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Summary

So PC It Needs Therapy

Book Description:
Evangelical Christians sing hymns in which blood figures prominently; one in particular is called "Nothing But the Blood." Such Christians may have to change their tune after reading J. Denny Weaver's The Non-Violent Atonement, which proposes that the idea of "satisfaction atonement" must be jettisoned in favor of a nonviolent approach. J.

The penal theory of atonement, as we show here, is the only one that fits the data of the Bible and the social context, but J. Denny Weaver (I almost typed "Reginald Denny", and you may guess why!) hasn't heard yet, having been too busy with two other pursuits: 1) ignoring any scholarship that doesn't start with "non-violence" as a mission; 2) pleasing those who don't like the penal theory of atonement and all that icky blood and stuff. Weaver's big fuss is that he thinks penal atonement theory is too darned violent; in its place he offers a theory of "narrative Christus Victor" (basically, "Jesus won, yay!" and that takes care of atonement) which is very nice and all, and we'd even say it is packed with truths, but it doesn't give us any reason to rip down the penal theory and put his new shopping mall in its place. In fact, it's hard to see how Weaver's theory atones for anything whatsoever; the mode of operation seems contrived, and it is just as well complimentary to penal substitution. It also slides right by the problem that however you slice it, Jesus had to undergo violence -- with God's sanction -- to get the job done; Weaver's description of Jesus' death as "nonviolent" reveals a whole new definition of the word with which the dictionary is unaware. Weaver is trying to scrub off what he sees as a stain on the whole side of an aircraft carrier by wiping down a porthole with a little Windex.

The initial chapter on the "nonviolence of Jesus" is the most critical and the least helpful because of it. It never occurs to Weaver that Jesus practiced "nonviolence" on earth because he wasn't leading a military campaign. To make something of Jesus' "nonviolence" on earth is like saying that Jesus must have been against music because he never played any. On the other hand, though he does a section on Revelation, Weaver seems to have missed the part of that book where Jesus goes out and gets with it on the violence score. Instead he tries to turn our heads to the opening of the seals by the lamb who (supposedly) is a "non-violent conqueror". Actually, the lamb here has conquered indeed on the point of honor; the part with the lamb kicking stuff and taking names comes later in the book. But Weaver, though offering a reading of Revelation that a preterist would appreciate, slides right over the point that the violent judgments of Revelation were ordained by God, that the victory of Christ is in the end achieved by violence. The level of waffling reaches amazing profoundity with comments like this: "Even more important is the nonviolent character of the supposed battle in the last segment of Chapter 19...no actual battle takes place." [33] In the end Weaver fails to exegete the entirely of any chapter, thereby avoiding the problem of explaining away every battle image as a symbol of something else that was actually and conveniently not violent at all. Perhaps this is what Jocelyn Elders meant when she said we would someday come up with "safer guns" and "safer bullets".

Nor does Weaver successfully deal with Matt. 26:28, a clear statement of substitutionary atonement; he claims it actually fits his mold, but in the end does not negate the clear meaning, but tries to distract us to a different true statement about it (that the sacrifice of Jesus was a gift to us -- true, but not a negation of the substitionary aspect, and indeed, even more an exclamation of it, under the quid pro quo rubric of ancient patronage). Most irresponsibly, Weaver dodges the clear parallels of Jesus death to substitutionary sacrifices of the Old Testament by claiming that the similarities are "more linguistic than substantial" [58] -- never quite answering the question of why the words used were chosen in the first place, and once again pointing to a secondary elements (that of personal dedication to God) while failing to negate the substitutionary element at all. All of this is of course devoid of any contextual reference to ancient beliefs in vicarious sacrifice and in interactive patronage.

The last half of the book is fairly well useless diatribe, given over to complaints in "black theology" and "feminist/womanist theology" about how objectionable a few malcontents from these fields have found the whole penal substitution thing. It's politically correct reader-response theory in a can, with no concern for what the text meant to those who wrote it. Next week I shall create my own reader-response to Weaver declaring that his book is actually a manifesto in support of necrophilia, and we'll see what happens and whether he objects at all. I did find of some interest [114] an explanation of why writers like Yosef ben-Jochanon disregard writing conventions and constantly capitalize, bold, etc. various words: it "displays independence of Eurocentric conventions." Well, that's fine for when you're in the house, but good luck getting a job that way. Keep displaying your independence right through the unemployment line; like I said, we'll see how Weaver likes it when I ignore the "Weavercentric conventions" of his use of words and decide that his book is actually a secret code manual for committing abominable acts.

In the end, this book represents what happens when objectivity and serious scholarship is thrown to the winds for the sake of keeping unreasonable people from being offended.