Is this narrative an atonement narrative? The answer is “no”, if for atonement narrative one means a story that pictures Jesus’ death as a divinely arranged plan to provide a payment to satisfy the offended honor of God or a requirement of divine law or understands Jesus as the substitute bearer of punishment that sinful humankind deserves. Narrative Christus Victor is not an atonement narrative if one requires a change in the relationship between God and sinful humankind based on the assumption of retributive justice that making right or restorig justice happens when evil deeds are balanced by punishment. The death of Jesus in narrative Christus Victor is not aimed at God and does not affect God in any of those ways.

But the answer is “yes”, if one envisions a reconciliation of humankind to God on the basis of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. In discussions of dogma, the classic questions of atonement concern the nature of sin and how Jesus’ death saves humankind from that sin. Narrative Christus Victor accounts for these questions. It portrays sin as bondage to the forces of evil, whose earthly representatives include the structures of imperial Rome, which had ultimate authority for Jesus’ death; the structures of the holiness code, to which Jesus proposed reforming alternatives; and the mob and the disciples in their several roles. All participants in society down to and including ourselves, by virtue of what human society is, participate in and are in bondage to – are shaped by – the powers represented by these earthly structures. Salvation is to begin to be free from  those evil forces, and to be transformed by the reign of God and to take on a life shaped – marked – by the story of Jesus, whose mission was to make visible the reign of God in our history.

In carrying out that mission, Jesus was killed by the earthly structures in bondage to the power of evil. His death was not a payment owed to God’s honor, nor was it divine punishment that he suffered as a substitute for sinners. Jesus’ death was the rejection of the rule of God by forces opposed to that rule….Far from being an event organized for a divine requirement, his death reveals the nature of the forces of evil opposed to the rule of God. It poses a contrast between the attempt to coerce by violence under the rule of evil and the nonviolence of the rule of God as revealed and made visible by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

When evil did its worst, namely, denying his existence by killing him, God’s resurrection of Jesus displayed the ability of the reign of God to triumph over death, the last enemy….

The resurrection as the victory of the reign of God over the fores of evil constitutes an invitation to salvation, an invitation to submit to the rule of God. It is an invitation to enter a new life, a life transformed by the rule of God and no longer in bondage to the powers of evil that killed Jesus…

Narrative Christus Victor is indeed atonement if one means a story in which the death and resurrection of Jesus definitively reveal the basis of power in the universe, so that the invitation from God to participate in God’s rule – to accept Jesus as the anointed one – overcomes the forces of sin and reconciles sinners to God.

Tony Abbot compounded the inhumanity by declaring that, should it win government, the Coalition will slash the number of refugees we accept .

These are crushing blows to people fleeing for their lives from their home country. They come on top of the recent moves to reopen detention on Nauru and Manus island and to start releasing people into the community while their claim is assessed. Only problem is, those released into the community  don’t have the right to work nor to access anything but limited welfare payments. So they’re pretty much consigned to poverty and dependence on family or charities.

Oh, and we’re still locking up children – over 1000 as at Feb 23.

Welcome to Australia.

The principle behind the Government’s policy is that if we make life tough enough for asylum seekers they won’t get on boats and come here. Not only is this cruel – we’re talking about actions that punish and further traumatise already traumatised people who have committed no crime -  but it’s not working. Asylum seekers continue to come.

For goodness sake, where is a leader like Malcolm Fraser, who stood up to the fearmongers and bigots when the waves of Vietnamese boat people started arriving and called on us to own up to the obligations of being global citizens?

It’s time we accepted this obligation once more. The world has a refugee crisis and we need to be part of the solution. Thanks to our remoteness we have very few asylum seekers coming our way. According to the Department of Immigration, as at Feb 23 we had less than 8,000 people in detention or community release. That’s a ridiculously small number when compared with other countries.

A better way forward? Increase our refugee intake to 30,000-40,000 per year, work with nearby countries to bring refugees and asylum seekers here safely, decouple offshore and onshore numbers (ie we accept x number of offshore applications regardless of how many refugees show up on our doorstep), release asylum seekers into the community after health checks and with the right to work. With a high likelihood of reasonably fast resettlement in Australia the number willing to risk a dangerous boat journey should decline. Will it work? No one knows for sure, but given the policy of cruel and inhumane treatment isn’t working, it can’t hurt for us to try decency.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life…

Steve Jobs sounded a similar note in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. He described the pain of being kicked out of the company he founded, Apple. When he and the CEO he had recruited disagreed sharply over the future direction of Apple, the Board sided with the CEO and Jobs was fired. He felt humiliated and an utter failure. But like Rowling, it was an inadvertent blessing.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life

I find Rowling’s and Jobs’ perspectives tremendously helpful. Like all human beings, I have experienced failure. My initial reaction is to deny that any failure has occurred and to get angry. I have been helped by the insight of Rowling, and have found that I can receive failure as a gift, an opportunity to gain a fresh view of myself, to honestly evaluate my strengths and my weaknesses, and to focus on what I want my life to be about.

So yes, JK Rowling, I appreciate your insight. Failure does have fringe benefits.

A little background might help. On my bookshelf I have the very mainstream evangelical  Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. In the entry “Atonement, Theories of the” it states

Each [NT writer] shows that it is the death of Christ and not any human achievement that brings salvation.

But none of them sets out a theory of atonement…View the human spiritual problem as you will, and the cross meets the need. But the NT does not say how it does so.

It goes on to note that there are many theories of how the cross saves that have risen through history. Perhaps the three most widespread are:

The Moral Influence theory – Christ shows us that confronted with all that evil could fling at him, God has nothing but love for us. This moves us to repentance;

The Christ as Victor theory – this focuses on the idea that we are caught in the grip of the forces of evil, sin, Satan, and death, and that Christ conquers these, thus liberating us.  In its early forms it suggested that the Devil owned us and that God bargained for our release. He would offer his Son’s life as a ransom for ours. The Devil accepted but God tricked him by raising Jesus from the dead. This theory died out in the eleventh century, but was revived in modern times by Gustaf Aulen, who argued that the emphasis in the Bible is on Christ, by his death and resurrection, conquering the powers that hold us captive;

The Penal Substitution theory – the ransom paid to the Devil notion was discredited by an eleventh century Archbishop named Anselm. He offered a stinging critique of the ransom theory and argued instead that the death of Christ was about the satisfaction of God’s honour.  Drawing from contemporary notions that when a king’s honour was offended there had to be something offered in satisfaction, he suggested that our sin offended God’s honour and that Christ’s death was the satisfaction offered to preserve the King’s honour. During the sixteenth century Reformation this theory was modified in light of the growing sense of the importance of law and punishment in accord with the law. Justice demanded that wrongdoing be punished, and Christ offered himself to bear the punishment our sin deserved.

I have already pointed to what I see as the shortcomings of the substitutionary theory. What this brief survey of theories highlights to me is that

1. If the penal substitution theory is the gospel, then no-one prior to the sixteenth century Reformation seems to have known the gospel;
2. The important thing is that Christ puts us right with God, not knowing how he does it;
3. Each of the models offered was strongly shaped by concepts of justice that prevailed in their day. Given the massive developments in our understanding of justice and community formation that have occurred in the last couple of centuries, it would be strange if our understanding of how Christ’s death and resurrection put us right with God did not evolve too.

My default approach has long been the forensic one. We willfully do things that harm others, ourselves and creation and will be called to account for it. I continue to believe this to be true.

I don’t want to jettison the forensic model, but I think Flood is correct to say we need to place far greater emphasis on the medical model. This model recognises the language in the New Testament about being caught up in the power of  sin. Human beings are not only perpetrators of sin but victims of it. Sin is an oppressive power that leaves us broken, oppressed, unable to do the good we want. Sin creates systems of power – economic, social, political, cultural – that trap us, hurt us, hold us back from flourishing. This is why Jesus liberated those tormented by demons, forgave the sinner, healed the sick. Here the emphasis is not on culpability but freedom from that which oppresses, holds us back.

When I was younger I read a book by JC Ryle called “Holiness”. Ryle bought into the concept of original sin, that we are hopeless sinners possessed of a nature that is prone to sin. In one memorable passage he describes the parents of a newborn caught up with love for their baby gushing about how beautiful and innocent the child is. Ryle retorts that this baby is no angel but a little sinner prone to evil.

A medical model thinks not in terms of original sin, but original goodness. We are amazing beings created in the image of God. We can’t help but be inclined to love, kindness, generosity. Sin distorts the ways we express this – eg we direct great love to our children while we neglect the poor Indian child – but as Christ changes us we love in ways more and more after the love of God.

At the end of the day I want to hold onto both models. I am both a perpetrator and a victim of sin. Nonetheless, I find the medical model really does frame the gospel as good, hopeful news. May there be more of it.

One of the effects of Parkinsons is that you lose facial expression. So on the inside I might be smiling but on the outside I might appear dour. On the inside I might be totally engrossed but on the outside appear disinterested.

While it’s relatively mild at present it will grow worse.  It might make me good at poker, but I’m not sure it’ll be much use otherwise. In fact, for someone who has spent a large part of my lifetime in public speaking it is rather disconcerting. As with other side effects of this disease I guess I’ll find a way to compensate.

One thing it does highlight to me is how thankful I am to have family, friends and colleagues who already know me and who won’t be fooled by my increasingly expert poker face. I always imagined it would be humiliating to deteriorate in front of others and become less independent. And maybe that time will come. But rather than humiliation, I am finding it is tremendously humbling, in the good sense of being genuinely enriched by the grace and love shown to me in a myriad of small ways: to have someone see the flicker of emotion that my face used to display ever so clearly and pause to ask how I am; to have a friend offer to open the chip packet that my feeble right hand struggles with; to have someone carry that second cup that I will only spill; to have a colleague bring me a fork and spoon because they know I can no longer eat with chopsticks. I am discovering that in my weakness I am privileged with the small acts of kindness that make life immeasurably rich and rewarding. To all those who have shown and continue to show me such grace, thankyou.

Inevitably there will be calls to delay the spending and cut programs. Just this week, after announcing a 10% rise in half yearly profits to $3.18 billion, the CEO of the ANZ bank called on the Federal Government to cut expenditure and taxes!

I for one think it’s time to raise taxes.

Contrary to popular opinion Australia is a low taxing nation. Total revenues collected by Governments hover around 25-30% of GDP, which places us in the lower half of industrialised nations, on a par with the US and substantially lower than the UK, France and Germany. Among industrialised nations we have the eleventh lowest tax burden on individuals. When you weigh up taxes and cash benefits the US, UK, France and Germany take a higher proportion of individual incomes in taxes than we do. We have the fourth lowest rate of consumption taxes, half the rate of most other nations. We’re at the higher end on corporate tax rates but still well below Japan and the US. (Stats from OECD tax database)

And contrary to popular opinion increasing taxes need not decrease economic growth. The economy grows as demand for goods and services increases and our capacity to meet demand grows with it. If doesn’t really matter who is doing the demanding, just that it is being done. If the Government takes more from me in tax that’s less money for me to spend at the boat shop but more money spent on disability services and education. So the loss in one area is offset by the gain in another.

Sure, we have to get the mix right. Taxes create artificial distortions that create positive and negative incentives. But that is an issue of carefully selecting which areas to tax, not whether we should have more taxes.

Would I prefer the money stay in my pocket? Of course. But even more than that I’d prefer to see the NDIS, Gonski, investment in renewable energy, a keeping of our promises on aid, and decent benefits to pensioners, the unemployed and the disadvantaged.

Bangladesh seems a world away, but it’s a lot closer than we rhink. One of the brands the factory makes clothing for is Mango, a Spanish company that will be sold through DJs from later this year and for which Aussie super model Miranda Kerr is a front woman.

According to the War on Want, the pressure on suppliers to keep costs low is driving them to shoddy practices such as violating building codes, operating dangerous workplaces and paying poverty level wages.

It’s up to us to tell companies such as DJs that we want them to pay a fair price for their goods and insist their suppliers operate safe workplaces and pay decent wages.

Last survivng Anzac, Alec Campbell[/quote]

I have always struggled with Anzac Day. On the one hand, I do want to remember the horror that is war and the sacrifice our soldiers made, but on the other, I can’t shake the feeling that eulogising our fallen soldiers masks that as we turn them into flawless heroes who only ever did what was good and honorable fighting for our freedom, and we come dangerously close to eulogising war itself.

And then I hear the words of returned soldiers like Alec Campbell.

So this Anzac Day I want to remind myself that war is an evil. It may at times be a necessary evil, but that doesn’t make it any less evil. It is unadulterated violence, limbs torn from bodies, lives extinguished, infrastructure essential to living decently destroyed, children terrorized. It is something to be avoided at all costs.

I want to remind myself that soldiers do brave and courageous things, put their lives on the line, and are to be honored for that, but at the end of the day their job is to kill people, and this is not something to celebrate but to grieve.

I want to remind myself that we do terrible things during war. Atrocities are committed by both sides. We have our My Lais and Abu Grahibs. And it shouldn’t surprise us. Send people into a situation of total violence and this sort of thing happens.

I want to remind myself that wars are fought for often very cynical motives. I recently began reading a book by Bill Clinton’s official historian. Clinton met with him regularly and talked through what was happening. On one occasion Clinton shared how he had begged European leaders to allow NATO to do more to halt the violence in Bosnia and had been met with refusal because they didn’t feel Europe was ready for a Muslim state. This was a war allowed to continue for very cynical motives, but it exposes just how “real politic” rules the world.

I want to remind myself that Jesus calls me not to hate my enemy but to love my enemies, and chose the path of non violence. I am still not sure how this translates into every context, but it is the path I will choose to follow as best I can.

It is perhaps ironic that the day most sacred to Christians, Good Friday, is in such close proximity to the day most sacred to Australians, Anzac Day. One declares God conquers evil not with violence but with suffering love. The other declares that brute force still rules the world.