Trust in Atonement
God, Creation, and Reconciliation
In Protestantism’s understanding of salvation, justification by faith has played a central role in framing theology. A glance at the systematic theologies of the last 400 years shows that justification is typically the doctrinal lattice around which all of the theology is constructed—and this is certainly the case with recent atonement theories. What goes missing in much discussion of the atonement, in Teresa Morgan’s view, is by faith.
What role does faith play in atonement models? Morgan, in her three groundbreaking studies of faith as trust (and a fourth in preparation), has not only sought to justify the importance of trust in understandings of atonement, she has turned trust into a model of “at-one-ment.” The challenge she will need to meet is to elaborate whether atonement remains an objective event resolving objective realities or a subjective experience of redemption that has generated theological terms to explain the experience of the event. Morgan wants at-one-ment theology to broaden beyond just Good Friday to include what God was doing in the world through Christ—from incarnation to glorification.
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Morgan’s studies of trust are intricate, deeply informed, exegetically alert, and breathtaking—but it will take a patient reader to work through all three texts (Roman Faith and Christian Faith, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust, and now Trust in Atonement). This latest book interacts with a wide range of studies about trust: philosophy, sociology, psychology, theology, conflict resolution, trauma, and pastoral care. Trust, she shows, is both complicated and a fertile field for theological study. Her specialty is the Pauline paradigm as approached through the Greco-Roman world, with much less attention to the Jewish world.
Atonement theories, in Morgan’s sketch, include new covenant, ransom, scapegoat, cosmic battle with evil, Jesus as God’s ambassador, God as the world’s lover, and Jesus as example. She points out something these models of atonement share: a profound absence of trust. Just as John Barclay drew attention to the lack of serious study of grace in academic theology (see Paul and the Gift), so Morgan has become the leading advocate for treating trust as a serious category for theology. The pistis-word group is the most important term in early Christian understandings of a relationship with God. It needs to be present in all discussions of at-one-ment, Morgan argues.
Instead of translating the Greek terms pisteuein, pistis, and pistos (and their cognates) as “believe,” “belief,” and “faith,” Morgan paves a wide path through the ancient world to arrive at the conclusion that these terms speak of a relational trust rather than a propositional belief. Her definition of trust reveals several nuances:
Trust is the action of putting something (which might include an object, an outcome, or oneself), or the attitude of willingness to put something, in someone else’s hands (i.e. in their power, responsibility, and/or care), on the basis (which might be e.g. a belief, hope, wager, or assumption) that the other can and will respond positively (for instance, because she is willing and/or able to do so, and/or because she is encouraged to do so by one’s trust).
Morgan develops her theology of trust through a searching examination of a multifaceted relationship of ongoing reciprocity.
God takes a risk on humanity, entrusting Jesus Christ to the world, trusting him to be able to form trust relationships with those who encounter him, and trusting humanity to respond. This is risky especially because God is acting indirectly through Christ and because Jesus is not a traditional messiah. In his earthly life, death, and resurrected and exalted life, however, Jesus mediates between God and humanity, trusting and trustworthy to both, to bring humanity back to trust in God and to keep it in that relationship until the end time.
To complicate her notion of trust further, the act of God that generates a revelation of trust is met by humans who respond to Jesus Christ, to God, to one another, and to creation. In other words, Morgan locates trust not only in God and humans but also in all creation.
If she offers a cosmic theory of trust, however, her emphasis is on the interpersonal, reciprocating relationship of God through Jesus Christ and humans. In beginning her theological portrait of trust with God’s own trust, Morgan draws out the idea of divine “therapeutic trust,” which is God’s preemptive act of trusting those who are not trusting. That act becomes an opportunity for a human to observe genuine trust and to risk trusting God as revealed in Jesus Christ. She is deeply aware of the challenge trust can be for those who have been wounded and traumatized. Despite this difficulty, she believes God’s revelation in Christ can be a path to healing through trusting, though the human development of trust can take time.
For Morgan, trust has two shapes, which she calls “three-place” and “two-place.” Three-place trust happens when a human trusts God to provide something (e.g., salvation). Two-place trust is a pure relationship without a benefit in view. Throughout these discussions Morgan displays a keen capacity to think phenomenologically—and theologically. She explores the question of why Christ needed to die for reconciliation to occur, and her formula will tease readers into pondering its implications: “he dies because he cannot be other than he is.”
Jesus functioned for humanity as a sort of “firebreak” (to use one of Morgan’s common images), and he died in this way because he was faithful to God and to humans. As she puts it,
Jesus’s death therefore reifies to the extreme his relationship with God and with humanity, which even suffering and death cannot change. It reveals his trust and trustworthiness and invites humans to respond. On this understanding of his death, Christ needs to die not for a discrete purpose—to act as a sacrifice or to defeat the powers of evil—but because he is who he is, and it is only as the person he is that he can reconcile humanity with God.
In dying as the faithful one, he reveals what trust truly is and so offers humans an opportunity to participate by trusting God in Christ. There are more than a few hints in Morgan’s study of the exemplarist model of atonement.
All humans and creation are involved in “wrongdoing” (Morgan’s preferred term because of its breadth of meaning and connotation). The base wrongdoing is the failure to trust God, to trust Jesus Christ, to trust oneself, to trust one another, and to trust creation as stewards of God’s universe. Wrongdoing can be intentional or not, and it afflicts humans and creation, whether individually or systemically.
Redemption is the restoration of trust—or it is trust that restores the relationship between God, Jesus Christ, humans, and creation, thus leading to reconciliation. Reconciliation is Morgan’s favored term for redemption in the New Testament, which is why she often writes “at-one-ment.” A singular contribution of Morgan is her ability to show that trust is the presenting or assumed challenge of various events in the Bible, from Adam and Eve to Peter. Along with this is her willingness to explore the connection of wrongdoing and suffering, and to present trust toward reconciliation as liberation from both sin and suffering. Although Morgan’s approach to at-one-ment expands most classical approaches, a weakness in her proposal is the failure to thoroughly integrate the Holy Spirit into her model.
At the heart of Morgan’s proposal is that trust, which is revealed in Christ’s trusting of God, enables and empowers a human to turn away from wrongdoing and suffering and toward Jesus and God. That risking, vulnerable act can become pervasively transformative for the trusting human. It opens the door to restoration and redemption in its fullness. This is where the “by faith” (now, trust) becomes uniquely operative in Morgan’s atonement model. Dying to the lack of trust creates the opportunity to live in (a trustworthy) Christ as trusting, trustworthy humans. As trusting humans, we become mediators of the grace of the trustworthy God. But we can become entrusted therapeutic mediators—and here I’m reminded of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together—only through Jesus Christ.
