Freedom from the blame game

THERE are two approaches to excited about the meaning of Jesus’s death. One focuses on the effect of his death on the person believer. The other asks what has been achieved by that death, even aside from its impact on believers.

The first approach is less complicated to grasp. When we stand or kneel before the cross, we confront the Son of God who has come amongst us to attract us into his Kingdom, and who, consequently, has suffered rejection and death. This each exposes the horror of human sinfulness and the extent of God’s love in his willingness to undergo torture to take us to himself. The cross is the worth he paid for reaching out to us, because the death of a soldier in battle is the worth he paid for love of his country.

AUSTIN FARRER believed that, whatever images we would use to bring out some aspect of the meaning of Christ’s death, we needed to say clearly what he had done. He put it like this: “In the saving motion of the incarnation, God got here all lengths to fulfill us, and dealt humanly with human creatures. . . He got here amongst them bringing his kingdom, and he let events take their human course. He set the divine life in human neighbourhood. Men discovered it in fighting it and were captured by it in crucifying it. What may very well be simpler? And what more divine?”

The incarnation was key to his excited about our redemption: the setting of divine life in human neighbourhood. This was an actual event, with historical consequences: something objective. It led to the cross, and this had the effect of raising a big query mark against the values of each society and each individual. This in turn led to the breaking down of all barriers for the primary followers of Jesus, which had the further effect of bringing into being a community of believers.

This was something achieved in history. But Farrer didn’t consider that the consequences of the incarnation were limited to time and space. Whether in time or out of time, all would have the chance to recognise Christ in his people. His work of redemption, breaking down all barriers and reconciling them to the fount of their being, had universal significance. But he saw this universal significance not in mythical terms but within the actual figuring out of the incarnation, inside time and beyond time, because it changes hearts and minds

THE other approach looks at what Christ’s death has objectively done, regardless of its effect in converting hearts and minds. Down the ages there have been a wide range of different images and myths used for this purpose, from ransoming us from the devil, to paying the worth for offending the majesty of God. None has ever been made the official doctrine of the Church.

One, often recommend by conservative Evangelicals, is that sin has so alienated us from God that we deserve everlasting death; nonetheless, on the cross, Christ has suffered that punishment in our place. For many individuals, this view of God is morally intolerable. For them, like Julian of Norwich, God is a God who pities us quite than blames us.

But, if God is committed to saving us quite than punishing us, is there not still some sort of metaphysical justice that demands to be satisfied? About the cluster of ideas which make up a penal substitutionary view of the atonement (as described above), Farrer wrote that, if that is taken as a chunk of solid theology, “It is monstrous enough. The theologian will probably be certain to ask what he’s to make of a debt to a Supernatural Bank of Justice. The idea is utterly meaningless; and if we try to present it substance by personifying the Bank as God himself, we merely exchange nonsense for blasphemy.”

FARRER strongly rejected the view that Paul taught that Christ propitiated God. He offered expiation, the spiritual cure for our sins. He equally strongly rejected the concept Paul taught that God poured his wrath on Christ, or cut him off from grace instead sinner on the cross. “Nothing of this kind is to be present in the Bible,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, all that having been said and accepted, there’s in human life a powerful sense that wrongdoing should be punished, and people who do flawed should suffer for it. This just isn’t a part of the outlook of God, and there isn’t any metaphysical basis for it, but it surely stays a really powerful driver in human life and conduct.

MATTHEW PARRIS has argued that no doctrine of the atonement will be present in the teaching of Jesus, and that Christian considering on the topic is a terrible muddle. He suggested it was invented by St Paul since it has deep cultural and psychological roots. Leaving aside his first points, he is unquestionably right within the last assertion: that the Christian message about Christ dying to cast off human sin does resonate deeply. This is because — even aside from any guilt we may personally feel — there’s that in us which is searching for someone responsible, and too often this takes the shape of scapegoating some innocent person or group.

Against that background we all know that, when things go flawed, the painful consequences of that wrongdoing are sometimes borne by the innocent. A person goes to prison for some terrible crime. His mother visits him repeatedly, doesn’t surrender on him. She bears the pain of continuous in a supportive relationship. So with Christ. As Simone Weil put it, “All the criminal violence of the Roman empire ran up against Christ and in him became pure suffering. . . The false god changes suffering into violence. . . the true god changes violence into suffering.”

WHEN persons are casting around for somebody responsible, the acceptance of responsibility by someone can, because it were, make possible a fresh start. If an establishment has failed people, and the chairman — though not personally culpable —resigns, there’s a clearing of the air, with lessons to be learned and a unique future.

The chairman, in such circumstances, will be said to have borne the sins of the entire institution. A price has been paid, and folks can move on from searching for someone responsible. I don’t consider that Justin Welby was personally culpable for the failures over John Smyth, but in resigning he has taken responsibility for the successive failures of the Church over this and other abuses. He has needed to bear the price.

Extending that analogy, Jesus, because it were, represents the Chair of the universe, taking responsibility for what the Book of Common Prayer’s Eucharistic Prayer describes as “the sins of the entire world”. This just isn’t because God needs such a sacrifice, but because we humans do. The effect of the sacrifice is to cast off this whole quest responsible someone.

AS JAMES ALISON, certainly one of those influenced by the considered René Girard, argues in his recent extensive exploration of the language and imagery related to sacrifice within the Bible (You Can If You Want To, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2026), such language just isn’t there to assuage a punishing God, but to cast off this whole way of considering.

We should “treat sacrifice as a largely tragic human ‘necessity’ since we don’t know the best way to live together without it, and what God was doing was not filling in something essential in God but exploding from inside something ‘essential’ for humans, making it permanently and endlessly unnecessary”.

Freed from the drive responsible others and ourselves, our eyes are open to see the regular, undeviating love of God for us.

The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford. He is the editor, with Stephen Platten, of Austin Farrer for Today: A prophetic agenda (SCM Press; 2020). richardharries.com