At-One-Ment and Atonement

 Ch.4: Dualism

Our culture has been snookered by Greek philosophers, especially Plato, for a long time now.  James Burke writes, ““These simple analyses of phenomena and the observation of the presence of opposites combined with the political and economic structure of the Ionian society to produce the dominant intellectual structure in Western civilization.” (James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995), 16) This division of reality into two qualitatively different and separate realms of the “spiritual” and the material has seemed so natural for so long to us in the West that we believe it is simply the way things are.

This dualism has become a filter that shapes and directs the way we think and act. And it was a major influence in shaping the development of DG and giving it an air of plausibility. Biblical thought has no truck with dualism however. Sawyer is right.

“Hebraic thought is unique in history. It presents us with a unitary or holistic model of understanding, in stark contrast to the dualist thought patterns of Western culture . . . Christianity was born out of a Jewish worldview that had no such dualistic thinking embedded in it. Unlike the Platonist’s God, utterly removed and unconcerned with physical reality, Yahweh was a God who got his hands dirty. He created the material world and took a personal interest in it, communicating personally with his people through the prophets. He loved his people. Most startling of all, he revealed himself through the incarnation of the eternal Son whose name was Emmanuel—God with us.” (Sawyer, M. James. A World Split Apart: Dualism in Western Culture and Theology . Sacred Saga Press. Kindle Edition: 115-126)

When Christianity spread out into the Hellenistic world where Greek philosophy held sway it began to develop its thought in those categories. Though necessary and helpful in certain ways the influence of this dualistic way of thought has been harmful to the understanding of the gospel in myriad ways (some key aspects of which I am exploring here). One has only to look at the ways the church struggled for centuries to find a way to express the unity of the divine and human natures of Christ to get a sense of ways Greek thought made it difficult to think Christianly. (Todd Miles’ book Superheroes Can’t Save You provides an entertaining look through popular culture of this struggle to think Christianly about Christ)

Out of these struggles, however, emerged a Greek word that has proven a powerful tool in articulating the biblical gospel in world soaked in dualistic ways of thought. In the Nicene Creed of 325 a.d. the term homoousion was used to express the truth that Jesus was God, of one substance with the Father. Not simply a god or like a god or a human being as like a god as is possible, both of which were ideas put forward I the early centuries of the church and recur even today.

In sum,

“The implications of the Homoousion (as it is called) were nothing short of revolutionary. God as he is in himself was to be known in the person of Jesus Christ. “The Nicene theology thus gave basic shape to the doctrine of the Trinity that was found to belong to the essential structure of faith in God and to the intrinsic grammar of Christian thought.” This conclusion shattered the Greek philosophical concept of God as static, remote, and impassible (incapable of suffering pain). God in his inner being is tri-personal relationship that is dynamic and active.” (Sawyer, A World Split Apart, Kindle Location: 179-184)

I’ll never forget early in my pastoral career I was assigned to teach the theology section for the training of a new class of elders. One member of this new class was hardly a new elder having served several terms as an elder before this time. But he was deeply troubled by this idea that the church believed Jesus was God. As we walked downstairs together he told me how hard that was to believe and wondered how he had missed that all these years. I agreed with him and suggested almost every Christian had a hard time believing it, in large part because of our cultural heritage of dualism, that things divine and human simply cannot mix. Indeed, a recent survey reports that 38% of evangelicals don’t believe it. But, I said to this man, unless you’ve already decided this latter is the case, it’s pretty clear that this identity of God and Jesus is taught across the New Testament. We just have to deal with it. And, as with understanding Jesus, it took the early church several centuries to do that formulating the view of God as triune as a result.

We have experienced something roughly analogous in the 20^th century with quantum physics discovery that at the subatomic level light is both a particle and a wave at the same time. And unless you’re willing to rule such a thing out of court before looking at the evidence, it is difficult to deny that this is what the evidence shows. This is an example from the level of material reality only, to be sure, but it at least provides an example of the kind of unitary thinking the early church employed to express the truth about Jesus and God against the dualistic thrust of Greek thought. Physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne insists: 

“Theology cannot operate under a yoke of a basically agnostic epistemology imposed on it a priori. It is the Christian testimony that God is most fully to be known in meeting with the One God whose triune triune reality is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Of course this way of thinking is counterintuitive, just as so much of quantum theory is counterintuitive, but, just as in the case of quantum mechanics, that novel pattern of thought is forced upon us by the reality encountered and it does not arise from fanciful or unconstrained speculation.” (Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, 77)

Well, that’s been a bit of a “heady” journey but a necessary one if we truly want to grapple with why we so often seem to miss the point in our reading the Bible and formulating its truths to share with our world.  

“Our theology, whether it be Protestant or Catholic, Calvinist or Arminian, charismatic or non-charismatic, or whatever else, must be critically examined so as to root out dualistic presuppositions and the conclusions that have followed from them—conclusions that have, unbeknownst to us, polluted our theological understandings and twisted it in ways that are not in harmony with who God in Jesus Christ has revealed himself to be; conclusions that have allowed something other than the person of Christ to be placed at the center of our theology.” (Sawyer, A World Split Apart, Kindle Loc.: 457-460)

To bring this discussion down to earth a bit let us look at two ways this dualism we have been discussing: creation and salvation.

The doctrine of Creation confutes our dualistically inclined theology by requiring us to confess that matter matters and it matters eternally. We’ve seen this already. In Rev.21 we encounter a new creation, “a new heaven and a new earth” (v.1). What’s more, the New Jerusalem, which T. Desmond Alexander calls “a fitting climax to the entire biblical story,” comes down out of heaven to the new earth (v.2) to celebrate her nuptials and set up an eternal “dwelling place” for God with his people on earth.

From heaven to earth – exactly the opposite of what a dualistically-infected faith teaches: that we go to heaven from earth to our eternal habitation to live there with God forever.  The ghost of Plato’s vision of death freeing us from this bodily prison that we may ascend to an eternal frolic in a “spiritual” world, heaven. N. T. Wright takes this view to task in the following response to Stephen Hawking’s saying the Christian view of heaven is a “fairy tale.” Wright counters,

“It’s depressing to see Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds in his field, trying to speak as an expert on things he sadly seems to know rather less about than many averagely intelligent Christians. Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race. But in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when they die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth (or, if you like, ‘the cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, the persons of Christians because they, too, were ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.

“Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of ‘going to heaven.’ Of course, if faced with the fully Christian two-stage view of what happens after death—first, a time ‘with Christ’ in ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise,’ and then, when God renews the whole creation, bodily resurrection—he would no doubt dismiss that as incredible. But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it—most people in England haven’t. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics, i.e. not much. . . .” (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/n-t-wrights-response-to-stephen-hawking-on-heaven/)

Heaven and earth are two different realities, to be sure, but they are not far distant and separate from each other. Rather, created to harmoniously interlock and interpenetrate one another (At-One-Ment), humanity’s rejection of relation to God, created an unbridgeable gulf between God’s space and human space but not in spatial or distance terms. Better to think of God and his space (heaven) as a room next door to our space (earth) with no doors from one to the other from our side. God’s At-One-Ment movement opens the doors between these spaces from his side and he comes in Jesus to reconnect them into their original differentiated unity.

That’s why Jesus taught his followers to pray with him for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Mt.6:10). Earth, humanity’s space, is to share in the obedience, praise, and love of God that heaven does.

Matter matters, and it matters eternally. Creation is not some prefatory throw away to the real thing God has for us. It is the site of the real thing from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem. God’s home with us. The external basis of the covenant. The flesh that Jesus has and will have throughout eternity. The theater of God’s glory, today, tomorrow, and every tomorrow God grants till kingdom come and through eternity.

Salvation, takes place on this earth, for the sake of this earth and its inhabitants. It is the internal basis of creation. Salvation reclaims and restores sinful humanity to its intended role as royal priests in God’s creational temple. Caring for and serving in his temple entails a central concern with righteousness – establishing right relations in all areas and at every level of creation. It is a “tilling and keeping” of the garden, extending the boundaries of that garden to its final universal scope (which we call evangelism), and a hope to see “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Hab.2:14).

Salvation does not remove us or refocus the concerns of our life from this earth and our life here. In truth, it roots our lives more deeply and concretely in what happens here. We are saved for the life here God always intended for us with him.

All this refocuses what was for me the point at which I began to question the dualistic view of salvation the church taught. A friend captured it one day when he observed “I’m all for the pearly gates and the streets of gold, and all that, but Christianity has got to mean something for now.” And there was the great gap in the usual way of presenting the gospel: you believe in Jesus and receive forgiveness and assurance of eternal life in heaven and then . . . wait to die or for Christ to return. The gap between believing in Christ and dying of Christ returning is the one that bothered me. What are we supposed to do in that time?

Maybe we could claim we should be fulfilling the Great Commission. Except few show much zeal for what we commonly think of as fulfilling the Great Commission and that understanding of the Great Commission is probably a faulty reading of that passage. So what else is there? Going to church? Being nice? Good citizens? Growing in our inner life with God? Raising good families? Something else?

Nothing very compelling there, in my view. That’s part of why people are leaving churches in droves. If all that really matters is waiting - playing out the string? - between believing in Christ and Christ returning we offer little or nothing to claim the passion and compassion of people for following Christ. If waiting is dualistic Christianity’s answer for a life that matters, it is a pretty poor one compared with the description of salvation I outlined above.

What C. S. Lewis wrote about people in general is applicable to the church as well:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, (HarperOne, 1975), 26)

Our faith offers “a holiday at sea”; the church with its dualistically-infected gospel too often offers only “mud pies in a slum.” No comparison, is there?

 

At-One-Ment and Atonement

We escape settling for “mud pies” and toward that “holiday” (full and vital life with God) Lewis speaks of by realizing or learning that At-One-Ment, God’s eternal purpose, is the goal of all God’s actions which actions can rightly be called Atonements. The chief of these is, of course, the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Though we usually associate Atonement solely with Jesus’ cross and resurrection, in reality God’s action to At-One us includes his birth, life, ascension, and exaltation to world ruler as well as his cross and resurrection. 

Adam Johnson summarizes the views of many early church theologians who make just this point:

“God’s intent was not merely to overcome sin, ‘but rather a profound reworking . . . of the terms of ordinary humanity, into a divinely graced life-form . . . That is to say, the goal of atonement is our ongoing transformation in Christ, into a life that is so filled with the grace, power and character of God that it pushes the boundaries of what we now recognize as human. The goal of the atonement is that we participate in the life of God as completely as possible, without ceasing to be the distinct and unique creatures God made us to be.” (Adam J. Johnson, Atonement for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 83)

Ah, there’s the in-between that fills that gap for us between the death and resurrection of Christ and his return! A description of the life of the royal priests God has called all men and women to be. Our “ongoing transformation in Christ” as we serve him in this world working to care for the creation that is his temple and the creatures that inhabit it as serve in it with us. This is the very will of God for us as we “participate” in his life in the fullness of the uniqueness and particularly of our humanity.

The best picture I know of this is again from C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The four Pevensie children have completed the ask fir which Aslan called them to Narnia. They have taken up their rightful rule over Narnia under Aslan. Here we pick up the story.

”And now, as you see, this story is nearly (but not quite) at an end. These two Kings and two Queens governed Narnia well, and long and happy was their reign. At first much of their time was spent in seeking out the remnants of the White Witch’s army and destroying them, and indeed for a long time there would be news of evil things lurking in the wilder parts of the forest—a haunting here and a killing there, a glimpse of a werewolf one month and a rumor of a hag the next. But in the end all that foul brood was stamped out. And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live. And they drove back the fierce giants (quite a different sort from Giant Rumblebuffin) on the north of Narnia when these ventured across the frontier. And they entered into friendship and alliance with countries beyond the sea and paid them visits of state and received visits of state from them. And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them. And Peter became a tall and deep-chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgment. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant. (Lewis, C.S.. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia Book 2) (p. 182-184). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition)

The Royal Pevensies lived and ruled in Narnia but this was not the time of the “End” (a story told in The Last Battle). Their time as kings and queens was not “heaven” but real life in Narnia. The work for which they were called and saved was their royal rule. Their job, their vocation, was to bring Aslan’s right relations again to a Narnia fallen away from them. They have their place in Aslan’s country at the End but this is no heavenly dwelling. It’s the real Narnia, so much more real than the Narnia they had experienced that the latter seemed but a shadow of the former. An apt picture, I think, of the Christian vision, At-one-ment.

At-One-Ment and the acts of Atonement through which God achieves it despite our resistance and apathy form the plotline and goal of human history as the fulfillment of God’s creational dream. Only a Bible read with the grain of this plotline can be read correctly. In this study we have sketched a reading strategy that focuses us on

-reading the whole Bible in light of those four pesky chapters (Gen.1-2 and Rev.21-22),

-aware of the ways a Gen.3-Rev.20 “gospel” distorts the biblical story and even (unwittingly) tells a story about a defeated God, and

-of the pernicious effects of the dualism at the core of Western culture is the key factor in the previous distortions.