On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for a world religion. In online posts beneath my column came hundreds of comments from Christians protesting that I’d misunderstood the Crucifixion’s meaning, which was (they said) the ultimate victory. Triumphantly, Jesus redeemed our sins. Or ‘atoned’ for them. Along with atonement and redemption, expressions like ‘ransomed’, ‘forgiven’, ‘pardoned’, ‘paid for’, ‘healed’ and ‘washed away’ recurred, as well as ‘sacrifice’ – Jesus’s blood-sacrifice to expiate the world’s sins: a kind of reparation. The notion of release – from slavery, debt or imprisonment – suffuses these responses.
In the context of human sin, what do those words actually mean? I’ve been thinking and reading around the subject. In a faithless age many readers will find such exploration arcane. But we remain essentially a Christian country, and over the last week I’ve understood that the doctrine of Redemption through Christ’s crucifixion is central to our national religion; and an outsider’s view – I’m an unbeliever – may be worth setting out.
Christians should face up to this: the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle
Confronted by the literature, one fast concludes that faith has developed a private language that’s almost impossible for non-believers to understand. I’m also coming to believe that many lay worshippers intone the words without really asking what they mean. I return below to the question of meaning.
First, though, the question of authority. Where does the doctrine of atonement through Christ’s crucifixion find its roots? To my great surprise I find no anchorage for the teaching in anything we believe Jesus said. It just isn’t there! There are claims made for him, but none by him. It appears to be years later that the doctrine was developed. Decades after Christ’s death the Letter to the Hebrews (9:11-28) uses the example of animal sacrifice to suggest that the self-sacrifice of the Crucifixion was the ultimate act of expiation. But it is really St Paul to whom we can trace the repeated and insistent claim that the death on the Cross was a triumphant redemption of all our sins.
In short, it was Paul who invented the Church’s teaching about redemption on the Cross. A brilliant researcher, Morgana Edwards, and I have made a sweep through biblical repetitions of this claim, and amid more than a score, almost every one is from Paul. Paul never met Jesus.
I admire Paul immensely as a writer, a thinker, a leader and a man. He comes across as a troubled, almost tormented figure. I warm to his tetchiness. I understand his nervy approach to women. I share his reproachfulness. I long to know what was the mysterious ‘thorn in my side’ of which he complains. And I’m left astonished by his energy. But the Church does not teach (does it?) that this all too human figure could never have been wrong.
We must surely set Paul in context. He was a missionary, a proselytiser. Jesus had left followers unclear whether he wanted to explode the Judaic belief that the Jews were God’s chosen people, and instead to convert all mankind: a revolutionary opinion for a Jew of his time, which, if he held it, we might expect him to have set forth. Paul was a man on a mission to do just that, across the world.
Preaching to Gentiles, Paul needed what was (in today’s marketing parlance) an offer: a unique selling point. That offer was salvation – but from what? From something (I suggest) which Paul knew troubles everybody and always will: our own misdeeds. He was selling them relief – a saviour and a God who offered, through his own self-sacrifice, a universal pardon; not sin by sin, person by person, calculating each individual balance sheet, but a complete wiping-clean of the slate, no questions asked. We are all saved.
In that sense the Crucifixion offered not justice, but rescue from justice. Can you not see the appeal? Paul certainly could, and the doctrine of redemption through the Cross traded on it – solving, too, the riddle that will have worried his audience just as it still worries some Christians, and appears to have tormented poor Jesus himself as he was dying: why God would ever have allowed the Crucifixion to happen. Jesus would have leapt at the idea of redemption, if he had ever thought of it. Paul did.
Nobody put it better than the 20th-centurytheologian Austin Farrer, to whose writing the inspirational Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, has referred me. Farrer talks about redeeming all debt ‘to a Supernatural Bank of Justice’. Unfortunately, though, he says that this is what Redemption does not mean.
Which returns us to that question of meaning. Farrer rejects the metaphor most of the laity embrace: payment. ‘Redemption’ is, after all, a metaphor drawn from the world of finance. This has two deep psychological roots in the Old Testament, in the human unconscious, and in every culture we know of. First, the idea of propitiation through sacrifice. Since the dawn of man we’ve offered up sacrifices (usually animals) to the gods. Self-abasement; kowtowing; the blushing apology; ritual humiliation; at its highest, hara-kiri; at its lowest the volunteering of cash… these are all variations on the theme of self-punishment in pursuit of forgiveness, sometimes on our own behalf, sometimes (as with reparations for slavery) on behalf of others. Second is ransom. ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’: paying for our release from captivity. There was even a theory that Christ paid our ransom to the Devil.
But if not to Satan, then to whom? And if propitiation, then who demands to be propitiated? The God we’ve fashioned over the millennia is not like that. And are we all redeemed forever, or only if we don’t run up further debt?
Christians should face up to this: the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle, a tangle of primitive and modern thinking, a proselytising salesman’s wheeze, a mess. Trying to make sense of it is a waste of time. Blame Paul. But don’t blame Jesus: it was never his idea in the first place.
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