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At the Origins of the Metaphors

Dialectical Tensions

Metaphor is a way of dealing with the shock of the new by juxtaposing the new with the familiar. The new thing was that the Spirit, dispensed by the glorified Christ, was revealing to people that the shamefully executed Jesus of Nazareth was the glorified King of all. This belief that Jesus was the only true Savior and Lord, and his triumphant inversion of crucifixion, Rome’s most powerful means of keeping the peace, put the first Christians very much on the wrong side of the political ideologies of the surrounding culture.

Philip Esler has made illuminating use of an axiom of sociologist Peter Berger, namely that the relation between religion and society is always “dialectical,” always fraught with conflicting aims and values. According to Esler, Luke, in the context of a parent religion and a wider political system that were both sometimes hostile, creates ways for the new beleaguered community to find a sense of its own legitimacy.1 Seen in this light, the metaphors of atonement would have been developed not only as a way of explaining the unfamiliar but also as a way of robustly defending a marginal and muted position that existed in irreconcilable tension with the dominant culture and its Caesar.2 The dominant culture had strong views about death by crucifixion. There was nothing to defend or eulogize about somebody who had been subjected to this ultimate sanction.3 Yet the first Christians had powerfully experienced the ascended Lord Jesus through the Spirit. The one who was crucified was now King. “The central focus of the proclamation after Easter,” wrote Gunton, “was that the events of Jesus’ history, and particularly of the Easter period, had changed the status of believers, indeed of the whole world. The metaphors of atonement are ways of expressing the significance of what had happened.”4

Inspired by experiences of Christ through the Spirit the metaphors of atonement were generated, in part at least, as items of resistance to the Roman hegemony together with its lord and savior, Caesar. The metaphors were both potent and polemic. It was assumed and accepted that the dominant culture would be outraged by the claims being made:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:18, 22–24. Also Gal 5:11; Heb 12:2).

Feminist Standpoint Theory

Transformative experiences of the Spirit gave the earliest Christians a certain vantage point or standpoint. Nancy Hartsock’s Feminist Standpoint is a Marxist-inspired theory that has now been applied usefully to many marginalized or “muted” groups as a way of helping us to notice that marginal groups hold a perspective on many aspects of life that is wholly other to that of the dominant culture,5 indeed, in Hartsock’s original version of the theory, the viewpoint of the marginalized is the inverse opposite of the dominant view.6 Further, this marginal viewpoint actually has a more accurate view of things, in contrast to which, the standpoint of the powerful is likely to be “partial and perverse,” or, “strange and harmful.”7 This seems to be mainly because the powerful have, in true Marxist style,8 a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and so choose not to see the things that might undermine their own legitimacy. In order to gain a more full-orbed understanding of the way things really are, therefore, the standpoint of the marginalized must be recognized. Nancy Hartsock is adamant that standpoint theory is not primarily about truth but power, not primarily about epistemology but resistance to hegemonies, so she goes no further than Marx originally did in explaining the exact nature of the epistemic advantage that the marginalized have, describing it only as “engaged” and exposing “real relations.”9 This epistemic advantage appears to be more to do with what those on the underside of society are unencumbered by rather than what they are endowed with. They are merely free from the standpoint of the oppressor. But might not the viewpoint of the marginalized have something more robustly positive to offer?

The Coming of the Spirit and the Birth of the Metaphors

The epistemic advantage of the post-Pentecost Christians over against Rome is easy to name. It is not merely an absence of skewed values but the presence of the Spirit. To a significant degree, the Holy Spirit is the epistemology—the way of knowing—of the earliest church. Pentecost revealed an ascended Lord to those who had not been eye-witnesses of the life, death, resurrection, or ascension of Christ. Their experience of the Spirit was all that was needed. It was an entirely convincing experience of the ascended Jesus, who was now Lord and dispenser of the Spirit (Acts 2:33). They knew he was raised and glorified for one simple reason: the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead now dwelt within them (Rom 8:11). For them, a new life had begun, which was understood to be a foretaste of the age to come. Hence, the Spirit provided epistemic access to the two least verifiable and yet the two most crucially important axes of the Christian faith: the reported past of the resurrection of Christ and the uncertain future of the return of Christ.

So, it was into this Spirit-inspired epistemic breakthrough that the metaphors were birthed, as language was sought for expressing the newfound faith. Accounting for how the metaphors were generated in this way naturally leads us into the temptation to speculate about the order in which they were born.

How we arrange the metaphors seems important to any attempt to make sense of them by reference to their origins. An attempt at chronology would share with all other efforts at nailing things down chronologically in the New Testament a certain sense of inevitable doom. For a start, there is, of course, no unanimity about the dating of any of the New Testament documents. Secondly, even though striking differences are thrown up by even so blunt an instrument as “earlier” and “later,” we do not know that changes over time account for this. It could have been changes over space, changes in context. All chronological development, if there was any, might well already have happened and been solidified well before Paul wrote Galatians. Moreover, the earlier portions of the New Testament are almost all Pauline, so that, in asserting a metaphor as “early” all we really might be saying is that it is “Pauline.”10

There was one change that happened in the surrounding context that might be significant. As I briefly explored in Old Rugged Cross, the cult of the martyrs during the early patristic period played a crucial role in the ever deepening attachment to the cross as the central symbol of Christian faith. The cross, in fact, always has been the way Christians have made sense of persecution, and it continues to function in that way. It may well be that there is a similar dynamic going on in the first century as we enter the persecutions first of Nero (r. 54–68 AD) and then of Domitian (r. 81–96 AD). This might explain the dominance of sacrifice and cost language around the cross during the later period. The metaphors that dominate earlier on, it could be argued, still reflect that first flush of Pentecost, which brought vivid experiences of a kingdom breaking in now, and of participating in the victory and vindication of Christ. We might even go as far as to say that the earlier metaphors are kingdom-now metaphors: the King has triumphed and is reigning, pouring out his power.11 He has led his people in a new exodus. There is liberation from former demonic and carnal powers and a participation in his heavenly reign. The later metaphors might be termed suffering-now metaphors, most notably the sacrifice metaphor. These, perhaps, are designed to instill resilience to growing hostility through an appreciation for the price paid and the life laid down to reconcile God’s former enemies to himself. It could be that such metaphors helped to prepare Christians to be willing to pay a price for faith, even the ultimate price, in the midst of a world full of people who are still God’s enemies.

The possibility of arrangement in two phases—kingdom-now followed by suffering-now—played a part in my early deliberations. However, as I penetrated deeper into the meaning of each metaphor, I became more interested in arranging them in terms of logical and semantic relationships, which might gently imply chronological begetting of one picture by another, but which don’t require a commitment to an early or late framework. Chronology is still implied but is not central to the structure. Instead I speak fancifully of one picture giving rise to another in putative chains of development, favoring the picture of mountain peaks with lower hills receiving something that somehow flows from the peak. Victory flows into redemption, which flows into participation, and sacrifice flows into justification, which flows into reconciliation. It is a thought experiment, if you will.

Cross or Kingdom: Which Gospel Is the Gospel?

. . . discourse about who will (or will not) enter the kingdom, and what the kingdom is like fills the pages of the Gospels. When we leave the Gospels and turn to Paul, however, what happens to the kingdom? We might get the impression that outside the Gospels the kingdom, except for a few mentions here and there, fades away into the background of the New Testament.12

Something we ought to attempt to resolve before we move onto the metaphors of atonement is the fact that there appears to be a pre-Easter message that was all about the kingdom, and a post-Easter message that was all about the work of Christ. Some scholars and popular Christian writers don’t really seem to know what to do with the cross and resurrection once they have finished waxing lyrical about the grand narrative of the God who, from Genesis to Revelation, is on a mission to establish his reign, his kingdom. An entire chapter of an edited work, entitled, “The Kingdom of God and His Mission,”13 says only this about the work of Christ: “Through his death and resurrection, Jesus has demonstrated decisively the victory of God’s reign over history.”14 Others prefer only to mention the kingdom in relation to the teaching and ministry of Christ, and proclaim the work of Christ, his once-and-for-all atonement for sin, as the most important thing. For them, the gospel is a gospel of the cross. On the part of some wise thinkers there has been some effort to find a synthesis between cross and kingdom. In fact, there have emerged four explanations for the apparent transition from a kingdom gospel to a cross gospel, all of which nonetheless affirm that both remain valid and interrelated. Let us consider each in turn.

Delayed Parousia

This is the oldest solution, dating back to the 1930s and the work of C. H. Dodd. He claimed that, although there is still to be found in Paul the kingdom theme of “transition from ‘this evil Age’ to ‘the Age to Come,”’15 there is a marked shift of emphasis away from a futuristic hope to a here-and-now gospel. In this here-and-now message, “believers are already delivered out of this present evil age.”16 In both Paul and John, there is still present the familiar “eschatological valuation”17 of the historical facts surrounding Jesus. In short, there is an already-but-not-yet tension in Paul similar to that found in the teachings of Jesus, the speaker of parables about tiny seeds and massive harvests and slowly spreading leaven which then completely permeates. But where Jesus is trying to wean his audiences off the idea of a right-now and complete in-breaking of the victory of God, Paul seems precisely to offer the possibility of right now walking in newness of life: for him the emphasis is on the “already.” Paul’s is more of a realized eschatology than an inaugurated one.

In both Paul and John, mystical incorporation into Christ is what brings this realized eschatology about. By participating in Christ, believers are already risen with him and the church has already become the eschatological people of God. Notably in John’s Gospel, in place of the Olivet Discourse predicting the second coming of Christ, there is the Upper Room Discourse in which, instead of a second coming of Christ, the coming of the Spirit after Christ’s departure is predicted.

Dodd believed he had an explanation for this: “This [realized eschatology] was the true solution of the problem presented to the Church by the disappointment of its naïve expectation that the Lord would immediately appear.”18 However, I would argue that this entering of the life of the age to come into people’s here-and-now experience is a phenomenon very much brought about by Pentecost. This, rather than some hasty revision demanded by the embarrassment and disappointment of a delayed parousia, is where I would prefer to place the emphasis:

Salvation meant incorporation into the kingdom of God, which occurred as the Holy Spirit swallowed them. . . . Until Pentecost, Jesus and the resurrection were wondrous events outside them. At Pentecost, however, the followers of Jesus became a part of the body of Christ.19

Dodd’s solution, then, offers a biblical hinge between the kingdom emphasis and the arguably more this-worldly emphasis of the cross and resurrection. Dodd reckoned that this hinge was basically an enormous non-event: the delayed parousia. I argue that it was an event: Pentecost. There is, of course, a case for saying that both are related. An arguably more cynical take on it would say that teaching about the present time wonders of life in the Spirit was deliberately pushed as a sort of consolation prize for the big non-event of the century. If we suppose, however, that people’s experiences of the Spirit were very real and that the teachings about life in the Spirit were an outcome of these experiences, then the Pentecost explanation becomes a convincing one, regardless of whether or not there was any real anxiety about a delayed second coming.

Lost in Translation

This is my term for the explanation that, in the transition from a Jewish sect to a predominantly gentile religion, Paul translated what had been a Jewish apocalyptic idea into terms that were their gentile equivalents. Jesus had already transformed it from a “narrow-minded nationalistic hope to a universal, spiritual order,”20 now Paul, without altering its fundamental meaning, replaced the kingdom language with dynamic equivalents.21 In Paul’s case, “the righteousness of God” was a favorite, but “salvation” and being “in Christ” also translate Christ’s original message about himself as the inauguration of the reign of God. Similarly, John, also writing for a gentile audience, liked the term “eternal life,” and generally avoided “kingdom of God,” though he did use the term (John 3:3, 5; 18:36). Poe again:

When the evangelists moved outside the context of a Jewish community, they no longer bound themselves to the language of the people of the covenant, wrapped up as it was with a redemptive time, place, and tradition. Instead, they employed language that communicated the same message, but to a people who never knew the Law or the Prophets.22

The kerygma, or preached message, on this reckoning, certainly retains a fixed inner core but superficially shapes itself to new contexts.

However, the transition from a gospel of the kingdom to a gospel of the cross and resurrection does seem like a change to the inner core, not just to its mode of expression. This cultural explanation alone, though illuminating, does not seem sufficient to fully explain the post-Easter transition, though it is certainly of some help.

Cause and Effect

Richard Bauckham opens the way for a promising synthesis in his use of the particular and the universal as two poles between which the whole mission of God may be articulated:

Mission takes place on the way from the particularity of God’s action in the story of Jesus to the universal coming of God’s kingdom. It happens as particular people called by God go from here to there and live for God here and there for the sake of all people.23

And the Bible, he says, is full of these journeys from the particular to the universal. God is the God of the heavens and the earth yet chooses Abraham, showing that he is both and equally the God of the particular and of the universal. The Bible is full of this “universal direction that takes the particular with the utmost seriousness.”24

Don Carson’s solution may be grouped together with this one as he resolves the disconnect using cause and effect. He is very clear that the gospel is a proclamation. It is not to be equated with any of the things that result from that proclamation, whether these are personal salvation or social action. Good news is simply to be announced because, “that’s what one does with news.”25 Carson describes the popular saying, wrongly attributed to St. Francis, “preach the gospel, sometimes use words,” as “smug nonsense.”26 That the Bible addresses both individual salvation and social justice he does not dispute, but “what is more doubtful is that the Bible treats either as the gospel.”27 The events of the incarnation, death, and resurrection result in the spreading of the kingdom that Jesus was predicting. Yet, this means that the message we actually preach is about the coming of Christ and what he achieved for us in death and resurrection. The kingdom is not the message but the result of the message.

Ironic Victory

For the earliest formative remnant of them the paradoxical notion that God’s anointed vice-regent was ignominiously killed became the generative center of their beliefs.28

The central irony in the passion narratives of the Gospels is that Jesus’ crucifixion turns out to be his elevation to kingship.29

The very most recent scholarship tries to make cross and kingdom as indistinguishable as possible. Taking their bearings from an entire sweep of biblical theology, advocates of this view point out that, at least as far back as Isaiah, the promised Messiah-King always was destined to ascend his throne by way of suffering, just like David himself. Isaiah becomes especially illuminating once we can move beyond the sharp divisions of the text into First, Second, and Third Isaiah. Irrespective of who wrote the various parts of Isaiah and when, the final work was edited to be a literary whole. Once we see Isaiah whole again we see that there is a connection between the royal Davidic figure of Isaiah 1–39 and the Servant of the Servant Songs of 40–55. In the case of the Suffering Servant passage, if we take the unifying step of placing it back into its literary context we can see that this suffering figure might also be a royal figure. Isaiah 51 and 52 are full of references to David’s Zion to which the Lord was now about to return bringing a reign of peace (52:1, 7–8), and 55:3 promises faithfulness to the covenant with David.

Fast forward to the Gospels, especially Mark, and it becomes clear that the entire journey to Jerusalem and the arrest, trial, and crucifixion is being quite deliberately portrayed, albeit with much irony, as the king marching on Jerusalem, asserting the ultimate triumph of the kingdom, and ascending the throne of the cross. The cross itself always did have ironic enthronement connotations with its built-in seat—a small wooden protuberance—upon which the dying victim would pathetically rest. As Wright points out, this accession via humiliation is really only part and parcel of the radical kingdom redefinition that had been so central a part of all of Christ’s teaching throughout his ministry: “the cross is the sharp edge of kingdom redefinition, just as the kingdom, in its redefined form, is the ultimate, meaning of the cross.”30

Plenty have noted the strong notes of glory through suffering, glory the other side of suffering, but, in this view, the suffering of the Messiah, as portrayed in all four Gospels, is actually the very means itself of Christ asserting his sovereignty.31 It is itself the messianic victory.32 This crucified Messiah is hence given the titles that belong to Caesar: Savior, Lord, King (Phil 3:20), and the cross itself—not even Christ’s triumph over the cross in resurrection and glory, but the suffering and humiliation of the cross—is the power of God (1 Cor 1:18). The crown of thorns is more than incidental, the robes and mockery are not there by accident, and the titulum announcing that this is Jesus the King of the Jews is central to the picture being painted by the Gospel writers. The crucifixion is the moment the rightful king ascends his throne. The kingdom of God, which forms the heart of Christ’s teaching, begins to actualize at the cross.

This view requires a fundamentally ironic way of looking at the cross, which seems to have its beginnings in Paul but reaches a climax in Mark’s Gospel. The cross is the opposite of a cross: an image that Paul deploys sparingly and in response to contexts where hubris of some kind is the main problem (as with the Corinthians!). At other times Paul finds himself addressing people who would have lived all their lives in fear of curses, spells, magic, and evil spirits (arguably the audience of Ephesians) and to them this message of an ironic victory is not routinely deployed. To reassure them, Paul does not tend to go via the rather convoluted and subtle route of the cross as ironic victory but cuts straight to the chase: Christ is Lord, has the name above all names, is head over all principality and power. It is certain situations that especially inspire him take his eye down from the heavenly throne of Christ to the seat of the cross, there to glory in the honor found only in shame.

Atonement, Kingdom, and Gospel

In the mid-twentieth century the trend in New Testament studies was to say “the answer is the delayed parousia; what was the question?” The assertion consequently was that New Testament pneumatology and the Pauline in-Christ doctrine emerged as remedies to the delay, as consolation prizes. Emphases that are integral to New Testament theology from its very beginnings were taken to be hasty re-writings of the original teachings of Christianity’s founder. There seems here to be a failure to recognize the fundamentally experiential nature of earliest Christianity. James Dunn has been exceptional in truly recapturing this emphasis, that the risen Christ was experienced as the Spirit.33

A way of looking at Christian origins that is less dismissive of the experiences that informed it is to say that, until Pentecost, the “already” aspect of the kingdom had only been implicit. Even seeing the cross as the inauguration of a reign required a certain way of looking at things that was not, by itself, obvious. Now, the already in-breaking reign of God came in the outpouring of “this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2:33). The Spirit came and gave the people such a foretaste of the age to come that they could now already taste it and became indomitably assured of its ultimate consummation in a new creation.

Reflection

1. Recall any experiences of the Holy Spirit, whether your own or experiences others have reported. What “epistemic advantage” took place? What were the main insights? A clearer vision of the saving work of Christ, or something else?

2. Esler believes that religion always exists in a dialectical tension with the surrounding culture. In other words, the culture is pulling in one direction and our faith is pulling in another. Where are the pressure points for you as you seek to live out your faith in your culture? Where do you find yourself rubbing up against a completely different dominant narrative?

3. What do you think of the way I have tried to harmonize kingdom and cross by using Pentecost?

1. Especially Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts. See also Esler, The First Christians in Their Social Worlds, 1–18.

2. Studies of the political Paul and possible traces of a critique of empire in his writings are of related interest. For a recent summary of the scholarly positions see Mackenzie, “The Quest for the Political Paul.”

3. Hengel, Crucifixion, 22–38.

4. Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 46.

5. Harding, “Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,’” 382–91.

6. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays, 107 and elsewhere.

7. Cockburn, “Standpoint Theory,” 335.

8. Standpoint theory apparently originates with Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave (Phenomenology of Spirit IV, 26, B), which is thought to have been influential in the development of Marx’s concept of class struggle. Marxism in turn clearly provides standpoint theory with much of its essential coloring.

9. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, 108.

10. Thanks to the delegates of the Erhardt Seminar at the University of Manchester for pointing out this, in retrospect, rather obvious fact.

11. Some older studies of the relationship of Paul’s conversion to his theology also speak of this triumphalistic element in the origins of Paul’s gospel, especially Beker, Paul the Apostle, but also (though presenting a very different argument to Beker’s) Bruce’s, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, and the work of Bruce’s student Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel. See also the discussion of these in Gaventa, From Darkness to Light, 17–21.

12. Vickers, “The Kingdom of God in Paul’s Gospel,” 52.

13. Luc, “The Kingdom of God and His Mission,” 94. William Abraham is similarly remiss in his classic work: The Logic of Evangelism. The gospel is defined as the proclamation of the reign of God and defined entirely in these eschatological terms. The death and resurrection is subsumed into that framework without any effort to really explain the salvific value of events so momentous as these.

14. Luc, “The Kingdom of God and His Mission,” 94.

15. Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 13.

16. Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 13.

17. Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 47.

18. Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 63.

19. Poe, The Gospel and its Meaning, 20. Poe provides a helpful overview of the “quest for the historical kerygma” that was initiated by C. H. Dodd and was at its height during the ‘50s and ‘60s: Poe, The Gospel and Its Meaning, 15–55.

20. Caragounis, “Kingdom of God/Heaven,” 430.

21. Caragounis, “Kingdom of God/Heaven,” 430.

22. Poe, The Gospel and Its Meaning, 38. See also Martin, Carmen Christi.

23. Bauckham, Bible and Mission, 10.

24. Bauckham, Bible and Mission, 11.

25. Carson, “What Is the Gospel?” 158.

26. Carson, “What Is the Gospel?” 158.

27. Carson, “What Is the Gospel?” 159.

28. Meeks, “Inventing the Christ,” 89–90.

29. Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” 73.

30. Wright, How God Became King, 228.

31. E.g., Wright, How God Became King, 237.

32. Wright, How God Became King, 243.

33. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit.