The atonement and violence -Mar 9, 2004

The subduing and occupation of Iraq, and the terrible tragedy of thousands of lives lost, of hospitals and schools looted and burned, of ancient cultural heritage destroyed, was initiated by the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, America, the "last empire" according to Gore Vidal. And the American President, like the Emperor Constantine in the third century of the Christian era, is a convert to Christianity. Gore Vidal said a few weeks ago that both Bush and Blair are Jesus lovers, and that is the problem. And even if they were not confessing Christians, Muslims throughout the world see the sacking and occupation of Iraq by the armies of Blair and Bush as an enterprise of the Christian West against a Muslim country.

This is not the first time Britain and America have invaded and subdued Muslim lands. Ever since the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in particular the enterprises of King Richard the 'Lionheart' who unilaterally (that is without the support of the French) led his crusaders to a battle with Saladin for Jerusalem which ended in a violent subduing and occupation of that city, Muslims have perceived their relation to the Christian West through the lens of the crusade.

Whence does the language of the crusade come within the Christian tradition? For many years as a child I attended an organisation which calls itself the Crusaders. It had a logo which clearly referred back to the enterprise of the first Crusaders and as well as attending weekly Crusader classes where we certainly did sing Onward Christian Soldiers on occasion, I also used to go on Crusader Camps in the summer. Our round bell tents in fields, and camp kitchens and fires, were even a little reminiscent of the camps of the Crusaders of old as they amassed in the desert to fight with the Muslim hordes.

The Crusaders are a Christian evangelical youth movement whose central tenet of faith, like most modern Protestant evangelical denominations and parachurch groups, is that the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross was a terrible punishment involving torture and violent death which Christ underwent in payment of the penalty which human sin required a righteous God to impose upon the human race. And we were taught as Crusaders that it was only because Christ had paid this penalty and satisfied the wrathful judgement of God the Father that we were saved. The Cross of Christ was presented to us in this way as the first Crusade, and as the only possible way in which God could have redeemed the human condition.

But for most of Christian history the Church has not made the theology of the atonement an article of creedal faith. The Nicene Creed in particular does not identify any one of the events of Christ's birth to a virgin, his life, death, resurrection, ascension and gift of the Spirit as the saving event but rather invites us to confess and celebrate them all as the way in which God showed Godself to be 'for us' by becoming one with human flesh, while also remaining 'one, of one substance, with the Father'.

Yet when I went to University I found that the evangelical Christian Union which I attended required me to sign a different creedal statement in which I had to affirm that the one atoning and sacrificial death of Jesus was the redeeming punishment for my sins and therefore the key to Christian salvation. I served on CU committees, played the guitar at Christian missions, I went out with, and then married, a CU girl, but I never signed the card. I did not believe then, and do not now, that this was a truthful account of a Christian understanding of salvation.

Well you may say that is just typical of a budding theologian you obviously were preparing from a youthful age for your current occupation. Why does it matter, and after all does not the imagery of sacrificial victimhood, of punishment for sin, have foundations in the New Testament, and not just in the IVF creedal formula?

Well it matters because if the central and exclusive saving event of Christian belief is a violent death by torture and crucifixion which is done to satisfy the unchanging demands of a heavenly divine judge who can do no other than demand violent satisfaction and punishment for human sin, then this sends a pretty powerful signal to all who follow this religion that violent punishment is God's way of dealing with criminals, with sinners, and with tyrants.

Religion is at its heart about mimesis as anthropologists are fond of pointing out. It is about acting out, copying, repeating, through ritual the events which God (or the gods) are said to have marked out as the means by which a people have become God's people. If the central event of the Christian story of divine salvation is about violent death, then it would be unsurprising if over their history Christians had not begun to copy, to act out this violent death, in their relations with people of other faiths, and in their punishment of criminals and heretics. And of course it was precisely this mimesis of violence and punishment which marred the Christian era from at least the tenth century onwards.

However until at least the fifth century Christians were pacifists. They gave an account of their faith which did not allow them the option of the use of violence. This meant that Christians could not join in wars, and they did not use violence or the sword in their relations with one another or with those not of the faith. They would rather be subjected to violence as martyrs than resort to violence themselves. What went wrong?

Christian art, as well as theology, is a wonderful source of information about the character of Christian faith through the centuries and it is notable that for the first five centuries the cross is rarely found as an image in Christian places of worship or in Christian mosaics and paintings. Instead we find the Chiro a combination of the first two letters of the Greek word Christ - as the most common symbol of Christian belief, along with the fish, the good shepherd and one or two other recurring images.. However by the fifth century the cross begins to be used as a symbol - interestingly enough only after the turn of Christianity into an imperial cult. But even then the cross images displayed not a dying and tortured Jesus but a risen and conquering Jesus who is on the cross but clearly in the resurrected form of Christ the King who has taken his seat in heaven on the right hand of God. Only in the Middle Ages do we find the first images of a dead and tortured Jesus on crosses in Christian art. Just as significantly, a new and influential teaching about the atonement was put forward by Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages in his book Cur Deus Homo where he argued that the death of Christ was a forensic and legal transaction between God and Gods Son in which the Son was killed in order to satisfy the legal requirements of the heavenly Lord for a price of redemption to be paid. All the analogies, the cultural context for Anselm's writing reflect the new form of hierarchical feudalism and seignorage which had overtaken the formerly relatively non-hierarchical Anglo Saxons and celts of these islands as a result of the Norman conquest.

It was Anselm's theological innovation which placed the satisfaction theory of the atonement at the heart of the Western Christian understanding of salvation history, and which was taken up in due course by the Reformers and by modern day Protestants and evangelicals. And it may be no coincidence that it was precisely at this time that the Church began to practice violence against heretics, invented the notorious Inquisition to deal with Catalan heretics, and even adopted a standing papal army, remnants of which can still be seen in the fortified citadel of the Vatican to this day.

Not surprisingly therefore the Anselmian theory has come in for a good deal of criticism in recent times, not least from feminist and black theologians, precisely because of its contextual links with Christian and European imperialism, with the violence of medieval Christianity, feudalism, colonialism and slavery, and thence with racism and patriarchy. The lonely male judge of feudal theology has acted ever since Anselm's day as a legitimator of wars of conquest, of patriarchy, and of violent forms of punishment, including torture and execution.

Instead of this violent atonement theory early theologians such as Irenaeus and Athanasius, and St Paul himself, laid a much greater stress on Christ triumphant, who through the totality of Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection enacts the divine victory over sin, evil and the devil. For the early Christians it was the Resurrection and not the Crucifixion which was the determinative, the truly saving event, for as St Paul says if Christ be not raised then we are of all men most to be pitied. It is Christ as victor over death, the Risen and Ascended Christ, who leads captivity captive as St Paul has it. And it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the sacrifice of the life of Christ can be seen as a saving sacrifice. It is not that it was not a sacrifice but to argue that it was the sacrifice alone, essentially, apart from the larger divine plan, which is truly saving - which is the true forensic and legal requirement without which God could not have saved the human race - to argue this is to misconstrue, to get deeply wrong, the true wonder and glory of our Easter faith.

America is the most Christian nation in the West. 40 per cent of Americans claim not just to be Christian but evangelical Christians. But it is also the most violent of all the democracies which have been birthed since the Enlightenment. And the violence is not just directed towards America's enemies. A postgraduate student of mine told me that he returned to the US after the terrible events of September 11th 2001 and found that all his friends in Seattle, including a number of evangelical Christians, now carried guns whenever they went on public transport, and kept them in their houses. America punishes by execution more than any other Western nation, and Texas more than any other State. And America since 1945 has bombed or invaded 49 countries. Violence - Rambo style, Clint Eastwood style - is the American way, it is at the heart of America's story about itself. The problem for us as Christians is that violence is also at the heart of American evangelical Christianity. The Southern states which do the most executing are the most conservative and evangelical states. The very same states which teach the doctrine of creation alongside evolution in their public schools are those states who execute the largest number of criminals. If religion is mimesis, and evangelical conservative Christians are committed to a view of their salvation which is intrinsically violent - which sets the necessity of violent punishment in the heart of the being of God, which even sets God as Father violently against God as Son on the Cross - then the violence of America is Christian violence.

Now of course by no means all evangelicals are committed to the violent course that American judicial system and American gun ownership and America foreign policy involves. They include powerful and prophetic voices such as Jim Wallis of the Sojourners Community. And we must also say that it is at least as much the technological prowess of America in its corporate development and sale of arms and weapons of mass destruction as a central feature of the American project which is responsible for the cult of violence. And we must say also that it was the birth of America in violence - the terrible genocide against Native Americans, and then the Civil War - that set its violent course.

But there clearly is a problem about Christianity, atonement and violence, that we do well to understand; Jesus charges the disciples at his final resurrection appearance in the Gospel of Luke to witness to a gospel of repentance and forgiveness of sins to all the nations. This is the Christian witness, this is what Resurrection means  not war or violent punishment, but mercy and forgiveness. Spreading this message may however bring Christians into conflict with the governing powers. But when such conflict arises the Christian response will be peaceable if Christians truly remain faithful to the victory over sin and evil which was won with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from death on the cross.

This victory involved the first Christians in a clear conflict with the violence and wealth of the Roman Empire. The Gospels clearly and unambiguously depict Jesus as a non-violent teacher. He teaches non-violence and he acts out non-violence, peaceableness, in his person and in the way of the cross. Living out the way of non-violence in a violent imperial culture means that he is killed though he is innocent. And it is precisely as the innocent victim that Christs death opposes the violence of those who oppose the reign of God. As the Mennonite theologian Denny Weaver puts it his death unmasks the powers of evil, and renders empty their claim that peace and order are founded on violence.

The reign of God is not founded on violence because God is from eternity a non-violent God. Violence is a consequence of the Fall of humanity it plays no part in God's way with God's world.

The option of non-violence for the Church is not then simply an option  it is a requirement if we believe that God truly reigns, is truly victorious, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Weaver says: those who believe in the Resurrection perceive the true nature of power in the universe. Resurrection means that appearances can be deceiving. Regardless of what appears to be the case from an earth-bound perspective such as the seeming triumph of tyranny and war in human history since the first centurythe Resurrection demonstrates the power of God's rule over all evil.

This is our Easter faith  it commits us not to the necessity but to the ultimate and divine impossibility of violence as a means to redeeming the human condition. Those Christians who claim that only through war can peace be attained are committed to another view of the atonement, a view which has to dismiss the non-violent teaching of the Jesus of the Gospels as a perfectionist ethic, only good for monks, sectarians, and pacifists who care not for the fate of the innocent, who would not resist tyranny. But it would be completely wrong to understand the Jesus of the Gospels as one who commends non-resistance to evil. It was precisely his resistance to evil which entailed his following the way of the Cross, and it is precisely in Christ as Risen victor that we see that evil IS overcome, overthrown, not by violence but by the reign of a non-violent God. And although truth and effectiveness are by no means the same thing, it is notable that in the last thirty years those "regime changes" which have resulted in a more peaceable and 'free' existence for their citizens include countries such as the Philippines, East Germany, Romania and South Africa where guns and totalitarianism were overthrown not by violence but by "people power" exercised non-violently.

Michael Northcott

This article first appeared in Third Way magazine