Reconciliation-Justification for New Heaven and New Earth
Aloysius Pieris

I believe in the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body...

 

You know that Sri Lanka has acquired notoriety for, among other things, having produced the first Asian Catholic to be excommunicated precisely for his views about the topic we are about to discuss today. I see, therefore, a historic necessity to clarify this question about "forgiveness of sins" and "justification of the sinner" without severing my communion with Rome![1]

This risk notwithstanding, I lament the fact that neither the Roman nor the Reformed churches have been courageous enough to acknowledge that their unresolved dispute about "justification" is based on a questionable premise, which both parties had assumed. As a result of this false start, the whole question of reconciliation and inter-human justice has disappeared from their disputatious discourse on sin and salvation.

 

Two Inadequate Perspectives on Sin and Forgiveness

The Pauline discourse on Adam's sin and Christ's redemption, already explained by Paul himself in the legal terms of the Torah, had been transmitted to later generations of Christians in the Latin forensic theology of "guilt and acquittal". May I say that the Protestants have been infected by this species of forensic Romanism more than they are prepared to admit? I say this because their justifiable rejection of post-Medieval scholasticism was not accompanied by a repudiation of the Latin mentality that animated it. They too were using Rome's jurisprudential idiom of "guilt" and "acquittal". So profound was the impact of Latin jurisprudence on the theological mood of the church that neither Protestants nor Catholics stopped to think of an alternative model.

Yet as late as the Reformation period, there was at least one alternative model which had survived Latin juridicism but failed understandably to enter mainstream theology. It was the therapeutic model of the Antiochian school which goes back to Chrysostom. This biblico-patristic paradigm had been preserved by the Benedictines of the Congregazione Casinese, a concatenation of monastic communities that stretched from Sicily to France through Spain. Luther's Germany unfortunately might not have been aware of its existence.

This theology had a therapeutic orientation for it understood "salvation" in terms of "health, wholeness and wholesomeness" as the Greek verb sozo and Latin noun salus suggest. It presented the effect of Adam's sin as mortality rather than guilt. It was "eternal death" that Christ's grace delivered us from, they argued. But the "healing process" by which our fatally wounded nature is restored to wholeness and wholesomeness is left to our faith and good works.

At the Council of Trent, melting pot of Counter-Reform, some Catholic theologians including the Benedictines Chiari and Ottoni pleaded for a switch-over from the juridical model of Latin scholastics with emphasis on guilt, punishment and acquittal, to the therapeutic language proper to the Patristic paradigm preserved in the Antiochian school. Such a change of paradigm, they argued, would obviate the imminent Western schism. But they were shouted down by the majority in the Council, accused of being biased towards Protestantism. How tragic![2]

There is another serious deficiency in Reformation theology. This needs to be amended before we can forge an ecumenical fellowship of churches capable of partnering the Spirit in the eschatological mission of reconciling humans through justice (= "forgiveness of sins") as well as that of transforming the earth (= "resurrection of the body").

Once more allow Jurgen Moltmann to do the talking for me.[3] In Moltmann's analysis, reformers have taken Paul's theology of sin and justification unilaterally without complementing it with Jesus' praxis of dealing with sin and sinners as evidenced in the gospels. This one-sided approach accounts for "Luther's erroneous judgment in the German Peasants' War". The dominant Protestant theology focused on the perpetrators of sinful actions and their forgiveness. It has not been sensitive enough to recognize the suffering of the victims of such sinful activity as well as their passive sins. It completely ignored "God's judging and saving 'option for the poor'".[4]

Justice: Roman and Biblical

The Catholic problem is not taking a partial view of biblical soteriology, as the Protestants have done, but a wholesale exchange of scriptural teaching on justice for a species of legal justice inherited from the Roman Empire. It was this notion of justice that had gradually evolved into the Western human-rights discourse now accepted in almost all countries.[5] Passing through the Aristotelico-Thomistic mill in the Middle Ages, this notion of justice not only solidified its juridical character but also sunk permanent roots in Rome's official theology as one of the four cardinal virtues, i.e., one of the four purely human virtues around which human morality revolved. This is one of the many instances in which Roman Catholicism has departed from the biblical stance.

We know that in the Bible justice is neither juridical nor human in origin. Rather it is one of four cardinal characteristics of Yahweh: love, fidelity, righteousness and justice. These are recurrently mentioned in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, as divine attributes which God's people are also called to emulate. For this justice and righteousness of God, as much as Her love and fidelity, register a strong and unabashedly overt bias towards victims of injustice. For there is a covenant, i.e., a defense pact between God and the poor, i.e., those victimized on the basis of class, creed, caste, colour, culture, gender, or language. This covenantal justice is not the justice that Roman theology speaks about, even today.

It is true that in the Roman Synod of 1971 the Catholics redefined their mission as Proclamation of Faith through Promotion of Justice. But in their still medieval mentality, what they mean by justice is what the Roman law has defined for them, a human virtue, which is contrasted with faith, a theological virtue. In the subsequent decades, Catholic activists who took this teaching seriously were accused of neglecting the divine dimension of faith in favour of a human commitment to justice.

Pope John Paul II tried to resolve the conflict in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, appealing to mercy as a mitigating factor to be introduced in meting out justice.[6] It was an attempt at curing the symptom rather than removing the cause of the ailment. Once our notion of justice is rigidly legal, such an appeal to mercy is legitimate, but it does not solve the problem unless the notion of justice is completely revised. That is why Desmond Tutu rejected the retributive justice of the West in favour of restorative justice of his Ubuntu tradition.[7] In the Roman theory of justice, now evolved into the human rights discourse, there is no room for forgiveness as required by Yahweh's justice.

Jesus himself has given us a precedent in this regard. If he hurled the "love above the Law" or "mercy above justice" argument against the Scribes and Pharisees, it was because the latter interpreted justice in purely legalistic terms (Matthew 9:13; 12:7; 18:33; 23:23), not because he accepted their narrow notion of justice. On the contrary, he wanted his disciples to excel in another kind of justice (Matthew 5:20) which was also known in Israel. This is the righteousness and justice of Yahweh which is inseparably linked with his love and fidelity. In other words, mercy and forgiveness are not added to Yahweh's justice as a corrective but are constitutive dimensions of justice which includes forgiveness of sins and cancellation of debts.

God's justice, in other words, is not the Roman justice of rigorous equity before a law that served only the non-slaves of the Empire. On the contrary, the Law by which God metes out justice is the covenant between God and the slaves, between God and the defenseless.

Justice of God and Forgiveness of Sins

Scriptural revelation of God's modus judicandi makes a smooth transition from the Old to the New Testament through the servant songs of Isaiah. In Israel, God's mercy is revealed in God's judgment in favour of the poor. God's misphat and sedeqa, i.e., righteousness and justice, are saturated with Her other two divine characteristics, hesed, Her love towards the weak, and emet, Her fidelity to the covenant with the weak. In the servant songs of Isaiah, there is a further development. God's merciful justice that defends the poor is seen in the Messiah who is himself the victim. According to Isaiah 1:17, he "will judge the poor with righteousness and bring justice for the meek of the earth". In Isaiah 42:1, God's spirit rests on the Messiah that he may "bring forth justice to the nations". It is to bring God's merciful justice to the world that the Messiah becomes the victim of injustice. He triumphs by his sufferings; he saves by taking upon himself the iniquities of others.

No wonder the compilers of the New Testament could not understand or explain adequately to their contemporaries what Jesus did and taught, and what he suffered and died for, simply by appealing to any other messianic model such as David or Moses, or even some of the Prophets. Jesus crucified is the Suffering Messiah. In him God is violated together with all the victims of injustice. In him, this violated God offers oppressors a gruesome indication as to who they oppress when they oppress the weak. In him, a bleeding God calls for repentance and amendment. What is more, this defeated God gives hope to the vanquished by rising with them, inviting them to join Her in declaring amnesty to their oppressors in view of their possible and desirable conversion. This then is the forgiveness of sins, an outpouring of the Spirit by the victim-God whose love defies death and survives it. Forgiveness of sins is the resurrection.

Here I once again return to Moltmann.[8] The Western church's atonement theology, he avers, revolves exclusively around the death of Christ and not his resurrection, while resurrection is interpreted only as the divine authentification of Christ. Moltmann contrasts this with the Orthodox tradition which "has proclaimed Forgiveness at the Easter festival and celebrated Easter as the great feast of atonement". Hence he confronts Western tradition with Paul's Christology "according to which Christ has died for us but much more (pollo mallon) is risen for us" (Rom. 5:10). The resurrection transforms our knowledge of the past into a hope in a sure future. Something more lies ahead.

Harping on the past, even atonement for past sins, is not the ultimate Christian ideal. For the Old has passed away (II Cor. 5:17). Forgiveness of sins means resurrection of the body. There is more in the future waiting for our active involvement than the past can offer with the blame resting on oneself or on others. Reconciliation, not remorse. Restoration, not simply retribution. Forgiveness of the past ensures hope for a certain future. In Sri Lanka at this time nothing more is demanded of the churches than preaching and witnessing to a forgiveness that culminates in a New Creation.

Mission of Christ and Mission Mandate

This premised, we can now discuss the two facets of the mission mandate, which we and the Spirit have received together, namely, the forgiveness of sins guaranteeing the resurrection of the body. This mission cannot be detached from Jesus' own mission, which Jesus himself, anointed by the Spirit, spelt out in the synagogue of Nazareth. The mandate to baptize nations and make disciples of them is grossly misinterpreted as a charter for proselytism when it is ruthlessly severed from the source of that eternal mandate, namely, the mission for which Jesus was anointed by the Spirit (Luke 4:18-19). This is the mission for which we too are anointed by the same Spirit:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me

Because he has anointed me

He sent me to announce the good news to the poor
[to heal the broken-hearted]
To preach deliverance to the captives
And sight to the blind

To set free the oppressed (tethrausmenos)

And declare the acceptable Year of the Lord.

The mandate to baptize and make disciples of nations cannot and should not be taken out of this context of mission of liberation directed clearly to the poor, broken-hearted, captives, blind and oppressed. The crowning point of his mission manifesto is the proclamation of "the acceptable Year of the Lord". This is the Jubilee ruling on the "release of debtors from their debts" which included an ecological amnesty to land and animals! Periodic release of debts among humans and amnesty to infra-human nature is the guarantee that among a people who have Yahweh as their sole Sovereign, the land, which is their means of production, is not desecrated by excessive exploitation, private appropriation and unfair distribution.

It is noteworthy that in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer, the notion of "release of debts" alternates with the notion of "forgiveness of sins". This indicates their semantic identity. The literal translation of Luke 11:4 is "Release us from our sins for indeed we relieve everyone who is indebted to us". It is therefore not farfetched to conclude that the forgiveness of sins that Jesus brings with him coincides with the end-time year of grace or the Jubilee Year of universal amnesty, when the land itself will also rise into an eternally restful Sabbath together with the resurrected humanity.

Forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of all things are, respectively, the negative and positive expressions of our mission. This involves a massive socio-political commitment to the oppressed, a concerted engagement of all churches in the exaltation of the lowly, the resurrection of the dead, and the regeneration of an Eden out of a desecrated earth, a communion of saints who possess the whole earth as the inviolable temple of their unending worship. This is the unfinished agenda of the Spirit.

Baptism and Discipleship of Nations

It is in the perspective of this unfinished missionary agenda that I wish to understand the command to baptize nations and make disciples of them. Let us disinfect our notions of baptism, nations, and disciples from the venomous zeal for proselytism.

Did not Jesus criticize and even ridicule proselytism or conversion from one religion to another in Matthew 23:15? Jesus' call was to change one's ways (metanoia, shub) and not to change one's religion. He invites all to abandon slavish dependence on creatures (idolatry) and to enjoy the freedom that comes from sole dependence on God, our Maternal Father. This beatitudinal spirituality of Jesus is naturally couched in a strongly theistic idiom, whereas Buddhists and Hindus, for instance, have a non-theistic version of it in alpecchata and vairagya. In either case, it is our rejection of every form of idolatry that constitutes conversion. Those who renounce the worship of creatures are his disciples. The Kingdom belongs to the poor.

In this sense we can understand what it means to "make disciples of nations". In the earlier strata of the Bible, it is generally admitted that a rough distinction is made between a nation (goy/ethnos) and a people ('am/laos). The implicit conviction seemed to have been that 'nations' are groups of persons who do not recognize Yahweh as their sovereign, but worship idols or Baals and other false gods of the oppressive rulers and, therefore, they constitute unjust societies. A "people", on the other hand, is formed when Yahweh, defender of the poor, reigns as their sole sovereign, thus guaranteeing justice. In the reign of Yahweh, who is the God of the oppressed, no other god is allowed to rule. For in the Bible idolatry is associated with injustice.

Perhaps, we can infer from this that a nation becomes a people when it abandons idolatry. Thus, to make a disciple of a nation, say, our nation, is for churches to participate in its own struggle to break down false gods, baals, moloks that it has enthroned - i.e. relativizing the good things it has absolutized, such as gender, race, language, money, culture, land, and even religion.

This struggle against idols is a risky enterprise entailing an inevitable social conflict which necessarily risks political reprisal. This is what baptism is. Baptism was Jesus' term for his own assassination on the cross, as well as the identical or similar fate awaiting his disciples (Mark 8 & 9). It is in participating in his baptism that we become his disciples. The social-conflict culminating in his baptism was the direct result of his zeal for Yahweh's reign. What is true of an individual disciple is true of a nation. No nation can be "baptized" into discipleship unless it dies, as a nation with all its idols, and rises as a people enjoying peace through justice. This death and resurrection of a nation is its baptism. Such baptism, which delivers it from its bondage to mammon, i.e., from sin and slavery, is the guarantee of its discipleship.

New Heaven and New Earth

The arduous task of baptizing the nations and making them disciples in the manner described above cannot be globalized by churches without also making the earth from which we are made partake in this death and resurrection. Here we are dealing with a concept unique to biblical religions: the final renewal of all creation as an indispensable accompaniment of life everlasting. When we confess, "I believe in the resurrection of the body", we pledge to do our part in the dawn of a new heaven and a new earth. The phrase "heaven and earth" refers to this world-system, for we have no other world where we can go to as to a "heaven". This world has to be transformed through our bodily resurrection into a new creation, which is our future and which dawns from God when we with Her Spirit do our part of this humanly impossible task.

However, we cannot believe in the resurrection of all creation without believing in our bodiliness. The Greco-Roman world-view, through which our understanding of Christianity has been filtered, has taught us to think that we have bodies. This means that we are different from our bodies. But the resurrection of the body is nonsense if we do not accept the biblical view that we are our bodies. The Greek philosophers have taught us that the spirit is what guarantees union among humans, whereas matter (body) divides us into separate individuals. But the Bible teaches us the exact opposite: it is the spirit in us that calls each one of us into an individual identity while the body involves us in a socio-physical solidarity with other humans and with nature. The body is the human person epitomizing as well as linking up the whole of creation. Therefore, we cannot have life everlasting in the spirit without our bodiliness, i.e., without the whole physical universe being resurrected into new heaven and new earth.

This "mission impossible" is an article of our faith and the sure horizon of our hope because the Spirit of God is at work with us. We have to restore health to a fatally sick world, as the Antiochian theology tells us. Were we not given this world as a garden of delight to be enjoyed, and have we not turned it into a hospital of incurable diseases? The care of our bodies is jeopardized because we have poisoned the earth. We have hurt our bodies by hurting nature. The power-hunger of the serpent within us has turned the paradise of plenty into a desert of want, where only a wasteful few live in oases of affluence.

No wonder Jesus prepared himself for his mission by visiting the desert that we have created. There he showed us how to re-create the paradise by resisting the three destructive forces within us and among us: (a) abuse of one's powers to satisfy one's own selfish wants (turning stone into bread); (b) inclination to bow down before any agent who brings power and wealth (bowing to the devil on the mountain), and (c) tempting God by resorting to exhibitionist actions that nature forbids as having lethal consequences (jumping from the pinnacle). Here are three don'ts which, if observed, can ensure our enduring involvement in the unfinished agenda of the Spirit, namely, the recreation of this universe as the risen body of Christ. Our immediate and initial task in this agenda roughly corresponds to the three don'ts of the new Adam, and can be summed up as the attempt to transform planet earth into something intended by the creator already here and now:

(a)   Home with one table, where the gifts of creation are enjoyed together by all its inhabitants, where some do not gorge while others starve (I Cor. 11. 21);

(b)  Temple of worship and house of prayer, where mammon is given no chance to turn it into a "den of robbers" (Luke 19:46) or an "open market" (John 2:16);

(c)   A garden of delight where creation remains the "enjoyable icon" of the Creator's beauty, which is the desired fruit of liberating wisdom, rather than "a monstrous idol" of technocracy which is the forbidden fruit of power-generating knowledge (Gen. 3:1ff).