of what had happened.”4
Inspired by experiences of Christ through the Spirit the metaphors of atonement were generated, in part at least, as items of resistance to the Roman hegemony together with its lord and savior, Caesar. The metaphors were both potent and polemic. It was assumed and accepted that the dominant culture would be outraged by the claims being made:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18, 22–24. Also Gal 5:11; Heb 12:2).
Feminist Standpoint Theory
Transformative experiences of the Spirit gave the earliest Christians a certain vantage point or standpoint. Nancy Hartsock’s Feminist Standpoint is a Marxist-inspired theory that has now been applied usefully to many marginalized or “muted” groups as a way of helping us to notice that marginal groups hold a perspective on many aspects of life that is wholly other to that of the dominant culture,5 indeed, in Hartsock’s original version of the theory, the viewpoint of the marginalized is the inverse opposite of the dominant view.6 Further, this marginal viewpoint actually has a more accurate view of things, in contrast to which, the standpoint of the powerful is likely to be “partial and perverse,” or, “strange and harmful.”7 This seems to be mainly because the powerful have, in true Marxist style,8 a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and so choose not to see the things that might undermine their own legitimacy. In order to gain a more full-orbed understanding of the way things really are, therefore, the standpoint of the marginalized must be recognized. Nancy Hartsock is adamant that standpoint theory is not primarily about truth but power, not primarily about epistemology but resistance to hegemonies, so she goes no further than Marx originally did in explaining the exact nature of the epistemic advantage that the marginalized have, describing it only as “engaged” and exposing “real relations.”9 This epistemic advantage appears to be more to do with what those on the underside of society are unencumbered by rather than what they are endowed with. They are merely free from the standpoint of the oppressor. But might not the viewpoint of the marginalized have something more robustly positive to offer?
The Coming of the Spirit and the Birth of the Metaphors
The epistemic advantage of the post-Pentecost Christians over against Rome is easy to name. It is not merely an absence of skewed values but the presence of the Spirit. To a significant degree, the Holy Spirit is the epistemology—the way of knowing—of the earliest church. Pentecost revealed an ascended Lord to those who had not been eye-witnesses of the life, death, resurrection, or ascension of Christ. Their experience of the Spirit was all that was needed. It was an entirely convincing experience of the ascended Jesus, who was now Lord and dispenser of the Spirit (Acts 2:33). They knew he was raised and glorified for one simple reason: the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now dwelt within them (Rom 8:11). For them, a new life had begun, which was understood to be a foretaste of the age to come. Hence, the Spirit provided epistemic access to the two least verifiable and yet the two most crucially important axes of the Christian faith: the reported past of the resurrection of Christ and the uncertain future of the return of Christ.
So, it was into this Spirit-inspired epistemic breakthrough that the metaphors were birthed, as language was sought for expressing the newfound faith. Accounting for how the metaphors were generated in this way naturally leads us into the temptation to speculate about the order in which they were born.
How we arrange the metaphors seems important to any attempt to make sense of them by reference to their origins. An attempt at chronology would share with all other efforts at nailing things down chronologically in the New Testament a certain sense of inevitable doom. For a start, there is, of course, no unanimity about the dating of any of the New Testament documents. Secondly, even though striking differences are thrown up by even so blunt an instrument as “earlier” and “later,” we do not know that changes over time account for this. It could have been changes over space, changes in context. All chronological development, if there was any, might well already have happened and been solidified well before Paul wrote Galatians. Moreover, the earlier portions of the New Testament are almost all Pauline, so that, in asserting a metaphor as “early” all we really might be saying is that it is “Pauline.”10
There was one change that happened in the surrounding context that might be significant. As I briefly explored in Old Rugged Cross, the cult of the martyrs during the early patristic period played a crucial role in the ever deepening attachment to the cross as the central symbol of Christian faith. The cross, in fact, always has been the way Christians have made sense of persecution, and it continues to function in that way. It may well be that there is a similar dynamic going on in the first century as we enter the persecutions first of Nero (r. 54–68 AD) and then of Domitian (r. 81–96 AD). This might explain the dominance of sacrifice and cost language around the cross during the later period. The metaphors that dominate earlier on, it could be argued, still reflect that first flush of Pentecost, which brought vivid experiences of a kingdom breaking in now, and of participating in the victory and vindication of Christ. We might even go as far as to say that the earlier metaphors are kingdom-now metaphors: the King has triumphed and is reigning, pouring out his power.11 He has led his people in a new exodus. There is liberation from former demonic and carnal powers and a participation in his heavenly reign. The later metaphors might be termed suffering-now metaphors, most notably the sacrifice metaphor. These, perhaps, are designed to instill resilience to growing hostility through an appreciation for the price paid and the life laid down to reconcile God’s former enemies to himself. It could be that such metaphors helped to prepare Christians to be willing to pay a price for faith, even the ultimate price, in the midst of a world full of people who are still God’s enemies.
The possibility of arrangement in two phases—kingdom-now followed by suffering-now—played a part in my early deliberations. However, as I penetrated deeper into the meaning of each metaphor, I became more interested in arranging them in terms of logical and semantic relationships, which might gently imply chronological begetting of one picture by another, but which don’t require a commitment to an early or late framework. Chronology is still implied but is not central to the structure. Instead I speak fancifully of one picture giving rise to another in putative chains of development, favoring the picture of mountain peaks with lower hills receiving something that somehow flows from the peak. Victory flows into redemption, which flows into participation, and sacrifice flows into justification, which flows into reconciliation. It is a thought experiment, if you will.
Cross or Kingdom: Which Gospel Is the Gospel?
. . . discourse about who will (or will not) enter the kingdom, and what the kingdom is like fills the pages of the Gospels. When we leave the Gospels and turn to Paul, however, what happens to the kingdom? We might get the impression that outside the Gospels the kingdom, except for a few mentions here and there, fades away into the background of the New Testament.12
Something we ought to attempt to resolve before we move onto the metaphors of atonement is the fact that there appears to be a pre-Easter message that was all about the kingdom, and a post-Easter message that was all about the work of Christ. Some scholars and popular Christian writers don’t really seem to know what to do with the cross and resurrection once they have finished waxing lyrical about the grand narrative of the God who, from Genesis to Revelation, is on a mission to establish his reign, his kingdom. An entire chapter of an edited work, entitled, “The Kingdom of God and His Mission,”13 says only this about the work of Christ: “Through his death and resurrection, Jesus has demonstrated decisively the victory of God’s reign over history.”14 Others prefer only to mention the kingdom in relation to the teaching and ministry of Christ, and proclaim the work of Christ, his once-and-for-all atonement for sin, as the most important thing. For them, the gospel is a gospel of the cross. On the part of some wise thinkers there has been some effort to find
