nuance

From Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement:

“Several texts bring home the fundamental reality that, without the resurrection, atonement is incomplete. We need to begin with this: the point of the resurection is more than hope for those who fear death, for those who are on the verge of death, or even for those who long to be reunited with loved ones. Resurrection, leading as it does to eternal life, is more than the hope for what Tom Wright in numerous settings calls ‘life after life after death.’

“What, then, is resurrection all about? If the death of Christ wipes away sin, the resurrection of Christ makes all things new. Resurrection is about new creation. A theory of atonement that does not flow into the resurrection is an atonement that rids one of the sin problem but does not transform life and this world. Stopping that flow of life from God into God’s people is the abortion of full atonement.”

Did you catch that last intentionally bolded sentence? Did you hear the genius in those words? Perhaps I think they are genius because of my experience; I was for a long time in a church and denomination that does precisely what Scot is warning us not to do, a church that loved to talk about sin/death and salvation/heaven but could barely formulate a meaningful statement about the resurrection. The result was the randomization and abstraction of this life. That is, we were taught to think about heaven, not earth; to focus on saving souls, not feeding the poor; to see pretty much everything as not yet, and nothing as already.

This was an abortion of sorts; a premature cessation of the lifeflow which emerges when the resurrection is primary. Resurrection in our lives, beginning with the new birth, makes our hearts new, then our lives new, and then the world new. Resurrection is the point of atonement, to fully reconcile the world to God and so transform it, to let the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.