Recovering Evangelicals #20 Atonement Theology: what does science have to say?
The last in this four part mini-series. Previously, we’ve talked about what science has to say about “Original Sin,” and then last week about seven ideas the Church has had for ten or twenty centuries about “Atonement.”
Here, we see how those seven ideas about Atonement stand up to our new modern understanding of human origins: we’ve evolved over millions of years from an ancestral species that we share in common with dozens of other hominids, and migrated out of Africa fifty to a hundred thousand years ago.
Most of those seven theories are really quite dependent on a very different version of human history: two humans created 6,000 years ago as perfect creatures in a garden in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). In fact, one of those theories — the one that produces the worst image of God … Penal Substitutionary Atonement — is absolutely dependent on that primal-couple-Garden-in-Eden scenario. The problem is, that scenario just doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about where humans came from. Three other theories which are basically variations on that PSA theme (Satisfaction Theory; Ransom Theory; Governmental Theory) may be less horrendous, but also don’t square up well with human history.
Two of the seven theories are not at all ruled out by human evolution: the Moral Influence Theory of Atonement (Jesus came to show us a better way to live) and Scapegoat Theory (an innocent is blamed for a problem in the community, and their murder by an angry mob solves the problem).
In fact, the Moral influence theory fits perfectly with what science tells us about the rise of humans through history, and with the timing of Christ’s appearance in human history:
- humans did not fall from a state of perfection, and from an intimate, personal relationship with God. Instead, it shows us how we’ve been on an upward trajectory biologically, anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, religiously, and even morally.
- Christ came not at the beginning of our history to take care of sin before it became a problem, nor at the end of our history after all that sin had taken place. Instead, he came into our history when we were still in the middle of that upward trajectory and finally ready … as a species … for a whole new idea. Moral influence indeed!
This new way of looking at Atonement is especially interesting when you look at the word that the Bible uses for sin, which is the fundamental problem being solved here. That word is a metaphor taken not from law (penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), or from clothing (stain; dirty; torn; rip), but instead a word taken from archery: a sport that’s all about being on a trajectory towards an ideal target … and falling short of the goal. Hmmmmm.
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