Resurrection: Eastertide Meditations

For the Easter season—the eight Sundays from April 20 (Easter) through June 8 (Pentecost)—I am writing the Sunday Blog for the Reformed Journal. The posts appear here. For the series, I am following the gospel readings from the Common Lectionary. 

I’m calling the series, “Windows on Mystery.” In the first of the meditations (posted on April 20), I wrote in response to the wooden literalness of John Updike’s ill-considered poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” that these stories are “multiple, layered, giving us first one perspective and then another.” Windows on mystery.

Thinking about these readings and the Easter faith that informs them has forced me to think more deeply than before about resurrection. We commonly and naively think of resurrection as just a continuation of life as we know it on another plane, but resurrection cannot be this. Resurrection is not resuscitation. It’s something altogether more mysterious and, I think, more compelling.

I invite you to these meditations as they play out each week. After they have all appeared, perhaps I will do a post here in which I draw together the insights I have been led to in writing the series.

Atonement: Penal Substitutionary and Other

Some of you will have noticed that I have fallen off the pace in writing about the theology of atonement. I had hoped to be done by now with a biblical critique of the commonly held way of thinking about atonement called Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). Many churches teach PSA as biblical. It’s not. 

I began well enough, with an overview. I then laid out two crucial critiques of how PSA reads the Bible. The first, based on work by Andrew Rillera in his Lamb of the Free (2024), looks at biblical sacrifice. The conclusion reached by Rillera and others is that biblical sacrifice is not substitutionary. The animal sacrificed does not die instead of the person who offers the sacrifice. This result seems firm. What is less firm is exactly what the biblical sacrifices did mean.

In a second post—less successful, I think—I offered a reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans based on newer work on Paul and some of my own work. It emphasized an aspect of Paul’s theology that has been recognized at least since Albert Schweitzer but often ignored: the idea of participation with Christ. Paul teaches that we die with and in Jesus and Jesus with and in us. This perspective can be found in many new studies of Paul. That said, I thought my writing in this piece was muddy and perhaps my thinking as well. I may return to clean it up.

I sandwiched those two posts critiquing PSA around another in which I highlighted the importance of the Maccabean martyrs for the New Testament thinking about cross of Jesus. A key story is of a rich young man who came to Jesus to ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The question betrays the anxiety of that age. And of ours: do we have to do something extraordinary to be faithful to God in the face of this cruel time? The answer of Jesus remains instructive.

I plan soon to write two more posts in the series (at least two, it may require more). The first post will look at three key biblical passages that are thought to sustain PSA: Isaiah 53, the book of Hebrews as a whole, and a few verses from 1 John. The second will gather some conclusions about how PSA has misread the Bible and how, in the process, it has misled Christians about the nature of justice and of the grace of God.

This is important because PSA is not just another “theory of the atonement”; it determines how we hear the Bible at, for example, Good Friday services. While in Tucson, we attend St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church. The Good Friday service, like the services in general at St. Philip’s, was moving and massive. The gospel reading—impressively chanted by three singers—included all of chapters 18 and 19 of John. The service also included a long reading from Hebrews, Psalm 22 chanted by the choir, and Isaiah 53. (How many evangelical churches read that much scripture?) It is especially Isaiah 53 that we tend to hear in PSA terms: 

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (vss. 4-5). 

Sounds “penal” and “substitutionary,” does it not?” It does, but it is not. Not in the PSA sense. I want to look carefully at this passage with you and try to give it a proper reading. I’ll return to all this as soon as possible.

Travel: Korea, Bellingham, and Copenhagen (and Beyond)

Meanwhile, I have been and will be traveling. (Hence my not getting to the PSA series.) At the beginning of April, I visited South Korea to meet with a group of pastors and churches known as the “Seoul Cluster.” My host was Bomsu Kim of the Seattle Dream Church. In an earlier post, I commented on the way that Korean politics mirror our own. Their most recent president, Yoon Suk-yeol, was impeached for attempting an internal coup by declaring martial law. His impeachment was upheld by the Constitutional Court on the day I arrived in Korea. Despite his being no friend of democracy and corrupt, he retains the support of much of the church in South Korea. My hosts found this puzzling and distressing, as do I the longstanding support of American evangelicals for Donald Trump.

International travel is always instructive, especially if you are able to go beyond the usual tourist haunts. While I was in Seoul, I reveled each morning in the sights and sounds of entirely untouristed streets as I strolled among people hurrying to work and businesses opening for the day.

Over the next few days, I will be driving back from Tucson to Bellingham, accompanied by two of my brothers. We will stop briefly at the Getty in Los Angeles and in Berkeley, where I will have opportunity to say some words in honor of Barry Koops who died last week.

And then, mid-May, off to Copenhagen, Berlin, and places beyond. It will be interesting to see how the American turn toward fascism plays in these European capitals where not long ago their own fascism had an ignoble turn. A few years ago in Germany our young guides in various cities seemed intent on warning us off the path that we have now taken. But now we have taken it.

The Path We’ve Taken

We’ve not had a time like this before in any of our lifetimes. Daily the headlines are a litany of destruction of governmental programs, of governmental norms, and perhaps of the government itself. It’s rule by whim and animus. There are times when writing a blog mostly about theology and the church seems, well, beside the point.

Perhaps it is, but then it has always been such. Difficult times are not times to strike off on our own, as if we have the answers. They are times to draw together and grasp again the truth of the gospel, which is the truth not only about God but about us.

Thanks for reading.

Clay