Untangling Cliché: The Metaphor of Atonement

From the Mailbag:

You wrote about the "forensic" view of subsitutionary atonement, and you've gotten into the idea of metaphor before.  I've never heard before about the atonement being a metaphor.  Can you explain?

Let's go right for the jugular. 

Assuming that God is what Christians say he is, is God literally incapable of forgiving sin without bloodshed?

Of course not. God can forgive sin as easily as he can create a moon or cause the rainfall.

Is God so fragile that he requires "justice" before he forgives? 

Of course not: he could crush the offender, or ignore the offender, or whatever he wanted to do.
We say things like, "But God's nature is holy," or "God is perfectly just and cannot tolerate sin" as if that solved the problem, but that just makes God a prisoner of his own nature, as if God were not eternally and totally free.

Which might be the case, I dunno.

What I do know is that we're already thinking through analogy and through metaphor about God's nature.

There is a complex reality of offense and justice that exists beneath any sin (in our real-world experience with one another) that demands that we make an emotional connection to those we have offended... and this comes to us in a metaphor, worked out in the history of Israel, and brought into its highest form in the understanding of the cross which we call "substitutionary atonement."

In it, there is a "price" set on offense. It's an arbitrary price: blood. Arbitrary, but powerful, since "the life is in the blood," and we see that the nature of justice and mercy is metaphorically expressed in the highest possible cost.

Was there some "magic" in the blood of the cross that expiated sin? Possibly, but I don't think so. I think that what happened was the metaphor was made complete: this is how difficult it is to set right an offense. The shedding of blood is like the unbearable agony of setting right things we have made wrong. In fact, we might as well die as try to make up for the things we've done.

Christ steps in as the metaphorical substitute for this whole business. Forgiveness now dominates the scene: he is the metaphorical expiation that says, "Once we commence to holding accounts over justice and mercy, the bloodshed never ends. It ends here."

If we assume that God is just unwilling to settle up without death and bloodshed (as substitutionary atonement claims), it means that God is as small and mean as a shop-keeper who refuses to part with his wares until paid in full. But the good news, as I read the gospels, is that God's forgiveness is freely offered, and that it is MAN, not God, who extracts payment, who commences and finishes the agony of sin and payment for it.

So yes, because metaphors can never cheat and reveal themselves as metaphors, it is quite true that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins," and he that "knew no sin was made sin for us."

 Can you think about sin without metaphor?

Sort of.

Metaphors are like those little dots and bubbles on your eyes: you know, the ones that you can see unless you actually look at them. When you try to track with them, they run just out of the line of your focus (because they sit on the lens that's moving to try to catch them).

I mean that once a metaphor comes out and says, "Surprise! I'm really a metaphor, and now you don't have to think of me 'literally' any longer," it ceases to exist.

Take the image, "Our God is a mighty fortress." Metaphor, obviously: God is not a fortress, literally speaking. But the image is trying to convey something to our imaginations and emotions, not our reason. Once our reason gets in on the act, it recognizes the metaphor and parses it and makes it go away. "God is like a fortress in that he grants us protection. He is unlike a fortress in that he is not made of stone and bricks. We must think of God as literally a fortress for the image to "work properly."

The metaphor, once recognized, evaporates, defeated.

One irony of biblical literalism is that it deals in a text stiff with metaphor, and labors to assert that metaphor is not intrinsic or necessary to speaking about the subjects the Bible takes on.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

If we assume that God is just unwilling to settle up without death and bloodshed (as substitutionary atonement claims), it means that God is as small and mean as a shop-keeper who refuses to part with his wares until paid in full. But the good news, as I read the gospels, is that God's forgiveness is freely offered, and that it is MAN, not God, who extracts payment, who commences and finishes the agony of sin and payment for it.

Yes. I'm reminded of something I read from Frederica Matthewes-Green:

When the prodigal son came home, the father was already running toward him with his arms open. He didn’t say, "I’d like to take you back, son, but my hands are tied. Who’s going to pay this Visa bill?"

[Sandra]

Oh, an excellent description of why literalism doesn't work, ESPECIALLY regarding the crucifixion. And an excellent little summary of what the metaphor IS, for those of us from literalist backgrounds who can't seem to see past the ends of our fundy Evangelical noses even when we want to!

Thanks.