The via moderna school of theology emphasizes the traditional belief that God is omnipotent. He could have created the world and the rest of the universe in any form. He obviously chose the one that he did create for some reason known only to himself. “There is no law extrinsic to God to which he must conform. Hence, God is free but reliable, for he binds Himself by His eternal decree.”
.. They disagreed with a number of Anselm’s beliefs, that:
The atonement was dependent on the incarnation — the concept that God appeared in human form in Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ). The redemption of humanity was a necessary act. Humanity could not be redeemed without satisfaction. Satisfaction could only be made by the God-man Yeshua . The best way to obtain satisfaction was by Yeshua’s death by torture on the cross. .. They argued that:
God could have decided of his own free will to save humanity through the work, and perhaps the death, of an angel, of Adam, of any other human being, or even an animal. But he decided, for his own reasons, to achieve atonement through the torture-death of Yeshua. “…all satisfaction comes from the arbitrary choice of God.” 7
Human sin is not infinite in magnitude.
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The belief that God’s pride is so wounded that he would demand as satisfaction the death of an innocent person “assumes a view of God’s moral nature that many modern readers would reject.” 7 Being omnipotent, God could simply forgive people, or find some other way for humanity to attain atonement. .. It seems logical that if the death of Yeshua satisfied God’s damaged honor, and if humans made no contribution to the process, then salvation and atonement should be granted to everyone — to Christian believers and unbelievers alike. It is unclear why only persons who trust Jesus as Lord and Savior would be rewarded.
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Most liberal and many mainline Christians believe that Adam and Eve were mythical humans. That is, they didn’t exist as actual people. Without that belief, this atonement theory collapses.
.. Some Christians note that Eve and Adam were created as proto-humans without a sense of sin. After all, they ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to develop a knowledge of good and evil. Being without a moral sense, they cannot be responsible for eating the fruit any more than an animal might. Again, if the first parents are not responsible for eating the fruit, the atonement theory collapses.
Incarnation instead of Atonement
Franciscans never believed that “blood atonement” was required for God to love us. Our teacher, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), said Christ was Plan A from the very beginning (Colossians 1:15-20, Ephesians 1:3-14). Christ wasn’t a mere Plan B after the first humans sinned, which is the way most people seem to understand the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Great Mystery of Incarnation could not be a mere mop-up exercise, a problem solving technique, or dependent on human beings messing up.
Scotus taught that the Enfleshment of God had to proceed from God’s perfect love and God’s perfect and absolute freedom (John 1:1-18), rather than from any mistake of ours. Did God intend no meaning or purpose for creation during the first 14.8 billion years? Was it all just empty, waiting for sinful humans to set the only real drama into motion? Did the sun, moon, and galaxies have no divine significance? The fish, the birds, the animals were just waiting for humans to appear? Was there no Divine Blueprint (“Logos”) from the beginning? Surely this is the extreme hubris and anthropomorphism of the human species!
.. The substitutionary atonement “theory” (and that’s all it is) seems to imply that the Eternal Christ’s epiphany in Jesus is a mere afterthought when the first plan did not work out.
.. This perspective allowed us to ignore Jesus’ lifestyle and preaching, because all we really needed Jesus for was the last three days or three hours of his life.
Ongoing Incarnation
Would Christmas have come even if we had not sinned?
Duns Scotus and his school suggested that Incarnation was the underlying motive for Creation, not merely a correction to it
.. Ultimately the church decided that both approaches had biblical support and could be accepted as orthodox. Though most theologians tended to follow Aquinas, in recent years prominent Catholics such as Karl Rahner have taken a closer look at Duns Scotus. Perhaps evangelicals should, too.
.. Yet far more often—164 times in Paul’s letters, according to one author—the New Testament uses the image of us being “in Christ.” At a time when theories of the Atonement seem incomprehensible to moderns and when the Christian subculture easily shrinks into a defensive posture, we could learn from the Christ-centered view of creation once expounded by an obscure theologian from the High Middle Ages.
A Nonviolent Atonement (At-One-Ment)
Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans agreed with the mainline position that some kind of debt had to be paid for human salvation. Many scriptures and the Jewish temple metaphors of sacrifice, price, propitiation, debt, and atonement do give this impression. But Franciscan teacher, Blessed John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), who founded the theological chair at Oxford, said that Jesus wasn’t solving any problems by coming to earth and dying. Jesus wasn’t changing God’s mind about us; rather, Jesus was changing our minds about God. That, in a word, was our nonviolent at-one-ment theory. God did not need Jesus to die on the cross to decide to love humanity. God’s love was infinite from the first moment of creation; the cross was just Love’s dramatic portrayal in space and time.
The image of the cross was to change humanity, not a necessary transaction to change God—as if God needed changing! Scotus concluded that Jesus’ death was not a “penal substitution” but a divine epiphany for all to see. Jesus was pure gift, and the idea of gift is much more transformative than any idea of necessity, price, or transaction.It shows that God is not violent, but loving.
Duns Scotus firmly believed that God’s perfect freedom had to be maintained at all costs. If God “needed” or demanded a blood sacrifice to love God’s own creation, then God was not freely loving us.
.. Jesus was not changing the Father’s mind about us; he was changing our mind about God—and thus about one another too. If God and Jesus are not violent, punishing, torturing, or vindictive, then our excuse for the same is forever taken away from us. This is no small point! And, of course, if God is punitive and torturing, then we have full modeling and permission to do the same.