Who was paid?

I have never watched The Sopranos but Cathleen Kaveny's discussion of religious redemption in the show ("Salvation & 'The Sopranos,'" February 9) grabbed my attention.

In the article, Kaveny uses St. Anselm's theory on how the death of Jesus worked for salvation, a theory based on a concept of retributive justice. This theology and interpretation has lost its standing in modern Scripture study and is hardly "central" any longer. The problem with this theory is that it couldn't answer the question, Who receives the ransom paid in the buyback, God or the devil? What kind of god demands the suffering and death of the innocent and the just to assuage his anger? Is this really the Father of Jesus? But if it's the devil who receives the ransom, this raises the question of who has the ultimate power in the cosmos.

No one was "paid" when God liberated Israel from Egypt. No one was "paid" when God used Cyrus to liberate Judah from Babylon. Both were God's acts of love and power on behalf of his people. Both were an undeserved free gift from God. No one was "paid" when God liberated humans from the power of sin and death; it was God's act of love and power in and through Jesus of Nazareth. Our liberation was, and is, an undeserved gift from God. However mob sagas may portray religious redemption, our redemption in Christ Jesus is the experience of grace--the free gift of God's salvation.

Redemptio was the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament term apolutrosis. In nonbiblical Greek, apolutrosis did mean "ransom" or "buy back." But by St. Paul's time that was a dead metaphor and apolutrosis was used in the New Testament to mean "liberate." Fortunately for us, the New Testament was written in Greek, not Latin.

There is a theological explanation of how the death of Jesus works for our salvation that corresponds with apolutrosis interpreted as "liberate." This theology is usually described as participation theology. It understands love as participation in the actual, lived destiny of the beloved. A clearly written Roman Catholic application of participation theology can be found in Cardinal Walter Kasper's Jesus the Christ. Ernst Kasemann and Paul Tillich have both written on the subject.

Chapter 3 of Dei verbum contains Catholic guidelines on interpretation that call for respecting the way language was used and understood in the time and culture of a text's composition. In my Scripture class, I plan to discuss Kaveny's interpretation of religious redemption as an example of the way not to do biblical exegesis.

MICHAEL SHEPPECK

Albany, N. Y.

THE AUTHOR RESPONDS

My purpose in the article was to explore the concept of religious redemption as it functions in The Sopranos, not to do full-scale biblical exegesis. The notion of redemption as Christ "buying us back" from sin and death is indeed subverted by Tony's "paying the price" (the down payment on the spec house) to buy Carmela back for a life of sin and death. That notion is not foreign to mainstream Catholic thought; indeed, the Catechism speaks of Christ's mission as "to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Still, I can't resist adding that Michael Sheppeck's interpretation of early church history is rather out-of-date. One does not need to be an Anselmian to recognize the centrality of the notion of "ransom" to our understanding of Christ's salvific action. Recent scholarship emphasizes the thoroughly Jewish context in which Jesus and his early interpreters operated. Redemption involved three closely related concepts in ancient Israelite society. All first-born males, whether human or animal, belonged to Yahweh. They could be redeemed from sacrifice by the substitution of a fixed amount of money. Second, it was the duty of the next of kin to redeem a brother, uncle, or clansman who had sold himself into slavery because of poverty. This redeemer also has a duty to exact blood vengeance on the murderer of his relatives. Third, the notion of redemption points to the ransom or price paid for a life that has become forfeit through wrongdoing. This notion of ransom is connected to the covering over of sin, atonement, and expiation. The Hebrew Scriptures analogically extended these functions to Yahweh on behalf of Israel; The New Testament extended them to Jesus on behalf of all humanity. So I do not agree that the meaning of apolutrosis as "ransom" or "buying back" is a dead metaphor--I think it is a rich, living metaphor that helps us recognize the intimate relationship between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.

CATHLEEN KAVENY