CHRISTIAN ATONEMENT - FROM METAPHOR TO IDEOLOGY - by Stephen Finlan

Problems with Popular Atonement Ideas

Popular doctrines of atonement say that Jesus was a substitute victim who took on the punishment deserved by humanity, that we need Jesus to intercede for us with God, and that the anger of God awaits all who dare question this doctrine. These doctrines were foreign to the historical Jesus, as I will argue later in this article. However, the major problem with them is not that they do not come from Jesus but rather what they imply about God. ¹ [1 Theological critique of the doctrine of atonement is a major topic of my book, Problems with Atonement (Liturgical Press, 2005)] Why would God require such extreme intercession as torture and death? Is God so implacable that he demands a victim and so unjust that he does not mind that the victim is innocent? These doctrines also picture a God who is less than all powerful, who is compelled to prosecute offenders and able to rescue them only through a legal fiction in which the innocent is punished in place of the guilty.

   These notions do not do justice to the biblical teachings on atonement, but they do build upon passages in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters, in ,1 John, 1 Peter, and the Letter to the Hebrews (for example: Rom 3:25; Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 1:19, 2:24). Unfortunately, some later theologians took Paul's metaphors and the formulas in the pseudo-Pauline letters very literally, giving rise to crude and literal-minded concepts, such as the ideas that all people (even children) deserve damnation and that salvation can be literally purchased with a ransom payment in blood. All of these ideas are based in ancient ritual and social traditions. Paul pictured the death of Jesus (metaphorically) as a sacrifice, as an expulsion ritual (like the scapegoat ritual), and as a monetary redemption (the practice of purchasing the freedom of slaves or ransoming captives). Paul also described the benefits of Jesus' death for believers as justification and adoption. Justification means, literally, being made just or being declared just. The latter option, for someone who envisions the soul being put on trial before God, has the concrete meaning of the soul being acquitted. Adoption was a Greco-Roman institution whereby someone designated someone who was not a son to be the heir. Paul is saying that everyone (Jew or Gentile) needs to be adopted into God's family.

What Sacrifice Does

In ancient societies sacrifice serves several functions. In the first place, as with any ritual system, it dramatizes, affirms, and preserves social boundaries and separations, excluding foreigners and stratifying insiders. Men are separated from women, priests from non-priests, and the chief priest from the other priests. Sacrifice dramatizes the facts of social segregation. The sacrificing cultures of Iran, India, and Israel all removed women from the sacrificial arena. Women were excluded from most of the Greek sacrificial rituals, but played a role in a few of them. In Hebrew society such gender segregation was linked with a very strict purity code and affirmed perceptions about God as separate and as requiring boundaries and separations.

   Along with holiness as separateness goes the awe and danger surrounding ritual objects. Improper handling of sacred objects, whether deliberate or accidental, carries the death penalty: Leviticus reports that Nadab and Abihu offered up unauthorized coals and were blasted by the Lord from heaven (Lev 10:1); while in 2 Samuel a man who innocently reached out to steady the ark of the covenant was smitten dead by the Lord (2 Sam 6:6-7). Yahweh protects his separateness with violence.

   This points to the second main purpose of sacrifice: to provide a way to understand and interpret violence. Sacrifice ritualizes and dramatizes what is thought to be a necessary act of violence, but it also is used to explain divine violence. Sacrifice does not just provide a rationale for the controlled violence of slaughtering food animals; it creates a symbolic world, by means of which divine separateness and violence are contemplated.

Is God so implacable that he demands a victim and so unjust that he does not mind that the victim is   iinnocent?

The Hebrew word for atonement is kipper_. (pronounced ki-PAIR). The linkage of kipper with violence is clearest in some non-ritual stories, as when the priest Phine has spears a Jewish man and his Midianite girlfriend in the act of lovemaking. Yahweh then says, "Phine has ... has turned back my wrath ... [so] that in my jealousy I did not consume the Israelites. Therefore ... I grant him ... a covenant of perpetual priesthood, because he ... made atonement for the Israelites" (Num 25:11-13) This is cleansing through violence (ethnic cleansing, in fact).

   Even more gruesome is the atrocious "atonement" that David makes to the Gibeonites. When Yahweh informs David that there was blood-guilt on Saul's house (2 Samuel 21), David hands over seven relatives of Saul to be crucified on a city wall. That is payment in blood. Atonement is surrounded by divine and human violence.

   The cultural theorist Rene Girard says animal sacrifice represents (and disguises) an underlying pattern of mob violence against selected human victims. Girard posits a universal social pattern of the focusing of violent energies onto a victim. Animal sacrifice is how the community mystifies and conceals its social violence through ritual and mythology, telling stories in which God commands the sacrifice. According to Girard, this "sacred violence" underlies all human religions. Although somewhat reductionistic, Girard's theory does help to make visible the widespread participation of institutional religion in the violent scapegoating of perceived enemies. Even when violence is invisible, institutional religion tends to sprinkle holy water on existing lines of hierarchy and power.

   There is a completely different, a third, function of sacrifice, which is not accounted for by Girard. In Leviticus, we see the concept that sin committed anywhere in Judah causes impurity to lodge in various spots in the temple. The only thing that can purge this impurity is blood, which has the power of life in it. Animal sacrifice releases blood, and lifesblood has the power to cleanse impurity. This is a ritual-a magical-power of sacrifice. It probably signifies the belief that the life-force has the power to cleanse that anti-life influence which is impurity. There seems to be some kind of intuition that infractions and sins leave a spiritual stain on that which symbolizes the whole nation-the temple. Such symbolic thinking becomes problematic when the symbol eclipses the reality, and when the problem of sin is treated primarily as a ritual, rather than an ethical, issue. Sacrificial thinking would use ritual to rectify a spiritual or ethical problem.

   Finally, there is a more mundane, but no less frightening, function of sacrifice: to persuade or pay off God. In earliest times this was a simple food payment. We see this in the Torah, where the Lord demands, "See that you present to me at the appointed time the food for my offerings by fire, my pleasing odor" (Num 28:2), so that he can smell the soothing aroma of the burning meat. This phrase "pleasing aroma" occurs 42 times in the Torah. In Hebrew, the word for payment (kopher, as in Exod 30:12) is cognate with the word for cleansing (kipper). Sacrifices have to be personally costly in order to have the power to persuade God to be merciful (2 Sam 24:24-25; 1 Chron 21:22-27). Sacrifices are sometimes described with their monetary value (Lev 5:15); monetary restitution is linked with a guilt offering of a certain value (Lev 6:1-7). There is a conceptual link between wiping clean ritually and wiping clean economically, and between sacrificial payment and economic payment.

    Sacrifice enacts primitive beliefs from the childhood of the human race about power, payment, and purity.

So sacrifice 1) dramatizes and affirms social boundaries; 2) ritualizes concepts of power, separation, and violence; 3) yields magically purifying blood; and 4) feeds, pacifies, or pays God. Socially, then, sacrifice provides a structure for reflection upon and maintenance of (mostly male) lines of separation and power, while metaphysically it aims either at undoing human-caused impurity or at appeasing the god's anger. It dramatizes ancient beliefs about giving-and-taking-negotiating with the gods. Sacrifice enacts primitive beliefs from the childhood of the human race about power, payment, and purity.

Anti-Sacrifice

There is another side to the story of sacrifice: its critique and mockery by the prophets. Several of the Hebrew prophets argued against the smugness of the practitioners of sacrificial ritual, who "trust in these deceptive words: the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" (Jer 7:4), and who think that God will "be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil" (Mic 6:7). The prophet Micah is mocking those who think to persuade God with an impressive offering. Similarly, a psalmist has God asking, "Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?" (Ps 50:13). According to Micah and the psalmist, the notion is foolish. Amos and Jeremiah question the notion that God established the sacrificial system (Amos 5:25; Jer 7:22).

   These prophets take a critical stand against sacrifice because they see the practice as inextricably linked with the people's selfishness and willful blindness. Isaiah says that bringing offerings is futile; instead people should "cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice" (Isa 1:13, 17). The prophet Hosea says "Their heart is false ... their altars to cleanse sin have become altars for sinning" (Hos 10:2; 8:11). The God of Hosea says, "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings" (Hos 6:6). I call this the Hosea Principle, the idea that justice, love, and morality are far more important than purity laws or rituals.

   Of course, some prophets, namely Joel, Ezekiel, and Malachi, want people to approach sacrifice with purified motives. Those prophets want a purified sacrificial system. But that is not the case with the prophets who see that system as manipulative, dishonest, and foolish. Hosea repeatedly condemns the priests and rulers of Israel for abandoning the covenant principles of kindness, justice, and knowledge (that is, relationship with God through loyalty to covenant ethics). "My people perish for want of knowledge! Since you reject knowledge, I reject you as my priest" (Hos 4:6).

Noble Death

The final essential ingredient in the story of sacrifice is how Greek and Hellenistic literature used sacrifice as a metaphor to express the idea of noble death (what we call "martyrdom"). The poet Pindar pictures dying for the Greek fatherland as a "holy sacrifice." Heroes and heroines in the plays of Euripides say they will "die as an atoning sacrifice for the city" (The Phoenician Women 969), and "Sacrifice me, sack Troy" (Iphigenia at Aulis 1397). The latter affirms military violence right after advocating sacrificial violence. Hellenic stories of martyrdom affirm political and military values, and, in a few cases, religious values: Antigone dies for a religious principle, and Socrates dies out of respect for the laws of the city.

   Jewish writers adopt the noble death theme in the books of Second and Fourth Maccabees where martyrs give speeches in defense of self-control, nobility, and the Torah while being tortured to death. These books use Greek concepts and language to affirm Jewish religion.

   Thus, in Gentile and Jewish literature, noble characters give their lives for their city, their people, or their religion, but not for their enemies, which distinguishes them from the Christ of Christian atonement theology, who dies for the ungodly (Rom 5:6). But did Jesus himself accept martyrology? Did he accept the theology surrounding animal sacrifice in the temple? If the answers to these questions are "no," then it is very doubtful that he would have applied a sacrificial interpretation to his own impending death. In fact, there is good reason to doubt that he embraced either of these theologies.

The bargaining mentality that underlies ancient sacrifice is simply not present in the teachings of Jesus

Jesus Against Sacrificial Thinking

The bargaining mentality that underlies ancient sacrifice, where Yahweh smells the pleasing aroma and is soothed (Gen 8:21), is simply not present in the teachings of Jesus, who is recorded as saying such things as, "it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). "Ask and it will be given; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you," etc. (Q-Luke 11:9-13//Matt 7:7-11). "Your Father knows what you need before you ask" and wants to heal the sick, affirming "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Matt 6:8; 9:12-13). God need not be persuaded, "for the Father himself loves you" (John 16:27). "You are children of the living Father" (Thomas 3). "It is to such as these [children] that the kingdom of God belongs" (Mark 10:14).

   One of the fundamental scholarly tests for authenticity of a Jesus saying is multiple attestation: the presence of the saying in multiple sources, especially from the oldest independent sources, of which there are six main ones: Mark, the Q Gospel, special Matthean material, special Lukan material, Johannine tradition, and tradition from the Gospel of Thomas. As one can see from the few quotations just cited, all six sources express the idea of the open generosity and invitation of God, unrelated to sacrifice or any kind of symbolic payment.

   All six sources testify, in differing ways and degrees, to Jesus standing at odds with ritualistic thinking and with the later Christian notions of his being a sin offering or "Lamb of God" (Rom 8:3; John 1:29). Although only one of the canonical Gospels (Matthew) has Jesus speaking against sacrifice, all four have him challenging the purity system, and all four tell the story of him overturning the tables in the temple and asserting that something other than sacrifice was the real purpose of the temple ("a house of prayer for all the nations" [Mark 11:17] ). For these reasons, it is necessary to discard sacrificial thinking-or at least its manipulative undercurrent-to understand Jesus' life mission.

   In Matthew, Jesus uses the Hosea Principle-the idea that love and justice trump ritual and purity laws-to defend his disciples against the supposed impropriety of gathering food on the sabbath: "If you had known what this means, `I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless" (Matt 12:7). His message is that one should not rate purity laws more highly than persons. Infatuation with purity and ritual leads to condemnation of the innocent. Consistently in the gospels, the most ritually fastidious are the most hostile to Jesus. Those who fail to embrace the Hosea Principle tend to crush people under a ritual millstone.

   Prior to the story about gathering food on the Sabbath, Jesus says he came to heal the needy, those who "need a physician," the "sick," the "sinners" (Mark 2:17).

   In the Matthean version of the sabbath story, Jesus tells his opponents, "Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, not sacrifice"' (Matt 9:13). Here Jesus is contrasting sacrifice with responsiveness to the needy. In Mark, Jesus goes on to say, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27). He values people more than procedure, humanity more than holy days. Ritual purity is concerned with the maintenance of boundaries, which entails the exclusion of foreigners. But Jesus will break these boundaries for the sake of life and fellowship. Of a Roman, he says (in the Q source): "not even in Israel have I found such faith" (Luke 7:9; Matt 8:10). For Jesus, ethics matter more than ritual (Matt 15:11).

    Most Christians are unaware of the extent to which sacrificial thinking marginalizes the ethical teachings of the gospels.

After the sabbath story, Matthew and Mark have Jesus warning the disciples of John against trying to pour new wine into old wineskins: trying to confine new truth in old ways of thinking. Jesus' new wine is expansive and cannot be poured into the old skins of ritualistic religion, which cannot stretch. We need concepts and social forms that are capable of stretching, or they will not be able to hold Jesus' teachings. The new wine does not fit with the old ritualistic ways of thinking; it will tear away, like a new patch tearing away from old cloth (Mark 2:21).

   Even when Jesus condones bringing offerings to the altar, his point is not ritual but moral. He is saying that if you have something against your brother, immediately stop the ritual and "go; first be reconciled to your brother," and only then finish the ritual (Matt 5:24). Reconciliation is interpersonal, and it must be attended to first. If ritual matters to you, then go ahead and finish it, but only after you have dealt with the interpersonal problem.

   Popular theologies use a few atonement passages to control the interpretation of the whole New Testament. Sacrificial thinking is so pervasive in Christianity that most Christians are unaware of the extent to which it marginalizes the ethical teachings of the gospels. Sacrificial thinking sweeps under the theological rug the contrast between ritual and compassion emphasized by Jesus and the prophets.

The Institution Passages

What of the Lord's Supper institution passages, with the mention of "my blood of the covenant"-the only places in the gospels where such meaning is given to "blood"? It seems that these passages were altered early on to bring them into conformity with standard liturgical usage, although we have solid textual evidence of this pressure affecting the text of only one gospel. There are widespread variations among manuscripts of Luke 22:17-20, particularly over the presence, the wording, and the order of the "this is my body ... this is my blood" passage (22:19b-20). These verses are simply missing in the oldest Western Greek manuscript and the oldest Latin and Syriac versions. In Greek manuscripts where they are present, there are numerous variations in content and word order, suggesting that they were added in order to make Luke conform to the wording in 1 Corinthians 11:24-25. If (as some recent translations indicate) the original text of the Gospel of Luke lacked this "body-blood" passage, that would mean that there is no sacrificial theology anywhere in this gospel; the Last Supper would then involve only a touching farewell scene, where Jesus says he will not again share the fruit of the vine until he shares it with his friends in the kingdom of God.

   Aside from the eucharistic passages, which very few critical scholars attribute to the historical Jesus, the sacrificial concept is absent from the synoptic gospels and seems to be alien to the teachings of Jesus, for whom salvation is available without any transaction, for whom faith means trusting in God's straightforward generosity, and for whom forgiveness is conditioned only by one's willingness to forgive others (Matt 6:14-15; Luke 6:37; 11:4).

Jesus on His Own Death

Of course, scholars do not accept the canonical gospels as precise historical records. Nevertheless, when a saying meets two or three of the main criteria (dissimilarity, multiple attestation, and coherence) it is considered to have an increased likelihood of historical veracity. There are quite a few parables and remarks of Jesus in the synoptic gospels indicating that he did not think that it was God's will that he should be murdered. Since this goes against the atonement concept, it meets the criterion of dissimilarity (being dissimilar to emerging church doctrine). Since it occurs in Mark-based, Q -based, and special Lukan texts, it has multiple attestation, and it coheres with Jesus' other teachings about God.

   In the parable of the vineyard and the tenant farmers, a vineyard owner sends his son to collect produce (Mark 12:2)-a natural thing for a vineyard owner to do. He did not send him to be killed-a very strange thing for a father to have done! The owner is angry when the tenants kill his son; that was not his intended outcome. The owner simply wanted his share of the produce; the latter image coheres with Jesus' other metaphors of agricultural growth to picture spiritual growth and progress: images of seeds germinating, trees bearing fruit, wheat growing overnight (Mark 4:28-31; Matt 7:17, etc.). Wanting "produce" means wanting to see spiritual progress. There is nothing here to suggest sacrifice or satisfaction.

   In his statements foretelling his death in the synoptics, Jesus says quite frankly that he is going to be killed and tries to prepare his apostles for the difficult experience that lies ahead for them, but he does not say that it is God's will, or that it will have any effect on peoples' salvation (except for the "ransom saying" in Mark 10:45, which is pointedly deleted from the parallel passage in Luke 22:26-27). There is no hint of atonement in the passion predictions, no concept of dying as a substitute for sinful humanity. The evangelists must have been aware of the atoning interpretations that were available, yet they applied no such interpretation to the passion predictions.

   Similarly, in their reports of Jesus' healings, the evangelists never have Jesus mention his coming death. He focuses on and affirms the faith of the people he heals, saying "your faith has made you whole" or "saved you" (the Greek sesoken can be translated either way; Luke 7:50; 8:48; 17:19; 18:42; Mark 5:34; 10:52). These affirmations of the healing power of faith are not accompanied by any doctrinal or sacrificial content.

   For Jesus, the way to God is already open, and one can get access by trusting, which is what "faith" means. The politics of doctrine in church history have caused the primary meaning of faith (trust) to be eclipsed by a secondary meaning (belief). The teaching of trust was faithfully recorded in the gospels as the core of the message of Jesus, but it did not become the core of the Christian proclamation about Jesus.

   What killed Jesus was the violence of people defending their religious and political turf: Sadducees scandalized by his temple critique (Mark 14:55-60) and Pharisees upset by his rejection of ritualism (Mark 7). Critique of ritual always means some critique of the social structure behind the ritual. Temple critique, in particular, implies a critique of the sacrificial system and its accompanying metaphysical assumptions and social stratifications. The response to Jesus was similar to the priestly response to an earlier prophet: "the land is not able to bear all his words" (Amos 7:10). Nor have Christian clergy refrained from silencing the voices of subsequent reformers and dissenters.

   The cross demonstrates the cruelty of the state and the violent envy of religious hierarchies; it was not required by God. This fact is too painful for many Christians to admit, since it threatens to reveal something about their continuing engagement in selfish political maneuvering and in the use of ritual to enforce conformity.

The Psychology of Atonement - Why Atonement is Compelling

The Jesus tradition provides the wherewithal to break the spell of sacrificial thinking. But feeling the need to explain the horrifying public killing of Jesus, Christians utilized sacrificial metaphors and steadily gave in to old ways of sacrificial thinking. That should lead us to ask why the concept of atonement has been so compelling in religious thought. The answer can be found in certain notions about "the way life is," about "give to get," about "no free lunch." People felt perpetually unlucky, in debt, or guilty (depending on the degree of moral self-consciousness in the religious culture). Projecting their experiences with the material order onto the divine level, they have concluded that nothing is free in the spiritual economy either. They believe that, even on the spiritual level, "you've got to pay for everything" and that suffering is one form of payment ("no pain, no gain"). In ancient cultures around the world, people tended to approach their gods the same way they approached each other, practicing inducement, ingratiation, alliance, and manipulation in their religion, as in their social lives. Cleansing, payment, self-punishment, and other forms of recompense were necessary to regain the good will of the deity. Much of this reflects, not surprisingly, the strategies children use to regain the good will of grouchy or abusive parents.

   Besides such a family psychology background there is a background of social psychology. There seems to be

a nearly universal belief that ritual preserves or restores proper order. We see this in Hebrew culture, for instance, where Yom Kippur is thought to be restorative, cleansing (re-ordering) the temple. But it is true of cultures around the world where rituals serve to bestow stability, affirm meaning, and regain safety.

   Atonement ideas that emerge from sacrificial systems, then, reflect the notion of giving (food, livelihood) to get something in return and the instinct that ritual preserves order. Hebrew sacrifice was believed both to maintain order (separating priests from laity, men from women, Jews from Gentiles) and to restore order (purification). Rituals restore one's adequacy before God, affirming social order and one's place in it. And sacrificial images of salvation offer ritual rectification for those who feel stained with sin, or who think they stand in irredeemable spiritual debt (both of which are forms of disorder).

   Rituals define a society and provide spiritual relief to those who belong to it. This socialized religious mentality, however, can be quite stifling to those who do not feel fully at home in that society, or who seek justice or truth beyond its established boundaries. No good deed, if it departs from the routine, goes unpunished. That Jesus was profoundly ill at ease with purity boundaries is evident from his behavior in the temple, and from the fact that he quoted the most radical prophets and consorted with "unclean" Gentiles, women, and tax collectors. Jesus was repeatedly criticized by religious professionals and politicians for disregarding purity boundaries.

The Cycle of Guilt and Cruelty

The atonement doctrine perpetuates ancient sacrificial beliefs and the anxieties they represent. It responds to (and perpetuates) worry about unresolved relationships, "owing" others, and the retaliation that is always looming. This nerve-wracking condition generates emotional outbursts of blame, self-blame, rage, guilt, and sorrow.

   God, too, is imagined to have a temper. Atonement envisions God as the ultimate authority figure, the great

judge or offended lord, who begrudges pardon or purification to believers who are told in no uncertain terms that they are still really guilty and dirty, and so should not relax their self judgment for a moment. The Christian idea of undeserved forgiveness does not dispel guilt. Rather, the idea of someone being tortured to death for one's benefit increases guilt. Atonement locks some believers into a mentality of shame about the "purchased" release, thereby making gratitude guilty-minded and joyless. For some, the liturgy can bring a temporary respite from feelings of dread and guilt. Others have found a way to escape guilt by suspending moral feeling altogether. They understand salvation by faith to mean never again having to worry about "works" at all and consequently feel free to indulge in behavior that is thoughtless and bullying without risking their salvation because, after all, what do works matter? In atonement psychology, consciousness of guilt, it seems, is always either excessive or insufficient.

   Parental cruelty is motivated by an unconscious dread of possible violence from God. Just as children develop strategies of bargaining, submission, and appeasement for dealing with violent parents, so do adults develop strategies of flattery, payment, diversion, and self-punishment for placating God. All of this is manipulative. Displays of piety and sacrifice are meant to impress God and cause him to extend his favor. Jesus offers a radically different option by teaching that people should trust God, a father who delights in giving every good thing to his children (Matt 6:30-33; 7:7-11). Jesus' God need not be manipulated.

   The harshness of God is really a by-product of ages of harsh parenting. Our God-concept and our concepts of parenting are interdependent, for better or for worse. As parents become less frightening, God becomes less frightening. The message becomes "come, let us reason together" (Isa 1:18) rather than "a fire is kindled by my anger" (Dent 32:22). But if we have fathers who really would give their sons a stone rather than a loaf of bread (Matt 7:9), then the God-concept will make no progress.

   Christianity is a profound mixture of these opposing teachings. And atonement mentality is often a paradoxical mixture of noble and crude ideas, combining manipulative motivations with ideas of loyalty and devotion. Atonement doctrine is fueled by anxiety, yet it may also embody love, a love that has not disentangled itself from manipulative behaviors. Simplistic analysis simply will not do justice to this topic. Atonement thinking commingles noble values with selfish motives based on the assumption of a cruel God.

   The sacrificial interpretation of the death of Jesus takes ancient ideas of ritual pollution, blood magic, sin debt, and ransoming, and spiritualizes them with ideas of heroism and (sometimes) of moral repair. The result is a complicated mix of ritual instincts and moral reflection, but reflection that has not grown up and moved out of the dysfunctional parental home. The sacrificial metaphor draws together many important religious ideas, but it has been taken too literally and has become intertwined with a crude ideology about punishing children that is inconsistent with Jesus' own statements about, and treatment of, children.

   One could say that crude sacrificial concepts are just the way that simple people get the point that God loves them-they get it in distorted form, but at least they get it. Another option is to say that sacrificial salvation is inherently distorted and perpetuates a cycle of harshness and abuse; it is a hand that offends me, and I would rather cut it off than enter the judgment with it.

Stephen Finlan is an Adjunct Professor of Theology at Fordham and Seton Hall Universities, with a Ph.D. in Pauline Theology from University of Duram (U.K.). He is the author of The Background and Content of Paul's Cultic Atonement Metaphors (2004) and Problems with Atonement (2005). A new book, Options on Atonement, is forthcoming in 2007.

                                                                       [WESTAR - Fourth R - Vol. 20 no 4 - July/Aug. 2007]