Here is the first post exploring ideas surrounding ‘reconciliation’. The first few will try and set the scene and give some (of my) pressupositions / boundaries. I will eventually publish these posts in an edited and expanded form in a pdf document.
There are many ways in which people approach God’s redemptive work and probably when it is reduced to a single lens much is lost in that process. One very common way is to emphasise God’s holiness in contrast to humanity’s sin and guilt, thus with some measure of payment introduced to enable redemption to take place. This approach, at worst, can present a divide in the Trinity (God, the Father demanding justice and the Son sacrificially taking the consequences so that justice is met; two principle actors – could this contribute to the marginalisation of the Spirit in much theology?); at best ‘payment theories’ can be presented using an analogy such as when someone breaks something of value that belongs to someone else and thus to repair it there will be a cost that has to be borne by someone. Such theologies then say that the ‘payment’ is not met by the one who broke the valued item but the generous God of creation undertakes the repair at his / her cost. This view undergirds Anselm’s satisfaction theory of satisfying God’s honour and the predominant view from the Reformation of restoring justice – restored, we note, through punishment. The inadequacy of the illustration, though, is that what needs to be repaired is something external whereas the repair in the biblical story is a relational repair. In that sense the cost of repair is not something that has to be weighed up for a God who so loved the world but does everything to bring about the healing that is needed relationally. Did Jesus pay a price? Yes indeed, but also we need to marvel at ‘for the joy set before him’, the utter commitment to bring about restoration. We might suggest that the pleasure of seeing humanity healed and thus able to fulfil their destiny is what motivates the journey of Incarnation through to the cross.
God was in Christ reconciling
A relational framework is central to Scripture. The God of Scripture is not some great unmoved mover, but an intensely motivated ‘Person’. Rather than focus on guilt and falling short of a standard it is better to focus on relational alienation. Disobedience is present in the first chapters of the Bible and subsequently throughout but the response desired is not for humanity to come back to obeying a set of laws but back into relationship, to be reconciled to God. Sin is to fall short, to fall short of the glory of God as humans (Rom. 3:23). Paul has already in the first chapter of Romans contrasted the glory that is ours (made in the image of God) with the choice made:
and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles (Rom. 1: 23).
Sin then is deeper than a ‘not doing what we were told’ and is centred in ‘not being who we were created’. Created to bear / carry the image of God, to be God-like, to be relational and to be agents of reconciliation where relationships are damaged. Sin is best understood as falling short of bearing the name of God as image-bearers, of falling short of displaying the wonderful God-glory so that it can be visible. The words we read in John’s Gospel of Jesus that, ‘We beheld his glory full of grace and truth’ reveal what true humanity looks like, Jesus being the express image of the invisible God.
True humanity
Alienation and reconciliation might be a reductive approach but it is one I consider is sufficiently representative of the biblical narrative as it focuses on the broken relationships and the redemptive process in bringing about healing. Alienation is expressed in multiple ways in the aftermath of ‘eating the forbidden fruit’. Divides and distancing are expressed in so many areas in that chapter and the subsequent ones.
- God / human
- male / female
- self alienation
- human / creation
- familial divides
- angelic / human.
Such tensions and divides are throughout the biblical narrative; alienation, being a relational word, is at the heart of the problem, thus reconciliation is at the heart of the solution.
In this extended article I will follow the theme of reconciliation and how that outworks in four directions
- Reconciliation to God
- Reconciliation to fellow-humans (and this has to include the ‘other’, even the person(s) that might be termed the ‘enemy’)
- Reconciliation to oneself, or as commonly termed ‘self-acceptance’
- Reconciliation to creation, the planet on which we live.
I am not suggesting that the above four are of equal status, but neither am I suggesting that any one aspect can eliminate one or more of the other three. All four aspects are essential as we hold out for ‘the reconciliation of all things’.
We might wish to argue that the first (reconciliation to God) has to come first in a temporal sense and without that taking place the others have no ‘kingdom’ value. I prioritise the first as of greatest value, but am not prepared to denigrate the others as having no value; indeed the other three should critique the claim that we have been reconciled to God.
In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us (2Cor.5:19).
What aspects of the world was God reconciling? Paul centres in on ‘us’ as we are the core of the problem. If we are out of sync everything else follows suit, such as we read in Genesis that the ground was cursed because of us. Reconciliation, and the great hope was of the reconciliation of ‘all things’. This reconciliation, Paul insists is to take place through the cross:
and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature [to the whole creation] under heaven. I, Paul, became a minister of this gospel (Col. 1:20-23, emphases added).
The reconciliation is already ‘ours’, but the message goes beyond us – to all creation (NRSV translating ktisis (creation) as creature). Paul’s vision of salvation / restoration is as big as to solve all issues, thus the universal statement of ‘all things, whether on earth or in heaven’. The apostolic gospel is cosmic in its message and the apostolic commission is to partner with the fulfilment of that message.
There is a small statement in Mark (short Gospel but with a number of small statements that can be missed) with regard to the temptation of Jesus, a note of heavenly and earthly reconciliation:
He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him (Mk. 1:13).
The angelic and human together, and… the wild beasts with the true human thus bringing a major aspect of the ‘all things’ of creation into harmony as expressed in the Isaianic vision of ultimate transformation. The true human who, unlike the first Adam does not submit to the ‘god of this world’, exhibits in the wilderness of all places (the supposed domain of the demonic) something of the reconciliation of all things.
Reconciliation to God is central, but the theme of reconciliation does not find its completion with some spiritual state for the redeemed elite. Hence the exploration of reconciliation in these four dimensions.