Another famous Englishman tackled the atonement recently. On Palm Sunday Sam Wells preached How does Jesus save us?
First indulge a little wistfulness.
Wells went off to the States a couple of years ago. Had he stayed he would be in the Anglican front row – which presently consists of Rowan Williams, Oliver O’Donovan, Tom Wright and John Webster (subs. Michael Banner). Of course the chapel of Duke is an important place to have a good theologian. We English import all our spirituality from the States, in our inverse snobbery assuming that there are no substantial Christian teachers here in the UK. So strangely we are more likely to hear Wells from Duke than from where he was, in dismal Cambridge.
How does Jesus save us? (PDF) is a great sermon, though you can feel the temptations on this wordsmith. I’ll make a couple of points in the hope that you’ll read it all. First Wells reviews a clutch of models of the atonement.
But I want to suggest today that there’s a real danger with all five [atonement] theories. And that is that they’re theories. That’s to say, they are disembodied constructs that pay little or no attention to the context and contours of Jesus’ life.
Why turn theory and story into opposites? What is a theory if not a story compressed? Let’s come back to ‘disembodied constructs’.
The single word that epitomizes the context and contours of Jesus’ life is this: Israel.
Which is to say that God is faithful to his promises to his people, promises given to us in the Scriptures. In slogan form: the gentiles will inherit Israel and Israel will inherit the gentiles, in Christ.
This is, I believe, how Jesus saves us. Not through a decontextualized theory that posits a faraway God doing curious deals in the light of arbitrary codes of debt, justice or honor
Arbitrary codes? Ouch. Nothing like belittling the whole dogmatic tradition of the Church
but through the Jews, God’s everlasting love for them, and his love through them for all the nations and the whole creation.
‘Love’ (and communion) and ‘church’ or people’ are the components of a properly theological account of how Jesus has saved us.
The Church is that body of people who declare they want to be in continuity with this story
Story? We just need to make clear how a ‘story’ may be be true and become our truth. Perhaps sanctification will get a mention in a minute. There should be a doctrine of creation, or ontology, here somewhere. We’ll need just a little eschatological ontology.
The circumstantial detail is the gospel
And a theological ontology would secure, not threaten, particularity.
When you hear all these theories together
They are not theories but doctrines, the teaching of the church. There is no dogma (settled decisions of the Church taken by its councils) of the atonement. It is for the Church in each generation to relate these doctrines of the atonement, and do so by linking them to the doctrines of God, man, creation and eschatology. Then they’ll make very good sense and not be so easy to belittle.
Wells rightly says that we need more than ‘disembodied constructs’.
What we need is embodied givens, embodied gifts. ‘Embodied’ refers to the ecclesiology. The gifts of God to us are embodied as this group of people, the Church, made distinct by God for the world, in particular congregations in particular places, and as the sets of instincts (‘virtues’) that they share with us.
And we need, not ‘constructs’, but doctrines, and with them all the good practices by which we can receive and learn the doctrines of the church, taught us by teachers who, like this one, understand their responsibility. Through this teaching we grow up into the whole truth – and life – of Christ. We receive Christ in those packages Christ gives to the whole Church, packages we call doctrine and sacrament (or gifts of the Spirit). That’s your pneumatology and eschatological ontology.
Anyway, Sam Wells is not too young to be a bishop. Tempt him back, somebody.
Meanwhile another Anglican theologian has recently given us an account of the Christology, pneumatology, anthropology, ontology and eschatology that are required to say how Jesus saves us. Readers of this blog will not need much of a hint.
