You try to assuage his wrath by giving him something that will satisfy him so that he won’t come into your country and mow you down. That’s an ungodly manifestation of appeasement. But if you are angry or you are violated, and I satisfy your anger, or appease you, then I am restored to your favor and the problem is removed.
.. Expiation is the act that results in the change of God’s disposition toward us.
.. Christ did His work on the cross to placate the wrath of God. This idea of placating the wrath of God has done little to placate the wrath of modern theologians. In fact, they become very wrathful about the whole idea of placating God’s wrath. They think it is beneath the dignity of God to have to be placated, that we should have to do something to soothe Him or appease Him.
We need to be very careful in how we understand the wrath of God, but let me remind you that the concept of placating the wrath of God has to do here not with a peripheral, tangential point of theology, but with the essence of salvation.
.. But there is no wrath for those whose sins have been paid. That is what salvation is all about.
Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery?
I saw the collective, institutional side of this process in the ongoing scrutiny of public statues and street names, the markers at the sites of atrocities, and the brass-plated stones embedded in the sidewalk outside my apartment building that listed all the Holocaust victims who’d once lived there. I saw the individual side of it in the lives of my German friends who’d spent a gap year volunteering at hospitals in Israel, who studied Yiddish in a spirit of preserving the endangered language of a culture their great-grandparents sought to annihilate, or whose relatives read their Stasi files and confronted the neighbors who’d informed on them to the East German police.
.. The longer I lived in Germany, the more steeped I became in this attitude toward the past, and the stranger the scarcity of visible markers of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans seemed on my visits back to the U.S. I understood that the two countries’ histories have different timeframes, different geographies, different varieties of wrongdoing, but some of the broader lessons of Aufarbeitung — that individuals and societies can improve themselves morally by struggling against the human urge to look away from the sins of the past, or that atonement is a process that instills a sense of responsibility for the past rather than an action that starts from that sense — felt strikingly absent in America.
Nonviolent Atonement: Four Questions on the Raising of Lazarus
Jesus is coming to terms with what he must do to heal the human species. To get us to see love he must show love by allowing us to do to him what we do to each other and then forgive us.
.. This week I have been disturbed and agitated. I have four sisters and three of them visited the fourth that lives in Arizona and suffers from traumatic brain injury and dementia. My three sisters were there to seek power of attorney, assess the situation, and provide care in the four days they had. They sent a picture and it shocked me. Knowing my sister’s history, the picture became a symbol for me of how many in the world are treated. She has only one eye, having been assaulted in the 80’s, and was looking at the camera with an expression that I experienced as despair and profound fear. It released a complex of emotions I still haven’t sorted.
.. In my agitation I said until we have a gospel that addresses this we don’t have anything worth sharing. I told them, for me, this is a picture of humanity in the grip of death. They let me vent.
.. When Martha objected to Jesus’ opening the tomb he replied “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Martha clearly didn’t believe but still it happened. Effervescent life isn’t based on Martha’s belief. It’s based on God’s desire that Lazarus, my sister, you and I and the one’s we’ve lost, all continue but with new and resurrected bodies.