"God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."—Romans 5:8
We can mouth and hear variations of this atonement text again and again, and it may not make that much difference. But if we really believe it in the depths of our being, we cannot escape its revolutionary power and implications. The affirmation that we are saved by faith only through grace remains a pious and vain aphorism as long as this grace is blocked from flowing through us in relationships with others.
The testimony that God loved us while we were yet sinners is hollow so long as our attitudes assume that God loves others only when they are no longer sinners. We fail to grow in God's grace as long as we love others only when they become like us. If we existentially believe that God loves us even when we are undeserving of [God's] love, we cannot help but become channels of God's love toward those whom we judge to be undeserving of our love.
Before exploring further the radical implications of this biblical truth, let us consider a grammatical fact with decided theological consequences. The first century text with its plural pronouns, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" is often translated singularly after the legacy of 18th, 19th, and 20th century individualism. This strong propensity in evangelical circles to singularize New Testament pronouns has not only worked to subvert frequently the biblical emphasis on community but also has mitigated against the full proclamation of sin. Preaching against individual sins has not been matched by similar proclamations against the sins we commit together. (At this point, it is necessary to part from the liberalism of many popular preachers, including Billy Graham. In his view of the corporate state, he has not been willing to confess that America sins. Instead, Graham echoes a liberal view of humans, which translated asserts that America only makes mistakes.)
The prophets of God pronounced God's judgement on Israel as well as on individuals. God judges our corporate raping of the resources of the world at the same time he judges our individual coveteousness and greed. God chastises our institutionalized racism along with our individual prejudices. God judges massive genocide as severely as personal acts of murder.
Naming an individual sin can be shifted to someone else because I can feel that I am free from that one. The proclamation of God's judgement on the sins we commit together can be more difficult because the judgement falls upon proclaimer and hearers alike. For this reason popular preachers would not long be popular if they focused on the sins we commit together. Though not popular and not heeded, the good news must be preached in the context of God's judgement on Babylon. Repentance is a biblical theme with high priority today.
Implications for the Individual
This does not mean that the gospel is void of individual accents. The message elicits personal commitment in response to Christ's work. "We love, because we have first been loved." If we have any goodness, any grace, the source is with God and not ourselves. Even this truth is antithetical to a predominant rational mood. Many moderns are scandalized by a position which tells us to take the blame when we are wrong but to give God the credit when we are good. This is the reason D.M. Baillie in God Was in Christ labeled this biblical truth the paradox of grace. When Israel sinned, God judged her to be responsible. Israel's good fortune, however, was attributed to the faithfulness of Yahweh. Personally, I do not believe that all persons are completely responsible for their sins. Their lives are often messed up because of messed up lives of parents and others. The sins of the grandfathers are often visited upon subsequent generations. For the purposes of understanding another person as lovingly as possible, it is sometimes helpful to know the pains and privations of the past. Nevertheless, the Christian stance has always maintained that if we are to change, if we are to be helped, we must confess our sins as our sins and take personal responsibility for our lives. This attitude makes more sense when one views the opposite. Such would be the posture of a person who takes credit for anything which is good and consistently projects on others the blame for any misdeed, mistake, or sin. The Christian way is to confess sin and at the same time confess that whatever good I do comes not from myself, but Christ working through me.
Implications for Humanity
It is this orthodox doctrine of the atonement which offers one of the strongest foundations for Christian humanism. If we have faith in mortals without faith in God, as in secular versions of humanism, we love because people are worth loving. Judging others to be naturally lovable, we hope to evoke a response of love. This becomes a problem, however, when instead of our love eliciting love, we receive the response of hate. As we discover that not all are naturally lovable and that one response to goodness is anger, our humanistic faith is punctured. If our rosy faith in inevitable progress is shattered by the realities of the fallen world, we can become bitter and emasculated by despair. We lose our faith in humanity.
On the other hand, if we love others because God loves them, our love need not necessarily be based on their lovability or any notion of the natural goodness of humans. We now love because we believe that God loved us even when we were unlovable. Although so-called Christians have sinned grossly in terms of inhumanity to fellow human beings, the doctrine of the atonement should mean that theoretically, and, we pray, actually, we can know the power to love even when our loving does not elicit a loving response. Our motive for loving is no longer anchored entirely in the object of our loving. Instead, we love, because we have first been loved. In response to God's grace, his undeserving love toward us, we can grow in the grace to love even the undeserving.
Implications for our Attitudes Toward the Dispossessed
It is in our attitudes toward the poor and dispossessed that the doctrine of the atonement may have its most surprising revolutionary implications. If we really believe that God loved us while we were yet sinners, it follows that God and God's people will love the outcasts of society, before and not after they have earned the right to be loved. If we have truly known love before we responded, then we will love the despised in this world before and not after they have learned to love.
How different and how revolutionary this is from the more typical attitudes of most American church-goers. Even those who utter most often the theme of justification by faith alone are thinking: "We have worked hard and long; we have been thrifty and not wasted our money on lustful pursuits. For this reason, we deserve what we have. The poor in the slums and in the third world are only that way because they are lazy. Instead of always crying about their plight and wanting something for nothing, they should work hard and be like us. If they would be like us, then they would enjoy the same fruits which we enjoy and deserve."
How fundamentally different from biblical faith. We are not self-made people who have done it all by ourselves, nor should we harden our hearts against the cries of the poor and oppressed. It is a good exercise to read the New Testament from cover to cover with the themes relating to the poor and the rich in mind. One discovers a decided bias on the side of the poor. Woes are pronounced concerning the rich. For this reason it is very difficult for most Americans to identify with the New Testament church and its message. Because of standard of living, status, and position, most of us in America identify either consciously or unconsciously with the wealthy and powerful instead of the poor. If we could genuinely internalize the doctrine of the atonement, namely, that God loved us while we were yet sinners, then we could not help but be open to God's offer of grace in sanctifying our attitudes toward blacks, peoples of the third world, and the dispossessed.
Implications for our Enemies
Even more scandalous for many of us may be the implications of the text concerning our relationship with our enemies. Some of us, who feel we have received grace in our attitudes toward the poor, may fail in our appropriation of grace toward others, for example, those in the establishment. The message of the doctrine of the atonement is that God loved God's own enemies, namely us. But there is another text calling us to love our enemies. Not many have discovered the intimate relationship between God's love of God's enemies, us, and God's command to love our enemies. It is my strong conviction that the doctrine of the atonement and the biblical command to love enemies belong together. The old-fashioned gospel and pacifism are intimately related. God's way on the cross, the way of suffering love, must be our way. The great heresy of Christendom has been to separate that which belongs together in the gospel.
I heard Martin Niemoller of Germany testify about his second conversion experience. He told of the black shirted Gestapo men who brought him his daily fare of bread and water when he was in a Nazi concentration camp. He related how he hated them and all they represented. One particular day when they came, his second conversion happened in the moment when he looked into the face of one of these despised men and realized that here was a man for whom Christ also died on the cross of Calvary. For many of us, our second conversion might come if and when we could look into the face of a communist, a radical, the president of our nation, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or anyone else whom we might regard to be our enemy, and feel that here is one for whom Christ died on the cross of Calvary.
Too often the doctrine of the atonement has been presented in a selfish and basically unchristian way. The stress has been on what Christianity will do for you. We have proclaimed that here is good news for you. This is true. But lest we lose our lives by wanting to save them, we need to be open anew to the radical implications of the message. For if we really appropriate the doctrine of the atonement, then through us Christ's death will also be good news for others, the dispossessed, and our enemies.
Dale W. Brown was a contributing editor to Sojourners when this article appeared.
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