In this chapter we will briefly outline some theories and ideas about salvation that have only been formulated in the last two centuries, but which are having a major impact in the field of soteriology. We must always keep in mind that although there have been a few largely dominant theories throughout history, these have been accompanied and overlaid by other ideas, and the same theories that we have analysed above have not been phenomena hermetically limited to certain historical periods, but have often mixed with one another. It is therefore necessary to be flexible and open to interpretation to appreciate the dynamism that has characterised this doctrine which, unlike others, has never had a definitive point of arrival but is still evolving. It is to be hoped that in the future we can arrive at a theory that is as true to the facts as possible, as was the case, for example, with the doctrine of the Trinity, which was the subject of heated debate in the first centuries of Christianity but is now accepted by most Christian denominations. The theories, which we will examine briefly, are as follows:
11.1. Liberal Theory - Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl
The Liberal Theory arose under the influence of Immanuel Kant's176 thought and spread mainly as a rejection of the scholastic theology based on Aristotelian speculative philosophy, that had characterised much of the second millennium. The coming to power of the intellect, according to this theory, is the cause responsible for the mechanisation of life and the associated spiritual impoverishment.177
The father of the Liberal theory can be considered Friedrich Schleiermacher,178 who argued that Jesus leads us to perfection not so much because of what he does, but because of who he is, the supreme instance of human consciousness transformed by union with the divine. “By transmitting to them a new vital principle, the Redeemer raises believers to communion with his salvation, and this is his reconciling activity.”179
Schleiermacher rejected the theories based on satisfaction and considered the need for divine punishment to be morally unacceptable and inadequate:
In no less magical a way is the forgiveness of sins achieved, if the consciousness of deserving punishment is supposed to cease because the punishment has been borne by another. That in this way the expectation of punishment might be taken away is conceivable […] but the consciousness of deserving punishment would still remain.180
His approach was mainly based on the experience of transformation that the Christian undergoes through union with the mediator Jesus Christ, not unlike the theory of Moral Influence, but in a deeper and more articulate way involving not only the moral but also the organic aspect. It is the total union with Christ, physical and spiritual.
Albrecht Ritschl,181 inspired by Schleiermacher's work, purified the doctrine of redemption from the alleged “priestly corruptions”, from the concepts of sacrifice and satisfaction and redefined redemption in terms of the freedom to cooperate in a connection of virtues aimed at the kingdom of God.182 His vision is based on the revelation of faith, only through which man can know; in this way he recovers the pre-eminence of faith over reason. The apparatus of juridical ideas, typical of the doctrines of satisfaction is rejected, while everything is defined in terms of God’s family and the restoration of the family relationship brought about by Jesus, who transmits this relationship of belonging and brotherhood to all the faithful.
11.2. Existential theory – Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich
Rudolf Bultmann183 moved beyond the approach of liberal theology and proposed an existentialist interpretation of the New Testament. According to Bultmann, only faith in the kerygma,184 in the proclamation of the good news of the Kingdom of God, is necessary for Christian faith, not other particular facts about the historical figure of Jesus. Bultmann carried out a work aimed at purifying the writings of the New Testament from the components that he considered mythological, typical of the first century and which risk being incomprehensible and alienating the Christians of our time. The theologian strips the figure of Christ of everything that appears extraordinary, supernatural, in short, everything that, in his opinion, is the fruit of the mythical mentality of the authors of the New Testament. Not only his miracles are demythologised, but also his virgin birth, resurrection and ascension to heaven. Of Jesus Christ, Bultmann only saves the message, the kerygma. For the Protestant theologian, this is sufficient because Christ's fundamental work is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The essence of his message is a new way of understanding human existence. The word of God calls man to renounce his selfishness and his illusory certainties, it makes him look beyond the visible world and rational thought, it challenges him in his unique and unrepeatable existence.185 God redeems humanity through the proclamation of the cross; the redemptive significance of the cross, for Bultmann, does not lie in any “ascending” theory of sacrifice or vicarious satisfaction, both of which smell of mythology, but in the “descending” judgement of the world and its liberation from the power of evil. The paradoxical message of salvation through the cross arouses in its hearers a response of loving submission, that moves them from an inauthentic existence to an authentic one.186
Paul Tillich187 proposes a similar existential theory: “The Cross is not the cause but the actual manifestation of God taking upon himself the consequences of human guilt. As God shares in human suffering, so we are redeemed by freely sharing in the divine participation and allowing it to transform us.”188 “The Spiritual Presence elevates the human spirit into the transcendent union of unambiguous life and gives the immediate certainty of reunion with God.”189
11.3. The Suffering God - Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann
In the field of Existential theory, and about God’s participation in human suffering as a way to salvation, important contributions should be acknowledged to Dietrich Bonhoeffer190 and Jürgen Moltmann.191
Bonhoeffer sees in God's participation in human suffering the exact opposite of what the religious man expects; the religious man, in fact, expects an intervention of God from the height of his omnipotence to remove suffering, instead Jesus took part in the suffering of the world, and, from this position of weakness, he conquered the world. It is only by virtue of this weakness that God can be with us and help us:
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. […] the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. […] That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.192
In the same way, man is called not to leave the world, but to share God's suffering at the hands of a world without God, as it was for Christ. It is the call to discipleship, to be imitators of Christ, to share his suffering in order to be light of the world and salt of the earth. Only in this way it is possible to manifest the true man that Christ created in us and to become sharers in his life:
To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man — not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ.193
For Moltmann, the suffering God on the cross is the perfect manifestation of the trinitarian God. Starting from the analysis of Jesus' disconcerting cry “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”,194 he imagines the cross as the place where the differentiation and at the same time the communion between the first and second person of the Trinity becomes visible. The cross, according to Moltmann, is not the “death of God”, but “death in God”, where the Father hands over the Son to death and suffers separation, and the Son hands himself over for us, suffers abandonment and undergoes death. It is the “kenosis”, the emptying of God, who humbles himself in order to give all of himself; it is not a movement of the elevation of man, which is the foundation of every religion, but it is the absolute lowering of God. This descent is the supreme manifestation of love, the gift of life for another, in which the Holy Spirit, the love of God, who is his very life, flows forth from within, in the same way as the blood which is the life of Jesus flows forth, and unites what the cross had separated:
In the event of the cross that movement of handing over which eternally takes place between the Father and the Son and which is eternally generative of the Spirit is made visible; in the event of the cross man is incorporated into that very event and becomes part of the eternal intratrinitarian love story. [...] In the cross of Christ, therefore, every human story is incorporated into the story of God.195
Only in this moment of extreme differentiation on the cross, can the suffering God, in the person of Jesus, unite himself with suffering humanity; the crucified and abandoned God unites himself with those who are abandoned so that, when the Spirit restores life and restores divine union within the Trinity, those who are united with Christ in death may re-emerge with him from the abyss, equally filled with God’s life. This, according to Moltmann, is salvation, the destruction of man “bent over himself”, the union with Christ in suffering that gives man true life and the capacity to love. It is much more than the simple forgiveness of sins, it is a restoration of creation:
The knowledge of God in the suffering of the cross of Christ destroys man who abandons his humanity, for it destroys his gods and destroys his supposed divinity. It sets him free from his inhuman hybris, to restore his true human nature. It makes the homo incurvatus in se once again open to God and his neighbour, and gives Narcissus the power to love someone else.196
The limitation of the theory proposed by Moltmann was rightly highlighted by Hans Urs von Balthasar,197 for whom the risk is to understand the event of the cross as the place where the Trinity is fulfilled, it would be to say that God takes shape only from the cross, within his own creation and by the work of evil. Balthasar's proposal, while lying firmly on the centrality of the cross, presupposes instead an eternal kenosis within God; the depth of the Father's self-giving, who deprives himself of all that he is to generate, in eternity, a God of the same substance, the Son. This allows us to look at the trinitarian God not only as a God for us, but also, and above all, as a God with us, who loves us so much that he humbles himself to share our sufferings, because “from eternity the essence of God is love capable of suffering, willing to sacrifice, love that gives itself […] in the death of the Son, the eternal heart of the Trinity was revealed.”198 “There must have been a Calvary in the heart of God before it was planted on the hill of Golgotha.”199
It is as if there were a cross unseen, standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages, out of which were sounding always, just the same deep voice of suffering love and patience, that was heard by mortal ears from the sacred hill of Calvary.200
11.4. Moral Substitution theory – C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis, in his famous book Mere Christianity, indicated that it was not necessary to know the “formula” of salvation in order to benefit from it; however, he paused to expound, with his usual lucidity and clarity, an idea of his which is worth considering for our study and which I have taken the liberty of calling “Moral Substitution”.
According to Lewis, mankind has fallen into a big “trouble”; this trouble consists in the fact that we have wanted to go our own way and behave as if we belonged to ourselves, thus abandoning the right counsel of God. This, besides getting us into distress, has made us enemies of God, leading to the tragic consequences we are witnessing in the world: “Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.”201 If we want to make things right, we must retrace our steps, surrender, and ask God's forgiveness for our pride and arrogance; and this is what Christianity calls “repentance”, a kind of death of our ego, of our pride: “It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.”202 However, Lewis continues, only a good person is capable of perfect repentance and does not need it, while an evil person, needing it, would not be capable of it; we need to humble ourselves before God, but what makes it necessary is precisely what prevents us from doing so. We could do it, however, if God himself helped us, or if he put an ounce of his wisdom and love in our hearts. But to surrender, to suffer, to humble oneself, to die to oneself, are all things that are foreign to God, they are not present in his nature, they are things that we can only find in human nature:
But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man.203
Jesus, by becoming man, subjected himself to that process of humiliation and death, so that he could give us, through his Spirit, the experience we need; he, who needed no repentance, subjected himself to the process in our place, so that we could receive the benefit of it and take it into our lives.
The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to “inject” His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.204
In conclusion, I have called the idea proposed by Lewis, Moral Substitution because it merges the substitution with the moral transformation aspect, providing an interesting picture, probably inspired by the Pietist205 view and by Schleiermacher's Liberal theory. However, Lewis's hypothesis, that God needs to “learn” to humble himself before he can pass it on to us, may be questionable.
11.5.1 The Scapegoat theory – René Girard
The Scapegoat theory was proposed by René Girard,206 in the context of his social and anthropological studies. It is an idea born in a different area of study and then extended to the field of theology, specifically regarding the theme of Jesus' crucifixion. We will dwell more on this hypothesis given the great impact it has had on the theology of salvation in recent decades.
To understand Girard's theory, it is necessary to take a step back to the social and human nature assumptions that underlie its meaning. Girard referred to mechanisms that he called “mimetic”. Human beings, he argued, are creatures that learn and grow through imitation process (hence mimicry), starting with the child who learns by imitating the gestures and words of adults. Thus, once we grow up, our desires remain guided by the principle of imitating certain behavioural, social and aesthetic models (advertisers know this well), and because we do not know what we want, we end up imitating the desires of others:
Once his primordial needs have been satisfied, and sometimes even before, man intensely desires, but does not know exactly what, since it is the being he desires, a being he feels he lacks and with which someone else seems to him to be endowed.207
So far there would be no problem, but imitation drives us to desire exactly what others desire, sparking competition to get what we want and giving rise to what Girard called “mimetic rivalry”. However, as we can well understand, competition generates individual and social tensions towards the people and groups with whom we compete, and this can lead to conflicts that threaten relationships, the social order and the very existence of communities. Man is ready to resort to any means to achieve his goals, and competition, if not controlled, risks degenerating into a spiral of violence, that jeopardises peaceful coexistence.208 The cycle can be summarised as follows:
desire → imitation → competition → rivalry → violence → spiral of retaliation → destruction
At this point, the compensation mechanism of the scapegoat intervenes, i.e., the conflicting parties, in order not to destroy each other, find a third subject or social group that is accused of being the cause of all evil, becoming the common enemy against whom the competing rivals unite, to be finally “sacrificed”. The frustration, anger, violence that were underlying the mimetic conflict and that risked exploding and shattering the relationship, are passed on a subject extraneous to the conflict. In this way, the contenders unite, appease their competitive and violent instincts and can find temporary peace; a transitory respite, since the conflict is dormant but not resolved, only postponed. The more serious the conflict, the greater and bloodier the sacrifice must be; it ranges from competing friends who make peace by gossiping about a third friend, to nations that exterminate entire peoples or minorities by accusing them of every iniquity (think of the extermination of Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Tutsis, witches and immigrants hunt, etc.).209 An alternative cycle is therefore set in motion:
desire → imitation → competition → rivalry → scapegoating210 → temporary armistice...
The scapegoat is thus the (violent) alternative to the blind and uncontrolled violence, that we have witnessed so many times throughout human history.
This brings us to Girard's theory about Jesus' death. According to Girard, Jesus was executed as a perfect scapegoat, to appease the tensions between the Roman rulers and the Jewish people and among the various social and religious classes. These tensions, if not mitigated, could have resulted in catastrophic events for the community (as indeed happened in 70 A.D. when the Jewish nation was wiped out by the Romans). This dynamic is particularly evident during a meeting of the Sanhedrin, between the chief Priests and the Pharisees, as they discuss the risk of conflict with the Romans: “What shall we do? For this Man [Jesus] works many signs. If we let Him alone like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation”, and the high priest Caiaphas replied: “You know nothing at all, nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.”211 From this discussion we can deduce that Jesus was chosen as a scapegoat to make peace with the Romans and to avoid, actually to delay, the destruction of the Jewish nation. After his execution, peace returned to Jerusalem; there were no clashes or tensions between the various social and religious groups or with the Romans, and the Passover ended peacefully, everyone convinced that Jesus was the cause of the unrest.
However, something did not go as planned and, through the resurrection of Jesus, God showed the world that the scapegoat was really who he claimed to be, and that he was innocent. The mask fell, the mechanism of mimetic violence was broken, and men were confronted with the disconcerting truth of their wickedness and the perversion of the sacrificial mechanisms:
Sacrifice is successful when no one takes the side of the suffering one, no one thinks that person is innocent, no one withholds participation in the collective violence against the person, no one considers his or her death a murder, no one remembers the victim as such after the victim is gone.212
And yet it turned out differently than expected; perhaps for this reason Luke, in the book of Acts, is keen to remind us that Jesus was killed as an innocent man, and Paul reminds us that every time we eat of the bread and drink of the cup, we announce the death of the Lord.
According to Girard, the sacrifice of Jesus put an end to the legitimacy of all expiatory sacrifices and opened the eyes of humanity to its own condition and to the need to follow the new path traced by Jesus, the path of non-violent reconciliation, forgiveness and the end of all sacrifices:
Under Girard’s interpretation, Jesus saved us by becoming a victim and overturning once and for all the scapegoat mechanism. Thanks to Jesus’ salvific mission, human beings now have the capacity to understand what scapegoats really are, and have the golden opportunity to achieve enduring social peace.213
The cross would then aim to show us the truth about our violent nature, and sacrifice as an expression of that violence, in order to propose a new way to resolve interpersonal and collective conflicts, restore social order and put an end to all violence and the sacrifices that come with it.
11.5.2. Criticism of the Scapegoat theory
According to some critics, Girard's theory is a little too ambitious, as it aims to explain every aspect of human nature through “mimetic” psychology. Not all desires are mimetic, not all mimesis necessarily leads to violence, and not all violence has a mimetic origin. The mechanism of scapegoating is plausible, but to claim that all human institutions are based on ritual violence and sacrifice is perhaps a bit of a stretch. Stephen Finlan, argues that even Girard's position may fail fully to escape the violent cycle of sacrifice and scapegoating, because Girard has “God making use”, if only to reveal the truth that violence is a dead end, of at least one act of violence, that against Jesus.214
The theory proposed by Girard is probably incomplete and partial since it tries to explain everything through a single interpretation. However, it has the merit of having introduced a new aspect in the discussion on salvation and of having overturned the vision that for about two thousand years, with some rare exceptions, had seen in the crucifixion of Jesus an act intended by God. Girard turns everything upside down and says that it is man's violent nature that has perpetrated this murder and that God is opposed to all violence, in particular sacrificial violence.