The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar famously called for a “kneeling/praying theology”—a phrase Pope Francis has several times made his own. In Atonement, Margaret Tureknot only echoes that decision; her book exemplifies it.
The doctrine of atonement, so central within the Latest Testament and the church’s tradition, has fallen into disfavor in some theological circles and into general neglect in Catholic life. Turek finds this case to be spiritually and theologically impoverishing. She discerns quite a few causes for this malady. Amongst them are a diminished sense of the gravity of sin and a one-sided appeal to God’s mercy—to the sensible exclusion of the Bible’s equally acute perception of God’s “wrath.” But perhaps the best stumbling block is the grievous misconception of atonement as the worth demanded by God the Father and inflicted upon the innocent Jesus Christ, which some have even likened to child abuse.
Turek’s wealthy study draws upon the insights of a quartet of theologians: Hans Urs von Balthasar, St. John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger and Norbert Hoffmann.
Turek’s wealthy study addresses each of those shortcomings, drawing upon the insights of a quartet of theologians: Hans Urs von Balthasar, St. John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger and (less well-known) Norbert Hoffmann. But her governing vision is that offered by the kerygma itself: “On this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). “Atonement,” Turek maintains, “is the shape that the love of God takes in his Son, Jesus Christ, under sin-wrought conditions—a love than which no greater could be conceived.” Christ’s atonement doesn’t “earn” the Father’s love for us, it’s the fruit of that love.
However the Cross, as the guts of atonement, not only makes manifest God’s love, it also reveals the true depth of sin. Sin is the refusal to make God present in our lives and in our world. It’s the refusal of “filiation,” spurning God’s loving invitation to grow to be little kids within the Son. God’s “wrath” is God’s passion for the well-being of his beloved creatures and God’s grieving judgment upon their rejection of affection.
In atoning for sin, Jesus takes upon himself sinners’ estrangement and alienation, hostility and hatred. He thereby transforms sinful rejection into loving reconciliation. And he does so in his own body, which he continues to present for us within the Eucharist. On this, Jesus incarnates filiation within the midst of the world’s estrangement: “You might be my beloved Son; in you I’m well pleased” (Mk 1:11). We start to fathom that “at-onement” is a radically interpersonal event that transpires between the Father and the Son and likewise embraces us who’re its beneficiaries.
Tutored, then, by her quartet of theologians, Turek suggestively grounds the interpersonal strategy of at-onement within the very lifetime of the Trinity. The mutual love of Father and Son within the Spirit is the source of humankind’s call to enter into and embody these life-giving relations. Indeed, atonement isn’t merely our redemption from sin; it enables the conclusion of our true vocation: to live out our inestimable dignity to grow to be little kids in Christ. Filiation isn’t lower than divinization.
Thus, we’re the graced beneficiaries of the atonement effected by Christ’s loving sacrifice. Our prayerful contemplation of this gift engenders in us each gratitude and generosity—gratitude that spurs to generous participation in Christ’s atoning work. Within the wealthy third a part of her study, “Toward a Spiritual Theology of Atonement,” Turek doesn’t shy from speaking of “our mission of co-atonement.” With, through and in Christ (note the increasing intimacy of participatory prepositions), we’re called to the awesome task of becoming “vicarious atoners within the Atoner.”
As St. Paul paradoxically expressed it: “to finish in [our] flesh what’s lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, the Church” (Col 1:24).
Radical as this vocation sounds—and is—Turek sees it as taking with utmost seriousness the Second Vatican Council’s issuing of a “universal call to holiness.” We’re commissioned, by Christ’s atonement of us, received in baptism, to bear each other’s burdens, even the burden of one other’s sin, so that every one may be “recapitulated,” placed under the headship of Christ.
Tutored by her quartet of theologians, Turek suggestively grounds the interpersonal strategy of at-onement within the very lifetime of the Trinity.
While enriched by so a lot of Turek’s insights, I might enterprise one concern. She rightly seeks to do full justice to Christ’s atoning sacrifice, his taking upon himself the burden of sin and the plight of the sinner. On this regard Turek draws upon von Balthasar and others to talk of “the God-forsaken Son”; of the Father “withdrawing from the one he has made ‘to be sin’ (2 Cor 5:21)”; of Jesus’ abandonment by the Father.
I ponder, nonetheless, whether this emphasis, though well-intentioned, relies too heavily upon the notoriously difficult and doubtless dramatic text from Second Corinthians? “For our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, in order that in him we’d grow to be the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). Does stressing “God-forsakenness” risk clouding Jesus’ loving fidelity to his mission and to the One who sent him, even within the midst of unspeakable anguish? Turek herself perhaps intuits the danger and hastens to guarantee the reader: “Doubtless it will be a serious mistake to treat the Father’s forsaking of Jesus as signaling an actual rupture of the Father-Son relationship.” But doesn’t the language of “forsakenness” and “abandonment” unwittingly threaten to just do that?
I feel St. John Paul II provides a promising and fuller way forward when he writes in “Novo Millennio Ineunte,” “Jesus’ cry on the Cross isn’t the cry of anguish of a person without hope, however the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father in love, for the salvation of all.” And John Paul II adds: “On the very moment when he identifies with our sin, ‘abandoned’ by the Father, he ‘abandons’ himself into the hands of the Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father.”
Jesus’ vision of the Father’s love each engendered and sustained his atoning mission, even to death on a cross. “Subsequently, God has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name” (Phil 2:9). Jesus, “the Amen,” is “the faithful and true witness” (Rv 3:14) not of God’s seeming absence, but of his sustaining presence. Atonement is fully completed, when, “bowing his head, Jesus handed over the Spirit” (Jn 19:30).
