In this sense we depend on others, our representatives, from the beginning of our lives to the end. As children we needed our parents, who fed and clothed us, wiped our noses, and enrolled us in school, until finally we could do all that for ourselves. Then we needed teachers, who with endless patience taught us to read and write and do arithmetic. And that others help us, introduce us to new knowledge, lead the way for us by their abilities, show us solutions—that will go on till the end of our lives. Even as adults we are constantly dependent on the competence and abilities of others.
We could add example to example here. Every person, every society lives through an infinite number of representatives. It is the same with the people of God, which is an even more dense network of representation. For it is still more true of the life of faith than it already is for everyone: a human being needs help; on our own we would inevitably shrivel and die. Every believer lives out of the faith of another who preceded her or him in faith—parents, friends, great models of faith, the faith of the saints. Even to believe in the first place we need the help of others. The statement abstracted from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, “You can because you should,”19 is highly questionable. Against the background of Jewish-Christian tradition it ought to be: “You can, if you are willing to be helped.” 20 The supposedly “autonomous person” who thinks she or he needs no help and no representative, of course, does have them: for example, the media that all too often think for us, shape us according to their dominant images, and thus incapacitate us without our realizing it. People always have representatives. It is only a question of which ones.
Atonement
The aversion of people today to the idea of atonement is even greater than their discomfort with the idea of representative substitution. There is, as we have seen, a serious reason for this. For today’s people atonement is only the “service” or “action” by which a debt is paid, or it is the “punishment” imposed by a judge as retribution for a crime committed. This puts a lot of baggage on the word “atonement” from the outset. Does God really want us to be punished for our sins? Or that someone else should be punished for our sins in our place?
The biblical idea of atonement means something different; in fact, it turns the notion of atonement common today on its head. Of course, that in turn raises the question whether we can still use a word when its content in the Bible is altogether different from what is understood by it today. Shouldn’t we just replace it with a word we can understand better, such as “reconciliation”?
In what follows I will continue to talk of “atonement,” because we are interested here not in the word itself but in the subject, what Jesus expressed in the sign-actions at his last meal and accomplished through his death. But I am fully aware of the language problem. Therefore in this section I will often put “atonement” in quotation marks, so that readers will know that this is not about the word as we understand it today. It is about what the Bible means when it uses the word.
What does the Bible mean by this word, so much misunderstood and so easily misinterpreted today? “Atonement” is nothing but representation carried to the ultimate, namely, representative substitution that often extends even to death for others. Of course, this description is inadequate; it is only an initial approach. We can only understand what “atonement” really means if we look at the difference between “atonement” in the Old Testament sense and in the world religions. In the latter the whole matter of sacrifice is often nothing more than a symbolic replacement to pay for sin, often even a self-punishment people impose on themselves to cause the deity to feel gracious toward them or to appease it. The religious person gives the gods something that belongs to her or him in order to receive something in return, something important to the person. Such people give something valuable, perhaps even what is dearest to them—even, it may be, one of their own children—in order to be certain of receiving what is desired.
With this sacrifice people seek to bring the powers that influence their lives to their own side. They perform an atoning sacrifice in order to be pure once more before the gods. Perhaps, they think, the punishments due them can be reduced by making a sacrifice. In any case, atonement falls within a diverse category of actions to be performed. The initiative comes from the human side, for the securing of one’s own life. For that purpose people develop a whole variety of cultic mechanisms, and in doing so they always run the risk of making use of the deity and rendering it instrumental to their own purposes.
Israel was familiar with all the atonement mechanisms just described. After all, it had been in Egypt and it was familiar with the cultic sites in Canaan. It had been exiled to Babylon and was aware of the rituals of atonement practiced there. It had seen through it all and rethought it in light of its experience of God. Essentially, it had turned the concept of atonement in the religions on its head. For in Israel all “atonement” proceeds from God, as God’s own initiative. “Atonement” is a new enabling of life given by God. “Atonement” is the gift of being able to live in the presence of the holy God, in the space where God is near, despite one’s own unholiness and constant new incurring of guilt. Effecting “atonement” means not appeasing God or making God amenable to reconciliation, but allowing ourselves to be rescued by God’s own self from the death we deserve.21
Israel knew that human beings cannot work off their own guilt and that both “atonement” and forgiveness must come from God. “Atonement,” like covenant and the forgiveness of sins, is God’s gracious order, into which the human being can only enter. In all this, biblical thought—at least as regards the power of distinction—is clearly different from the religions.
Certainly the real question has not yet been answered. We could state it somewhat as follows: If everything comes from God’s initiative, why is there any need for “atonement” at all? If God himself has created “atonement,” just as he created forgiveness, why not simply forgive? Why can God not simply decree: your guilt is absolved; everything is forgiven and forgotten? Why is it not enough for catechesis and preaching simply to speak of the immeasurable readiness of God to forgive, or of God’s endless love, or even of God’s “crucified love”?
The answer is: if I simply say “God forgives everything on condition that I acknowledge my guilt,” the reality is too quickly covered up. The consequences of sin are not really taken seriously. Sin does not just vanish in the air, even when it is forgiven, because sin does not end with the sinner. It has consequences. It always has a social dimension. Every sin embeds itself in human community, corrupts a part of the world, and creates a damaged environment.22
Even if God has forgiven all sin, the consequences of sin are not eliminated. What Adolf Hitler set in motion was by no means eliminated from the world by his death in April 1945, even if he was contrite and even if he himself was forgiven. The fearful consequences of National Socialism poison society until today, and they are still nesting in the lives of the surviving victims, even in the lives of their children and grandchildren.
So the consequences of sin have to be worked off, and human beings cannot do so of themselves any more than they can absolve themselves. Genuine “working off” of guilt is only possible on a basis that God himself must create. And God has created such a base in his people, and in Jesus he has renewed and perfected it.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, who died on 17 September 1961 in a plane crash near the border in Katanga while on a mission to try to resolve the civil war in the Congo, offers us a text that can help us better understand the connections we are discussing here. It is in his diary, published after his death under the title Markings: