Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

We could add example to example here. Every person, every society lives through an infinite number of representatives. It is the same with the people of God, which is an even more dense network of representation. For it is still more true of the life of faith than it already is for everyone: a human being needs help; on our own we would inevitably shrivel and die. Every believer lives out of the faith of another who preceded her or him in faith—parents, friends, great models of faith, the faith of the saints. Even to believe in the first place we need the help of others. The statement abstracted from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, “You can because you should,”¹⁹ is highly questionable. Against the background of Jewish-Christian tradition it ought to be: “You can, if you are willing to be helped.” ²⁰ The supposedly “autonomous person” who thinks she or he needs no help and no representative, of course, does have them: for example, the media that all too often think for us, shape us according to their dominant images, and thus incapacitate us without our realizing it. People always have representatives. It is only a question of which ones.

Atonement

The aversion of people today to the idea of atonement is even greater than their discomfort with the idea of representative substitution. There is, as we have seen, a serious reason for this. For today’s people atonement is only the “service” or “action” by which a debt is paid, or it is the “punishment” imposed by a judge as retribution for a crime committed. This puts a lot of baggage on the word “atonement” from the outset. Does God really want us to be punished for our sins? Or that someone else should be punished for our sins in our place?

The biblical idea of atonement means something different; in fact, it turns the notion of atonement common today on its head. Of course, that in turn raises the question whether we can still use a word when its content in the Bible is altogether different from what is understood by it today. Shouldn’t we just replace it with a word we can understand better, such as “reconciliation”?

In what follows I will continue to talk of “atonement,” because we are interested here not in the word itself but in the subject, what Jesus expressed in the sign-actions at his last meal and accomplished through his death. But I am fully aware of the language problem. Therefore in this section I will often put “atonement” in quotation marks, so that readers will know that this is not about the word as we understand it today. It is about what the Bible means when it uses the word.

What does the Bible mean by this word, so much misunderstood and so easily misinterpreted today? “Atonement” is nothing but representation carried to the ultimate, namely, representative substitution that often extends even to death for others. Of course, this description is inadequate; it is only an initial approach. We can only understand what “atonement” really means if we look at the difference between “atonement” in the Old Testament sense and in the world religions. In the latter the whole matter of sacrifice is often nothing more than a symbolic replacement to pay for sin, often even a self-punishment people impose on themselves to cause the deity to feel gracious toward them or to appease it. The religious person gives the gods something that belongs to her or him in order to receive something in return, something important to the person. Such people give something valuable, perhaps even what is dearest to them—even, it may be, one of their own children—in order to be certain of receiving what is desired.

With this sacrifice people seek to bring the powers that influence their lives to their own side. They perform an atoning sacrifice in order to be pure once more before the gods. Perhaps, they think, the punishments due them can be reduced by making a sacrifice. In any case, atonement falls within a diverse category of actions to be performed. The initiative comes from the human side, for the securing of one’s own life. For that purpose people develop a whole variety of cultic mechanisms, and in doing so they always run the risk of making use of the deity and rendering it instrumental to their own purposes.