Crime & punishment.

Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross

Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition

Hans Boersma

Baker Academic, $29.99, 320 pp.

The Crucifixion of Jesus, surely one of the major dividing points in human history, has become of late an event in search of a theological purpose. Some contemporary believers and theologians, having rejected flawed interpretations of the cross--a cruel Father who demands the blood of his Son in payment for sin; a glorification of suffering that legitimizes oppression and abuse, especially of women and the poor; a reduction of Christ's life and ministry to mere opening acts for the real work of redemption on the cross--have offered little to take their place. James Carroll, for example, writes that Christians must de-emphasize the cross as a universally salvific act, in order to foster genuine respect for Judaism and other religions, but he leaves the cross with no constructive role to play either in Christ's life or in our own. Lutheran theologian David Yeago counters this. For Yeago, the cross changes things. It is not only a revelation of God's unconditional love for humanity and of divine solidarity with victims, it is the divinely willed event that renews humanity and creation.

In Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, Reformed theologian Hans Boersma, who teaches at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, seeks to recover the central meaning of the cross: atonement, or the reconciliation of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. Boersma writes that the cross is best understood as an expression of God's welcoming hospitality toward humanity. On Calvary, his arms outstretched, Jesus embraces humanity in all of its misery and grandeur, giving himself fully to both God and humanity, excluding no one from his sacrificial love.

To this straightforward argument, Boersma adds a twist: the Crucifixion involves a form of divinely "redemptive violence." Defining violence as "any use of force or coercion that involves some kind of hurt or injury--whether the coercion is physical or nonphysical," Boersma argues that in our fallen world violence can be necessary, moral, and redemptive. "To expect that in such historical circumstances God could correct evil in consistently nonviolent ways is to underestimate the persistence and power of evil."

The cross, for Boersma, is the supreme intersection of redemptive violence and divine hospitality. The core of his book explores the three dominant models in the Christian tradition: moral influence, in which Christ's death is the culmination of his teaching and moral witness; penal representation or substitution, in which Christ is punished and pays the price of human sin through his death; and Christus Victor, in which Christ defeats the powers of sin and death. In each model, Boersma claims, the cross is the means of atonement--absolute hospitality--and that in each, God acts violently: giving up his Son, punishing sin, and defeating evil.

Yet despite the apparent starkness of his argument, Boersma displays a welcome irenicism. When exploring polarizing topics (such as Anselm's satisfaction atonement theology), he writes with a generosity of style and understanding that always situates his criticisms within a broader appreciation for an author or even for a movement's strengths. Thus, when he affirms the necessity of divine wrath and anger, he does so not as a means of redressing an offense against God's honor but as a just response to the sin that violates God's good creation. In his final chapters, Boersma insists that cruciform hospitality has both ecclesial and worldly dimensions. He writes, for example, that reconciliation is inherently communal, that it cannot be limited to privatized, interior concerns. As a result, atonement and salvation are known fully only in the story of Israel, Christ, and the church.

Boersma's book, nonetheless, is sometimes repetitive, both within and among chapters; and his scholarly sobriety sometimes seems dutiful and plodding. More important, though, Boersma's theology of divine violence is finally unpersuasive. In particular, it underestimates the power of God's nonviolence to overcome evil. Although he fairly critiques Rene Girard's influential "scapegoat" theory as one that makes violence the foundation of human culture and history, he wrongly rejects Girard's point that humanity--not God--is the author of violence. The Father does not "hand over" his Son violently, but does so peacefully, to a humanity that is solely responsible for his crucifixion. The cross is the definitive instance of God's rejection of coercion: Christ defeats sin and death by submitting freely to them and subsequently being raised by the Father. Thus, the Apostle Paul wrote that God's weakness is more powerful than human strength, and that such weakness reveals the impotence of violence before God's hospitality. The Catholic theologians James Alison and the late Herbert McCabe have much to offer on these points.

Despite its limits, Boersma's book rightly underscores the cross-influenced character of all genuine Christian existence. As Luke Timothy Johnson has noted in these pages (November 5, 2004), the "new Gnosticism" exemplified by Elaine Pagels and others depends on a rejection of the concrete, the particular, and the communal. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, for instance, divorces Jesus from the story of Israel and ignores the Crucifixion. Salvation is shrunk to an amorphous inner enlightenment, one whose cost is negligible.

The cross, finally, is more about transformation than self-confirmation. Christ enters into the farthest depths of our alienation--suffering and death--and heals us from the inside out: "Christ is risen from the dead," the Eastern Easter Vigil chants repeatedly, triumphantly, "trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." In the cross, God does not wave a magic wand and declare everything well. Rather, at great cost, God actually makes us just and whole. We are divinized, given nothing other than God's own life in the crucified one, a paradox we must remain in rather than reject or attempt to resolve.

Christopher Ruddy is an assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.