Shalom and the Cross

This article was written by a Peace Catalyst International staff team in order to articulate the centrality of shalom (which is also one of our organizational core values) in how we understand God's work in the world and our calling as Christians. To view this article as a pdf, click here. To read the first article in this series on Shalom, click here. To read the second article on Shalom in the Biblical Narrative, click here.

Peace Catalyst International believes that the biblical arc bends toward shalom, but often Christians struggle with how Jesus’s violent death fits at the center of that biblical narrative and as the climax of God’s shalom-building mission. If Christians are to wholeheartedly believe peacebuilding and shalom are the very mission and vision of God and embrace them as the Church’s vocation and hope, then we must see clearly and powerfully how Jesus’s brutal crucifixion incarnates God’s nonviolent, restoring, healing, and reconciling work.

The Cross: Redemptive Violence or Nonviolent Shalom-Building?

The purpose of this paper is, first, to address some misunderstandings about the cross that can significantly impact our peacebuilding efforts, and, second, to offer biblical alternatives. We often hear Christians wrestling with three spheres of questions related to the cross and atonement:

1. God’s character and relationship with humanity - Who is God really and how does God relate to us? Is God best understood as the nonviolent, enemy-loving, freely-forgiving convict hanging on the cross or as a deity that must vent his wrath and requires blood in order to forgive sinners?
2. God's action and work - What was happening on the cross? What was God doing or wanting? Did God the Father commit or require violence against Jesus on the cross? Is the idea of redemptive violence (i.e. that violence can right wrongs and repair what’s broken) ultimately true and at the very center of Christian theology in our understanding of the atonement? How can such a violent death on a cross be in any way salvific or redemptive? How is God continuing to work to save and restore all things, and does it in any way follow the pattern we see on the cross?
3. Our response - How are we called to respond? Is God first and foremost concerned that we convince others to believe and accept Jesus’s death as for them? Are we called into some form of intellectual competition with others in order to save them from God’s wrath? How does God call us to respond, proclaim, and live out this news of Jesus’s death and resurrection?

Peace Catalyst staff believe that Jesus’s death and resurrection are central to God’s healing and liberating work to restore shalom, consistent with God’s mission throughout the biblical narrative and the life and teaching of Jesus while he lived. From the beginning of Holy Week when Jesus lamented, “If only you knew the things that make for peace,” to the end of the week when Jesus declared to the disciples, “Peace be with you,” Jesus demonstrated practices of peacebuilding by lamenting, confronting injustice, calling out oppressors, and contending for God’s shalom.¹ On the cross Jesus provided us with a definitive revelation of God as self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love, a revelation which in and of itself is salvific; and through his resurrection, he won a decisive victory over the powers of sin and death, thus releasing us from our bondage to sin and fear.² “[Jesus] too shared in [our] humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”³ Jesus’s death and resurrection were thus liberative (salvific) in order to make things right, heal our conceptions of God, and free us from bondage to fear and sin so that we might live as first fruits of God’s kingdom – a restored community experiencing and embodying God’s shalom.

In what follows, we will explore various atonement theories at greater depth, but first it is important to make several notes. Atonement theories are just that: theories. As such, they do not capture reality itself, but are rather a representation of reality. As R.W. Dale asserts, it is the fact of the atonement that is salvific, not the specific theory of atonement.⁴ As you read, you will find that Christians have thought about the meaning of Christ’s passion very differently throughout the centuries. This is because no single theory adequately represents the reality of what Christ did for us in his life, death, and resurrection, nor can we understand the mechanism of how this atonement functioned in its entirety. Each and every theory has weaknesses, because as human constructs, they are necessarily imperfect and develop from within and for a specific context or generation. Atonement theories are like maps: they are useful but always incomplete. A map is not the land itself–it is an understanding of the land. Different maps highlight different aspects of the terrain, and may provide clearer routes to a destination. For this reason, we believe that an important measure of the suitability of a theory depends greatly on its fruit (“you will know a tree by its fruit”), and therefore, any atonement theory we believe or promote should fit within the larger arc of God’s work throughout the biblical narrative, with its trajectory toward God’s vision of shalom. As Christian peacemakers, this is our preeminent criterion.

In this paper, we will look at some metaphors and theories that have shaped Christian understandings of the cross over the last two millennia. This is not an exhaustive list, but these represent the ideas we often run into when discussing God’s shalom-building mission and the character and work of Jesus. Then, we will attempt to show how the diverse and multifaceted theories about the cross create a tapestry of meaning at the center of our faith that answer the three areas of questions Christians often have about the cross: God’s enemy-loving and freely-forgiving character, God’s nonviolent and co-suffering work to heal and restore, and our response to collaborate for the justice and peace of God’s shalom.

METAPHORS AND MODELS OF ATONEMENT

Throughout the ages, Christian atonement theories attempting to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross have been contextual, speaking the language and culture from which they originate and addressing the problems believers felt at that time. Thus, different models have seemed useful at different times to different believers. The following models, although arising before 21st-century Western Christian culture, represent ideas encountered when learning about Jesus-based peacemaking with, primarily, Western churches.

Christus Victor

The Christus Victor model may be understood as addressing the problem of fear and the need to feel more powerful than impressive worldly powers. This idea says that Jesus, by his death and resurrection, proved that he was more powerful than all the evil spirits and powers who would have desired his destruction. As the God-Man, Jesus triumphed over fear and bondage for all who put their trust in him. Richard A. Muller says the early church fathers preferred themes of atonement related to the Christus Victor model “not because these themes necessarily appeared to them to be the central themes of the New Testament in its own right, but because this particular New Testament way of understanding Christ’s work spoke directly to their own cultural and historical context.”⁵ In the minds of the church fathers, fear was the main spiritual problem facing mankind, and Jesus beat all fear-causing entities at the cross and empty tomb. J. Dudley Woodberry alludes to this model when he mentions that suffering is involved in winning the victory. “Our Lord conquered the cosmic powers on the Cross (Col. 2:15), and we can expect to be ‘partakers of Christ’s sufferings’ (1 Peter 4:13, KJV).”⁶ Ephesians 4:8 provides a nice example of New Testament emphases when it says, “When he ascended on high, he made captivity itself a captive.” The church fathers expanded on such scriptures by urging that humanity had, at the fall, given over its rightful rulership of creation to Satan. Thus, as Ben Pugh asserts, “the cross and the resurrection are construed as a dethroning of the devil and an enthronement of the born-again man.”⁷ A modern application of this idea is that Jesus has conquered unjust systems and hierarchies. Therefore, the believer in Jesus’s death and resurrection has freedom and power to disobey the principalities of this world and live according to the principles of the Kingdom of God.

The fact that Jesus led captivity captive offers tremendous hope to individuals who feel captured, such as addicts, and together with appropriate interventions, such hope can bear the fruit of sobriety. Other captors can be financial debt, or unjust socio political systems. The hope of release from bondage can enable those feeling captive to take actions that lead to real release. However, even when freedom remains unreachable, the Christus Victor idea makes freedom seem possible even in the midst of bondage.

The Narrative Christus Victor model by J. Denny Weaver is a version of Christus Victor which holds that Jesus’s victory was literally accomplished through the living out on Earth of his 33 years of nonviolent life, death, and resurrection. This importantly unites the death and resurrection of Christ to his life, and by extension, his ethical teachings. By emphasizing the centrality of the reign of God to the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Weaver successfully joins what too often become separated in other atonement models. The victory over Satan that is achieved by Christ’s resurrection makes plausible a life that takes seriously Jesus’s instructions for living in solidarity with the reign of God in the face of the oppressive forces that presently hold earth in bondage.

Satisfaction

Anselm of Canterbury’s Satisfaction model addresses the cultural issues that surrounded him: shame and the restoration of honor. He said humanity owes God perfect obedience and submission but cannot satisfy those obligations and therefore cannot make up for our failure to submit perfectly to God.⁸ Humankind has shamed God by failing to give him the honor he deserves. A divine human can, though, give God his honor, and by virtue of a perfect life and death, expunge the shame humankind has inflicted upon God’s honor. Hence, the necessity of the life and death (though not the resurrection) of Jesus.

The logic is crisp and unassailable given Anselm’s assumptions. Pastor Rebecca Parker says that for some in her congregation, Anselm’s interpretation of Christ’s death has deep significance. “It told them they were loved, forgiven, and freed...and renewed their confidence. It told them that their lives had worth.”⁹

However, a serious issue arises with Anselm’s definition of “sin” as “not to give God what is owed to him.”¹⁰ Anselm thus implies that, in order to correct this injustice, the primary response God has toward sin is punishment.¹¹ Forgiveness, then, is only not punishing sin. It becomes apparent from this that Anselm never conceives of the relationship between God and human as a relationship. Anselm describes the connection between God and humanity by words such as debt, honor, owe, task—the economic language of a vassal relating to a feudal lord. He never uses the biblical paradigm of the lover and the beloved. So humanity “owes” God “love.”¹² This must be an exceedingly strange sort of “love” that is not freely given out of a desire to delight in the other, but to keep from falling into debt. Is it logical to define love in economic terms? Moreover, is it biblical to do so?

Additionally, this model attempts to set a person’s focus on another world. In James Cone’s words, “it dehistoricizes the work of Christ, separating it from God’s liberating act in history.”¹³ Similarly, J. Denny Weaver argues that because the theory ignores the resurrection of Jesus, it imagines “salvation outside of history.”¹⁴ This means, he continues, that “it lacks any impulse of confrontation with and witness to the social order, which orients it toward accommodation and support of the status quo.”¹⁵ In doing so, it risks a disregard of the ethical content of Christ’s life and teaching, and takes atonement out of the “now” in which life is lived, and places it in a distant “then.”

Penal Substitutionary Atonement

We turn now to a radicalization of Anselm’s theory¹⁶ which has become one of the most popular contemporary theories of the atonement, especially among evangelicals.¹⁷ Its antecedents can be traced to the Reformers, but it received its name from Princeton theologian Charles Hodge.¹⁸ In Hodge’s thought, God is the sovereign ruler of all creation¹⁹ and by nature perfectly just. Humanity’s fall impugns God’s justice and calls forth God’s judgment and wrath.²⁰ The satisfaction of that judgment requires the death of the sinner. Hodge defines the love of God as the opposite to God’s wrath, but he insists that that love must not violate God’s justice.²¹ To satisfy the judgment and “propitiate” the wrath, then, a blood sacrifice is required. In response, God the Father and God the Son mutually agree that God the Son will take human flesh and offer His life as a sacrifice for sin.²² Thus, as Ben Pugh puts it, the innocent Jesus’s death served as a “satisfactory equivalent” for the punishment of humanity.²³

This model’s emphasis on the complete satisfaction accomplished by the God-man Jesus is a solid foundation for complete forgiveness of sin, thus assuring expiation to the sinner feeling overwhelmed by guilt. This is because penal substitution atonement, communicates (once again, tracing back to Anselm) that God is lacking something only a human can provide; until the debt of humans is paid, God is powerless to forgive and to look with favor on a human.²⁴

Is this really what the Bible says, though? The Bible is explicit that our salvation is based on God forgiving us. But according to Greek lexicons,²⁵ the Greek word for “forgive,” ἀφίημι, (“aphiemi”) is not just ceasing to feel resentment – it is giving up a claim to requital, canceling, leaving behind, or granting relief from a payment, as in forgiving a debt (for example, Jesus’s parable of the unforgiving servant).²⁶ This is opposite to the theological idea that God cannot forgive without the payment of Jesus’s death. If Jesus paid the debt of our sins, then he has satisfied God, and there is no forgiveness. By definition, payment of a debt precludes forgiveness of that debt; the debt is only transferred to Jesus. Does Jesus then forgive us? How, or on what basis? This theological confusion hinders the ability of many American Christians to understand biblical notions and applications of forgiveness. We are more preoccupied with “Who’s going to pay for it?” instead of applying the radical life-changing power of forgiveness we see Jesus live out in perfect obedience to God.²⁷

Penal substitutionary atonement also implies that justice and mercy are in opposition to one another, that is, that God has mercy only when God withholds the punishment demanded by justice. This dichotomy arises out of what appears to be an inadequate concept of justice, wherein God’s scales are balanced simply by violence. On the other hand, Miroslav Volf promotes a richer idea of justice that is “intertwined” with mercy toward God’s beloved people. ²⁸ Thus he asserts that “God never treats Israel as though she were not God’s covenant people, never steps outside the relationship to gain a detached objectivity, never suppresses interest in her salvation.”²⁹ Similarly, with respect to the prodigal in Luke 15, the family relationship of the father, prodigal, and older brother define, rather than ignore, justice.³⁰

It appears, then, that while the model of penal substitutionary atonement has historically helped assuage the guilt of believers, this is at the cost of misunderstanding biblical witness regarding the concepts of justice and forgiveness.

Psychotherapeutic/Incarnational Commitment Model

An alternative model, addressing the concerns of some current Christians (just as previous theories addressed concerns in the contexts of their originators) may be adapted from Don Browning’s psychotherapeutic idea of atonement. For him, the powers from which humanity must be freed gain their power by ‘robbing’ or ‘diverting’ energy from the deeper growth potentialities and energies of the ‘real self.’³¹ God, in Browning’s model, became a human so that God could demonstrate God’s understanding and acceptance of humanity’s experience. The incarnation was necessary since:

If man perceived that God’s acceptance was based on a faulty and inadequate understanding or feeling of the full reality of his hostility then man would be left to conclude that God’s acceptance would be withdrawn when man’s enmity was really understood or that God’s acceptance was sheer sentimentality and spiritless permissiveness.³²

This explains the incarnation, but not Christ’s death. Browning continues, as the client often disbelieves the therapist’s acceptance and tests that acceptance with hostility, humanity could not accept the acceptance communicated by Christ’s life and ministry. “Christ’s death,” Browning writes, “is a result of an intensification of man’s hostility when confronted by a relationship of unconditioned acceptance which necessarily contradicts and judges man’s conditions.” Christ’s death, then, was the ultimate proof of God’s enduring acceptance of humanity. Christ’s death resulted not from God’s choice, except to the degree that it was a foreseeable outcome of God’s choice to “be with” humanity. Rather, Christ’s death resulted from humanity’s choice – a choice that God endured rather than break relationship with humanity. As the therapist’s enduring acceptance of the client “is the beginning and basis of all favorable personality change,”³³ God’s enduring acceptance of humanity makes it possible for the energy that props up humanity’s pseudo-worth to be “‘released’ and made available once again to the more fundamental fulfillment of man’s basic nature.”³⁴

Christ’s death represents, for Browning, God’s refusal to abandon broken humans. Individuals who encounter the crucifixion encounter a love that will not give up on them. Such love, moreover, does more than assuage guilt – it posits unconditional acceptance in the face of guilt. And, if Browning and the psychotherapists are correct, such acceptance leads to personal growth as one gains the strength to encounter and ultimately to master one’s shadow.

Every time the word translated “propitiation” or the verb “to propitiate”³⁵ appear in the New Testament, it is never with God as the object, but God as the subject. God does the propitiation; neither he nor his wrath are ever propitiated. God, through the death of Jesus, propitiates the sins of humans. The equivalent Old Testament term is the Hebrew כפורת”) kapporeth”), usually translated “mercy seat” (referring to the structure associated with the ark of the covenant), but literally means “thing of wiping out” or “thing of cleansing.”³⁶ With this Old Testament connection, and knowing how the word “propitiation” is used grammatically in the New Testament, it seems reasonable to understand propitiation as the merciful provision of God’s presence to satisfy, cover, and cleanse the sins of humans through the death of Jesus.

This psychotherapeutic model may be criticized on the grounds of its novelty – there are no noticeable precedents in Christian thought before the 20th century. Some theologians hesitate to use modern psychological insights to rethink traditional ideas. Additionally, shifting the responsibility for Christ’s death from God to humans – and thus making it seem more contingent – may weaken its salvific power. Do we honor Christ’s sacrifice sufficiently if we see it more as the result of God’s unfailing commitment to humanity than a necessary step to achieve forgiveness of our sins?

Browning’s model calls individuals to exhibit the same unconditional love towards others as they experience themselves in view of the cross. Christ’s death calls individuals to treat all, including those who have been victimized by society, as subjects with content and emotions that should be empathetically experienced by all. Because by underscoring the subjectivity of all, it calls individuals to avoid the objectification of others; it also promotes community formation based on inter-subjectivity. By insisting that each individual empathetically encounter the experiences of others, it leads to a deep understanding of others that in turn results in relationships that go beyond the egalitarian to the empathetic.

2. A Tapestry of Metaphors and Meaning

We see diverse ways that various Christians have understood the life and death of Jesus to be part of a larger story of God’s reign (and therefore, the establishment of shalom). There are many more atonement models than those mentioned above, and they all have different applications and implications for Christian life and thought. As Christians committed to shalom and peacebuilding, we do not see biblical peace established on God’s objectively changing or fixing reality through violence. The means match the ends of God’s redemptive work in Jesus. Shrinking the gospel into a single atonement theory impoverishes our understanding of God’s work and hinders our ability to follow Jesus.

Jesus does take the penalties of our sin. Something is needed for salvation that has sufficient power to break the evil that has been sowed by a rebellious creation. There are horrendous consequences to sin in this world, and Jesus took those on himself. God doesn’t demand blood; blood and death and pain are the natural consequence of sin (including broken relationships). What can triumph over the sin, death, violence, hatred, guilt, bitterness, and shame in the whole cosmos? May this not be what “making peace by the blood of his cross” means?³⁷ Instead of getting ever worse effects from their actions, all creatures can eventually reap the benefits of Christ’s humble sacrifice. Therefore, the “triumph” of Christ was not over a sentient enemy but the attitudes, systems, and mindsets that result from the rebellion of his creation.³⁸ These resulting sins are forever triumphed over and banished from God’s kingdom, once his reconciliatory work is fully manifest and accomplished.

“Sin” as it is used here is defined not as failure to live up to a divine moral code (as in penal substitutionary atonement), and it is not failure to render God what he deserves (as in Anselm’s satisfaction model). It is the rupturing of relationship due to rebellion. Rebellion is turning away from God, which necessarily rends our relationship with him. His attitude toward humans does not change, for he remains the lover pursuing his beloved to the ends of the earth.³⁹

Jesus is truly our substitute, stepping into our violence to take it on himself. All evil was gathering around to attack Jesus – not God’s wrath, but evil in the world, including natural sin consequences, violence, and scapegoating – and Jesus stepped in as our substitute to take on that evil. Jesus is God inserting Godself into our broken history, hostile relationships, systems of scapegoating, and group violence, proclaiming another way; the natural result, the “penalty,” of contradicting our cultures and systems of violence was that our human system scapegoated and attacked the Prince of peace. We demanded Jesus’s blood; God knew that would be the case, yet still remains committed to us regardless of what we do to God. This revelation of God as sacrificial substitute (Jesus) interrupting our cultures and systems, and taking on their penalties, broke once and for all the power of sin and scapegoating, revealing the depth of God’s self-sacrificial love for us. Jesus didn’t change God’s posture toward people; he revealed it. The change happens in humans. As stated in Hebrews 10, Jesus sanctified (made clean or holy) us through shedding his blood, but it did not happen by means of a sacrifice appeasing the wrath of a deity who is otherwise unable to be in loving relationship with his creation. The objective nature of the sacrifice of Jesus is attained through his obedience, with the result that his law of love is written in our hearts. In this passage it appears that Jesus reminds God that God takes no pleasure in sin offerings. In other words, sacrifices do not bring about the reconciliation God desires. Jesus, by writing the principles of shalom in us through his life, death, and resurrection, corrects the misunderstandings of “sacrifice” that arose in our religious systems.

To sum, we affirm that no model or theory of the mechanism of Jesus’s death is sufficient to explain salvation. Moreover, our hope and faith is not in any model or combination thereof: Jesus is the savior – our salvation comes through a person, not a mechanism. God was in Christ reconciling the world; whichever metaphor we prefer, we believe the biblical witness is about God’s love for the world. God expected and was able to use the violence of the cross to undo violence, but God did not perpetuate or desire the violence of the cross. Creative, nonviolent love is at the heart of Jesus’s life and death – not sacrificial violence.

3. Practical Application

We will discuss more of the practical application in the other papers exploring sin and salvation from a shalom perspective, and how we bear witness to the gospel based on shalom. In brief, the means match the ends: we believe God is establishing a kingdom of shalom where all creation may live in cooperation and service of one another – as Jesus lived and taught in his time on earth. Therefore, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have the capability to live that way now. Part of this is realizing that we are not in competition with flesh and blood; God does not need us to win arguments about theology or religion, nor does God require anyone to give mental assent to certain atonement models, as if that is enough to settle anything eternal.

The cross is a picture of divine love and opening up (see metaphors above) a new way of being in the world; the way of God’s kingdom of shalom, of nonviolent, noncoercive neighbor/enemy love; this way of agape shalom-oriented love is the ultimate redemptive power of the universe. Jesus is not only a sacrifice, a new nonviolent ethic, or an example to follow, but a new life and new practical, experiential vitality to participate in.