Word: christ
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Arguments still rage as to which group of humans (everyone? Christians? the elect?) the sacrifice benefits and about whether our sins somehow retroactively exacerbate the agony of Christ's sacrifice. But no other postbiblical formulation has so elegantly intertwined the Father, the Son, wayward creation and intimations of sin and grace. None has so bound believer to Saviour in the intimacy of pain (and eventual Easter glory) and fulfilled Paul's great work of turning the Cross, an image of ultimate horror, into the paramount Western icon of love...
...most part, the skirmishing remains verbal. From early on, critics of the exemplary theory have held that it had no particular use for Christ's divinity. Any virtuous martyr might do. One wit remarked that the Bible could have ended with the death of Abel, a decent enough man. Calvinist Evangelicals like Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Southern Seminary, continue to press that point. Pure exemplary theory, he says, "is just an account of one human trying to impress other humans with the moral of self-sacrifice, and that is not the Christian Gospel and never...
This theory is known as exemplary atonement, and it was expounded with vigor a few weeks ago by the Rev. Shafer at Rutgers Presbyterian. Shafer, having just seen The Passion of the Christ, felt moved to respond to what he regarded as its assumption that "the central purpose of Jesus' existence [was] to offer himself as a sacrificial ransom to a God made angry by our sin." The pastor disagreed. "The mission and purpose of Jesus' life and ministry," he preached, "was, first, to model for humankind the fullness of mercy and forgiveness that God offers to us sinners...
Others see a double disempowerment--first of a humanity whose redemption is being negotiated well above its collective head and, more important, of Christ, the child of a father whose moral universe somehow seems to require his death. Even if one ignores literalist claims that substitution espouses divine child abuse, the evidence of hundreds of years suggests that, in the wrong hands, it can deliver the wrong message. Writes the Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, of her experience as a spiritual counselor: "Countless women have told me that their priest or minister had advised them...
...religious right's politics of individual morality. Indeed, substitution's top-down nature reaffirms conservatives' scorn of any rights that they feel lack God's biblical imprimatur. "The substitutionary understanding is humbling," says Mohler. "It has the Father in the position of satisfying his righteous demands of us through Christ's atonement. We don't have the authority to define our own existence or to claim rights such as a woman's right to abortion...