At-One-Ment and Atonement: A Preface to a Fresh Theology (1)

Ch.1: Beginning at the End

The Issue

The problem with much of our Bible reading and consequent theologizing in the West is due to our reading a Bible four chapters short of the whole thing. Really. I mean that in all seriousness. Not that we don’t actually read the words of these four chapters or debate their meaning. It’s that we don’t understand what we read there and thus those chapters fail to exercise their regulative effect on our understanding of just about everything else in the Bible.

Again, I am utterly serious in making this claim. The four chapters I refer to happen to be the four most important chapters in the Bible and should set the context and form the reading guide for the rest of it. Sadly, this seldom happens. As a result we misread the intent and purposes of God, the heart and direction of the Bible, and a strategic vision for addressing our world with its message.

And all that is what this book is about.

I write it for church people and other readers interested in what the biblical message truly is. I hope that if you have turned away from the church because its message and practice was exclusionary, judgmental, and dogmatic you will give this book a chance. That’s not the faith and message I find in the Bible and I want to tell you why in these pages. Years ago Bill Pannell, a black professor, claimed that if at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century the existential human question was “Where can I find a gracious God?,” that question for 20th century humanity was “Where can I find a gracious neighbor?” I would add that in the 21st century the question is “Where can I find a gracious church?” And that last question is the one I want to explore here, though we will find the other two questions addressed in a different perspective than we’re used to as well.

Those Pesky Four Chapters

The four important chapters I referred to above are the first two in the Bible (Gen.1-2) and the last two (Rev.21-22). These four chapters are especially important for the following reasons:

-they are the only four chapters in the Bible that show us what God intends and what he achieves apart from the taint of sin.

Gen.1-2 reflect God’s purposes before sin enters the picture. Rev.21-22 picture the completion and fulfillment of that purpose after sin has been dealt with and done away with. The point here is that what we find in these chapters are the bookends of the biblical story which tell us what it is really all about. What God started in Gen.1-2 is what he is truly interested in. What we see pictured in Rev.21-22 is the assurance that God will achieve what he set out to do in Gen.1-2.  When we get clear on this we can read the rest of the story, ensnarled in sin and dysfunction as it is, with clear eyes as to what God intends and is really doing. And that is often surprisingly different from what we have heard or been taught!

In ch.2, then, we will “begin from the end” in Rev.21-22 and then return to the beginning in Gen.1-2 to catch a glimpse of this “sinless” divine Big Picture.

-reading the Bible as if Gen.3 – Rev.20 were the main story to which Gen.1-2 and Rev.21-22 were mere Introduction and Conclusion (as we have been taught to do) plays us false.

Badly false, in my view. To read them as the beginning and end of the story told in Gen.3-Rev.20 does not allow these chapters to determine our reading of the Bible but rather determines how we read them. And in ch.3 we’ll see that this way of reading the Bible actually promotes a theology which inadvertently has a deity who fails!

-failing to allow these chapters to exercise their regulative role in Bible reading leaves a hole that must be filled. Some story or set of ideas will regulate how we read the Bible. And in North America it’s the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato that has most often filled that role.

Plato thought reality was divided into two realms, the material, physical, and bodily realm and an immaterial, inner, spiritual realm. The latter realm was the realm of our true existence and life was a struggle to escape the inertia, satisfactions, and allures of the material, physical realm and practice the disciplines that better enabled us to experience that spiritual realm. At death, he believed, our soul finally escaped the prison of the body to flee back to its true home in the spiritual realm. This dualism, as it is called, between these two realms dominated Western thought for centuries and has been a persistent feature of the way we think, including how we read the Bible. Its influence has been far from positive in helping us read the Bible aright, which we will explore more fully in ch.4.  

Once we have looked in more detail at why and how we misread the Bible and its consequences in the life and mission of the church, we can begin to sketch a more accurate and better vision of biblical thought. One in which we can relearn and reframe our identity and vocation as God’s people in ways fruitful to the times in which we live.

At-One-Ment

The upshot of all this is that our theology needs a profound reorientation to its biblical roots and an equally profound reorientation of the church’s life and mission in our ever-changing world. God’s eternal purpose, the end toward which all his works are directed, is to have a world full of people who live with him in fellowship, harmony, and peace on the planet he created to host this divine-human fellowship. Let us call this At-One-Ment – God and his creation in perpetual and uninterrupted communication, communion, and community. God intends this At-One-Ment to by in and under Christ (Eph.1:10). Even after humanity rejected God’s plan to journey together toward this goal he enacted a series of Atonements, actions designed to gradually bring about his purposes in the history by effecting his drawing ever closer to his people Israel in order to the bless the whole world (Gen.12:1-3). Atonement through the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth ultimately dealt with the problems and disruptions our sin visited upon God’s creatures and creation enabling Christ to reclaim and restore us for the ultimate fellowship God intended with us through him, At-One-Ment.

This is where we are headed in this study: At-One-Ment through Atonement. The three areas identified above by our neglect of the four pesky chapters of Gen.1-2 and Rev.21-22 are key pieces of the reorientation we need for faithfulness today.