Very thought provoking, keep it coming.
Your comments will be in the normal font, and mine in bold.
First, regarding the thought experiment that you present. It seems like forgiveness could be involved in either option or not [where is the forgiveness if you kick me back?]; the disjunction is not that sharp. If you wrong me grievously by kicking my shins, it seems that justice demands that both I am revenged on you [clearly not, unless God is unjust for not sending us all to hell] and you pay reparation to me. Now maybe both are accomplished by you washing my car (it needs it) but maybe not. Every evil requires vengeance or punishment, which is penal. But as I say, your one act of washing my car may make reparation and as you say, still involve that penal aspect. [Washing the car, that is, making satisfaction, does involve something penal; but this is still fundamentally different from revenge. It comes down to this: justice may be restored by the sinner offering something sufficiently good to the offended, or by the offended inflicting evil on the sinner.]
In the case of the relationship between God and man, it seems that sin, at least original sin, merits the eternal punishment of damnation [exactly]. Yet God accepts the sacrifice of Christ as satisfaction for our sins [true]: those who become members of Christ, that is, who participate in Him and in His Passion through Baptism, no longer have to undergo this punishment [right; and neither does Christ. So, what has happened to: "justice demands vengeance"? Is God unjust?].
They do have to undergo the punishment of purgative suffering, however. [Yes, they do. God, in His Wisdom, seems to want our cooperation in our salvation. Sin entails both temporal and eternal punishment; once the sin is forgiven, eternal punishment is out of the question – once again I question how forgiveness remains when the full punishment is inflicted – but temporal punishment remains. Now, for those forgiven of their sins, there is a direct correspondance between the amount of satisfaction they make for their sins through penitential works on earth and the amount of punishment that will be inflicted upon them in purgatory. Making satisfaction = not being punished]. Now it is clear that Christ does not undergo eternal damnation (your point 3). So somehow Christ's sacrifice is sufficient for His members not having to undergo the punishment that they justly deserve for sin.
Here is what I would accept about the situation from what you have said: Christ freely offers Himself to the Father. He does this in obedience to the Father. In doing so, He takes upon Himself the deepest level of human suffering [This last depends very much on what you mean. When discussing the fact that Christ endured maximal pain, St. Thomas is very careful to say that this refers to maximal pain in this life: "The pain suffered by a separated soul belongs to a state of future damnation which exceeds every evil in this life, as the glory of the saints exceeds every good of our present existence. When we speak of Christ’s pain as being maximal, we exclude all comparisons with the pain endured by a soul in the next life" (S.Th. IIIa, 46, 6, ad 3)]. He does this so as to offer perfect worship to the Father, to reveal the glory of the self-donative love of the Trinity in a fallen world, to give us a perfect model of charity. He also does this so as to repay the debt which we owe to the Father, but not just repay it but overpay it, so to speak, that He might have an abundance of grace to pour out upon us [also true; it is at least the common opinion (Sent. communis) that Christ’s atonement is superabundant, that is, the positive value of the expiation is greater than the negative value of the sin. Actually, come to think of it, your point about the superabundance of Christ's satisfaction strikes me as an argument in my favor. Pope Clement VI declared that one drop of blood would have sufficed for the redemption of the whole human race on account of its infinite preciousness (is that a word?). Tradition says that the suffering on the Cross was more than enough; it seems to me that von Balthasar wants to say that it wasn't enough - now Holy Saturday must also be a day of suffering, in fact, of even greater suffering than good Friday. If this is the peak of Christ's redemptive work - his alienation from God in hell - why the stress upon the Cross, and specifically upon His Blood in the Bible and the Tradition?]. He furthermore does this so as to reveal His love for us, to be in total solidarity with us in our every suffering [just curious, but this seems like a premise to me, more than a conclusion – a premise which leads to the conclusion that Christ suffered the pains of damnation – and I wonder upon what is this premise based. It strikes me as unnecessarily assumed], even to the point of descending into death and hell [Christ's descent to hell has always been interpreted as a descent to the limbo of the fathers in order to lead them forth – never as a continuation of his suffering, at least until the modern era. His work of redemption was "finished" on the sixth day (Friday) – on the seventh day he rested]. St. Thomas argues that Christ descends into hell to shame the damned, but I think that there is something to what Balthasar says: He goes into hell so that even there His compassion has been manifested, so that no one can say that God was not there for him. [I’m not sure what that means]
So Christ repays our debt freely as a gift—on this we can agree. But this can lead to some problematic results [It shouldn't. It is one, undoubtably true premise. Problematic results could only occur throught the addition of false premises, or through faulty reasoning]. Our debt involves the punishment of suffering, death, and hell, and Christ takes these on Himself (though not so as to go to hell eternally [well, then, does he or doesn’t he take upon him our punishment? I don’t think you can have it both ways.]). Christ is innocent, yet the Father commands Him to suffer and He obeys—is this just of God to do (your point 1)? Christ is not fallen—so how can He pay our debt? How would it be just? For it is not qua human but qua fallen that we need to pay a debt in the first place. And the Fathers pointed out that "that which is not assumed is not redeemed" and Christ did not assume our fallenness. This seems to be an objection to the whole legal justice model that has to be met. [I don’t see the difficulty here – Christ’s innocence (and divinity) is precisely that which allows him to make such a valuable offering to God, and He makes this offering qua human, not just as a man, but as the definitive and last man, as the new Adam, who takes all of humanity up into himself; indeed, this is exactly why we must be incorporated into His body (the Catholic Church) in order to receive the fruits of the redemption. The “debt” cannot be paid by an innocent man if it is understood as the obligation to undergo punishment; it can be “paid” an innocent (representative) man if it is understood as the obligation to make reparation. If my brother breaks your car’s windows, it would be unjust for you to punish me, but it would be perfectly fine for me to pay for your window to be fixed. Re: the Eastern Fathers, and the "not assumed, not redeemed", it is not our "fallenness" that needs to be redeemed it is our nature, our race. This, at least, was clearly what they who said it meant by it. In fine, I see the points you make as an objection to penal substitution specifically, rather than to considerations of justice in general.]
[…]
Regarding Christ’s alienation from God, I think this is to be understood on an experiential or phenomenological level, not on the level of the actual principles involved. So there is no divide in the Trinity. [What does it mean to experience something that is not true/real? If Christ is not separated from God (remember: He is God), how can He experience this?] Rather, Christ willingly takes on all of our sufferings [I admit only maximal suffering in this life], including the experience of alienation from God [this is the suffering of the damned – this is the necessary conclusion of the penal substitution theory, which is precisely why I think that theory so woefully errant]. This does not preclude that He is actually close to God at the moment of his cry on the Cross. But we could tell the story this way: in the immanent Trinity, the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father involves the total self-donation of each to the other and thus their union. But when the Son becomes man in a fallen world, this total self-donation is experienced in terms of all the uncertainties and divisions that come with our fallen world. Coupled with His choice to experience all of our sufferings [again, only temporal sufferings], this means that the Son, in pouring Himself out to the Father on behalf of humanity reveals the glory of the Trinity (that is, the self-donative, self-emptying love of the Godhead) but this is experienced, in virtue of His humanity, in terms of uncertainty and loneliness. Thus it seems to me that both Balthasar and Ratzinger could be correct to a certain degree. [In regards to the story just told, I think that I can only admit that I don’t speak fluent von Balthasar. What does it all mean? I’m not really sure what you mean especially by kenosis within the Trinity. I’m aware of this word only in Phil. 2. Do you really think that Christ experienced uncertainty? What about the experience of the Beatific Vision that was his from conception unto eternity?]
It seems to me that we must take seriously the fact that our experience of alienation from God is the deepest source of suffering, and thus a 'place' that Christ must go if He is really to be 'God With Us' [I don’t see why. He is "God with us" in everything but sin.]; we must also take seriously the fact that the Son and the Father are one [I think that this actually has to be taken way more seriously than the previous point, since it is the Primary Dogma of the Catholic Faith, whereas the assertion that "God must experience alienation from God in order to be with us" could only be, if granted, a conclusion at some remove from the articles of faith. Theology works from the top downwards – soteriology is to be understood in terms of Christology, not vice versa]. An objection that you could make is that Christ is not fallen and so has no way of having this experience, but I think that this lodges you in the same difficulty I raised earlier about the justice model to begin with [I disagree, but I wrote a few inadequate words there, so I won’t repeat myself]. Part of the merit that Christ earns is that He suffers through this alienation, which is indeed arduous for Him on an experiential level in virtue of His humanity, still trusting in the Father. By taking this on Himself He both fully allows humanity to be assimilated to Himself and offers the perfect and total sacrifice of Himself in a fallen world as a man, and thus reveals to us the sacrifice of Himself which He eternally makes to the Father in His self-donative love in the immanent Trinity.
I look forward to hearing from you re: the weak points in all that I said, and re: which concerns of yours you think that I failed to address.
P.S. I see you've entered a new comment.
It seems to me that the hierarchical notion of truth is a good one, but the Trinity is, to say the least, difficult to understand. All of our understanding is in the form of analogies and metaphors. Thus it seems that it is possible that different models of the Trinity can be correct and thus perhaps different models of the Redemption. It seems to me that there are various paradoxes or aporias involved here, as I mentioned in the above post, and involving various Bible quotes. I'm not sure that there is a "one size fits all" interpretation of them, and it seems that we need to respect these difficulties and not just try to explain them away.
Just two things: (1) I agree that the Trinity (as well as the Hypostatic Union) is difficult to understand. In fact, that's precisely why I favor an interpretation of the atonement based upon this understanding of the Trinity: "The three Persons of the holy Trinity are one in being and yet really distinct in their relations of origin." And for Christology I take this: "Christ is one person in two natures unmixed, untransformed, undivided, unseparated." What "self-donation" and kenosis mean in the inner life of the Trinity, and how these would be mirrored in the human life and actions of Christ, are far less certain.
(2) The only thing that I am trying to "explain away" is the theory of penal substitution. If it contradicts firmly clearly truths about the Trinity and/or Christ Himself, then its problems must be "explained" so as to make it go "away." If there is something that you think I'm inappropriately explaining away, I'd like to know, but maybe I'd need to hear more specificly what you don't want "away".
Pax!
5 comments:
Oh, and by the way, this has all been far too mild mannered. We need some theological trash talk. Some favorites:
You're such a cross between a Jansenist and a Cathar. Yeah, pun intended, pharisaic punk.
Your similitudo dei needed an elephantine spit shine when you were born.
(source: http://ironiccatholic.blogspot.com)
I stand by my orininal comment, even though I misspelled "atonement."
Mark (and anyone else who is interested),
There was an interesting exchange in the pages of First Things on the topic of von Balthasar's doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell.
First, here: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5422&var_recherche=balthasar
Then, here:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5398&var_recherche=balthasar
Then, here:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5454&var_recherche=balthasar
Enjoy! Alyssa Pitstick, by the way, is a graduate of the ITI (my sympathies are obviously, therefore, with her).
My dear Docetistic Ultra-Montanist Cousin John,
Call me a Jansenist, will you?!!! Well, I heard that you are a liturgical dancer!
Anyways, sorry for not writing back sooner. It is a paper-revision weekend, and Abelard, Husserl, Aristotle, and St. Thomas consumed my thoughts.
I appreciate a lot of the points you make here; I think that I was probably a bit extreme is some of the things I said. You are also right that some of the things that I said are arguments in favor of the anti-penal substitution model. However, there are still some points I wish to make. I think I have figured out what the main differences are in what we are saying, and what I want to “save” in the penal substitution and Balthasarian models of the Atonement. You will probably still disagree with me, though.
First, I think that I was wrong to make a blanket statement that forgiveness and me kicking you back when you kick me are compatible. Forgiveness, in its fullest sense, involves remission of the debt. But there could be a situation in which you kick me, ask my forgiveness, I say that I forgive you, but I go on to say that (assuming that I am a competent authority) you need to be kicked in the shins to learn not to do things like that to people. But I suppose that that would be to teach you a lesson, not for me to get revenge. It still seems to me that when A wrongs B, two things need to happen for justice to be restored: A needs to do something for B to make up for the wrong, and B needs to be satisfied towards A. Would it be wrong to say that A needs to “make satisfaction” and B needs to “be revenged”? In the case of you paying for your brother breaking my car windows, it seems to me that you are taking upon yourself some of the punishment that ought to belong to your brother. But some of my need to be revenged on your brother will be mitigated when you pay the price of the windows. I might even forgive your brother and not demand that anything be done to him (or I might kick him in the shins, slaughter his livestock, burn down his village, and sell his children into slavery). But some of the punishment has been served by you who were innocent. It is true that you served this punishment as a free gift, as a sacrifice, etc. But you served it none the less. We could even imagine that I said to you “Look, I know that your brother can’t pay for the windows; I’d like it if you paid for them” and then you freely did so. Here, I am transferring the punishment to you, an innocent person, but you are freely offering it as a gift. You make satisfaction, and I am satisfied/ revenged, and I forgive your brother. Could not a similar situation happen with Christ? Perhaps this is just a confusion about language regarding the words “punishment” and “revenge”; perhaps the confusion is mine. But I think the situation as I have described it here and the interpretation in terms of punishment which I have given is the good content that I see in the symbol of penal substitution. I repeat that I think it is only a symbol and I utterly repudiate all the crude versions of it (Oswald Chambers comes to mind). I guess our main difference here is that you say making satisfaction excludes being punished, and I don’t make this disjunction so strong; I think I may be relying a lot here on the experiential aspect of these two phenomena.
Now the other issue is this Balthasar business. I mostly picked this argument with you because you said something negative about Balthasar, and I like Balthasar, and I thought a good argument regarding that would be fun, and it has been.
The major thing that I want to save here (as, probably, in the prior case) are the experiential phenomena. You say that a theory of the Atonement ought to be based on the Trinitarian and Christological Dogmas, and so it should. At the same time, however, it seems that we have a lot of other data that we can’t just throw out. Christ was made sin for us and was marred beyond human appearance and knows how to sympathize with us in our weakness and shared our entire human condition, except for sin, etc. The way I want to approach these issues is not to force them into a hierarchy from the outset, but to say “These are all things that are true and cannot be explained away”, but on the other hand “This hierarchy of truths is true, and ultimately everything must fit into it”, then set up various paradoxes and aporias, meditate on these, come to resolution in some cases, and in other cases say, “I don’t know how these two truths could be fit together; they seem to exclude one another, but I trust that they do not. This is a mystery to me”, then continue to meditate on them as mysteries, holding the various truths in tension, and maybe eventually gain insight into how they can fit together, but maybe not. (Of course, I am a philosopher, and a phenomenologist-existentialist to boot, so that may set me off-track from the outset...)
It seems to me that if it is true that Christ did share in all our weaknesses but sin, and if He experienced every sort of suffering in this life, then Christ experienced alienation from God. Now you could object that alienation from God in this life differs in kind not just in degree from alienation from God in Hell, and I would disagree with you, but I’m not sure whether either of us would be justified in our claims. But it seems to me that alienation from God is a great source of suffering in this life, perhaps the greatest. And it seems to me that one can experience simultaneously both alienation from God and closeness to God, as in the Dark Night of the Soul. Christ, since He had the beatific vision (although it is difficult to know what this experience is like), would be the extreme case of this; as Ratzinger says (Intro. to Christianity p. 290), Christ is “simultaneously immersed in God and in the depths of the God-forsaken creature”, bringing faith and redemption and the presence of God to those in the midst of alienation from God, but still experiencing the uncertainty and temptation to despair that is our human condition. If Christ did not share this core suffering with us, it becomes difficult for me to see how He is “God with us”; it becomes difficult for me to see how He is even really human. In short, it becomes almost too easy.
Now this is not to say that Clement VI is wrong that one drop of blood would have sufficed to save us. But it seems that it is most fitting that Christ share everything with us, except sin. Furthermore, it seems that He did share everything with us, based on the Scriptures. His cry of “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?” thus seems to be a real expression of an experience of abandonment that Christ is having, though it is an act of trust also. I don’t think we would want to say that He is just quoting Scripture to make a didactic point. Thus it seems that we have to hold in tension two facts: Christ’s experience of alienation from the Father and Christ’s union with the Father. The fact that the latter is “higher” in the hierarchy of truth does not mean that the former did not happen. And it seems that the fact that Christ’s life reveals the Trinity shows that there is some sort of self-emptying love in the Trinity. I admit that you are right that it is difficult to know what this means. But the idea of kenotic love in the Trinity is still something I want to hold onto. What is it that seems problematic to you about the idea of kenosis and self-donation in the Trinity? It certainly does not seem incompatible with the Trinitarian dogma that you mentioned. Nor does Christ experiencing alienation in tension with union seem incompatible with the Christological dogma that you mentioned. We have experiences all the time that do not give us reality exactly as it is. It seems that Christ, having a finite human nature, could have had similar experiences, though they would have been in tension with His experience of the Beatific Vision. The subjective experiences of Christ seem almost too strange to understand for those who are not Him, who only have one intellect and one will and one nature. But I think that theology has to deal with them.
I think that a lot of this discussion comes down to my insistence on a focus on the experiences involved and your insistence on the established dogmas. I admit that this puts you on firmer ground, and that my approach must be ultimately governed by yours. But I still think that my approach is important, even if dangerous.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Let me know what you think when you get a chance, but I might be slow in responding as we are traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday. I hope that you and Lisa and Maria and the baby have a happy Thanksgiving. I think that you will agree that Christ’s sacrifice means that we don’t have to do animal sacrifices. So don’t sacrifice any turkeys to your Manichean gods.
All the best,
Mark
P.S. Thanks for those links; I will check them out. God bless.
Liturgical dancer? Seriously? Way below the belt, Mark.
There are many interesting things to be discussed in what you wrote, but I'd like to focus on what you (correctly, I think) identified to be the main difference in our views here: I say that making satisfaction excludes being punished, and you don’t make this disjunction so strong.
First of all, I do hold that the act of making satisfaction has a penal character in the sense that it ought to be an arduous work.
There seems to be some difficulty in how each of us is using the word "punishment". So, let me try to explain my meaning.
Divine Revelation teaches us about Christ's act of salvation often using (oddly enough) monetary images.
We are in debt to God; Christ pays our debt; we are hence redeemed. If we reflect for even a moment on this simple analogy, it runs something like this:
We've borrowed $100 from God and have no way of paying it back. If the debt is not paid, we get justly thrown into debtors prison. If we pay the money back, justice is restored and nobody goes to prison. I am making a disjunction, if you will, between paying the debt and being punished for not paying the debt. They seem worth distinguishing. If you want to turn around and say that forking over the $100 is a "punishment", then that's fine, although tends towards some confusion. It hurts, of course, even more if it's 100 euro, but it's precisely not punishment in the sense that I outlined above.
There's plenty more to say, especially since you know as well as I do that every analogy breaks down at some point. However, in order to keep the discussion within managable limits, I'll leave it here for now.
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
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