Theodore W. Jennings Jr. Transforming Atonement. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009.
I liked this book. I agreed with Jennings almost the whole time, but I felt it was flawed by a persistently one-sided analysis. This may be due to his audience. One suspects he is trying to win over people in the church who will find his views difficult, and that is to be applauded. It can be a bit frustrating to read though. For instance, his discussion of asceticism is a good warning about how it has been misconstrued and can be put to work against the heart of the Christian faith but there’s no indication of how it can be used to further our love and compassion for other people. Another example would be his handling of the gospel material on repentance. He points out that Jesus is happy to be with ‘sinners’ and include them in God’s kingdom without prior conditions. He suggests this is perhaps what repentance means for Luke (87). But he doesn’t reckon with the stories when Jesus tells sinners not to sin any more, or calls them unrighteous, or the implicit narrative approval when (for instance) Levi stops cheating people. (Here the continuity between John the Baptist’s calls to repentance and Jesus’ own are instructive). Nor does he attend to Jesus’ more conservative moments, for instance, his pronouncements on marriage. That is not to say I disagree with his central thrust on the indiscriminate welcome of God and the over-riding importance of mercy. I realise this could come across as some sort of arch-conservative moralising and that really isn’t my intention. It’s just that the biblical material is a bit more varied than I think he allows for. Maybe this is because he feels his audience knows that side of the story well enough.
Jennings takes seriously the problems that have come from atonement theory, especially for Jews, women and other marginalized or oppressed people. He takes seriously the need to try to understand the process of reconciliation that Jesus’ death and resurrection are meant to effect. For instance, so often one hears recourse to language of sacrifice, but no explanation of the underlying metaphysics that are supposed to make this intelligible. Does God want Jesus to die? How does that help anything? If there’s a flaw here it is perhaps that Jennings dismisses the traditional theories too quickly, and that some of us may want to take more from them than he allows.
Jennings is often close to Girard and Girardian theology, which is all to the good, I think. It is important to make clear, as he does, that God does not will the death of Jesus. But God isn’t stupid, and God, like Jesus, would have been expecting Jesus to be killed, and God, like Jesus, thought that Jesus should allow this to happen in order to expose the violence and scapegoating on which we construct our communities (I speak in shorthand). So there is a sense in which God does require Jesus’ death, the sense of martyrdom. Of course, God would have preferred people to follow Christ and begin a new politics, but this is naïve. So statements such as ‘the divine will is in every case opposed to human suffering as such’ (40) are perhaps a little careless, especially in light of Jennings’ own talk of solidarity with the suffering, which involves suffering with them.
Jennings seems to think all power is bad: ‘the opposition between the messianic force and the structures of power is itself complete.’ (215) It’s as if any institutions or community structure is automatically bad. That seems to be going too far. I’m not convinced we can live without such institutions and structures, and I think they can be good and helpful. They are not always good and we should always have a critical and especially self-critical attitude, which is what Jennings has. That alertness to institutional injustice, and to the church betraying the messianic vision, is very important. But simply affirming that justice, mercy and peace are more important than anything else, though true, is not enough. Now this is not a work about how to keep communities together or how to build good and just institutions, so it is not entirely fair to criticise Jennings for failing to do that, but one suspects he would be uninterested or uncomfortable with such work because it always involves compromise, pragmatism, making do. That may be unfair, he may be very interested in that, it’s just a nagging suspicion. His observation that secular movements may be ‘historical effects’ of the message of the cross is a good example of where this critical emphasis bears fruit.
One difficulty is how would put into practice the refusal of ‘ideological privilege of one group relative to another.’ (64) I liked this idea but wonder how it would work in practice. How can communities be shaped towards justice and peace without criticising those who deny justice and peace? This is what Jennings thinks Jesus was really criticising the Pharisees for, and I tend to agree. But isn’t this an example of ideological privileging? (Jennings says that Jesus is always against the accuser (94) and the quotes him as accusing the Pharisees of a lot of bad things). Jennings seems to want us to abandon the importance of (and need for, presumably) baptism and church membership (82), but without addressing how the message of Christ will then be transmitted as a form of life. It’s one thing to say the church often gets it horribly wrong, which is true enough; it’s another to say we should get rid of it. It’s not clear if this is what Jennings imagines, but it would be really interesting to know just what he does think about this. There’s a hint on p.154: ‘In these defenses of the “rationality” of the message concerning the cross, a constant feature will be an appeal to the form of life of hose who came to be called Christians.’ Especially their communal life. Diversity is to be welcomed, taken seriously, not allowed to be a cause of division. We should renounce the ‘sense of religious security, the reassurance that is provided by adherence to a religious institution or tradition.’ (182) I think this is probably right, but difficult to do; to try to take one’s beliefs seriously, and live them consistently, but recognising you may be mistaken about them, and therefore not assuming you alone have access to truth or God. ‘What is involved here is a withdrawal of a certain kind of belief, belief in the ultimacy of these structures, their permanence of self-evidence. What it is that binds us to these structures loses its hold or claim. We engage them, but without being determined by them.’ (189) But does this underplay how much we need structures, how influential they are on us?
In the end, Jennings advocates breaking with and leaving behind the atonement theories of the past to emphasise the politics of the cross. The desired result is the view that ‘justice and mercy are always more important than any religious practices whatsoever, and that religious practices and places are often no more than an attempt to evade the call and claim of God to enact justice and mercy.’ (145) Hard to disagree with the latter, whatever you think of the former.
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