The violent or the loving God and the question of (un)limited atonement. Or: are Arminianism and Calvinism on the same (wrong) side of things?
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| Jesus with a sword in his mouth. Not in his hand. |
The one is the traditional discussion within protestantism on whether the atonement is limited or unlimited (i.e. did Jesus die for the salvation of all human beings, or only the elect?).
The other is the question whether Jesus died as a payment to an angry God (protestantism) on the one hand, or whether he was God's ransom paid to death (not God) out of love, thereby defeating death, on the other (classical, pre-medieval Christianity).
I was reminded that the seemingly unrelatedness of these questions might only be at face value, when a friend recently posted a talk by Mark Driscoll on my fb-wall (link). In the talk Driscoll pretty fairly discusses some of the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism. His own view is that the atonement is limited with regards to salvation, but unlimited with regards to benefits for people in this life. Driscoll remains a five point Calvinist, though.
Before even listening to the talk (sorry!) I complained about Driscoll, who is famous for this quote:
"Jesus is a pride-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. [...] I cannot worship a guy that I can beat up".Driscoll's ranting is pretty close to being a denial of the Christ who we know from the Cross (read more here). But what does this have to do with the discussion on (un)limited atonement?
Well, at the very fundamentals, this whole idea of a violent, swordbearing Jesus comes down to a distorted picture of who God is. Or at least one that is very 'different' from the one where God is self-sacrificial, non-violent love (no buts!). In the same way, the question about (u)limited atonement is a question about who God is. Hence Driscoll is not right when he says that this is a marginal question. Rather it defines your whole basic idea of who God is, and thus how you read the bible and understand everything else for that matter.
The latter idea of God as love (no buts!) is based on what we know from the Cross (1 Jn). Hence Christ does not defeat death through violence, but through his weakness. Violence is conquered through non-violence. The sword is not in Jesus' hands but in his mouth: The sword is his Word, which is like (but not the same as) a two-edged sword (Hebrews).
The problem with Driscoll is not that he "freaks out" people with his rash talk, but rather that he is all too confirmative of a worldly idea of justice and of who God is (which is also expressed in his affirmation of bourgeois morality, the rule of law and so on).
For the sinner and the Pharisee, as for the superficial Christian, who sees everything from the worldly perspective of the law (through the knowledge of good and evil), God might still look like an angry, violent judge. But from the perspective of the gospel things are very different. From that perspective it turns out that we are our own judges, and that we project that judgment onto a god made in our own image. God's judgment (the sword that comes out of His mouth) is a condemnation of this judgment (the knowledge from the tree), a negation of our false images of who He is (and who we are).
God does not take sin lightly, no. The serpent's head is crushed, yes, but to our surprise this happens in ways incomprehensible to the fallen human mind, that wants God to work through law, order, violence, justice.
Instead we should stop defining God first of all as sovereign, just and so on (philosophical, metaphysical ideas), and instead look to the Cross, and define Him as love. This idea is what we call Christocentric: We only know God in his actuality, as defined through his revelation in Christ, not (as Calvinism would have it) as an abstract sovereign, who is only seemingly non-violent, who is love, but also something else (e.g. 'justice'). God is love, and from there we can deduce what it means for God to be sovereign, just and so on, but these things are relative to his love. In Calvinism it is the other way around.
So how is all this related to the question of (un)limited atonement?
Well, it seems that the whole idea of a limited atonement presupposes that God's love is not absolute, but relative. Moreover, in some forms of traditional protestantism God is not fully known through the Cross, but remains partly 'invisible'. He is not, in protestant orthodoxy, just the non-violent God who defeats death through His own weakness, but also a sovereign ruler who through an eternal, hidden decree picks and chooses who to save and who to damn (this is why people like Driscoll tell us to trust in God's wise election, as if he had not revealed his will fully).
This is especially the case with Calvinism, but both Calvinism and Arminianism abstracts election and reprobation, and makes them into metaphysical categories, independently of the Cross (Arminianism only holds that God lets human beings choose their category, so to speak). This is why both belong to the same 'wrong side' of things.
We cannot, however, distinguish between 'the elect' and 'the reprobate' in this abstract way. On the Cross, Christ is himself the subject of double predestination, to reprobation as well as salvation. Christ is predestined to go through death, in order to defeat death and bring life. This is God's eternal decree, which is not hidden, but revealed on the Cross.
This is the other problem with the swordbearing, tattooed Jesus-guy: This guy condemns some and forgives others. But in Christ all is condemned, and all are forgiven. There is always both law and gospel. The law tells us that we are all condemned, the gospel that Christ has taken this condemnation upon himself for us, and that this is the way he defeats death.
Jesus Christ becomes the reprobate so that all others may have life through him. This alternative to Calvinism and Arminianism is parallel (if not identical) to that of Karl Barth's (by which he is closer to much pre-Augustinian theology). On Rom 8:34, "who [is] he that is condemning? Christ [is] He that died, yea, rather also, was raised up; who is also on the right hand of God -- who also doth intercede for us" (YLT, NIV is completely off here!), Barth said that:
"Who damns, who condemns, who rejects these men? Paul does not deny – how could he? – that there is such a damnation, condemnation and rejection of man – of these men too – that they have deserved it a thousand times and that they are hopelessly subjected to it. But who executes it? The answer is that Jesus Christ executes it. He has executed it once and for all for us and thus also on us – by bearing it himself and dying as its bearer." (Barth, Shorter Commentary on Romans, p. 66)
By the way: Election and salvation are two quite different things. God elects people to do certain things, and in the long run this election must show to be an expression of the eternal election through Christ that defines all other elections in historical time: Israel lost their election temporarily, but did not stumble to fall. Israel stumbled in order that salvation be brought to the gentiles, so that the fulness of Israel might itself be saved. In this way God shuts up the whole to unbelief, so that He might have mercy on the whole (Rom 11).
