Nouslife: Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-Centred (7)

31 March 2013

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-Centred (7)

The Eikon of Forgiveness.

The image I find myself returning to again and again in relation to the cost of forgiving (recast into a theological key), is summed up in the phrase 'the Cross is the Eikon of Forgiveness'. This is really what is at the heart of what I'm wanting to say and is , in fact, where I started in my own thinking before trying to write these last few posts (immediate precursor here) -which have been explorations of some related issue by way of background.

The core thesis that the phrase references is this: that the Cross of Christ is a showing forth in spacetime and human affairs of the costliness of God's forgiveness. I would actually like to find a stronger way of expressing it than 'showing forth' because 'showing forth' might seem to indicate only a kind of picture rather than being in some way the real thing. And this perhaps allows us to glimpse why I would want to use a word like 'eikon' rather than picture.

A picture is not the thing itself, merely a depiction of it, a representation of it in another form but without the reality of it involved. This is not adequate when we are talking of the Cross and forgiveness because the Christian tradition (scriptures and the history of theological reflection on them) tends to regard the Cross as an actual divine-human effectual event -one where something actually happens.

An ikon -'eikon' to evoke the original Greek more fully- is not supposed to be a mere picture. it is meant to be a point of interaction between heaven and earth where the person depicted is in some way actually present to the viewer and vice versa. Thus, in the phrase 'eikon of forgiveness' I'm trying to convey the idea that the cross is a point of interaction between heaven and earth where what is depicted (in this case forgiveness) is made actual 'for us and for our salvation'.

Forgiveness actualised in human space-time

I think this is where I'm differing from the theories of atonement I was given as my defaults through Christian nurture. And I'm not necessarily seeking to displace them, rather add to them: I think that each has interest and can be helpful in appropriate circumstances as well as being unhelpful if used or pressed inappropriately (which may be happening with PSA in our culture).

In quick and dirty terms what I'm proposing under the heading 'Cross as eikon of forgiveness' is that we focus on the cost of forgiveness to the forgiver; the fact that it hurts us to forestall our retributive desires and that we suffer agony of personal miseries when righting the wrong and 'expunging' the detriment is frustrated (even if willingly by our own choice). This is brought about by our refusal at the point of forgiving to re-export the wrong back to the harmer; we decline to put the pain back into circulation in human affairs; to absorb ourselves the detriment and to neutralise it in our own person rather than to seek to pass it on (however just such a handover might be).

That pain and cost as experienced by human beings is what is brought to culmination in the intersection of divine and human life in the crucifixion of Jesus. On the cross of Christ we see the pain-cost of forgiving human ill, fleshed out in time-and-space and in human affairs. On the cross of Christ we find God demonstrably bearing the weight of the divine refusal to put the pain of wrongdoing back into human affairs. And we find God absorbing in God's own being the detriments and neutralising them in God's own 'person'. This is what it costs God to forgive, real-ised in the reality of divine-human life.

There, that's the core of the thesis.

What has to happen now is to explore it further in terms of what it means for divine-human life and how it fits with what we already think about God's ways with and in the world.

Next post.