New Article: The Abolishment of Retribution in the Church Fathers

 In 2010 I wrote an article for EQ entitled "Substitutionary atonement in the Church Fathers" (you'll find a link in the Articles section to the right) where I argued that the "substitutionary" aspect of the atonement was not understood by the Fathers in the terms of retributive justice (as the Calvinist doctrine of penal substitution holds) but in terms of God's restorative justice.

Recently, Garry Williams has written a rebuttal of my article in EQ where he argues that the Fathers did understand substitution in terms of the fulfillment of retributive justice. After this came out many of you wrote to me and asked for my response to his critiques. Well, today is your lucky day! I've written a response entitled:

The Abolishment of Retribution in the Church Fathers

In this new article I decided not to reply to every point Garry made in his article (which I thought would just be self-indulgent and tedious to most folks). Instead, I decided to take the strongest points he made, and address those in a deep way. So I've focused the article on two big figures: Athanasius and Augustine.

I dig in deep to their respective understandings of the atonement, getting into a lot of the Greek for Athanasius, but also (and I think perhaps more substantially) using my artist's eye to recognize the broad narrative themes they both paint of God's struggle to save humanity. So there's lots of good stuff for you theology nerds out there to sink your teeth into!

 At the same time, I wanted to go beyond my first article and ask some more probing questions of the Fathers: Beyond their understanding of the atonement--which I maintain are clearly based on a model of God's restorative justice--do the Church Fathers also embrace the way of restorative justice as it applies to our lives together? In other words, is their understanding of God's restorative justice only applied to our individual personal salvation, and the rest of life governed by retributive/punitive justice? Or does that understanding of God's restorative justice inform how we should act in our world--including how we understand the role of civil authority? Considering the history of violence and religion that still shapes our thought today, these are difficult but critical questions to ask.

So give it a read and let me know what you think in the comments below!

Substitutionary Atonement and the Church Fathers (my EQ article is now online)

 UPDATE: I have a new follow-up article (See details below)

The new April issue of Evangelical Quarterly is out (vol. 82 no. 2) with my article Substitutionary Atonement and the Church Fathers: A Reply to the Authors of Pierced for Our Transgressions. I've posted a PDF of the article for folks to read. Here's the abstract:

This paper offers a reply to the claim of the recent book Pierced for Our Transgressions that the doctrine of penal substitution did not originate with Calvin, but was taught by the church fathers. A survey is presented of the writings of Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, Ambrose, and Augustine’s respective understandings of the atonement, understood within their larger soteriology. From this it is concluded that the church fathers did not teach penal substitution, rather the dominant pattern found in these patristic writers is substitutionary atonement understood within the conceptual framework of restorative rather than retributive justice.Since I announced the upcoming article in a previous blog post a couple of the authors of Pierced for Our Transgressions contacted me. (It still amazes me how connected the internet makes us!) They were quite gracious, and I look forward to being in dialog with them more in the future.
So have a look at the article, and let me know what you think in the comments section below.


 UPDATE: See also part 2: The Abolishment of Retribution in the Church Fathers

Being Post Evangelical

I've been trying over the past few years to figure out how to describe my faith. It seems a lot of others are on that same journey through the "evangelical wilderness" not really feeling at home in the traditional molds, but not knowing exactly where they belong either. I'm not conservative, but I am equally not liberal, and in todays polarized culture where you are either one or the other, that puts me in the category of nowhere.

Many people have responded to this with a shift in terminology. They see that calling themselves evangelical and even Christian has a negative association that they want to distance themselves from and so they come up with new terms like "follower of Jesus" or even "follower in the way of Jesus" (that's FITWOJ for short, very catchy indeed). Others have left evangelicalism for the orthodox church, the mainline church, the catholic church, the emergent church, and so on. I never felt I could do that. As much as I struggled with it, I felt that this embarrassing family was, like it or not, my own family. It was my home, and I felt inauthentic anywhere else. Yet I did not feel at home in my dysfunctional evangelical family either, kind of like how many of us feel at our own biological families over the holidays when we cringe at the awful things uncle Larry says.

I have tried putting a good face on evangelicalism by my own witness, trying to broaden people's view of what it means to be evangelical, showing them that it can be thoughtful and compassionate. The basic line I took - and I think it is one an awful lot of people take - is that yes there are a few wackos out there that give us all a bad name, angry hurtful people with a pulpit and a TV camera, but the vast majority of us are really pretty loving people. "On the whole evangelicalism is good," I would argue, "it's just a few bad apples". I don't think I can get off that easy now. I think there are many things that are fundamentally wrong with my own evangelical faith, places where we have strayed from the Gospel and become idolatrous in adopting values of our country and culture that are diametrically opposed to the Gospel and what Jesus stood for. I could string out a laundry list of these, and I'm sure you could too. I don't want to defend that or even white wash it.

So I am post-evangelical. Not 'post' in the sense of being 'anti' evangelical or 'past' evangelical. I still very much affirm all the core beliefs of evangelicalism - I am an evangelical. But I think our faith needs to reform itself back into a faith that authentically arises directly out of the Gospel. A big part of that recovery of an authentic evangelicalism has been in looking at my own church heritage and history. Like most evangelicals my understanding of the last 2000 years of church history used to look something like this:

Book of Acts . . . . . . . . . Luther . . . . . . . . . now.

What I found though as I studied history is that my own evangelical faith has a rich tradition beginning with German pietism, continuing into Methodism and the First and Second Great Awakenings, and then into Pentecostalism - not only of stressing the importance of being transformed through a vibrant relationship with God, but also of a deep commitment to social justice and the poor. For hundreds of years loving Jesus and caring for the poor were inseparable. That's not to say that these 'golden years' of evangelicalism were without their own problems of course. I don't want to idealize the past. But I have found that understanding more about where we have come from can help us to figure out where we should be going now, and what authentically following Jesus might look like in our time.

For me being post-evangelical (or if you prefer new-evangelical) means that I affirm that I am an evangelical, and at the same time that my own evangelical faith has in many ways taken a major wrong turn and seriously needs to deeply seek out what radically loving and following Jesus might look like.

I remember when I first visited Germany we were at the Gedaechniskirche in the center of Berlin. This is a church that has been deliberately left as it was after the war - a huge gaping hole ripped into it by a bomb - as a remembrance of Germany's role in WWII. I remember speaking to the pastor of that church and him asking me to forgive him and his people for what they had done. I was taken aback at first since this pastor could not have been more than 4-years-old when it all happened. Yet there he was, taking responsibility for the deeds of his own people, and repenting in the midst of that war-torn cathedral. I hope I can be a bit like him now, because I am an evangelical, and I need to ask your forgiveness.

Gregory of Nyssa on the Trinity

In his "Address on Religious Instruction" the church father Gregory of Nyssa has some pretty amazing insights into the Trinity. He begins with the statement from the Nicene Creed that the Son and the Spirit "proceed from the Father", and then conceptualizes the Son as the Word, and the Spirit as Breath (the biblical Greek word for spirit "Pneuma" also means "breath"). Words are used to communicate who we are to another, and the Word is God's self-revelation of himself. The Word of God is also God's vehicle for creation (Genesis says "God spoke" an the Earth was), and for transformation (Hebrews says that the Word of God is like a sword cutting to the bone). He is careful to stress that this should not be understood conceptually only, but that the Word is also a Person. The idea of truth (communicated by word) is not abstract, but personal, Jesus says "I am the truth". The Word of Truth then is creative, transforming, and alive. Because the Word "proceeds from the Father" it is through the Word that God reveals who God is to us, in a sinless man who perfectly reflects as Genesis says "the image of God".

Similarly the Spirit is the "breath". Breathing is the spark of life. God breathed into Adam and he became alive. So the Pneuma of God is what breaths new life into us, so that we are indwelt with God's life. Spirit also implies inspiration, as the prophets often began by saying "the Spirit of the Lord is upon me". So the Spirit is how we encounter God inspiring, convicting, comforting, indwelling, and enlivening us.

One thing I especially like here is how since both the communicative Word and the life imparting Spirit "proceed from the Father" we have God encountered in three persons, but all coming from one single essence. We encounter God through the Word (Jesus) and through the Spirit, but there is only one God that this is all coming from. That is a God who looks like Jesus (his image and Word) and relates to us as the life giving and ministering Spirit.

Pomegranates and Pantomimes (215 AD)

I've been reading "Apostolic Tradition" by Hippolytus (d. ca. 236AD). It is a document from the early pre-Constantine church that describes the process one had to go though in order to be baptized in the faith. Here's some stuff I bet you didn't know about the early church:

If you were a juggler, pantomime, or a grade school teacher you would need to quit your job before you could become a Christian.

"Inquiry shall be made about the professions and trades of those who brought to be admitted to the faith... if a man is an actor or pantomimist, he must desist or be rejected. A teacher of young children had best desist...a juggler...must desist or be rejected"

I can understand why they rejected pantomimes. I always hated mimes...

I also bet you didn't know that if you wanted to bless fruit (heck, who knew they blessed fruit in the first place?) that pomegranates, peaches, and mulberries are OK, but pumpkins and cucumbers are out. "Excuse me", says the usher, "I'm going to have to ask you to take your cucumber out of the sanctuary, brother"

And I've saved the best for last:
(drum roll please)

people were baptized naked.

"When the elder takes hold of each of them who are to receive baptism... the bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water. They shall stand in the water naked...Then, drying themselves, they shall dress and afterwards gather in the church"

woohoo! Pray naked!