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Living the Story of the Word: The Atonement
By Scot McKnight

Reading and Living the Word: The Story of Atonement

For some Christians, clearly not all, the doctrine of Scripture ignites all theological reflection. For such, Scripture becomes foundationalist, the way Almighty Reason was foundationalist for thinkers in the wake of Descartes. Instead of cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore, I am”), it becomes “I scripture, therefore, I am.” First, it is argued, agree on the premises and then we can talk theology. A variety of terms are used for Scripture in this approach to theological reflection, not the least of which are Scripture as “norming norm” or “revelation” or “authority” or “inerrant” or “infallible” or “inspired.” Frankly, I have no truck with any such words or even for the commitment to the central role Scriptures play in the life of the Christian community. The question is whether or not such terms define the role Scripture plays in the life of the Church. As John Goldingay, an Old Testament scholar, reminds us: “In scripture itself, then, models such as authority, inspiration, and revelation are little used to describe scripture, much less scripture as a whole.”1 What model fits? What role does Scripture play in our life of faith together?

I will shortly propose that we learn to look at Scripture as a facet of the praxis of atonement as we struggle together to let its story be our story. Before we get to that proposal, however, we need to clean out some rubble. I begin with the clutter called Biblicism and bibliolatry, the tendency for some of our fellow Christians to ascribe too much to the Bible. Now one of the first things we need to see about the faith of Christians is that they had this faith before they had the Bible. Telford Work makes just this point:2

While the Bible is basic to Christianity, it is also marginal – in that God alone occupies the center of the faith, and that both belief in God and the believing community predate and will succeed Scripture’s present for and roles.

At the center of the Christian faith is God – the Trinity – and the gospel and atonement are about restoring cracked Eikons to this Trinitarian God. Whenever the Bible replaces the Trinity, we have bibliolatry or, even worse, idolatry. The first Christians, and the same could be said for ancient Israel in its various epochs of development, believed in a radical development: that God’s Story entered a new chapter in Jesus. And they were living in this Story before they sat down to tell that Story. So, we need to get this straight: our faith finds expression in Scripture but that faith is in the Trinitarian God and not in the Bible.

This brings us into conflict with common language in the Church. Often we hear this: “I believe in the Bible.” I propose we leave that language alone as long as what is meant is that we believe in the God of the Bible who makes his will known in that Bible. Recently, Tom Wright wrote a little book on Scripture, called The Final Word, in which he made the case for the expression the “authority of Scripture” meaning the authority of God expressed in Scripture. I concur, and contend that this is not a small matter. When Scripture itself becomes the Authority, we trespass the line that leads to idolatry; when we keep Scripture’s authority as a dimension of how God chooses to make his gracious will present, we maintain the proper balance. After all, once again, the central element is relationship to God, not our relationship to Scripture.

Another piece of rubble that needs to be removed is this: Scripture is the extension of the Trinity into our world. We begin with God and not with Scripture. God the Father sends his very own Son, and his Son sends his Spirit to created the Church, and the Scripture is an expression of the Spirit’s presence in the Church. Here is the proper order, which nearly reverses the foundationalist enterprise of so many: Father à Son à Spirit à Church à Scripture. Of course, we know God through Scripture – at least that is what many tell us. I happen to think this, too, is rubble that needs to be tossed out. We know God through the Spirit who makes God known through the Scripture.

Lest I be accused of saying something out of bounds, let me offer an illustration. I am avid reader of biographies. A recent read of mine was Jean Cash’s sparkling biography of Flannery O’Connor.3 If I were to treat Jean Cash’s story of O’Connor, I would focus my efforts on her text – how she told the story, how she arranged her facts, how she “stori-fied” O’Connor and how her story compares to and contrasts with other stories of O’Connor. Then I would have to investigate more about Jean Cash, and her family of origin and friends and scholarly career and influences, and before long I could deconstruct her story. Or, to shape this in the direction of how we read Scripture, I could read Cash to come to know O’Connor, however imperfectly, and this would lead me to read O’Connor herself so I could know her even more. Which, should you care to know, is what happened to me when I read Cash’s studious biography. So also with Scripture: we read Scripture not to know Scripture better and more (though some clearly do this) but to know God more and better. The reason we do this is because Scripture is the Voice of God that leads us to God. There is more, of course, to the reason we read Scripture, but more of that in a moment.

And one more piece of rubble that needs to be cleared away, and with this I’ll be done. Scripture, if my order is right, is the Church’s book. Father, Son, Spirit, Church, Scripture – if this is the order, we get Scripture through the Church. Now this has a very important implication for each one of us, especially for those of us who are like me trained to be Scripture experts: Scripture is the Church’s Story of Jesus and that means it is interpreted within the community of faith as it interacts with both the Church’s tradition and contemporary culture.

Now we have arrived at our central concern in this section: Scripture is the Spirit-inspired Story of Jesus as communicated through, to, and for the Church. As such, the New Testament, and in its wake a refreshed understanding of Hebrew Scriptures, is the Church’s Story of Jesus Christ. By “Story” I mean that the Bible comes to us in an over-arching narrative that begins with Creation and charts a narrative path through the covenant with Abraham, the exodus under Moses, and kingdom under David, and then the attempt to live out the covenant in the Land but which falls apart quickly into the division of Israel, the necessary rise of the prophetic summons to live within the covenant, the seemingly inevitable exile and the revival-like return to the Land to re-establish worship and obedience to the Torah. It is this Story – the Creator God who forms covenant with a community of faith (Israel) in this world, who shapes his redemption in terms of exodus and worship (including atoning sacrifices), and who willingly guides a free people who at times need discipline – that is continued and fulfilled in the Story of Jesus himself, and who continues that very same Story in the Church that is his Body. As Richard Hays, a New Testament professor at Duke, puts it: “the Bible narrates a world into which we are drawn, a world in which we live and move, a world in which God’s word encounters us with power.”4

But this Story is the Church’s Story of Jesus Christ, it is the Church’s Story of the development of Israel’s Story. It is nothing other than that Church’s Story of nothing other than Israel’s Story as fulfilled in Jesus Christ and continued in the Spirit. The Church’s Story has one intent: to shape the identity of God’s People, and therefore everyone of God’s People. The Church invites everyone to learn this Story and to let this Story become that person’s Story. Some prefer to speak of the Scripture as “authority,” and as I have said above, I have no problem with such a term, but I don’t think that is the best term to use for the Christian’s (or non-Christian’s) relationship to Scripture, just as I do not think “authority” is the best term to describe my relationship to my students or my relationship to my pastor. The best way to describe Scripture is that it is identity-shaping.

In fact, Scripture is inherently missional and that is why it is identity-shaping. Its missional focus is, at the same time, also praxis oriented. Nothing is clearer than the early Christian statement in 2 Timothy 3:15-17:5

and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All [or, better yet, Every (text of)] scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.

Great debates rage over the meaning of “inspired” (Greek, theopneustos) but, since it is so rare, it is best to keep it general and obvious: Every text in Scripture is somehow a “God-spirited” text. Of course, a God-spirited text is authoritative, as a teacher ought to be and as a car manual should be and as a computer manual ought to be, but the one who focuses on the Scripture as authoritative will quickly trespass the line toward idolatry. Those who are pressing the position of authority to the front are already in danger; those who live in its authority need not press the point. For it is obvious that the point of Scripture is missional: As God-spirited stuff it is “useful” (ophelimos). And useful “for”:

Teaching

Reproof

Correction

Training in righteousness

And it useful for these four things “so that” Christians, those who belong to God (who “spirits” the Bible) might be “equipped for every good work.”

This is what it is meant by Scripture being missional: Scripture is designed by God to works its Story into persons of God so they may become doers of the good. Scripture is missional because it is designed to create restored Eikons so they can be in union with God and communion with others for the good of others and the world. It is not designed just to be exegeted and probed and pulled apart until it yields its (gnostic-like) secrets to those who know its languages and its interpretive traditions, and who can then divulge their gleanings behind pulpits on Sunday mornings. Scripture is missional because it is designed to create missional people who learn from their missional praxis how to see Scripture as a missional text that shapes them so they can live in the Story that the Church tells in Scripture. To use the terms of Kevin Vanhoozer in his massive The Drama of Scripture, the Scripture is a “theo-dramatic script” which is performed by the people of God on the world’s stage of historical flow.

To say that the Church’s Scriptures are missional, to say that they are a theo-dramatic script, is to bring us back one more time to atonement as praxis: when Scriptures are treated as missional, and that means letting its Story be our Story and letting its Story be my Story, then Scripture restores cracked Eikons in all four directions – with God, with Self, with Others, and with the World. Scripture as Story heals a wounded people and wounded persons. When we enter into the Story of what God is saying through the Spirit in the Church we find atonement – we are restored. Even if in a slightly different order, Telford Work’s study Living and Active contends much the same when he frames Scripture as follows:6

Our bibliology [his word for the theology of Scripture] starts where the Bible starts: in the eternal purposes of the Triune God. It goes where the Bible goes: out to the fallen world as God’s instrument and medium. [Here, the missional intent.] And it ends where the Bible ends: in the eternal assembly of the Triune God’s worshiping disciples.

Alan Mann, in his new book Atonement for a ‘Sinless’ Society, sketches how such a process might work for a postmodern generation. Mann argues that the postmodern generation experiences sin as “shame,” and that shame leads to ontological incoherence – the Self can’t find its way. Mann, creatively, suggests the passion narrative permits a postmodern, shamed Self to find through the Story of Jesus’ facing and experience of death, along with the victorious resurrection, a perfect exemplar of a Self who is filled with ontological coherence. Here are his summary words:7

The story of atonement does not call on readers to see Jesus as a get-out clause, one who will live a life of narrative coherence for them and allow God to author his life so that they do not have to. It is more that the reader is called to identification – an identification which, for the post-industrialized self, requires the story of the ‘Other’ (Judas and the other disciples) as much as the story of Jesus. For it is they who reveal the self as being without narrative (ontological) coherence. They are the ones who demonstrate what it means to live in the absence of mutual, unpolluted, undistorted relating. Jesus, by comparison, opens up the radical possibility of the removal of that incoherence of the self, but only by the willingness to walk a similar path of intent which will require an act of repentance: living with God as the author of our life by dying to self and embracing the ‘Other’ in an act of at-one-ment.

Mann gets it right: treating Scripture as Story, the kind of missional Story that restores and creates atonement, requires identification. Central to our understanding of atonement is the notion of recapitulation. Recapitulation works both ways: Jesus identifies with us – the Incarnation – so that we can identify with Jesus. He lives our life so we can live his life. The apostle Paul calls this both co-crucifixion and co-resurrection. Notice Galatians 2:19-20

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Or Romans 6:11:

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

If we add to this that the co-crucified and co-resurrected are also mutually indwellt by the Spirit of God, we have in front of us a perfect model of learning how to enter the Story of Jesus in Scripture. We are invited to identify with Jesus, to let his Story be our Story, by dying to self, by being raised to new life with Christ, and by being overcome by the grace of God’s Spirit so that we become, through this missionally-shaped and atoning Story, people who are equipped for every good work.

The Church becomes an atoning community, a place where the praxis of atonement works itself out, every time it reads the Story of Jesus and every time it identifies itself with that Story and every time it invites others to listen in to hear that Story. Reading Scripture and listening to Scripture, and letting Scripture fill us up, is atoning. It works atonement in all four directions: it restores our relationship with God, it heals our inner Self, it generates love for others, and it invites us to become stewards of the world.

Scot McKnight is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. The author of more than ten books and numerous articles and chapters in multi–authored works, McKnight specializes in historical Jesus studies as well as the Gospels and the New Testament. As an authority in Jesus studies, McKnight has been frequently consulted by Fox News, WGN, US News & World Report, Newsweek, TIME, as well as newspapers throughout the United States.