Q & R: The Cross and Violence

A reader writes ...

Q: I wanted to personally thank you for your book, A New Kind of Christian. It came at a point in my walk when I most needed to hear it's message of Christ's transcending love. Having grown up within a pretty narrow concept of what 'being' a Christian meant it opened the doors for me to continue my walk with Christ from a more honest and hopeful place. The journey I am on has taken me to seminary (at XXX) where I am exploring leadership from a missional perspective.

I have recently been working out my understanding of salvation (and in how our view of salvation correlates in our acceptance of violence). To that end I find that most classical soteriological theories are still largely living within the law/sin narrative of the old testament rather than accepting the cross as God's repentance of that system and the violence it breeds in favor of an agape(shalom)/kingdom narrative.

I haven't gotten to read your newest book yet (as a seminarian I have way more books than I know what to do with). But from the reviews and conversation (along with your blog) it seems this is the same trajectory in which you are headed. I see a lot of Christians spending time to either justify or explain away the violence of the Old Testament, I think though that the work of the cross makes those efforts somewhat frivolous. The work of Christ's life, death, and resurrection was nothing less than the abolishment of the law/sin narrative. Instead we now have the, "you have heard it said, but what I say is..." narrative which is agape and kingdom founded. I think we should acknowledge that violence was and is part of the law/sin narrative and how God needed to work then; however that has been replaced and it is not part of this new narrative found in Christ.

I am not looking to divorce God from his Old Testament roots and way of working within that narrative; rather I am saying that in the cross God repented (turned away) from that system and the violence that perpetuated it's existence in favor of the Love of a self-sacrifical Lamb in Christ to end that violence once and for all. In essence on the cross God killed himself to save us from the law/sin narrative.

This is still in the working-out stage but I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you might have.

R:I have been on a similar path of rethinking. At some point, if you get a chance to read just the first four or five chapters of the new book, I think you'll find both some confirmation of your line of thought and some fine tuning. I think that you're on the right track (I hope folks who read your question/comment will see how you define "repent" and not assume you mean something else). But I don't think you can rethink salvation fully without also rethinking how the Bible is supposed to have authority for us and what the basic narratives of the Bible are ... and how Jesus is "the Word of God" for us. So many of these questions are deeply interrelated, which is why I tackled ten together in one book ... If you try to fix one element of a defective paradigm, the rest of the system will blunt the effect of your repair work. That's why I think we need to deal with the paradigm as a whole, to the degree that we're able. To me, that paradigm is a narrative ... an assumption about what the big story is. Thank God for people like you who are plunging into this needed work. I look forward to hearing more from you in the future!