Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens, Fall of Adam and Eve (Wikipedia)
God is not a noun, that demands to be defined, God is a verb that invites us to live, to love and to be. — The Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, Twitter, April 20, 2015 (qtd. Wikipedia)
Maybe it’s dumb luck, or maybe it’s serendipity. It may even be a subtle hint from on high. But I happened to be reading John Shelby Spong’s The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic at the same time I was doing the assigned readings on medieval scholasticism, the rise of universities in the 13th century and the Protestant Reformation for my church history course.
More good luck: The class is sponsored by my synod (equivalent to a diocese) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for synod-authorized ministers, lay people who are licensed to preach and administer the sacraments. But I’m only auditing the course.
Why is that good luck? Because that combination of reading got me to thinking some un-Lutheran thoughts about the doctrine of the atonement, which has a decidedly 16th-century, even medieval, ring to my way of thinking. Wikipedia, my go-to source for all matters theological, has two definitions:
- “[I]n western Christian theology, [atonement] describes beliefs that human beings can be reconciled to God through Christ’s sacrificial suffering and death”; or, alternatively,
- “[…] the forgiving or pardoning of sin in general and original sin in particular through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, Luther fits right in here, holding as follows:
Indeed, God reconciled the world with Himself once and for all (2 Cor. 5:19), but this atonement event is reappropriated in faith and put into effect again and again. […] In this atonement event mediated by the work of the Holy Spirit, sin is overcome; the death and life of Jesus Christ are appropriated by God for the believer, and the person is separated from his or her sin.
I think this can be reconciled with my evolving attitudes on the whole ball of wax, which are pretty close to Spong’s (we’ll get to that in a minute or two). But it involves taking a deep dive into the philosophy of a medieval cleric named Anselm of Canterbury, and I wouldn’t want to try doing that over Zoom in a church history survey class discussion.
Our readings for Saturday straddle two volumes in The Story of Christianity by Justo L. González, covering roughly the period from the birth of St. Francis in 1181 CE to the Council of Trent in the1540s and 50s and the death of John Calvin in 1564. In between, we breezed through the formation of the Franciscans and the Dominicans; St. Thomas Aquinas, his Summa Theologica (summary of theology) and the golden age of medieval theology; the fall of Constantinople; and the Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) reformations of the 1500s.
As I read, I looked for a theme tying most — if not all — of these things together. And I think I found one in the doctrines of atonement (there were several), and the related idea of justification, or “the event or process by which sinners are made or declared to be righteous in the sight of God,” as my personal summa of all knowledge (Wikipedia) explains it. Luther is best known for his take on the subject, but it goes back to the epistles of St. Paul.
And that’s where my reading of Spong comes in. “Paul,” he says, “was obsessed with human evil.” I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to the guy, but Paul did have a lot to say about sin; and his obsession, if that’s what it was, had a lasting influence. Spong continues:
Primarily under the influence of a late-fourth-century theologian and bishop named Augustine, but continuing in history through Anselm in the twelfth century, to both Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, atonement theology has dominated Christian thought. Not having at that time the rudimentary critical study of the scriptures that is available to us today, these historical figures viewed the Bible from a very limited perspective. (176)
The upshot, according to Spong, is that two very different origin stories in Genesis were conflated, and from this combined metanarrative Augustine got the idea of original sin. I’m not sure how much I buy all of Spong’s hypothesis. There’s something about the story of a lost Garden of Eden that I believe transcends time, place, specific theological doctrines and textual criticism. And I believe, with Joni Mitchell, that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. At any rate, Spong theorizes:
Augustine proceeded to put these two narratives together, whether they fitted or not. Then he used the resulting understanding to create the template against which traditional Christianity would ultimately tell the story of Jesus. There was an original goodness, that familiar narrative begins, followed by a fall into sin, which in turn necessitation a divine action of redemption in which God had to come to our aid. Salvation was accomplished, this storyline suggested, when God sent his son to save the world from the fall and to rescue human life from sin. (179)
Episcopal bishop of Newark, NJ, from 1979 to 2000, John Shelby Spong was nothing if not controversial. He wrote at least 20 books with titles like Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (1991) and Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today (2018). He was a popularizer, and no less an authority than Raymond Brown, a scholar whose work on St. John’s gospel I especially admire, dismissed Spong’s scholarship as “amateur night.”
That said, Spong’s insights challenge my own, even when I think it over and decide he’s riding his thesis a little too hard. So I read his books with interest, but more as his personal reflection on scripture than scholarly exegesis.
And I share his skepticism about the doctrine of original sin.
Which brings me back to Anselm.
I’d heard of related concepts called forensic justification and substitutionary atonement in my other reading — they all run together in my head, and no matter how many times I go down that rabbit hole, I can’t tell them apart. But as I read up on what González justly calls the “Golden Age of medieval Christianity,” I got a new insight on one of the sources where Luther and other Protestant reformers got the idea. The legalistic hairsplitting of the day had many sources, of course, but before I read González’ take on Anselm of Canterbury, I’d never connected it with Beowulf and the origins of English common law.
Says González of Anselm’s treatise Why Did God Become Man?:
There he explores the question of the reason for the incarnation, and offers an answer that would eventually become standard in Western theology. In this scheme, clearly shaped by feudal views on crime and its penalties, the importance of a crime is measured in terms of the one against whom it is committed. Therefore, a crime against God (sin) is infinite in its import. But, on the other hand, only a human being can offer satisfaction for human sin. (SOC 1:371)
Shaped by feudal law? Indeed. That passage triggered half-remembered bits from The Lord of the Rings and Beowulf, in which, as Wikipedia explains, weregeld, or blood money, was paid to a murder victim’s family; the amount due was a “defined value placed on every man graded according to rank” (Wikipedia even has a table showing the weregeld was 30,000 gold shillings for a king; 15,000 for an archbishop or an alderman; and so on, down to 70-80 shillings for a landless Welshman!) Beowulf owed Hroðgar, king of the Danes (the letter that looks like a d with a crossbar was an eth, pronounched like “-th”), because Hroðgar had paid the weregeld for his father after the old man offed one of his in-laws. What better way to even the balance sheet than to slay a dragon (or try to)? We still find echoes of Anglo-Saxon thinking, however faint, when we go to court and sue for damages.
But what does all this have to do with atonement, sin and redemption?
González continues, explaining the weregeld (although he doesn’t use the term) for a sin against God would be infinite, but human beings are finite, so the math didn’t work:
For this reason, there is need for a divine-human, God incarnate, who through his suffering and death offers satisfaction for the sins of all humankind. This view of the work of Christ, which was by no means the generally accepted one in earlier centuries, soon gained such credence that most Western Christians came to accept it as the only biblical one. (SOC 1:371)
I don’t want to make too much of this. There were a lot of currents swirling around in late medieval Christianity. But Anselm of Canterbury was an interesting guy, and his career offers us quite a window into the Middle Ages. Like many bishops of his day, he was embroiled in politics — he squabbled endlessly with the sons of William the Conqueror — but he was also deeply interested in theology, and he is sometimes known as the father of scholasticism, a philosophy that relied heavily on strict dialectical logic and gave us the image (perhaps unfairly) of medieval academics debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
As González tells us, scholasticism had its heyday in the 1200s, with Aquinas and the rise of medieval universities at Paris, Oxford and Bologna. But as the Middle Ages waned in the 1300s and 1400s, his brand of substitutionary atonement came to be questioned. Says González:
Anselm, and practically all theologians after him, had claimed that the incarnation of God in a human being was reasonable, since humankind’s debt before God, being infinite, could only be paid by God made human. But theologians in the fourteenth and fifteenth century pointed out that, no matter how reasonable this may seem from our point of view, it is not so if we take into account God’s absolute power. By that power, God could have canceled our debt, or simply declared that humans are not sinners or have counted as meritorious something else, quite apart from the merits of Christ. We are saved by Christ’s merits, and this is so, not because it had to be so, not because the incarnation and passion of Christ were the most fitting means to that end, but simply because God decided that it would be so. (SOC 1:435)
Which brings us — almost — up to Luther and the Reformation.
González tells the familiar story — and I think he tells it well — of Luther’s crisis of faith in the years leading up to 1517, and of his discovery of justification by faith (sola fide) rather than good works. As González tells the story, Luther had was especially struck by a passage in Paul’s letter to the Romans [1:17 NRSVUE]: “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The one who is righteous will live by faith’.” Luther thought this talk of righteousness, or justice, and a gospel of mercy was self-contradictory, says González, and he “spent day and night seeking to understand the relationship between the two parts of that single verse”:
The answer was surprising. Luther came to the conclusion that the “justice of God” does not refer, as he had been taught, to the punishment of sinners. It means rather that the “justice” or “righteousness” of the righteous is not their own, but God’s. The “righteousness of God” is that which is given to those who live by faith. It is given, not because they are righteous, nor because they fulfill the demands of divine justice, but simply because God wishes to give it. (SOC 2:25)
With this, if I’ve got the right number of angels dancing on the right 15th- and 16th-century pin, Luther isn’t all that far from the late medieval scholastics who came to question Anselm’s concept of substitutionary atonement. God could have canceled the debt […] simply because God decided that it would be so. And I don’t think Luther would have said God is a verb (although he wasn’t averse to grammatical puns, see HERE for example) but I don’t think he’s that far from John Shelby Spong, either. God is not a noun, that demands to be defined […] God invites us to live, to love and to be.
Live by faith, in other words.
Links and Citations
Sybelle Rolf, “Martin Luther’s View of Atonement and Reconciliation,” Oxford Research Encyclopeda of Religion, https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-337.
John Shelby Spong, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic (New York: HarperOne, 2014).
Wikipedia Anselm of Canterbury, atonement, eth, Hroðgar, How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?, justification (theology), scholasticism, sola fide, John Shelby Spong, substitutionary atonement, Summa Theologica, thrymsa, weregeld and Woodstock (song).
Textbooks:
- Justo L. González, Church History: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. (CHEG)
- Justo L. González, Story of Christianity: Volume 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. Revised and Updated. New York: HarperOne, 2010. (SOC1)
- Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: Volume 2, The Reformation to the Present Day. Revised and Updated. New York: HarperOne, 2010. (SOC2)
[Uplinked Feb. 17, 2024]
Ordinary Time 