פֶּסַח And The Ransom Theory Of The Atonement *(Continued)

Sorry for the hiatus from my Atonement Post series for awhile but it seems like so much Blog-worthy stuff has been happening lately that it's been hard to keep up with everything. Anyways, continuing from the previous post: TheoPoetic Musings: פֶּסַח And The Ransom Theory Of The Atonement---here are a few other thoughts regarding the Ransom Theory of the Atonement:

First here's a refresher on what the Ransom theory exactly entails:

The ransom view of the atonement, sometimes called the classical view of atonement,[1] is one of several doctrines in Christian theology related to the meaning and effect of the death of Jesus Christ. The first major theory of the atonement, it originated in the early Church, particularly in the work of Origen. The theory teaches that the death of Christ was a ransom, usually said to have been paid to Satan, in satisfaction of his just claim on the souls of humanity as a result of sin. Robin Collins summarized it as follows:

Essentially, this theory claimed that Adam and Eve sold humanity over to the Devil at the time of the Fall; hence, justice required that God pay the Devil a ransom to free us from the Devil's clutches. God, however, tricked the Devil into accepting Christ's death as a ransom, for the Devil did not realize that Christ could not be held in the bonds of death. Once the Devil accepted Christ's death as a ransom, this theory concluded, justice was satisfied and God was able to free us from Satan's grip.[2]

"Redeeming" meaning, literally, "buying back," and the ransoming of war captives from slavery was a common practice in the era. The theory was also based in part on Mark 10:45 ("For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many") and 1 Timothy 2:5-6 ("For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time"). The ransom theory was the main view of atonement through the first thousand years of Christian history, though it was never made a required belief.[2]

Another way of viewing the Ransom theory is that God ransomed us from Himself via Jesus in some way---although, the above definition is the traditional description of the Ransom view of the Atonement. Also, the traditional understanding of the Ransom theory is widely accepted by the Eastern Orthodox Church or some other variation of the Ransom theory:

Today, the ransom view of atonement is not widely accepted in the West, except by a few theologians in the Word of Faith movement. However, it remains the official position of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[1]

I believe that we can view the Ransom theory as God ransoming us from not only sin and death as the Ransom theory mixed with the Christus Victor view of the Atonement suggests but that God also ransomed us from His wrath as well as slavery to the Law---which is what Christian liberty and freedom afforded to us by God's Grace is. In other words, Jesus' victory on the Cross ransomed us from the sting of death, God's wrath and the double burden of sin and the Law.

Anyways, one other way that this motif of liberation appears in the scriptures is within the framework of Palm Sunday. Here in this cry:
When the Jews cried out "Hosanna" they were hoping that Jesus the Messiah would liberate them from slavery to a foreign power as God once had done before during the Exodus---of course, the slavery the Jews were enduring during this period was a different type of slavery than the slavery of the Exilic period, but the same principle was there. Hosanna is basically a Hebrew idiom for "save us" or "deliver us" but it is also related to the theme of liberation, which ties into the Ransom theory well as in:

Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" (Mark 11:9)

How would you welcome Jesus to the city? What should be our attitude to his coming into our world or into our lives? He is one who comes to meet us. Remember too that he did promise to come again and he warned his followers to be ready to welcome him when they least expected to see him.

(Luke 12:35-36) "Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; {36} be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.
If we are to be ready, what should be our attitude in expecting him? And, at a devotional level, remember how he said, in that vision of the end time in the book of Revelation:

(Revelation 3:20) Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.
Those are perhaps more private ways of welcoming him than the public demonstration which greeted him at the entry to Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday. As we were remembering last week he arrived on an immense wave of popularity, while at the same time trying to prepare himself and his disciples for his death.

As they made a carpet of welcome for him with their cloaks and the branches they carried, they shouted "Hosanna!" The word "Hosanna" is formed from two Hebrew words meaning "Save now", or taken together "Save us" or "O save". We tend to think of the shouts of the crowd welcoming Jesus as shouts of joy; and true it is that the cry of "Hosanna" had been used for centuries in festivals of joyful celebration; yet originally such festivals were also times of remembrance when pain and suffering were brought to mind. To call out "Save us" was to greet a saviour, not in the personal sense in which Christians today might think of it concerning our individual salvation, but more in the sense of a national saviour, like a general leading an army of liberation. That kind of saviour came to deliver them from danger or present suffering under an oppressor who was a ruler of a similar kind. For the people who shouted "Hosanna" to Jesus, it might well have been a joyful in anticipation of being liberated from a foreign power which occupied their country. The same shouts with the waving of branches were sometimes used to celebrate a victory over enemies that had already been won, as when a few generations before Jesus came to Jerusalem the people celebrated the defeat of their enemies in the time of the Maccabees:

They celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the festival of the booths, remembering how not long before, during the festival of the booths, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals. Therefore, carrying ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanks giving to him who had given success to the purifying of his holy place. -- 2 Maccabees 10:6-7.
Note the waving of branches and remember too how Jesus purified the Temple. In another part of those writings that fall between the Old and New Testaments, 1 Maccabees 13:51, we read of an entry to Jerusalem not very different from what happened with Jesus:

It was on the twenty-third day of the second month in the year 171 [about the beginning of June 141 BC] that the Jews entered the city amid a chorus of praise and the waving of palm branches, with lutes, cymbals, and zithers, with hymns and songs, to celebrate Israel's final riddance of a formidable enemy. [REB]
Those celebrations of the life of the nation being saved and the Temple restored are continued today as the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which comes close to our Christmas -- our celebration of the coming of the Saviour.

So Jesus was welcomed in a traditional manner, and it was with thoughts of deliverance of the kind that one would expect of a king leading an army of liberation. Of course it was quite clearly different. Jesus chose to ride a donkey rather than a war horse and took on the style of a humble servant.

Picture then the Jews asking Jesus to liberate them from their captivity and another view of the Ransom theory emerges for Jesus does liberate/ransom us from our worldly/societal inclinations so that we are free to follow Him by participating in the Kingdom of God and in this way also we find another multifaceted and rich contextual layer to the Ransom Theory of the Atonement. Anyways, so ends my discussion on the Ransom Theory of the Atonement. Next, we'll be look at Implications Of The Incarnation To The Atonement and don't worry if you've missed any of my Atonement or Holy Week posts, I will index them in a single post after I've finished the series.

פֶּסַח And The Ransom Theory Of The Atonement

---Image from: The God Blog: A Look At Religion In The News.

So originally this post was originally going to be titled שִׁ֥יר הַשִּׁירִ֖ים (Shir Ha-Shirim), Intimacy And The Passover as previously mentioned but I'm saving that post for a later and separate post as that post more specifically deals with the beginning of the impartation of the Holy Spirit to be incarnated in all peoples of the world instead of dwelling within the Holy Of Holies. Anyways, פֶּסַח (Pesach) is the Hebrew word normally translated as Passover---a word coined by English Bible translator William Tyndale who translated the first mostly complete English Bible from the original languages rather than from the Latin Vulgate translation as Wycliffe had done about 200 years earlier. Tyndale also coined the word Atonement as Wade Burleson pointed out:

William Tyndale himself coined the English word atonement to help get over translation difficulties of the Hebrew word kipper and the Greek word hilasterion. Tyndale's understanding of the words kipper and hilasterion was that they pointed to a full and entire work of the triune God in making a total satisfaction for sin by providing a complete substitution, which was a once-and-for-all act procuring everlasting salvation for His people. This "moment" of becoming "at one" with sinners He chose to redeem Tyndale called an "at- one- moment."

My friend George Ella writes about why Tyndale intentionally coined the word "atonement" in order to translate the Bible into English:

The Roman Catholic Church, in the days of Tyndale, viewed the atonement as reconciliation being made to God for man’s guilt or original sin but not for the penalty of sin which had to be worked off by works of special merit and penance. This left the reconciled without true union with Christ and with Christ’s work only half done. This error led Tyndale to realise that the entire Biblical teaching was concerned with man becoming fully accepted in the Beloved, and thus becoming one with God. Christ’s reconciling death, he therefore saw, was an at-one-ment with God and promptly used the word to express both the Old and New Testament words to do with a sinner becoming right with God through an expiatory sacrifice at God’s initiative.

Moving forward---Passover of course is the Jewish holiday which commemorates the events of Jewish Exile and subsequent Liberation from slavery---here is a brief description of that:

Passover (Hebrew, Yiddish: פֶּסַח, Pesach (help·info), Tiberian: pɛsaħ, Israeli: Pesah, Pesakh, Yiddish: Peysekh, Paysokh) is a Jewish and Samaritan holy day and festival commemorating God sparing the Israelites when he killed the first born of Egypt, and is the seven day Feast of the Unleavened Bread (it lasts eight days in the diaspora) commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery.[1]

Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan (equivalent to March and April in Gregorian calendar), the first month of the Hebrew calendar's festival year according to the Hebrew Bible.[2]

In the story of the Exodus, the Bible tells that God inflicted ten plagues upon the Egyptians before Pharaoh would release his Israelite slaves, with the tenth plague being the killing of firstborn sons. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a spring lamb and, upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord passed over these homes, hence the term "passover".[3] When Pharaoh freed the Israelites, it is said that they left in such a hurry that they could not wait for bread to rise. In commemoration, for the duration of Passover, no leavened bread is eaten, for which reason it is also called חַג הַמַּצּוֹת (Ḥag haMaẓot), "The Festival of the Unleavened Bread".[4] Matza (unleavened bread) is the primary symbol of the holiday. This bread that is flat and unrisen is called Matzo.

Together with Shavuot ("Pentecost") and Sukkot ("Tabernacles"), Passover is one of the three pilgrim festivals (Shalosh Regalim) during which the entire Jewish populace historically made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. Samaritans still make this pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim, but only men participate in public worship.[5][6]

It is within the context of the Passover that Jesus and the Disciples celebrated the Last Supper which was most likely part of the Passover Seder. (More on that in my next post). It is also within the context of the Exile that the Ransom Theory of the Atonement emerges as previously stated:

Limiting the atonement to any one flawed and man-made theory of the atonement does a disservice to ourselves and others. Instead I propose that when one looks at all the theories of the atonement a more holistic approach to the atonement emerges as each flawed theory corrects the flaws of the others. For example, the Ransom theory is flawed in the fact that it makes God out to be a deceiver but it’s scripturally supported such as in the case of I Timothy 2:5-6:

5 For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, (NKJV)

And when one reads the Jewish Exile as a metaphor for human slavery to sin, so that the Ransom theory is one that emerges from the picture of the marketplace with the Gospel accounts' use of λύτρον (lutron) and more accurately a slave market with the theory’s metaphorical use of Exilic literature.

See pgs. 81-82 of Guide to Christian Belief (Questions of Faith) by Mark W. G. Stibbe for a more detailed explanation of the Ransom Theory and the picture of the marketplace. I shall continue my discussion of the Ransom theory in the post after the next.

More Thoughts On The Atonement

Yesterday, I was going to start my post series on the Atonement, but last night we found out my grandfather Jack had another heart-attack and had to go to the hospital. He seems to be ok now that they gave him some blood last night. My mom went to stay with my grandparents today. Also, yesterday I gathered up some more books for my upcoming series on the Atonement. Anyways, here are some thoughts on the Ransom Theory Of Atonement which I shared on Christian's post:

I never said that I disagreed with the idea of the penal substitution theory of the atonement. What I disagree with is those that believe it is the only theory of the atonement. Limiting the atonement to any one flawed and manmade theory of the atonement does a disservice to ourselves and others. Instead I propose that when one looks at all the theories of the atonement a more holistic approach to the atonement emerges as each flawed theory corrects the flaws of the others. For example, the Ransom theory is flawed in the fact that it makes God out to be a deceiver but it’s scripturally supported in1 Timothy 2:5-6:

5 For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, (NKJV)

And when one reads the Jewish Exile as a metaphor for human slavery to sin, so that the Ransom theory is one that emerges from the picture of the marketplace with the Gospel accounts' use of λύτρον (lutron) and more accurately a slave market with the theory’s metaphorical use of Exilic literature.

Since my first post in the series will be on the Passover and it's connection with the Ransom theory, the above comment is pertinent. See also: Ransom Theory--Blasphemy or Misunderstood?

My last post in the series will deal with the Christus Victor view of the atonement. Here is my comment on Christian's post pertaining to that:

Interesting post… sounds like one that I’m going to post soon on the Christus Victor theory of the atonement. Similar to your post—I found this interesting essay: EXCERPTS ON THE IDEA OF PUNISHMENT AND PAYMENT IN THE ATONEMENT while looking up links for my future post—although I don’t agree with everything that essay says—it does make valid points. See also: The Meaning of the Atonement—here is a summary of that:

Summary

In my judgment, Satisfaction/Penal Substitution runs contrary to Scripture at many points:

Penal Substitution declares that salvation must be earned by perfect, perpetual obedience;5 the Scriptures declare that God saves us “in accordance with his pleasure and will” (Eph. 1:5, NIV).
Penal Substitution declares that “God must visit sin with punishment”;6 the Scriptures declare that God “does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities” (Psa. 103:10, NIV).
Penal Substitution declares that in the Atonement, God is reconciled to humankind;7 the Scriptures declare rather that humankind is reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:18,19; Col. 1:20).
Penal Substitution declares that Christ dies instead of the sinner; the Scriptures declare that sinners must die with Christ (Rom. 6:1-14).
This is not to say that Satisfaction/Penal Substitution has no positive features. Indeed, it emphasizes the cross and the uniqueness of Christ’s death. However, I fear it “proves too much” by negating God’s forgiveness and excluding other aspects of the Atonement. Other theories of the Atonement have been articulated to take these other elements more seriously.

Penal substitution does have it’s flaws, but fundamentalists especially of the more Calvinistic type ala Todd Friel and John MacArthur won’t hear of it. Personally I believe that we should look at all the different theories of the atonement flaws and all and accept them as humans trying to make sense of what we see through a glass darkly. However that said—I lean more towards the Christus Victor view myself as being more consistent with God’s self-revelation in Christ.