Beyond moral influence to an atoning life

Theology Today, Oct 1995 by Young, Pamela Dickey

The powers of evil are neither set aside nor conquered but taken up into God who, in spite of them, offers the grace that enables us to resist and to mend. When I hear the biblical witness to Jesus, to his whole life not just to his death and resurrection, I am offered the same grace that was offered to those first followers who experienced him. This is no past act of God once-for-all, but a present relationship.

It is not that God in Jesus does something once that never needs repeating. God's offer of Godself to us in Jesus is an offer enacted over and over again as one encounters Jesus in Scripture and in the Spirit. God offers not a past act but a present relationship with Godself. And this offer of present relationship is embodied in Jesus whom Christians know as the Christ.

The grace of God offered is a constant of God's ongoing relationship with creation. That it is embodied in Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ re-presents to us, not just to those already in the Christian fold but to all who would hear, the possibility of reconciliation with God is not to say that this offer is made only through its embodiment or incarnation in Jesus Christ. Bruemmer argues that Jesus Christ's suffering "is not merely the paradigmatic revelation of God's atoning forgiveness. Such a revelation is also a necessary condition for this forgiveness to achieve reconciliation."(13) To restrict God's grace to its offer to us in Jesus Christ is a very great restriction indeed to a love that desires the reconciliation of all, if, indeed, as Bruemmer seems to imply--and I concur--the reconciliation of relationship with God is two-sided and requires my participation to be fully enacted.

To reject a view of Jesus' death as atoning does not mean that atonement, used in its broadest sense as reconciliation, is not necessary. Nor does it mean that Jesus is not central to the reconciliation, either for Christians or for all who would hear the Christian message as offering the possibility of human integrity in renewed relationship with God. Some feminist theologians have argued that we cannot and should not look beyond ourselves for the possibility of our own integrity, our own healing, our own wholeness.(14) I do not find such a position adequate either to my understanding of the Christian tradition or to my experience of both lacking and being offered the possibility of living an integrated life.

Positions that seek possibilities of wholeness only within ourselves often originate in the rejection of particular notions of God or of transcendence that are judged to be unhealthy or unhelpful to women. Certainly, there are many views of God that have been detrimental to women in the history of the Christian tradition. But I am not as confident as some that all the resources for the integrity I long for reside within myself. It is my experience of the transcendent, which I, as a Christian, call God, that draws me beyond myself to the possibility of integrated relationship with others and with that God. Integrity is relational. I find it only in relation to others, including, I would argue, God, who is its very possibility. The values that I ought to work for are not just "my" values but are worthy of valuation and are valued by God. Thus, the wholeness I see is not just my own desire but a possibility that is given by God to a universe where God is the integrating factor.