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This biblical study of atonement is the third phase in my Atonement Project. So far, I have been using the “Wesleyan” quadrilateral, but have ended up using it in this order: reason and tradition first, then experience, then Scripture. The first volume came out in 2014, which was my Atonement Theories: A Way Through the Maze. I concluded this book with what I termed the Incarnation Criterion. By this I meant that the Christ of the cross is the prime criterion for judging all theories of the cross: his person defines his work. I named Irenaeus, Anselm, John McLeod Campbell, and P. T. Forsyth as especially noteworthy examples of this incarnation-eye-view of atonement. To let the Father define the work, I pointed out, results in difficult moral problems that too easily impugn the Father as demanding and inflexible. To let our humanity define the work, results in theories, such as the Moral Influence theory, that are inadequate for explaining the extremity of the solution offered. To place the person of Christ himself at the center compels us to attend to him who is the God-Man of Chalcedon, the bridge and mediator between the divine and the human.

My second volume came out in 2016 and was called: The Old Rugged Cross: A History of the Atonement in Popular Christian Devotion. In it, my aim was to analyze what has been happening on the ground. How, if at all, have these atonement theories helped ordinary Christians to live more devoted lives? The key concept I came up with was the Participation Imperative. By this I meant that the one assumption that underlies the church’s most formative engagements with the cross has been the assumption that Christ is the representative human. He suffers with our sufferings and dies our death yet raises us up to newness of life with him. The church’s use of Eucharist, metaphor, and art has been all about the attempt to re-present, and hence to participate all over again in, the events of Gethsemane, Calvary and the tomb. Even within the evangelicalism of the nineteenth century I discerned a shift away from the strictly forensic theories of atonement to which it remained ostensibly committed and in the direction of the ever-increasing use of the word “blood” instead of “cross” or “Calvary.” The atonement thus became liquefied and applicable. The hymnody and preaching of the nineteenth century was famously filled with the invitation to wash and bathe in this blood—a subjective participation to counterbalance the objective penal substitution.

In the first volume I was a historical theologian, then, in the second volume, I became a church historian, and now I change hats again, but in a way that gets me back to my true first love: I am wearing the hat of a biblical scholar. I like to live dangerously, always feeling like I am a guest at other people’s debates, a visitor wondering around other people’s countries of well-honed expertise, a foreign piece of mail sitting in a clearly-labelled pigeon hole. Even while writing Atonement Theories—which, of all the books I have written, most falls within my areas of proven academic expertise—I quickly became an intruder in other people’s cherished specialisms such as Anselm studies, Luther studies, and Calvinism. Similarly, in the second volume I knew that my only well-practiced area of specialism was in the Pentecostal part of the story. Again I was an intruder tiptoeing through the quest for the historical Eucharist, Anglo-Saxon literature, and medievalism, trying not to disturb the natives. Strangely, though, with this biblical volume I feel like I am coming home. And that is for two reasons. One is that my personal meditations on the Word have centered on the themes explored here since as far back as April 1992. I am writing about a biblical place I have personally inhabited for twenty-eight years. The second reason is that the Bible is every believer’s pigeon-hole. It is every Christian’s specialism. The Word of God belongs to the church, which is also why I am pleased to be trying out here the new discipline of the theological interpretation of Scripture, to which I now turn.

The Theological Interpretation of Scripture

This piece of work aims to make a contribution to the new hermeneutic that has been gaining increasing traction since Stephen Fowl’s seminal work of 1997.1 The theological interpretation of Scripture (TIS) is being appropriated both by biblical scholars who are disillusioned with “atomistic and naturalistic”2 historical-critical methods and systematic theologians who, like me, want to try their hand at some serious biblical work without having to engage with the kind of atomizing exegesis that empties the Word of all useful meaning, and leaves you wanting to slash your wrists.

As I introduce this concept I want to first register two oddities about the TIS movement. The first is that, despite the fact that Fowl’s founding document was a reader and therefore entirely immersive, outlining only in the briefest of terms what the approach consists of, there has been a never-failing stream of prolegomena ever since. There seem to be at least as many books about TIS as there are books that seek to exemplify it as a practice. The other oddity that the newcomer will notice is that many publications that are coming out under the auspices of TIS are written by scholars who are not in any very obvious way practicing TIS and do not seem to have even fully understood it. The main reason many such publications are not really TIS gives me a reason now to introduce what, in my view, is the greatest strength and most distinguishing feature of the movement and the thing that marks it out as a clear development on the older discipline of biblical theology: it is theology done in and for the church. One avowedly TIS book I read mentioned the church right at the very end, as an after-thought, like most theology books do. By contrast, what you will find in Pictures of Atonement is academic research with some of the features of a devotional. It will have reflections at the end of each chapter borne out of my own daily meditations on these atonement themes.

A second strength of TIS is that, unlike biblical theology, which was always at odds with systematic theology and wary of its confessional biases, TIS tries to be a genuine rapprochement between theology and biblical studies. Laudably, Brazos are in the middle of producing a series of commentaries that are written not by biblical scholars but by people who, in various ways, would normally be classed as theologians: Stanley Hauerwas and Robert Jenson, for instance. This is where TIS is truly ground-breaking. However, TIS is clearly not new. All of its leading proponents are unanimous on this point. The church has always instinctively read the Bible theologically, seeking to receive it as God’s Word spoken to faith for the formation of Christian character and action.

There is, according to one article, a form of TIS called “interested” TIS (I-TIS).3 It is this kind of TIS that I will mainly be practicing as I will be bringing to the biblical texts the interests generated by my first two volumes on the atonement. As mentioned, these gave me two motifs: the Incarnation Criterion (in Atonement Theories) and the Participation Imperative (in Old Rugged Cross). I will be bringing both of these to the light of Scripture.

The Role of Metaphor

I will be especially interested in the role of metaphor, which I identified in The Old Rugged Cross as being crucial in re-presenting the cross in ever fresh ways to the faithful, rescuing it from sliding into a mere sign or logo for Christianity. This was a major plank in my Participation Imperative thesis. The re-metaphorization of the cross via the arts allowed a renewed sacramental participation in the cross. McGilchrist, in his study of the importance of right hemisphere thinking in the appreciation of metaphor, is correct in saying that “the gap across which metaphor carries us is one that language itself creates. Metaphor is language’s cure for the ills entailed on us by language.”4 Metaphor, it is claimed, “was the first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour could it become a literal sign.”5 If this is the case then our never-ending words about the cross might actually be placing it further and further away from us. In this study, I will be examining the New Testament metaphors with a view to recovering their spiritual immediacy, their embodied logic, their sacramental power.

Metaphor is of interest to any biblical study of atonement since the way the earliest church understood the death and resurrection of Christ was expressed almost entirely in pictorial language. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find any New Testament interpretations of the work of Christ that are not in metaphorical language. Even the renderings of Christ dying or suffering “for us” and “for our sins”: ostensibly non-metaphorical language, almost certainly make some filtered reference to the Levitical sacrifices or qualify some commonly known trope from the Greek stage about heroic deaths for others.

Metaphor is variously defined as: “the application of an alien name by transference”;6 “An affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting”;7 “a calculated error,” which, “discloses a relationship of meaning hitherto unnoticed”;8 and “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”9 Metaphors always involve two things: one familiar and the other unfamiliar and they are always characterized as much by dissimilarity as they are by similarity between the familiar and unfamiliar components. They exist in an “is” and “is not” tension, with the “is” highlighted by the new relationship and the “is not” aspects left behind. The power of the new relationship that is forged between the “predicate with a past” and the object is positively revelatory. It brings out the “hitherto unnoticed” element that Ricoeur highlights as the fruit of the new and often startling relationship. It is this too that gives metaphors their explanatory power. Because of these things metaphors are absolutely ubiquitous to language and totally central to the way we learn about new and unfamiliar or abstract things. Negatively, in just the same way as a metaphor will only use some aspects of the familiar thing: called the source, or vehicle, so a metaphor will only highlight certain aspects of the unfamiliar thing: called the target or tenor. Everything else disappears from view. It must be acknowledged, for instance, that the horrible realities of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus somewhat disappear from view in Paul’s atonement theology, which could explain perhaps the post-Pauline Synoptic Gospel tradition, which sought to be more attentive to the passion narrative itself. Then, by the time we arrive at the Johannine corpus, we see a marvelous synthesis between the narrative and the theology, which became definitive of the later patristic traditions.10 But the point is that the reason for the omissions in Paul’s theology is that he is only giving us a series of pictures, none of which claim completeness.

In one very important sense the considerable use of metaphor in New Testament atonement theology was because there was no other way of expressing the otherwise inexpressible. Metaphor, far from being a frilly, aesthetic superfluity, is in fact the way we always grasp new truths, even scientific ones. Metaphor is therefore reality-depicting, perhaps even supremely so, and not a lesser category. Metaphor speaks a language that conveys deep meanings and emotions not accessible through “naked abstract formulations.”11 The first Christians had stumbled upon an unforeseen yet long foretold new thing: the tragic execution of the wholly innocent Jesus of Nazareth turned out to be a death-defeating, life-transforming event. It turned out to be a promised divine intervention, the power of which could be appropriated simply by receiving the Spirit. The result would be an in-rush of overwhelming experiences of God’s presence, grace, and power. There was no other way to communicate this new thing than to use familiar concepts as vehicles for the unfamiliar. The main difficulty for us, of course, is that, in many cases, the familiar component is no longer familiar to us. This, needless to say, will be one of the problems I will try to rectify in this book.

Metaphors are structured in different ways by different linguists. Perhaps the most helpful way of viewing the structure for our purposes is to see a metaphor as occupying the liminal and affective space between the source or vehicle being commandeered for a new usage, and the target or tenor: the new idea needing new language. With each atonement metaphor I will be clarifying the source of a metaphor so as to re-describe, with the newly clarified metaphor, the target. Though I agree with Gunton,12 who, like Ricoeur, elevated the role of metaphor to take its rightful place alongside other expressions of realist epistemologies, I am also an artist. This being the case, I also agree with David Brown in his enthusiasm for the non-cognitive, sacramental power of a metaphor. He points out that God is a real presence within God-ordained metaphors. In other words, God is able to inhabit well-chosen words in just the same way that he is understood in some traditions to inhabit bread and wine, and we see this in concentrated form in poetry (especially theistic poetry) where metaphors occupy such a central place. Brown then applies the same appreciation for the metaphors found in poetry to the metaphors of the Bible. He uses John 1:1 as a case study, pointing out that efforts to paraphrase John’s use of “Word” to describe the incarnation, using terms such as “expression” end up introducing a whole new set of associations not native to John’s original “Word” metaphor.13 Brown thus adds a second layer of irreducibility to that established by Ricoeur: biblical metaphors are irreducible because God-inhabited.14

And it is this sacramental power of metaphors that joins up with the aim of TIS, namely, that of faith-formation. I will be approaching the metaphors of atonement as an appreciator of poetry and image and seeking to recapture the immediacy that was their original faith-nourishing power.

So, I bring three interests to this study. The first is the motifs of incarnation and participation which I identified during phases one and two of the Atonement Project. The second is an interest in adopting the theological interpretation of Scripture as the overall ethos of this study: it is biblical study for theological results, and the research user is understood to be the church. Thirdly, I bring an interest in metaphor. Indeed, following the lead of Colin Gunton and John McIntyre, the entire study is structured around the metaphors of atonement.15 Appreciating the value and possible origins of these metaphors I am hoping will be the most illuminating way of studying New Testament atonement themes.

New Year 2020

1. Stephen Fowl (ed.). The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). The use of “theological interpretation of Scripture” as a technical term seems to not go any further back than 2005: Robert Plummer, 40 Questions about Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2010), 314.

2. Goheen, “A History and Introduction to a Missional Reading of the Bible,” 9.

3. Greg Allison, “Theological Interpretation of Scripture: An Introduction and Evaluation,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 14.2 (2010), 30 [28–36].

4. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009), 116.

5. Richter, cited in McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 117.

6. Aristotle Poetics 1457b 7–8.

7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 69.

8. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” Semeia 4 (1975) 78–79.

9. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 5; italics original. In addition to Lakoff and Johnson, the key literature would look something like this: Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); Paul Ricoeur and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, (trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J.; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (rev. trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; New York: Seabury, 1989). In relation to theology: Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).

10. Petros Vassiliadis, “Beyond Theologia Crucis: Jesus of Nazareth from Q to John via Paul (or John as a Radical Reinterpretation of Jesus of Nazareth),” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 47.1–4 (2002), 139–63.

11. Craig Ott, “The Power of Biblical Metaphors for the Contextualized Communication of the Gospel,” Missiology 42.4 (2014), 362 [357–74].

12. Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988).

13. David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 52–55.

14. However, he makes it clear that this should not be taken to mean that we must never go beyond the biblical metaphors. We should create new ones for new situations: Brown, God and Mystery in Words, 72.

15 Gunton, Actuality of Atonement; McIntyre, Shape of Soteriology.