A Community Called Atonement: Part 1

Scot McKnight, Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University, offers another provocative study. His recent book A Community Called Atonement (Abingdon) invites us to hear the symphonic music of the biblical metaphors for the atonement.




The guts of the book comprise four parts:

1. Atonement and Convergence: Where to Begin?
2. Atonement and Image: With Which Image?
3. Atonement as Story: Whose Story?
4. Atonement as Praxis: Who Does Atonement?

Many teachings on atonement get right to a specific text like Mark 10:45, for example. Scot wisely resists that urge. In Part 1 Scot begins with Jesus (of course!) and with Jesus and the kingdom of God.

But, wait! Like the cable TV, late night commercial, there's more! Scot goes on to present six significant converging realities that lead up to the symphonic sounds, the multiple images that present the atonement. Let the reader, read.

"Thus, atonement is not just something done to and for us, it is something we participate in---in this world, in the here and now" (30).

Next: Part 2

African Bible Commentary: New Lens on Life

"The gospel has no permanent resident culture."

A good friend of mine recently gave me a copy of the African Bible Commentary. I've wanted one since it became available over a year ago. It is a one-volume whole Bible commentary with entries from 70 African scholars. These highly competent men and women (most have PhDs from highly prestigious schools) present a commentary from their culture and worldview. These African scholars invite us westerners to look beyond the confident, often arrogant results of our biblical study skewed as it is by western cultural limitations.

Kwame Bediako, PhD in Divinity from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland (as well as PhD in French Literature from the University of Bordeaux, France) wrote an opening article for the ABC titled "Scripture as the Interpreter of Culture and Tradition." While Kwame Bediako's entire article is immensely stimulating, one sentence by this African scholar leaped from the page, grabbed my mind and pinned it to my desk saying, "Think!"

Kwame Bediako wrote this simple, stunning sentence: "The gospel has no permanent resident culture" (ABC, 4).

The gospel doesn't reside in western Michigan or Wheaton, IL or Dallas, TX, or Colorado Springs. The gospel isn't exported with American missionaries to other countries. The gospel is nomadic, a God-created gypsy, a "word" without a country, yet comfortably at home in all cultures.

Why did this sentence stun me? Because it socked me in my fat American arrogance. Bediako humbled my supposed theological superiority. His precise sentence was a crow bar that pried away my culture-bound grip on the Americanized "good news."

We live in a truly startling moment in history (no matter how you feel about USAmerican politics). We live in a time when clear, strong voices "from [almost] every tribe and language and people and nation" are helping to shape a global gospel and an international theology that are not hide-bound by any one culture. Western gospel empirialism is fading fast. To God be the glory!

Simply Christian by N.T. Wright

This is simply one very good book by a good guy.

Those who long for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty will find Tom Wright's exploration of these realities within the Christian story a compelling read.

I connected with his often repeated refrain that we do not live in a world where God and everything are one (pantheism or panentheism) or in a world where God and everything else exist on the opposite sides of some great cosmic divide. Wright presents a reality of God and everything else overlapping and interlocking. Heaven (and God) are not me and you and the wind and trees nor is heaven (and God) polar opposites of earth and human existence. God and heaven are here in and around us. Torah and Temple, Jesus and the church are where heaven and earth, God and humans have overlapped and interlocked. We are called "to live at the intersection of heaven and earth." And Tom points out--it's not an easy place to live.

His descriptions of the 'church' and her mission are profound, yet simple to grasp. The implications of his re-definitions of church and mission from what most of us have received are staggering. New creation began in earnest at the (bodily) resurrection of Jesus and because followers of Jesus participate in that resurrection, we are new creatures commissioned to announce to the world that with Jesus--his life, death and resurrection--everything has changed! Jesus alone is the world's rightful Lord.

From this eminent and prolific New Testament scholar, historian and theologian, we get a down-to-earth vision of heaven (pun intended) and a breathtaking vision of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah and the world's Lord. We are able to set the universal longings for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty into a thoroughly Trinitarian-framed, Christ-centered, world-affirming theology. We are invited to imagine how our little acts of kindness and love done out of loyalty to Jesus are changing this planet for the better. The "little seeds" will in fact become very big trees someday. Jesus said so.

Simply go and buy and read Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.