Review - Saving Power

Saving Power: theories of atonement and forms of the church

Peter Schmiechen
Eerdmans, 2005, £19.99
ISBN 0-8028-2985-6

This is a solid and inspiring theological book opening up a doctrine which is at the heart of our faith and which provokes so many other questions concerning the goodness and justice of God. It is refreshing to have a book which gets away from the present obsessions with sexual ethics and ecclesial trivia and which brings us back to the amazing grace of God in the saving work of Christ. As Walter Brueggemann remarks ”[it is] an important resource for the church seeking to find its way back to the saving truth that is larger than all our pet projects.”

There have been a series of debates and conferences in the last year about various views of the atonement, and which is ‘right’. Schmiechen is not interested in defending any particular model, but tries to draw truth and inspiration from the ten theories he outlines: from Augustine, Calvin, Hodge and penal substitution, to Irenaeus, Gutiérrez and liberation theology. En route he engages with feminist, womanist and postcolonialist theologians. He does all of this with an attractive and engaging style, informed by an obviously broad and deep appreciation of the subject.

The sub-title, ‘theories of atonement and forms of the church’, indicates that this book is not only stimulating theology, but also committed to understanding the ecclesial implications of that theology. Schmiechen’s use of history demonstrates to us that understanding the atonement is not purely a matter of academic interest. Theology forms the church as much as the church formulates theology. He brings this out as he explores the cultural reasons that some theories have appealed to particular groups in particular ages, and he also examines some of the present divides between conservatives and liberals and how they might be healed by a better understanding of the limits of their respective interpretations.

Schmiechen does a brilliant summing up of the ten theories in the penultimate chapter (a good place to start!) that makes you want to go back to some of the sections you hurried over. He shows, for instance, the danger of theories that depend too much on either guiding principle: that of unconditional love or that of the demands of divine justice.

We are too often tempted to put theories of the atonement into the area of divine mystery, or on the other hand to be too dogmatic and prescriptive. But here is an account which nurtures and challenges our faith as it deepens our sense of love, worship and fealty.

Church Times

True Myth, Easter Vigil 2006

True Myth Easter Day

“Happy are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” John 20.29

Two priests decide to go to Hawaii on holiday. They’re determined to make this a real holiday by not wearing anything that would identify them as clergy. As soon as the plane lands, they buy some outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals & sunglasses.

The next morning sitting on the beach, enjoying a drink, a gorgeous blond in an imaginative bikini walks by. She smiles at them and says, "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

They were both stunned. How in the world could she have known?

The next day, they bought even more outrageous outfits - so loud, you could hear them before you saw them. Well after a while, the same gorgeous blonde walks along the beach, turning heads as she passes.

As she approaches the two of them she nods and says "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

Astonished one of the priests shouts out “How do you know we’re priests?”

The blonde turns with a puzzled look and says, "Father, it's me, Sister Monica!"

In the Middle Ages the priest would start the Easter sermon with all manner of ribaldry in order to elicit the Risus Paschalis - the Easter Laughter - from the faithful. Not a practice I would dream of resurrecting!

The media always have a field day at Easter, coming up with the latest harebrained theories about Jesus, or this year, Judas. The Da Vinci Code (which is a good read) shows how gullible many people are. Most surveys show that most people in Britain believe in the historical Jesus.

But then that isn’t the million dollar question, which today confronts us with.
Here’s the Big Question. And it is of course multiple choice. You may tick either A or B.

A: Is the idea of a God who became a human being, who died and rose again, a myth which nurtures the ‘Christ within us’; which releases the power of that myth at the heart of our own consciousness; an ancient by-product of human self-awareness?

OR

B: Is there a reality which is beyond the cosmos, the First Cause of the cosmos, a Being who is the Ground of our Being; a transcendent God revealed in the man Christ Jesus who rose from the dead?

If you ticked A, then the Easter story ends in the darkness of Good Friday. The existentialists were right when like Sartre they asserted, “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within.” All the other high-flown talk about the power of myth is whistling in the dark. Although of course priests like Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group, the so-called non-realists, would deny this. They somehow find hope for living in this myth tradition; this psychological self-trickery.

And if you ticked B when in fact A is correct, then as St Paul puts it, you of all men are most to be pitied. For you have lived your life for a lie. You have supposed there is ultimate meaning when there is none.

Life is a Cabaret if you’re lucky, and a Nightmare on Elm Street if you’re not.

But wait a minute, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do ‘tick one box only’. We tick both and keep our options open!

But by ticking both boxes, we are making a profoundly Christian statement. The Answer to the Big Question is A because of B.

In other words: Yes we see the dying and rising myth enacted everywhere around us, and it has deep resonances within our psyche. Christ is within us, and the image of God is implanted within every human. And the self-awareness of most humans for most of the last 10,000 years has been caught up with god-awareness.

And this is not surprising, for there is a God who is out there, beyond space and time, who has seeded us with longings of immortality. He is there and he is not silent. He woos us to faith by his wounds of love.

Let’s bring it back to the events we celebrate this Easter Eve.

Of course I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus both theologically and historically; and I have experienced that new-life-through-death which the Spirit works in me personally. I would not dare stand here unless, having not seen, yet, I have believed.

And yet… at a very deep level I cannot conceive a dead Man resurrected to a new and supranatural state of being. It is alien to all I experience in my everyday world of life and stay-dead death. It relates more to the powerful imagery of legend, saga and myth, whether The Iliad or Narnia.

But if it is just myth, A and not B, then I take no comfort from it. For that would be to deceive myself and others. I want no fairy story to sweeten the bitter pill of life, and more to the point, of death.

Having not seen, I am drawn by the authenticity of Christ and his people, to believe.

That great student of myth, CS Lewis, puts it well:

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (1979:43) Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, “we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…” (Eng ed of God in the Dock, Collins, 1979:44)

We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. Or as Lewis says: “We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.” (1979:44/5 ‘Myth Became Fact’ is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock, Eng & US eds)

“…the mythical radiance resting on our theology…”

Today we celebrate the cornerstone of our faith. Christ is Risen, and because he is risen, because I choose to believe that he is risen, then I encounter True Myth. The Holy Spirit gives me a hope that I cannot explain, but which has been at the heart of Christian experience through the centuries.

I spoke to an elderly lady this week who had just come out of hospital in Shoreham- by-Sea: Southlands Hospital, a dilapidated, run-down old 30’s building, that was due to be rebuilt after the war.

She had been close to death at one point, and a bright young doctor had asked her, if she lapsed into unconsciousness, whether she wanted to be revived?

“I ask you” Elsie said, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”

This is the Resurrection faith of the people of God.

This is the hope of the Risus Paschalis, the laughter of Easter that carries us through this vale of tears and on to join the laughter of heaven.

My last Vicar, Bill Scott, has a beautiful illuminated manuscript of this piece of prose by Paul Bunday:

In the beginning… God laughed
And the earth was glad.
The sound of laughter
Was like the swaying and swinging of thunder in mirth;
Like the rush of the north on a drowsy and dozing land;
It was cold. It was clear.
The lion leapt down
At the bleating feet of the frightened lamb and smiled;
And the viper was tamed by the thrill of the earth,
At the holy laughter.
We laughed, for the Lord was laughing with us in the evening;
For the laughter of love went pealing into the night;
And it was good.

“Happy are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” John 20.29

The Cross, Good Friday 2006

The Cross – Good Friday

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choirboy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter.

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choirboy who had fallen into a depraved and degenerate life.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We know in our best moments and in our worst moments, what we are capable of.

The very name Good Friday contains this ambiguity, for it reminds us that the cross is the Good News of the Gospel, and yet at the same time it is the instrument of torture for our Saviour.

On Good Friday our Lord wrestles with the powers of sin and darkness, and overcomes. We still wrestle with our own sin and darkness and with the corruption which blights the whole human race on this war-riven planet.

Yet the Cross is our strength and our help, and the guarantor of our ultimate victory – the victory we will celebrate tomorrow night.

But on this Good Friday, let us spend a few minutes looking at the daily struggles we all face to choose the hard way of the cross, rather than the easy way of self.

One of John Donne’s poems illustrates this struggle very well – A Hymn to God the Father.

As you read the poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career (1573-1631): from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral. Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man.

He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil". Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong. But also the choices we make day by day, even when we know they are wrong and ultimately self destructive. We follow the example of Adam & Eve.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil".

Donne writhes with that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. We’re doomed to follow the sins of our forebears. To lighten the theme a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

And the ‘more’ is the realisation that his sinful behaviour affects others. However much we imagine that our sins are simply ‘private’, they always contribute to the greater woe of our corporate humanity; and more specifically to those closest to us at home, at work, in church. The second verse:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

In the final verse, Donne begins to bring some resolution to this dilemma. The verse reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.
You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th. We too fear being locked into an empty, Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of the God who made us.

But Donne, unlike many today in the Western world, can dare to believe - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe. John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ. The Cross is a crossroads, where the sin of man is overwhelmed by the love of God. Through the saving work of Christ on the Cross, there is the death of death, and therefore for those who cling to the cross, even the death of the fear of death.

Hear the third verse:

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Cross: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember a young man called Neil, who had a past that could almost match Donne’s! He came out of church after mass one day – tears streaming down his face – ‘you ought to put tissues in the pews!’ he said. He was overwhelmed by the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Today as we venerate the cross, we mourn for our sins and the sins of the world which cost Christ so dearly; and yet we wait with quiet confidence for the power of the resurrection to break afresh into our lives.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” 1 Cor 1.18

Maundy Thursday 2006

Maundy Thursday

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” John 6.53

It’s a very stark statement of our Lord - “no life in you”. It has led the church into great debates which have largely missed the point of the words. But then the church is good at great debates that largely miss the point...

This verse became a proof text for receiving the Eucharist in 2 kinds: bread and wine. It encouraged the practice of feeding the sacraments to babies, lest they die with no life in them.

But what is the life that Jesus speaks of here and how do we receive it?

Corpus Christi is the day we give thanks for the blessings of the mass. It should logically be today on Maundy Thursday, but the Passion of our Lord overshadows this day. So in the 13thC the church took the first ‘free’ Thursday after Eastertide - the Thursday after Trinity Sunday - as the Feast Day.

This text from John 6, forms a later, cogitated part of John’s teaching, already beginning to reflect early church Eucharistic practice.

It is always difficult in John’s discourses to tell where the words of Jesus end, and where the pondered theology of John begins.

And often the words of Jesus are selected from different times in his ministry and then run together thematically.

In fact the earlier verses from 35 - 50 form the backbone of our Lord’s teaching, and so help us to understand our text in its context.

Raymond Brown, the great Roman Catholic commentator on John puts it this way:

“The juxtaposition of the two forms of the discourse teaches that the gift of life comes through a believing reception of the sacrament” (cf.47 - “he who believes has eternal life.”) (Raymond Brown p.292)

John is stressing that Christian mystery is not pagan mystery, nor is it like the magic of the Jewish gnostic cults. There is no hocus pocus, no hoax (which despite most lexicographers who think the phrase derives from the magician’s nonsense bit of dog-Latin hax pax max Deus adimax, I and others think comes from the words of the Latin Mass, hoc est corpus meum - hocus pocus).

The church has spent much of the last 500 years arguing over what actually happens in the Eucharist.

Transubstantiation was the doctrine developed most fully by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13thC: the conversion of the Bread & Wine into the Body & Blood of our Lord, only the ‘accidents’ (appearances of bread & wine) remaining. This fitted well into the Aristotelian metaphysics that so greatly influenced Aquinas.

Consubstantiation was Luther’s re-interpretation in the 16thC of the mediaeval doctrine: the Body & Blood of our Lord coexist in the Bread & Wine. But there was no transformation.

Memorialism, or Zwinglianism - Zwingli was the People’s Preacher in Zurich in the early 16thC - stressed the purely symbolic value of the elements. In contrast to the Anglican ‘harmonisation’ described as the Real Presence, Zwinglianism was caricatured as the Real Absence.

The ARCIC (Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission) report of 1971 tried to avoid all troublesome descriptions of process and simply referred to ‘the mysterious and radical change’ which takes place at the consecration.

One of my friends - Nick - spends all his time on the internet. Most of his waking hours are spent in Virtual Reality; in Cyberspace - there is no ‘there’ there.

Sometimes theologians live too long in doctrinal cyberspace. To take Kant’s words out of context: ‘God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.’

The Blessed Sacrament is not a doctrine to be analysed, it is a meal in which we encounter the living God.

This very earthy, everyday stuff of bread and wine, is to remind us that reality, that eternal life, that starts from this moment and goes on into the glory beyond death, is ours through Christ. The everyday act of eating, is in this sacrament, the assurance that we share in the eternal life of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

And on this night, there is an even more tangible, more down-to-earth symbol of God’s saving grace: the washing of feet. The enactment of the Gospel truth that we are saved to serve. Jesus sets the pattern for us – the life we receive from God, the Body and Blood of Christ, are to sustain us in service of one another and of the world around us. This was the great Anglo-Catholic mission of the 19th century – to exalt the sacrament of the mass, in order to serve the needy and the outcasts of society.

At this Last Supper we rejoice in a God who gives us his flesh to eat and who washes our feet as an example of the servant love we are to proclaim to the world.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”

The Aroma of Christ, Holy Week 2006

The Aroma of Christ (Holy Week)

Reading: Mark 14.1 - 15.47; Is 50; Phil 2

You can now get sniffer dogs for dry rot! Dogs have remarkably sensitive noses and can be trained in so many different and useful ways. For many animals, the sense of smell is vital. Over the course of evolution, as humans we have modified its importance. But it is still a crucial sense. I can still ‘remember’ the smell of my mother (and how do you do that?) I know what most of my friends smell like.

Of course it can be deceptive. Jacob deceived his father Isaac by wearing Esau’s clothes:

Gen 27.27 So he came near and kissed him; and he smelled the smell of his garments, and blessed him, and said, "Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the LORD has blessed.”

For many of us, smell is a part of the worship life of the church. When we come to Prayers on Monday morning, the church is still full of the rich, heavy smell of incense: the smell of God. The people of Israel were given instructions on how to make incense and also forbidden from making it to use at home (Ex 30.34-38). It was to be a fragrance that was uniquely associated with the people of God at worship:

“The LORD said to Moses: Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (an equal part of each), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy; and you shall beat some of it into powder, and put part of it before the covenant in the tent of meeting where I shall meet with you; it shall be for you most holy. When you make incense according to this composition, you shall not make it for yourselves; it shall be regarded by you as holy to the LORD. Whoever makes any like it to use as perfume shall be cut off from the people.”

The passion narratives which we read this week are full of the smell of God made Man: the divine smells of ‘the Anointed One’; the salvific smells of the bitter herbs, the wine and the bread of the Last Supper, the Passover; the Garden where now, full circle, Adam’s sin was coming to fruition in the second Adam as he sweats beads of blood in his anguish; the myrrh & vinegar of the cross; the human smells of sweat and blood, of torches and fear, of mobs and bloodlust, of urine and all the vileness of ritual torture and execution.

Mark positions the story of the expensive ointment at the beginning of his passion narrative - the variations found in the other Gospels reflect either that there were other women who made similar anointings (Mary Magdalene didn’t come into the picture till a 4th century tradition), or that the Gospel writers were quite imaginative in their interpretations of the one event.

In Mark this story is used as a summary of the Gospel which is why it will be universally recounted. As Jesus foretold, the Woman is remembered by millions of Christians around the world whenever the Gospel is read; as she has been remembered today.

The anointing is a prophetic action which prepares the body of Jesus for burial - there can be no anointing after death (Mark 16.1) - although the women try - for God will have raised him.

It is above all, a ’beautiful thing’ (14.6) which demonstrates love lavished on the Beloved, to borrow language from the Song of Songs which is also heavy with this passionate and erotic language of fragrance.

In this 1st century context, the woman has gate-crashed a men-only party and the barely suppressed eroticism of the act of anointing makes the onlookers feel uncomfortable. They want to be critical of the woman and of Christ. You can see why the early church, aware of the sensuality of this gesture, were predisposed to attribute it to Mary Magdalene - a woman with a past.

Of course there were cultural precedents for what the woman did. Rather like those scented freshen-up cloths you get given on aeroplanes, it was customary for wealthy hosts to pour sweet oil on the hair of guests. But not this amount nor of this quality (a year’s wages).

When I was at Lancing College in the 1970s, as I showed people round the magnificent Chapel, still then being built - and still being built today after 130 years - many would admire it but tell me it was a terrible waste of money; money that could go to the starving. But the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always shunned that either/or mentality, for it has recognised the deeper truth.

Being extravagant in what we spend on God, if it springs from love and deep devotion, will make us generous to the poor and needy. In contrast, those who are niggardly in their worship of God, bound by laws and a spirit of legalism, are usually ungenerous in their judgements and stingy with their possessions.

Mark, who was obviously in a Johannine rather than a synoptic mood when he wrote this, is anxious to bring out the cultural and mystical symbolism of the event, which is perhaps why he places it here at the beginning of the passion.

He and his readers are well aware that kings are anointed. Jesus the King rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (Mk 11); he will be crucified as ‘King of the Jews’ (15.26) and challenged by the high priest - “are you the Messiah?” - the Anointed One. (14.61)

Now at this time it was not the custom to wash your hair daily – or, for that matter, very often at all. So the fragrance of this almost outrageous anointing must have been heavy upon our Lord throughout the coming days of trial and death.

The disciples lying in the upper room at the Last Supper would have smelled it; the soldiers and the high priests would have smelled it; Pilate would have noticed it.

The anointed king of glory was moving towards the offering up of himself - a fragrant sacrifice to the Lord.

Jesus had set his face like a flint (Is.50.7) to follow through his path of suffering, so that he might be ‘highly exalted’ (Phil 2.9) and bring us with him to glory.

We who live on the other side of the cross and the empty tomb can see how, in the words of Morna Hooker, “this woman’s action epitomizes Jesus’ death and resurrection, proclaims his status as king, and challenges others to share her devotion to him.”

Let this woman be an encouragement to us to be unembarrassed in our devotion to Christ, knowing that through our actions of love, we can point others to his saving work and joyful service.

Perhaps Paul had this incident in mind when he wrote:
“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2.14-16)