, scratching or slumping.

So in this simple story, I see Nan’s misery and Miss Matheson’s intervention and Nan’s release from that toxic inner anger and they look to me like steps one, two, and five. Miss Matheson unquestionably effected a change. It doesn’t look like there was anything that could be called a ransom. It doesn’t look like it cost Miss Matheson anything personally. There is no vicarious benefit here. In short, it is clearly unlike the notion of atonement as it is developed in the New Testament on the basis of the sacrificial metaphors of Israel.

So let me come back to the point with which I began. If the language of theology is not rooted in our experience, it will be of no use to us whatever other virtues it may have. The transformation of Nell from a life dominated by anger and frustration to one of understanding and inner peace is a transformation that could easily be called religious in another story. We know what the experience felt like to Nell. We have what I would call “a choice of redemption narratives” available to us; some better, some worse. But all of them, both better and worse, begin with Nell’s experience. Without that experience, nothing needs to be explained.

It is the actual movement from slavery to freedom—the experience of that movement—that we are trying to explain when we talk about redemption.




[1] Gordon Kaufman, Systematic Theology, A Historicist Perspective. p. 75-76.
[2] The theological word atonement means that the alienated parts of a relationship become at-one (united) so atonement isn’t a bad vibration to get from this reported experience.