Posted December 13, 2004 Book: Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition Author: Hans Boersma Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pp. 288 An Excerpt from the Jacket: The Cross is central to any understanding of Christian theology. But what is the primary significance of the cross: God’s victory over death and hell? The moral example of a righteous sufferer? God’s Son taking the punishment for the world’s sin? Or is it possible that in our postmodern setting these traditional views of the atonement are irrelevant and outmoded? In this important study, Hans Boersma proposes an understanding of the atonement that is sensitive to both the Christian tradition and postmodern critiques of that tradition. Throughout his work, Boersma takes seriously the critics of traditional atonement theology. He also acknowledges a certain paradoxical tension between violence and hospitality that will remain a mystery. Nevertheless, he offers a substantial response in the form of an alternative account of violence that also reenvisions the atonement as divine hospitality. An Excerpt from the Book: God “stetched out His hands on the Cross, that He might embrace the ends of the world; for this Golgotha is the very center of the earth,” wrote Cyril of Jerusalem around A.D.347. His comment illustrates the fact that it is at the foot of the cross that we learn from God how hospitality is to function. The human practice of hospitality is, in the words of Reinhard Hutter, “both a reflection and an extension of God’s own hospitality — God’s sharing of the love of the triune lifewith those who are dust. At the very center of this hospitality stands both a death and a resurrection, the most fundamental enactment of truth from God’s side and precisely therefore also the threshold of God’s abundant hospitality.” According to the Christian understanding of history, Christ’s death and resurrection constitute the ultimate experience of God’s hospitality and form the matrix for an understanding of all God’s actions and as such also the normative paradigm for human actions. In Cyril and Hutter’s understanding, God has embodied his hospitality n the cross. The well-known parable of the prodigal son functions as an icon of this embodied hospitality. The parable, often accused of lacking in Christology, in reality presents us with our crucified Lord. It depicts God’s embracing welcome of sinners into his eternal home. Throughout the history of the Church, this parable has rightly functioned as a narrative description of God’s grace of forgiveness and renewal. The story captures for us the amazing interplay between divine grace and human freedom. Divine grace enters the picture in a number of ways: a father who unceremoniously runs up to his lost son to receive him back and who ignores his dignity as the paterfamilias must have a very special place for his son in his heart. A father who restores his prodigal son’s position as a member in the community (offering him the best robe), who grants him authority (giving him a ring to wear), and who gives him freedom (putting sandals on his feet) is someone who manifestly revels in the celebration of fellowship between father and child. The parable of the prodigal son is, therefore, equally the parable of the hospitable father. At the same time, God’s hospitality does not nullify human freedom. The father’s embrace does not force itself in tyrannical fashion on a son who has no choice but to endure the father’s imposition of his love. Hospitality rejects the violence of a totalizing imposition of oneself on the other, the violence that forces the other to be shaped into one’s own image. The father’s love, says Henri Nouwen in his commentary on Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son, “cannot force, constrain, push, or pull. It offers the freedom to reject that love or to love in return.” A forced embrace would mean the loss of hospitality through the violence of the imposition of the host on the stranger. Even when we have lost our way and when our lives have come to an end, God’s hospitable grace requires that we enter voluntarily into his loving embrace. Table of Contents: Part 1 The Divine Face of Hospitality 1. The Possibility of hospitality 2. Limited Hospitality: Election and Violence in Eternity 3. Preferential Hospitality: Election and Violence in History Part 2 The Cruciform Face of Hospitality 4. Atonement, Metaphors, and Models 5. Modeling Hospitality: Atonement as Moral Influence 6. Atonement and Mimetic Violence 7. Hospitality, Punishment, and the Atonement 8. Atonement, Violence and Victory Part 3 The Public Face of Hospitality 9. The Church as the Community of Hospitality 10. Public Justice and the Hospitality of Liberation Epilogue: The End of Violence: Eschatology and Deification