There’s been a heavy slew of blog posts and books lately on why young adults are leaving the church (see Frank Schaeffer, Christian Piatt, Dianna Butler Bass, etc.).  And Bass is awesome in her interview by the way!  This is a good conversation to have, and I think the practical issues definitely need to be addressed.  We should talk about aesthetics, music, liturgy, ethics, programs, etc.  But two of the biggest factors at hand, I would want to say, are still identity and purpose; and surely we get these from our theology, and perhaps more precisely, our christology.  Without this, it’s hard for me to see how the church won’t just eventually morph into something else.

As has frequently been noted, a major problem in many evangelical contexts continues to be the degree to which “the gospel” is equated with the penal substitutionary theory of atonement (PSA).  I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the future of the emergent church depends on its ability to articulately refute, and concisely recast, this reductive tendency amongst our more conservative friends.  No matter what kind of social justice projects (KONY 2012, etc.)  get tacked onto this message, and regardless of how much Relevant Magazine calls for “rejecting apathy,” so long as PSA is depicted as the full picture or main event of the good news, the church will always fall short of expressing Jesus’ vision for it.  (By the way, I’m talking to people who still care about preserving something like the Christian church that isn’t just Mainline version 2.0… if this isn’t you, that’s fine!).  An adequate response, however, might take more than just ignoring or only deconstructing the components of Bebbington’s evangelical quadrilateral (conversionism, Biblicism, crucicentrism and evangelism).

Because even if you’re convinced that PSA is the devil, and even if you revise it, the language is in the Bible, so it’s probably not going away.  Tony Jones knows this, and he also knows better than to flatly dismiss it.  Instead, as others have tried to do (e.g., Scot McKnight), he’s merely attempting to dethrone it, and I would like to join him.  I’m very appreciative of the various feminist criticisms of traditional atonement readings (especially that of Kathryn Tanner), but unless “emergent” is to become forever irrelevant even to the most open-minded evangelicals (does this matter?), then you can’t just throw out PSA.

At the same time, Tony is also careful to point out that, generally speaking, atonement theory (not christology) has never really been a dividing debate in church history and shouldn’t be now.  Compared to the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, atonement is secondary.  I’m not as sure about this, but he could be right.  I’m simply saying that, just as mainliners might need to meet emergents halfway, so too maybe emergents can be generous enough to “go to the middle” for evangelicals so to speak.  Or at least for those of us who are recovering, as I’ve heard Tripp say, it’s a good idea to be gracious to every version of our old selves.

Here are some things from the book:

• The first thing Jones does is to (convincingly, in my view, and biblically!) debunk original sin without neglecting the seriousness of sin as such.  Again, this is not new, but sin must be understood structurally and socially (war, violence, oppression, inequality, environmental degradation, etc) without forgetting about it individually.  This is crucial for an emergent church theological project.

• Secondly, in a respectful and fair way, Jones directly challenges Driscoll and Piper on this issue for their hyper and irresponsible, Calvinist PSA.  I am so glad he’s not ignoring them.  They are way too powerful and influential to ignore if we care about the North American church.  And they are way too wrong for us to be silent about it.  And here’s what we have to see: a lot of people who go to their churches aren’t even like them, because they don’t know any better!  The response: offer an alternative that isn’t reactionary and that doesn’t poison its own roots.

• Thirdly, after outlining the major theories of atonement throughout history and testifying to both their necessity and finitude, Jones turns to a better theory for our time, despite its shared limitation (see below).

Anyone who has studied 20^th century theology already knows what Jones is saying here.  Jon Sobrino and the liberation theologians said it.  Jurgen Moltmann and other political theologians have said it.  Andrew Sung Park has been on the podcast and is certainly influenced by Sobrino and Moltmann.  Scholars like Theodore Jennings, Miroslav Volf, and Joel Green have made cases along the same lines as Tony.  People who like the Girardian “Last Scapegoat” take will obviously appreciate Mark Heim or someone like Ingolf Dalferth.  This is one of the positions that Jones defends.  Most emphatically though, Jones follows Moltmann’s notion of atonement as solidarity through the Philippians 2 hymn and The Crucified God.  To be fair, the best proponents of PSA (e.g., von Balthasar) can say this too, but think substitution without the penal, or what Volf calls inclusive substitution, in which Christ is not a third party inserted between God and humanity, but the very God who was wronged:

“Jesus’s life, and particularly his death, show God’s ultimate solidarity with the marginalized and the poor,” Jones explains, “with those who most acutely experience godforsakenness . . . in his death, we are united with his suffering.  And in identifying with his resurrection, we are raised to new life.”

My interpretation of A Better Atonement goes something like this: The real hole in the gospel for conservatives is the failure to proclaim the saving significance that Jesus and therefore God participates fully in and understands human suffering, while for liberals it is that Jesus does this as Christ.  This means three things: we affirm incarnation, we affirm resurrection, and we declare the prophetic meaning of the crucifixion loud and clear.  Yes, we’ve read and written about this, and it might even be old news for some, but surprisingly enough, most people sitting in the pew as it were still haven’t really heard it preached or seen it in action, either because we’re too distracted as ministers with preaching salvation as a legal transaction on the one hand or using it as mere exemplary inspiration on the other.  The justice of God gets sidelined in both cases, as the parables about the reign of God are either overly eschatologized or mystically internalized.  The cross and the kingdom must be reconnected, and it can’t just be social.  It has to be soteriological.  This is what Jones is saying, I think.  Is this what emergents can and should claim? (for a better Scriptural understanding of how one could do this, I recommend N.T. Wright’s most recent book, How God Became King).

The book reads like a blog – very informal and straightforward, but still free from simplistic caricatures, which is a difficult balance to find.  This is reliable, timely, and bold theological leadership for the emergent church that is desperately needed.  I must confess that I wish it had come sooner, as I feel too many people have already moved away from the conversation before listening to what might be a tenable alternative to the monolithic PSA gospel.    Nonetheless, this should be a welcomed and appreciated little book for easy reference and for prompting discussion in an intelligent and accessible fashion.  What could be more appropriate as we approach Easter?  In my view, Jones highlights a most compelling theory of atonement for our situation, especially in light of the crises we face as a North American church that comes in the midst of what Walter Brueggemann has perceptively called a culture of therapeutic, technological consumer militarism.  I’m looking forward to the interview!

Other things I’m wondering:

1. Does talking about emergent “theology” even make sense?
2. I’m not saying that we have to have one “right” theology (or does it sound like I am? if so, call me out!), but can this kind of atonement be unifying for the mainline-evangelical divide?
3. Maybe it’s a worn out question, but is the word “emergent” still useful? (i.e., is it too insular, sub-cultured, taboo for evangelicals, etc.)
4. Finally, for those who will have listened to the Bass interview, I’m curious if anyone notices a relationship or contrast between what she’s talking about and what Tony is doing here…

(I wrote a more extended introduction to this topic that can be seen here).

 Guest post from…Hannah Heinzekehr is a student at Claremont School of Theology, pursuing a Master’s Degree in Community Development and Theology. She works as a Church Relations Associate for Mennonite Mission Network.  I (Tripp) opened a package with a copy of Lauren’s new book in it.  Hannah saw it and started a conversation which ended in me anticipating this guest post. Very glad I passed the book on.  Here’s Hannah and her testimony!

Last winter, after a rather intense week-long bout with the flu that I was still struggling to overcome, I piled into a car with four friends and made the hour plus drive from Claremont to Malibu, where we were all registered to attend a two-day interfaith dialogue event that brought together students from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish schools throughout the Los Angeles area. In my current self-pitying state, still toting a box of Kleenex with me and feeling easily fatigued, traveling to this particular event was about the least fun way that I could envision spending my weekend. That evening, after the first set of dialogues and dinner had been completed, two friends and I bundled ourselves up and tromped down to a nearby beach.

We clambered over rocks until we reached the sand, where we took our shoes off and waded out into the clear, cold ocean water. In the darkness, as our feet slowly turned numb from the cold and we stood looking out, hypnotized by the horizon where the moon-lit sky bled into the water, my friend Nelda began to sing the first verse of the familiar hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Slowly, I found myself, unwittingly, perhaps mostly by habit, harmonizing alongside her. After we had finished singing, we fell silent, and Nelda began to pray, or rather to speak directly to God. “God, I have not felt you near in a damn long time. But just now, there you were again, creeping in.” She went on to pray a prayer of gratitude, but I was struck by her honesty with God, by the surroundings, and by the surprising places where an encounter with God becomes possible.

Too often, in these last few years at graduate school, where the academic “hermeneutic of suspicion” has grown stronger within me, I have found myself unable to attend church or read spiritual memoirs without feeling the inward desire to dissect the theological underpinnings and political correctness of each anecdote or example that is given. Is this feminist enough? Does it represent and acknowledge a diversity of opinions? And this list could go on. These are all good questions, but sometimes I have wondered whether or not it is time to begin cultivating my own hermeneutic of retrieval (as one of my professors so aptly named it) alongside all this deconstruction. So as I sat down to read Lauren Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, I found within myself a fear that I would not be able to engage the material without feeling the need to turn this reading experience into an exegetical study.  
But Winner’s writing proved a pleasant surprise. Throughout her book, I found that Winner offered small glimpses of grace, without moving too far beyond these glimpses into a neat and tidy resolution. In the wake of a marriage that did not proceed or end as planned, Winner confronts her own crisis of faith, and struggles to sort out who and what she believes in. In a style that holds traces of Anne Lamott, Winner interweaves personal anecdotes, church history, spiritual practice, poetry, and myriad literary references into a meandering book about the journey with faith: whether one is in the joyful throes of a new conversion or stuck in the middle somewhere having somehow grown apart from God.

In my own experience, the journey with faith is messy, and not cleanly or easily resolved, and I appreciated Winner’s willingness to live with this mess.

In her short recommendation for the book, Phyllis Tickle suggests that Winner’s writing is “as breathtaking as it is rugged and beautiful.” I resonated with the simplicity with which Winner approached conversations about faith, resisting the temptation to intellectualize away the emotional elements of stories, while also pulling in source material ranging from Emily Dickinson to the desert monastics to more recent theologians like N.T. Wright. Winner spends much time exploring and unpacking the significance of the “middle” or the “in-between.” This is perhaps not a full-on “dark night of the soul” but rather a time marked by reinvention, distance, and perhaps even what Winner calls boredom with God and church. Although her book does show a movement from depression and crisis towards a new awareness of God, Winner does not suggest that the new openness she reaches is in any way an end, but suggests that perhaps this new openness is another middle phase, which will be reinvented or reimagined again.

Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman writes that, “…true faith in God is not living with a conviction that everything is going to be okay in the end because we know that our heavenly father is taking care of us. It is, rather, acknowledging and accepting the ultimate mystery of things, and precisely in the face of that mystery, going out like Abraham, not really knowing where we are going, but nevertheless moving forward creatively and with confidence…” Perhaps the challenge inherent in Winner’s book, and Kaufman’s thought, is to embrace and move forward within the nebulous middle, and to embrace the encounters with surprising creativity and grace when they come, along the way.