Pictures of Atonement. Ben Pugh
established by Ricoeur: biblical metaphors are irreducible because God-inhabited.14
And it is this sacramental power of metaphors that joins up with the aim of TIS, namely, that of faith-formation. I will be approaching the metaphors of atonement as an appreciator of poetry and image and seeking to recapture the immediacy that was their original faith-nourishing power.
So, I bring three interests to this study. The first is the motifs of incarnation and participation which I identified during phases one and two of the Atonement Project. The second is an interest in adopting the theological interpretation of Scripture as the overall ethos of this study: it is biblical study for theological results, and the research user is understood to be the church. Thirdly, I bring an interest in metaphor. Indeed, following the lead of Colin Gunton and John McIntyre, the entire study is structured around the metaphors of atonement.15 Appreciating the value and possible origins of these metaphors I am hoping will be the most illuminating way of studying New Testament atonement themes.
New Year 2020
1. Stephen Fowl (ed.). The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). The use of “theological interpretation of Scripture” as a technical term seems to not go any further back than 2005: Robert Plummer, 40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010), 314.
2. Goheen, “A History and Introduction to a Missional Reading of the Bible,” 9.
3. Greg Allison, “Theological Interpretation of Scripture: An Introduction and Evaluation,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 14.2 (2010), 30 [28–36].
4. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009), 116.
5. Richter, cited in McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 117.
6. Aristotle Poetics 1457b 7–8.
7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 69.
8. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” Semeia 4 (1975) 78–79.
9. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 5; italics original. In addition to Lakoff and Johnson, the key literature would look something like this: Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); Paul Ricoeur and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, (trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J.; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (rev. trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; New York: Seabury, 1989). In relation to theology: Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).
10. Petros Vassiliadis, “Beyond Theologia Crucis: Jesus of Nazareth from Q to John via Paul (or John as a Radical Reinterpretation of Jesus of Nazareth),” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 47.1–4 (2002), 139–63.
11. Craig Ott, “The Power of Biblical Metaphors for the Contextualized Communication of the Gospel,” Missiology 42.4 (2014), 362 [357–74].
12. Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).
13. David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 52–55.
14. However, he makes it clear that this should not be taken to mean that we must never go beyond the biblical metaphors. We should create new ones for new situations: Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 72.
15 Gunton, Actuality of Atonement; McIntyre, Shape of Soteriology.
chapter 1
The Possibilities of a Pentecost Standpoint
At the Origins of the Metaphors
Dialectical Tensions
Metaphor is a way of dealing with the shock of the new by juxtaposing the new with the familiar. The new thing was that the Spirit, dispensed by the glorified Christ, was revealing to people that the shamefully executed Jesus of Nazareth was the glorified King of all. This belief that Jesus was the only true Savior and Lord, and his triumphant inversion of crucifixion, Rome’s most powerful means of keeping the peace, put the first Christians very much on the wrong side of the political ideologies of the surrounding culture.
Philip Esler has made illuminating use of an axiom of sociologist Peter Berger, namely that the relation between religion and society is always “dialectical,” always fraught with conflicting aims and values. According to Esler, Luke, in the context of a parent religion and a wider political system that were both sometimes hostile, creates ways for the new beleaguered community to find a sense of its own legitimacy.1 Seen in this light, the metaphors of atonement would have been developed not only as a way of explaining the unfamiliar but also as a way of robustly defending a marginal and muted position that existed in irreconcilable tension with the dominant culture and its Caesar.2 The dominant culture had strong views about death by crucifixion. There was nothing to defend or eulogize about somebody who had been subjected to this ultimate sanction.3 Yet the first Christians had powerfully experienced the ascended Lord Jesus through the Spirit. The one who was crucified was now King. “The central focus of the proclamation after Easter,” wrote Gunton, “was that the events of Jesus’ history, and particularly of the Easter period, had changed the status of believers, indeed of the whole world. The metaphors of atonement are ways of expressing the significance of what had happened.”4
Inspired by experiences of Christ through the Spirit the metaphors of atonement were generated, in part at least, as items of resistance to the Roman hegemony together with its lord and savior, Caesar. The metaphors were both potent and polemic. It was assumed and accepted that the dominant culture would be outraged by the claims being made:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18, 22–24. Also Gal 5:11; Heb 12:2).
Feminist Standpoint Theory
Transformative experiences of the Spirit gave the earliest Christians a certain vantage point or standpoint. Nancy Hartsock’s Feminist Standpoint is a Marxist-inspired theory that has now been applied usefully to many marginalized or “muted” groups as a way of helping us to notice that marginal groups hold a perspective on many aspects of life that is wholly other to that of