Christ crucified

Christian Century, March 7, 2001 by S. Mark Heim

ALL THESE CRITICISMS have strong voice within the churches as well as outside them. It is little wonder that oldline Protestant congregations especially strike very uncertain notes on this subject. Responses have fallen into two main categories: those that defend a revised understanding of Jesus' death as a redemptive sacrifice on our behalf and those that attempt to articulate the significance of the cross without recourse to sacrificial terms at all.

Many who would maintain the substitutionary understanding of Christ's death do not deny that it has been and continues to be subject to abuse. The battered wife sent back to her husband with a pastor's exhortation to bear her cross as Christ did is sadly no figment of imagination.

Yet it is also true that for a supposed charter for oppression and abuse, the theology of the cross has a peculiar history among the poor and the marginalized. The testimony of numberless such persons indicates that they do not see in the cross a mandate for passive suffering of evil. What they see, in the midst of a world that regards them as nobodies, is the most powerful affirmation of their individual worth. That Christ, that God, was willing to suffer and die specifically for them is a message of hope and self-respect that can hardly be measured, and that transforms their lives. That God has become one of the broken and despised ones of history is an unshakable reference point from which to resist the mental colonization that accepts God as belonging to the side of the oppressors.

The liveliness of substitutionary atonement theology in the storefronts and barrios may, as some contend, stem from "false consciousness." Or it may arise because they know what they are talking about, those powerless ones who find the Jesus crucified in their place a source of self-respect that the rulers of this world cannot take away.

Some protest that this affirmation comes at a cost: You cannot receive it unless you first abase yourself as a hopeless and helpless sinner in need of redemption. It is insult added to injury to ask those who are weakest to focus on their own shortcomings in this way. Of course, the oppressed are rarely unaware of their weakness, and if anything they have less means than the advantaged have of deceiving themselves about their need or their sins. They may be less offended that atonement theology presumes a human situation of bondage and moral need which they know all too well than grateful that the cross meets them precisely at this place, with the extraordinary insistence that nevertheless they are loved, worthy and precious.

Major efforts have been made to rework atonement theology to meet the various criticisms. Jurgen Moltmann is a key example. He has focused on the tendency of substitutionary ideas to set God, as the one who requires an expiatory death, over against Jesus, the one who suffers it. If orthodox Christian teaching is to be believed, Moltmann points out, this account cannot be right. Jesus is God. In fact, in the title of Moltmann's important book, Jesus is the crucified God. Whatever the reason for the offering, it is made by God and what is offered is God's own self.