Another Interview with Margaret Turek

In “Atonement” (https://t.co/yjm8bDAaCD) Margaret Turek presents the wholly gratuitous, radically forgiving, passionate & powerful nature of God's redeeming love for mankind.

She spoke about the book with @mabrumley for the Ignatius Press Podcast: https://t.co/qpioFXZbq1

— Ignatius Press (@IgnatiusPress) July 19, 2022

Margaret Turek on Atonement

Diagnosing the Modern Aversion to a Biblical Theology of Atonement --Margaret Turek of @StPatricksSem published with @IgnatiusPress#mondaythoughts #Catholic #Theology #CatholicTwitter #Godislove #religion #biblicaltheologyhttps://t.co/f5mllVx9Nx

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) July 18, 2022

Margaret Turek with Cordial Catholic

Dr. Margaret Turek had a great conversation with @cordialcatholic about her new book "Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology" (https://t.co/yjm8bDRLub). Listen now! https://t.co/smLlUdwuPS

— Ignatius Press (@IgnatiusPress) July 13, 2022

Margaret Turek on the Ignatius Press Podcast

In “Atonement” (https://t.co/0i4DXGPAAj) Margaret Turek illuminates the gratuitous, radically forgiving, passionate & powerful nature of God's redeeming love for mankind.

Listen to this conversation w/ Dr. Turek, here or on your favorite podcast platform: https://t.co/INIdBLsDxn pic.twitter.com/duC5bbcflf

— Ignatius Press (@IgnatiusPress) July 6, 2022

Sacrifice and Substitution

Roberto Calasso’s Substitutionary Logic of Sacrifice
by Stephen Metzgerhttps://t.co/saQSwfNC3X

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) August 5, 2021

Does St. Anselm really hold to that sort of substitutionary theory of atonement? Or to an older Patristic one, in which Christ is the substitute for Adam after his failure?

A Western View of Atonement

Michael Ramsey: "Christians' present access to the Father has been created by the Lord's sacrifice; it is only through facing the cross and its disclosure of the awful realities of sin and of God's forgiving love that men have free access to God in sonship,》 pic.twitter.com/MIj0L1marI

— Akenside Institute for English Spirituality (@EngSpirituality) April 29, 2021

Of Course a Latin View

CWR Dispatch: Full text: Pope Francis’ Easter Urbi et Orbi blessing 2021

“Dear brothers and sisters, once again this year, in various places many Christians have celebrated Easter under severe restrictions and, at times, without being able to attend liturgical celebrations. We pray that those restrictions, as well as all restrictions on freedom of worship and religion worldwide, may be lifted and everyone be allowed to pray and praise God freely.”

The crucified Jesus, none other, has risen from the dead. God the Father raised Jesus, his Son, because he fully accomplished his saving will. Jesus took upon himself our weakness, our infirmities, even our death. He endured our sufferings and bore the weight of our sins. Because of this, God the Father exalted him and now Jesus Christ lives forever; he is the Lord.

Byzantine Soteriology

Rooted in Scripture...

And thus all who are in Him may become one with God, being healed of their sin and corruption, freed from demonic domination and granted eternal life in the resurrection. 6/

— Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (@FrAndrewSDamick) March 25, 2021

A Latin View?

“Let us fix our attention on the blood of Christ and recognize how precious it is to God his Father, since it was shed for our salvation and brought the grace of repentance to all the world.” -St. Clement I #AshWednesday

— Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, OP (@FrAquinasOP) February 17, 2021

Fr. Panayiotis on Salvation and Redemption

Salvation & Redemption -- The Early Christian Understanding
Fr. Panayiotis discusses the early Christian understanding of Salvation and Redemption.https://t.co/9pll4ac1qX pic.twitter.com/IlUTsJ6oMg

— Trisagionfilms (@TrisagionFilms) December 18, 2020

Aiming at Latin Theories of Satisfaction

why Latin/Frankiah theology is topsy turvy in a nutshell https://t.co/0lT7AzbwcU

— Byzantine Ambassador (@byzantinepower) October 13, 2020

The Victory of the Cross

IVP: The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy by James R. Payton Jr. (Google Books)

Well... No.

CWR Dispatch: “They Killed Him”: Deicide and Holy Saturday by Dr. Leroy Huizenga
Why Holy Saturday started to hit me differently a few years ago

Many Christians in modernity, I think, have a conception of the crucifixion restricted to a legal version of penal substitutionary atonement: Our problem is guilt, for which God must punish us, but loving us and desiring to forgive us, God punishes Christ in our place.

True enough as far as it goes, but when compared to classical soteriologies, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant, it doesn’t go very far. 

Penal substitutionary atonement is not true at all, and worst of the satisfaction explanations of atonement.

The cross isn’t just a component in the economy of our salvation, something God needed to do to Christ to acquit us. The cross also reveals the hatred of the human race towards God. They killed him: God comes into the World in Jesus Christ, and Jew and Gentile conspire to cooperate in killing God for reasons of convenience.

The World stands guilty of deicide.

And so on Holy Saturday I feel generally sick to my stomach. The one man who could have helped us, we hammered him to a cross. And that means two things: Deep down, I’m capable of murder and I’m liable to being murdered. We mustn’t deceive ourselves about our capacity for sin, and that of others.

Most people have a theologia gloriae, a theology of glory in which we bypass the cross as we affirm ourselves and affirm God for affirming us in a circle of moral therapeutic deist bilge. True theology, as Luther so rightly and so often stressed, is a theologia crucis, a theology of the cross in which God’s murderers are saved by God through the very instrument of His murder. Our salvation cannot consist in self-improvement; our salvation consists in our own crucifixion.

Forget the Theotokos, the beloved disciple, the remaining apostles who fled and were in hiding, St. Mary Magdalene, Pilate's wife, Joseph of Arimathea, the women of Jerusalem crying in the streets... and probably there were many others as well. The whole entire world at that point in time, afterwards, and before, stood guilty of deicide? That is a bit of an exaggeration which might comport with certain tendencies in Western Christianity to pile on shame and create unnecessary guilt, but it isn't healthy. Is there any collective guilt because all of humanity is guilty of the crucifixion of Christ? Maybe some were guilty of indifference, others of fear, and so on. But not everyone else is guilty of killing or murdering Christ.

Now, one can say that we caused Christ to die, but not as an efficient cause but as a sort of final cause, in so far as Christ died (and chose to die) for us and our salvation. That is true. But that is not the same as having agency in killing Him.

Who isn't guilty of the sin of pride or disordered love? Only our Lord and the Theotokos are probably exempt from that one, and maybe St. John the Forerunner. With those exceptions, all are guilty of some sin worthy of death as a consequence (or a penalty, if you prefer). But that sin isn't necessarily the murder of Christ.

Who is guilty of killing God? Strictly speaking, maybe no one, as (the Son of) God, as divine, cannot be killed. The communication of idioms in this instance may be a bit tricky. Did those guilty of killing Christ believe He was God? It seems noi. They may have been culpable in rejecting the gift of belief that Christ is God, or culpable in denying that He was the Messiah. Does that make their sin formally "deicide"? I don't think so, even if  it could be argued that their sin was materially "deicide." Were they guilty of murdering a man innocent of any crimes against Roman law? Yes.

I don't see any awareness of non-Latin soteriology and theories of atonement in this essay, and I don't think anyone with such an awareness would have written something like this. This seems like the product of a Western Christian, and reveals what is problematic in certain strands of popular Western Christianity.

"Jesus Wept"

A Latin understanding of the passions of Christ...

First Things: Meditating on COVID-19 by Hans Boersma

The fifth Sunday of Lent is traditionally known as Passion Sunday. During the two weeks between Passion Sunday and Easter, we are called upon to meditate on Jesus’s suffering and death. For the most part, our preoccupation with suffering and death leaves Jesus out, so as to focus strictly on ourselves.

An interpretation of Christ's weeping in line with St. Maximos the Confessor?

We do well to attend to Jesus’s tears, for it is only by meditation upon his tears that we are able to process our own. Why does Jesus weep? The question is pressing because Jesus cannot possibly be weeping in the same way that Martha, Mary, and the bystanders are weeping. The narrative doesn’t allow us to think that Jesus is mourning the loss of his friend. He has travelled to Bethany with the precise aim of raising Lazarus from the dead (11:4, 11). Hippolytus of Rome adroitly observes: “He wept but did not mourn.”

Why, then, does Jesus weep? He weeps because he meditates upon our passion. Just as we are called to “weep with those who weep” (Rom.15:12), so Jesus weeps with those who weep. (In fact, Saint Augustine suggests that the reason Jesus weeps here is to teach us to weep; this must at least be part of the picture.) Jesus weeps with Martha and Mary, with the Jewish bystanders, and with a world struggling with illness, suffering, and death.

We should not miss the intensity of Jesus’s emotional upheaval. He was “deeply moved,” suggest many recent translations—a hopeless sentimentalizing of his passion. Jesus’s grief is mixed with furious anger and indignation. The Greek term here, embrimaomai, is reminiscent of a bristling, snorting stallion.

What upsets Jesus so? Is it Martha and Mary’s confounded reproach, “Lord, if you had been here . . .” (11:21, 32)? Is it the bystanders’ unwarranted censure that he should have kept Lazarus from dying (11:37)? Is it the grief and pain that he reads in all of their faces? Is it the havoc that illness and death cause in the lives of the people he loves? It is all of these. Jesus meditates on our passion and weeps.

Merit? Participation? Or something else?

Reflect for a moment on the incomprehensible depth of these words, “Jesus wept.” His passion deliberately and fully exposes him to the virus we carry. When Jesus weeps, he opens himself up to our illness; he takes on our passion; he enters our grief. We meditate on Jesus’s tears, but comprehend them we cannot. Why not? Their flow contains nothing less than the pooled passion of the entire human race.

The biblical lessons and the Psalm appointed for Passion Sunday remind us of the depth of Jesus’s tears. They depict the valley of the dry bones—the mass grave of exiles (Ezek. 37). They cry out from the depths (de profundis) of the psalmist’s iniquities (Ps. 130). And (depending on the assigned reading in your church), they speak of slavery to sin (Rom. 6). When Jesus weeps at Lazarus’s graveside, he weeps for all of this.

Still, Jesus’s tears are not just tears of lament. I suspect they are tears of joy at the same time. Dry bones come to life when the Spirit of God breathes on them. Iniquities are forgiven when the Lord sends redemption to Israel. And slaves of sin become slaves of righteousness when in faith and baptism we are united to Christ Jesus. Each of the readings offers resurrection hope beyond passion and death. Jesus’s tears are a promise that grief of illness and death will be overcome by joy of life eternal.

The church fathers were fond of saying that whatever our Lord did in his incarnation, he did “for our sake.” His weeping is no exception. Jesus weeps “on account of the people standing round” (11:42). That doesn’t mean his tears are fake. Quite the contrary, as we have seen. But it does mean that Jesus’s tears are infinitely dissimilar to ours. They are not tears of impotence. They are the tears of God. And when God weeps, we may be sure our passion is about to yield to resurrection.

What about assuming our nature to heal human passions? Does Christ feel the loss of Lazarus on an emotional level? Is it possible for him to do so without experiencing sin? Or can he weep only out of love for us, and not for Lazarus?

N. T. Wright on Atonement

A Meditation by Dom Pius de Hemptinne

He was a Benedictine (1879–1907), a disciple of Dom Columba Marmion.



NLM

A Latin view, with an emphasis almost solely on our Lord's death and no mention of the Resurrection, and of course the key word is sacrifice, but there is no definition of that word to be found here at least:

THE DEATH OF A GOD, dying for the salvation of men, is the central point in the history of mankind. All ages bear witness to and converge towards it: the preceding centuries point to its coming, the others are destined to harvest its fruits.

The death of Christ is the centre of history, and also the centre of the life of each man in particular. In the eyes of God every man will be great in proportion as he takes part in that deed; for the only true and eternal dignity is that belonging to the divine Priest. The degree of each one’s holiness will be in exact proportion as he participates in that bloody immolation. For the Lamb of God alone is holy.

But although Jesus Christ the divine High Priest appeared only once on earth, to offer up His great sacrifice on Calvary; yet, every day He appears in the person of each one of His ministers, to renew His sacrifice on the altar. In every altar, then, Calvary is seen: every altar becomes an august place, the Holy of holies, the source of all holiness. Thither all must go to seek Life, and thither all must continually return, as to the source of God’s mercies.

Eastern Christian Books: Deification Through the Cross

Eastern Christian Books: Deification Through the Cross

Eerdmans: Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation by Khaled Anatolios

Anatolios uses the phrase “doxological contrition” to suggest that the truth of salvation is found both in Jesus’s perfect glorification of God and in his representative repentance for humanity’s sinful rejection of its original calling to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity.

I personally don't see the need to combine Byzantine and Latin views of soteriology in this way but apparently Anatolios does.

More on Atonement

Debt (and Satisfaction)

Fr. Stephen De Young Continues His Series on Atonement

Propitiation and Expiation