Violence in Christian Theology

Beyond the generalities, it is important to underscore for whom these images of Jesus as an innocent and passive victim may pose a particular concern. It is an unhealthy model for a woman abused by her husband or a child violated by her father, and constitutes double jeopardy when attached to hierarchical theology that asserts male headship. [13] A model of passive, innocent suffering poses an obstacle for people who encounter conditions of systemic injustice, or an unjust status quo produced by the power structure. Examples might be the legally segregated south prior to the civil rights movement, or de facto housing segregation that still exists in many places; military-backed occupation, under which land is confiscated and indigenous residents crowded into enclosed territories, called "reservations" in North America and "bantustans" in South Africa and "autonomous areas" in Palestine. For people in such situations of an unjust status quo, the idea of "being like Jesus" as modeled by satisfaction atonement means to submit passively and to endure that systemic injustice. James Cone linked substitutionary atonement specifically to defenses of slavery and colonial oppression. [14] Delores Williams calls the Jesus of substitutionary atonement, the "ultimate surrogate figure." After depicting numerous ways in which black women were forced into a variety of surrogacy roles for white men and women and black men, Williams says that to accept satisfaction or substitutionary atonement and the image of Jesus that it supplies is to validate all the unjust surrogacy to which black women have been and still are submitted. [15] Such examples show that atonement theology that models innocent, passive suffering does have specific negative impact in the contemporary context.

A victim is controlled by forces and circumstances beyond himself or herself. A victim surrenders control to others and accepts the injustice imposed by others. Jesus in satisfaction and substitutionary atonement models victimization. When this atonement motif is the model for people who have experienced abuse or exploitation, this model underscores their status as victims. For them, being like Jesus means to continue to submit to unjust suffering, abuse or exploitation.

Seeking liberation means to assert control of one's own life by beginning to struggle against that oppression. Because one who struggles is no longer voluntarily submitting, he or she is no longer a victim. While liberation is not yet achieved, it has already begun in the struggle. For oppressed peoples, satisfaction atonement reinforces their status as victims rather than undergirding them in the struggle for liberation from oppression. And it should be obvious that since satisfaction poses an image of submission to oppression, it consequently poses no challenge to the acts of those who oppress and exploit.

Some writers have appealed to the Trinity to defend satisfaction atonement against the claims that it poses a harmful model for abused or oppressed people. According to this argument, the unity of the persons of the Trinity means that the Father suffers with the Son. Thus rather than having the Father cause Jesus to suffer, one has God the Father both identifying with the suffering of Jesus and also suffering for sinful humankind rather than exercising judgement. [16] In my view, this appeal camouflages but does not deal fundamentally with the abusive imagery of satisfaction atonement. Returning to the questions used earlier about the object of Jesus' death and who needs and arranges the death shows that the death of Jesus is still aimed Godward. This appeal does change the image, however, from the Father abusing the Son to the Father engaging in abuse of himself. Perhaps it is akin to what once was called patripassianism.