Paper for Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology Loyd Ericson November 1, 2013 Utah Valley University

Several Sundays ago I asked my young niece what she had learned in primary that day. She excitingly told me about the object lesson that she had participated in: We went outside and sat on the grass, and our teacher had two buckets. One bucket had dirt in it and another bucket has water in it. We put our hand in the water and then put it in the dirt. This is what it is like when we do things that are bad. We become dirty. Then we put our hands in the water and it cleaned off the dirt. This is like when we repent. If we repent Jesus cleans away our sins and we are clean again. While much has been and is being said about the Atonement in Latter-day Saint thought (especially at this conference), very little discussion seems to involve the nature of this thing called sin that the Atonement of Jesus Christ is said to be remedying. And while many, if not most, may not think that my nieces object lesson was the perfect metaphor for understanding the Atonement, most theories of the Atonement assume a shared basic premise with the lesson of the dirty hands: that the Atonement is meant to remedy *effects* of our actions. The purpose of my paper is to explore the nature of sin and its relationship to the Atonement, beginning with an examination of what some of the major traditional theories of atonement assume to be remedying, followed with a similar examination of the traditional understanding of the atonement in Latter-day Saint thoughtparticularly that of Blake Ostler, who has offered the most robust analysis of the Atonement from a traditional Latter-day Saint perspective. In doing so I will argue that the underlying premise of traditional LDS understandings of the atonement is

both nonsensical at the least and perhaps even harmful in how it is relayed. Finally, I will point to liberation theology as an alternative way to understand the Atonement that proposes a new way to understand sin, Christ, and the Atonement in what I will call an Archetypal Theory of Atonement, where the primary purpose of the Atonement of Christ is not to remedy the spiritual effects of our actions (or our works), but rather, as Christ tells the Nephites, to draw all men [and women] unto me (3 Ne. 27:14) in joining his work to seek the salvation of the poor and oppressed. *** Dominating the first millennium of Christian thought, the Ransom theory of atonement posited that during the Fall of Adam and Eve, Satan took possession of the Garden couple and their posterity through the Original Sin and its effects. Here the relationship between Satan, humanity, and God is understood in the context of warring nations and prisoners of war, wherein ransoms are paid for the return of captives. Desiring to free his creations, God offers his Son s death as a ransom for Adam, Eve, and their descendants. The wool has been pulled over Satans eyes though, as he did not know that Jesus possessed the ability to resurrect himself. Thus the ransom is paid, we are freed from Satan, and through the resurrection of Jesus, God is made victorious. Recognizing that this theory implies that Satan has a certain power over God, wherein he is able to make demands of God that can only be overpowered through trickery, variations of the Ransom theory posited instead that humanity was held captive by either Satan (or just sin, suffering, and death in general) because of our banishment by God, and that a ransom of pain and punishment, rather than death, was paid to God the Father by His Son Jesus Christ. Regardless of whether humanity is captive to Satan or to the hardships of the world, or whether the ransom was paid to Satan or to God, the Ransom Theory is meant to describe how

the Atonement remedies the effect of disobeying Gods commands. In this case, Adam and Eve (or all of humankind) disobeyed God. As a result we have been separated from God, and an atonement is necessary to bring us back into Gods presence. While we are not made *dirty* in this scenario, our actions have consequences for ourselves and the Atonement is meant to remedy those consequences. The Ransom Theory eventually became less favored and was replaced with theories of Penal Substitution and Satisfaction. With this view, our relationship with God is largely one of master and servant (or noble and civilian) where disobedience of the servant disrespects the master and must be punished in order to restore the masters honor. Not only did the disobedience dishonor the master, but if the master did not follow through with punishing the person who disrespected him, he would dishonor himself further and lose respectability. After all, who would honor or respect a ruler who did not follow through with his own edicts. (For any number of examples of this, watch an episode of Game of Thrones or any number of films depicting Japanese feudal life--where disobedience to the king or leader is viewed as mockery, and punishment must be handed out to save face--despite the pleadings of a wife or mother to forgive the wrongdoer.) Similarly, when we disobey Gods commandments, we dishonor Him and must either pay God back in some way or be punished in order to restore Gods honor. Because of our inability to pay God back and restore His honor, the punishment of death is required. (We can easily see the same logic in arguments for contemporary capital punishment.) And, of course, like any leader of respect, God cannot simply forgive the act without recourse and expect to be taken seriously. In order to be *both* forgiving and respectable, God chooses to suffer the punishment Himself, substituting the disobedient servant with His person of the Son Jesus Christ. Thus,

punishment is made, honor is restored, and the erring servant is forgiven of his disobedience. With the Penal Substitution Theory, the primary purpose of Christ s sacrifice was to take the place, or be a substitute, for those who should have been punished. Not liking the punitive nature of God described in Penal Substitution, Saints Anselm and Aquinas instead proposed a modification of this as the Satisfaction Theory, wherein punishment was not a punitive act for the benefit of God, but was for the benefit of the disobedient to help them learn the error of their ways and recover from that which they had done. (A recent of example of this has been in the news, where a man confessed on youtube about accidentally killing a man while driving intoxicated. The man was so ridden with guilt that he felt he had to be legally punished in order to find peace.) With the Satisfaction Theory, the dynamic of honor was still in effect though; but rather than Jesus suffering as a substitute for punitive punishments, he instead takes on the reparative punishment so that humanity can still reap the healing and experiential benefits without having to suffer the punishment itself. This self-sacrificial act of Christ is so honorable that it more than makes up for the dishonor we have caused God through our disobedience. Interestingly, with both the penal substitution and satisfaction theories, what is being *fixed* is not the sinner, but is actually Gods honor. The status of the former is only changed insofar as Gods honor no longer requires punishment. Ultimately though, what necessitated the Atonement was the *effect* of the sinners act. Disobedience had the effect of God s honor being diminished, which required punishment to restore. Or, to go back to my nieces object lesson, when we do something bad, the problem is not that we end up with dirt on our hands, but that God ends up with mud on His face. The Atonement washes Gods face clean and removes the need for us, the disobedient servants, to therefore be punished. While the Satisfaction Theory

also restores Gods honor, it also sees Christs sacrifice as providing a healing benefit for those who have done wrong. It thus acts as a remedy for both the effects that our disobedient acts have on God and ourselves. While the Ransom, Penal Substitution, and Satisfaction theories all understand the Atonement as Christs sacrifice remedying the consequences or effects of sin, it is interesting that none of these do so in a way that is described in my nieces Primary lesson or is commonly evoked in LDS discoursethat is, they do not evoke a metaphysical stain or dirt that needs to be cleansed away. While the scriptural metaphor of washing away sins is commonly tied to these theories, that metaphor is usually evoked as simply a metaphor. However, in LDS discourse the language of cleanliness, impurity, washing away sins, purification, etc has been transformed from a metaphor into a metaphysical reality. Thus in traditional Mormon discourse about the Atonement, this language is not simply used to describe the remediation of certain effects of disobedience, such as the absolving of punishment or the freedom from captivity, *as if* those things were washed away, but rather the language assumes a metaphysically real dirt, stain, or impurity that is created through disobedience and must actually be cleansed. This transformation of washing away sins as a metaphor to a metaphysical reality seems to come hand in hand with the super-materiality of 19th-century Mormon theology (and much of contemporary Mormonism), where all spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure (D&C 131:7). Thus, in a book that surprisingly has no focused discussion on the Atonement, Parley Pratts Key to the Science of Theology points out that An agent filled with this heavenly fluid [the Holy Spirit] cannot impart of the same to another, unless that other is justified, washed, cleansed from all his impurities of heart,

affections, habits or practices, by the blood of atonement, which is generally applied in connection with the baptism of remission. A man who continues in his sins, and how has no living faith in the Son of God, cannot receive the gift of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of any agent, however holy he may be. The *impure* spirit of such a one will repulse the *pure* element, upon the natural laws of sympathetic affinity, or of attraction and repulsion. While many Mormons may not adopt the language of the natural repulsion of pure spiritual fluid from impure spiritual fluid, the assumption of a super-material effect on our spirits from our wrong acts remains. In his very influential book Believing Christ, Stephen E. Robinson writes: I am particularly fond of the way the Lord says this in Isaiah 1:18 . . . though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.. . . What the Lord is saying here is this: It doesnt matter what you did. Whatever it was, no matter how horrible or vile, is not the issue. The issue here is that whatever your sin was or is, I can erase it, I can clean *you* up and make *you* innocent, pure, and worthy. (8) The implication is clear. By Robinsons words clean *you* up, and make *you* innocent, pure, and worthy, he is also stating that your actions have a very real and material effect on your very being. They cause *you* to be dirty, guilty, impure, and unworthy. In the second volume of his Exploring Mormon Thought series, Blake Ostler offers perhaps the most philosophically rigorous approach to a traditional understanding of atonement in Mormonism. In it, he begins to critique the language of an unclean spirit as being only a metaphor, but he follows this by simply pointing the metaphor at another metaphysical reality

that affects our soul. He writes: The scriptures view our responsibility for evil acts as something that remains with us after we do the act. It is uncleanness or a stain on our soul. Metaphorically, this stain or uncleanness can be washed away through the Atonement. *However, it is obviously only a metaphor* (245). For Ostler, it seems though that it is only a metaphor insofar as there is not a literal stain that requires literal washing. The metaphor instead refers to our harbor[ing] an *energy of sin* that remains within us unless and until we repent (244). There is a sense in which guilt *adheres to our very being* until it is atoned for (245). And while he does not directly mention this sin-energy in his most recent book, Fire on the Horizon, the idea is still present. There, he writes: [T]he effects of sin are seen as a type of poison that remains in us. . . . There is more than a metaphor here. There is a sense in which we literally hold onto the effects of sin in our bodies. The effects of our behavior are not merely mental but have real effects in our bodies. . . . The effects of sin are stored in our cells, our organs, and our memories located throughout the central and automatic nerve systems (105-6). For Ostler, the effects of sin are usually manifest physiologically. As he puts it, The damage that we do to ourselves through sin is literally stored in our bodies in the form of painful memories and disease. Our bodies manifest the energy of such pain in the form of heart disease, high blood pressure, ulcers, and all kinds of psychosomatic illnesses and manifestations of neuroses. The pain of a guilty conscience is real (245). And echoing early Mormon arguments for the materiality of spirits, he writes: This energy is real in the sense that it causes real effects in our minds and bodies. It seems necessary that anything that can cause such effects is a form of energy because it brings about real change in us (245-6). It seems obvious that it is reasonable to say that wrong acts *can* bring about negative physiological and psychological effects. For example, sexual promiscuity can result in disease,

drug abuse leads to addictions and other ailments, and other acts can cause depression, anxiety, and harm to oneself. However, for Ostler the effects of sin run metaphysically deeper. These are rather symptoms of sin-energy that have infected a persons very being. This is clear when Ostler claims that, unlike the symptoms above that can generally be remedied or removed through medicine, counseling, and time, the sin-energy cannot be simply removed. Rather, they (perhaps like evil spirits in the New Testament) must be transferred to another body. Ostler writes that through the Atonement of Christ the painful energy of sin that resides in the flesh as memory is transferred to [Christ], adding,[T]his transfer is real and not merely metaphorical (247-8). Robinson mirrors this notion when writes, God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The sins that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. These things can be shared and absorbed, but they cannot be simply wished or washed away. They must be suffered (123). Thus returning to my nieces object lesson, the dirt on her hands cannot simply disappear, it must be transferred from one location to another--from her hands to the water. And just as that water becomes silted with the dirt from her hands, Jesus is now the bearer of our negative sin energies. If there were actual negative sin-energies that could not simply be washed away, it would make sense then for a suitable Atonement theory to need to explain how these sin-energies are remedied. This is a primary reason that Ostler gives for why his theory succeeds where most others fail; because, according to him, the LDS view of the Atonement assumes that the transfer of pain for sins is real (230). Yet are those energies real? And are they things that can be transferred to another in any meaningful sense? In his critique of traditional atonement theories, Ostler writes: The problem

of atonement in conventional Christianity consists of the fact that it is a solution looking for a problem. Traditionally, theories of atonement answer the question about how we are forgiven of our sins by Christs suffering as a substitute in our place, but there really does not seem to be a problem here because we can forgive others without a third party enduring pain and suffering as a necessary condition (250-1). It seems though that this logic can just as easily be applied to Ostlers theory, that it is a solution looking for a problem of how the metaphysically or supermaterially real energies of sin be transferred or removed from our very being. And we could simply contend that the problem is that there are no such entities to begin with. While it is certainly the case that one could easily infer these energies or their transference from certain scriptural passages, as Ostler does, we are still left with the problem of determining whether these passages of scripture ought to be read literally or metaphorically. As Ostler recognizes, explanations of atonement as ransom, acquittal, victory, etc all find their place in the scriptures. However, he contends that these must be read as metaphorical expressions and not actual explanations or theories--that is, scriptures that describe the atonement as ransom and acquittal only tell us what atonement is *like,* whereas scriptures that might describe atonement as a transference of negative energies tell us what atonement *is.* Concerning the Ransom theory of Atonement, Ostler writes: What Christ did somehow metaphorically pays the price owed to the devil to free us from bondage--although it quickly leads to nonsense if the metaphor is pushed to far (204). This pushing to far of a metaphor seems to be precisely what Ostler is doing with his conception of sin energies. However, just as we can, or perhaps ought, to reject theories of atonement because of the absence of ways in which forgiveness, captivity, and respectability have sense in our understandings of the world and relationships, we can (and I say ought) to reject a theory of atonement that depends on the

actuality and transference of negative sin energies or metaphysically real impurities of the soul. This is because (1) the positing of these transferrable energies simply lacks sense; (2) the rhetoric of soul-binding negative consequences is harmful, especially when it is unnecessary; (3) it misplaces moral concern away from concern for others and instead promotes selfishness; and (4) the emphasis on these energies completely ignores and has no necessary or practical relation to the predominant theme of atonement in Christian and LDS scripture: that is, the cross.

First, while it makes sense to say that certain acts *can* have particular negative consequences for a persons body or psyche, positing the existence of metaphysically or supermaterially real energies adds nothing to the equation. It is akin to positing undetectable rainbow power to explain how a magnet works when we already have a suitable explanation. Ostler s elaboration of these negative energies is ultimately a longer rephrasing of the inference he is trying to explain. In other words, in attempting to address how it is that Jesus is able to literally take our sins and pain and suffers from them, Ostler explains that Jesus does so by literally taking our sin energies and pain energies and suffering from them. Adding the language of energies when they have no sense outside of the explanation leaves them sense-less as an explanation. This is rendered even more sense-less when actual pains and harms are said to be transferred to Jesus via these energies. Pains, especially our deepest pains, have their sense in a complex web of experiences, identity, relationships, memories, and physiology. Pain is not found in a separate energy tagged on top of these things; and despite what science fiction movies depict, they cannot be contained in test tubes and injected. What does it mean to say that Jesus feels the pain of birthing labor through the transference of pain energy? Even if we set aside the

fact that Jesus does not have a uterus, this pain is much more than just nerve fibers in the brain responding to signals from a contracting cervix. It s a complex web of fears of a first pregnancy or complications from the last, it involves the months of hope for the child, the trauma of a premature delivery, the inadequacy of a new mother, the stress of a single parent, and so on. What does it mean to say that Jesus knows through a transfer of energies what it is like to be brutally raped and violated? What can these energies tell Jesus about a husband who was unfaithful to his wife he deeply loved, and is now facing the risk of losing his family and all that he truly holds dear? How can the energies convey the life of a father who accidentally drove over his daughter while backing out of his driveway, turned to alcohol as a way of coping, and lost his wife, the rest of his children, his job, and his home to alcoholism? Without the rush of methamphetamines and later withdrawals how does Jesus understand the pain of a drug-addict? Even the most vivid dreams are just that--dreams. Though I may feel pain and even guilt in my dreams, I can wake up and know that it was all just a dream. It was never my reality. Part of the pain of a teenager who accidently kills a mother and her children while driving intoxicated on a Christmas Eve is knowing that he will always know the pain he caused. No matter how much the grief-stricken surviving father forgives him, no matter how much God forgives him, and no matter how much he forgives himself, he knows that the fact of the accident will always be with him. This is something that Jesus cannot know and makes no sense of him ever knowing through a transfer of energies.

Second, teaching those who have done wrong that they are in some way tainted, dirty, unclean, or necessarily damaged in the deepest way possible adds further harm to those who have made mistakes. In The Book of Mormon Girl, Joanna Brooks poignantly recounts the object

lessons of her youth, something not entirely different from the lesson my niece received. After discussing a lesson involving a rose that had been wilted as it was passed around, she writes: Standards Night were all about object lessons. Some years, it was not roses but cupcakes, or donuts, passed from girl to girl around the semi-circle of folding chairs, losing glaze or frosting, fingers getting sticky, and the inevitable question: Who would like to eat this damaged donut? And who would rather have one of these untouched donuts here in the pink box? (114). While this was an object lesson on sexual purity, the message is the same for my niece and for anyone who is told they are now in some way tainted or deeply and negatively affected by their acts: Why would God want to be near something as tainted as you? While it usually would not be presented in this way, it is implicit with talk of the pure spirit being repulsed from impure spirit, or as Robinson writes: Some of you know what it is like to do something that makes you feel as if you just drank raw sewage. You can wash, but you can never get clean. When that happens, sometimes we ask the Lord as we lift up our eyes, O Father, cant we ever be friends again? The answer that can be found in all the scriptures is a resounding Yes, through the Atonement of Christ. Note his response to the hypothetical question. It is not No, God is still your friend, regardless of what you did. Instead, it is Well after you are clean, God will renew the friendship. To Ostlers credit, he does not posit that God is repulsed by our unclean selves, but that it is us who choose to stay away from God. He writes: They [who sin] will not voluntarily enter into a healed relationship with him because they are unclean and cannot stand the guilt of being in relationship with a perfect and holy being (219). Note what is going on here though. The guilt is not guilt for what they have done, but for the impurity of their souls in the presence of God. They feel they are the dirty donut that God would not want to touch. I havent

constructed an argument about how telling someone that they are dirty and impure is necessarily harmful, but I think we can all intuitively understand how it is.

Third, this understanding of sin and its effects misplaces the morality that should undergird Christian behavior. When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus answered that two great commandments were to love God and love our neighbor. Regardless of how we interpret these, implicit in them is that the basis of Christian morals is love for the other. This is perhaps best exemplified when Jesus states that what separates the sheep from the goats at judgment is whether or not a person was helping those in need. More importantly, the underlying premise in Jesuss response is that the sheep served others for no other reason than concern for them, and not for the inheritance that Jesus promises them. Hence they ask, [W]hen saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? (Matt. 25:37). On the other hand, the emphasis on cleanliness and worthiness before God misplaces the moral concern in Christian behavior from the other to the self. We dont love others for the sake of their wellbeing, we love others for the sake of our spiritual purity. And coming unto Christ becomes less about acting as Christ would, but of our selves being clean before him. Thus, we end up teaching that the real harm when we sin against others is not about the harm we do to others, but about the harm we do to ourselves. Sexual immorality is less about objectification, abuse, and risk and more about personal purity. Theft is less about taking from others and more about worthiness to stand in front of God. And even murder becomes less about the killing of another person, but whether or not we have committed some unpardonable sin and will remain tainted with uncleanliness or negative energies for eternity. Or think about how modesty discourse generally works in our culture, where it has little to do with the objectification and sexualization of

womens bodies, but has to do with the purity of the female who dresses *inappropriately* and the potential loss of purity for the male who might see her.

Finally, this understanding of sin and its effects makes no room for the cross. While there are certainly criticisms to be made of ransom, penal, and satisfaction theories, they are at least built around the central Christian element of the Atonement, that is the crucifixion of Jesus. In discussing his theory of Atonement, Ostler makes very little mention of the crucifixion, and does so only in the context as being the end of Jesuss mortal suffering that began in Gethsemane. This makes sense though, because it is hard to make sense of the cross in terms of spiritual uncleanliness and negative energies. Instead then, Latter-day Saints are prone to appeal to scriptures that discuss Jesuss suffering in abstract terms and read Gethsemane into them. In fact the only passage of LDS scripture that seems to directly address (by way of Luke s gosepl) his experience in Gethsemane is Mosiah 3:7, which states: [F]or behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his *anguish for* the wickedness and the abominations of his people. If we dont try to read a transference of energy or pain into this passage, the straightforward reading is simply describing Jesuss response to the wicked state of the world and not a suffering on behalf of it. I think we have all felt an anguish like this to a lesser degree when we have witnessed unjust suffering in person or in film--a feeling that is often intended to be evoked with films about Jesuss crucifixion. This emphasis on Gethsemane and virtual unimportance of the cross seems to be incongruous with Jesuss own account given in Third Nephi. After identifying himself by the very wounds of crucifixion, Jesus teaches,

[A]nd this is the gospel which I have given unto youthat I came into the world to do the will of my Father, because my Father sent me. And my Father sent me *that I might be lifted up upon the cross;* and after that I had been lifted up upon the cross, that I might draw all men unto me, that as I have been lifted up by men even so should men be lifted up by the Father, to stand before me, to be judged of their works, whether they be good or whether they be evilAnd for this cause have I been lifted up; therefore, according to the power of the Father I will draw all men unto me, that they may be judged according to their works (3 Ne. 27:13-16). Here the emphasis is placed on the cross and *zero* mention is made of Gethsemane. It should also be noted, as will be discussed soon, that judgment is discussed in terms of how people respond to his being lifted on the cross--ie., their works--and not in terms of spiritual cleanliness and purity. And I note as well that in LDS temple liturgy the imagery of crucifixion plays a key role, whereas Gethsemane is again absent. This is all not to say that there are no scriptures that imply or explicitly discuss the impurity of souls or the transference of sin. However, like with all scriptures, we must make decisions on how we read them and whether they should be read metaphorically. And with the reasons stated above to either question the reality or even avoid the rhetoric of them, it seems that those passages can and should be read metaphorically. In the same way that scriptures discussing the Atonement in terms of captivity and ransom can be read metaphorically to describe our experience being *as if* we were captives of Satan who have been released, or other scriptures discussing penal substitution can be read describing our experience *as if* we were sentenced to be punished and someone took it in our place, it seems that we can just as

easily read these passages to describe our experiences of atonement being *as if* we were dirty and had been made clean. I, for one, have certainly experienced it this way at times.

***

So what then of sin and the Atonement? It is here that I believe that liberation theology can provide an understanding of Christs atonement in a way that both avoids the turn to metaphysical effects of our actions and fully embraces the cross in a way that is meaningful and not sense-less. And it paves the way for what I will call an Archetypal Theory of Atonement. Without going into too much of a discussion on liberation theology, of which there are many variations, I will instead briefly summarize what Gustavo Guiterrez calls the preferential option for the poor. This means that all aspects of Christ, the Gospel, and Christianity need to be understood through a hermeneutic of how it addresses the plight of the poorincluding Jesuss life, the Cross, and resurrection, soteriology, ecclesiology, evangelization, scripture, sacraments, and community. Through this hermeneutic, sin is defined as the existence of poverty and the oppressive behaviors and systems that propagate it, and the atonement is the mission of the Christ to confront those things. This perspective of the Atonement is perhaps best illustrated by Ignacio Ellacuria when he writes that the question Why did Jesus die[?] is inseparable from the [question] why did they kill him[?] His colleague Jon Sobrino touches on this more when he says: Persons who preach an exclusively transcendent [Kingdom] of God do not get themselves murdered. People who preach a [Kingdom] that is only a new relationship with God, or only love, or only reconciliation, or only trust in God, are not

murdered. All these things may be legitimately regarded as elements accompanying the message of the [Kingdom] of God, but they alone do not explain Jesus death, and therefore they alone cannot be the central element of the [Kingdom]. The [Kingdom] of God must have had some bearing on the historico-social, not only the transcendent.

According to these liberation theologians, God as Jesus did not come to earth simply to suffer and be hung on the cross to absolve persons of some sort of metaphysical effect of sin. Rather than coming to earth to die, God as Jesus came to earth to live a life that both confronted sin and taught his followers to do the same. And because of this life, he was murdered by powers that wished to stop him. By this, the cross is not a symbol of violent sacrificial death for the sake of sacrifice or an appeasement of a punitive deity. Instead, the cross signifies the question why did they kill him. It is when we ask this question that we come to realize that Jesus was capitally murdered for confronting oppressive systems and trying to liberate the oppressed from their suffering. The cross is the center of Christianity because it symbolizes, points to, and embodies the life that Jesus of Nazareth lived. Because Jesus was crucified for his work to free the oppressed, the cross is a symbol of his life. But, some may argue (as some of you surely feel), the scriptures are clear that Jesus died for our sins and the sins of the world. To this, those who argue for a liberation theology would answer, yes, Jesus died for the sins of the world. However, Ellacuria adds: We must ask in all seriousness what the sin of the world is today, or in what forms the sin of the world appears today. . . . If we look at the reality of the world as a whole from the perspective of faith, we see that the sin of the world is sharply expressed today in what must be called unjust poverty. Poverty and injustice appear today as the great negation of God s will and as the annihilation of

the desired presence of God among human beings. Or we can phrase it as Doctrine and Covenants 49:20 puts it: But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin. It is for this reason that Ellacuria called Jesuss work of salvation historic soteriology, because it addresses salvation in terms of the actual material world instead of in the otherworldly or Mormon super-materiality. Furthermore, by understanding the Atonement as not just transcendent, but rather emphasizing the very real and material suffering of humans, God shows that his response to suffering is not to justify or understand it, but to confront and end suffering at its roots. When this is understood, our own identity and purpose as Christians should also be understood. According to Sobrino: Christian spirituality is no more and no less than a living of the fundamental spirituality that we have described, precisely in the concrete manner of Jesus and according to the spirit of Jesus. This is the following of Jesus. . . . Jesus was not merely vere homo, truly a human being; he was precisely homo verusthe true, authentic, genuine human being. . . . [T]o be truly a human being is to be what Jesus is. To live with the spirit, to react correctly to concrete reality, is to re-create, throughout history, the fundamental structure of the life of Jesus. Now there is another significant Christian theory of Atonement that I did not discuss at the beginning of this paper, and that is the Moral Influence Theory. Popular in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and still popular among more liberal theologians today, this theory claimed that God condescended as Jesus to, as the theory is called, be a moral influence on his creation. While liberation theology can be viewed as a form of a Moral Influence theory, it is distinct in the way in which I will call the Archetypal Theory of Atonement, because rather than just desiring to

teach us to be better people, Jesus taught us what it means to be Christ (or the messiah). Thus, to a certain extent, Christ is bigger than Jesus of Nazareth, in that Jesus simultaneously incarnated the expectations of the Messiah and became the new embodiment of the Christ. In doing so the divine archetype of salvation (which was previously Gods liberation of the Israelites from the Egyptians) and a new archetype--Jesus Christ--is established. That Christ is bigger than Jesus of Nazareth is important because, as the archetype of Christ, Jesus--as the revelation of God, shows us through his incarnation and death what it means to be divine. Salvation is two-fold: it is salvation for those who are oppressed through liberation from their oppression; and it is salvation for those who are oppressors through liberation from their way of life. In some way or another, we are or have been oppressors of others. By seeking to truly follow Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we encounter God and are transformed. Sobrino writes: The believer who follows Jesus, who lives in history, who makes history and suffers it, finds himself or herself confronted with truth, life, cross, and hope. All of this is placed by the individual in reference to the mystery of God. To be a follower of Jesus, is to be, as Ellacuria phrases it, a crucified people. Whether literally as martyrs or symbolically through our commitment to the poor, we are seemingly nailed and crucified with Christ for the cause. For Sobrino, by seeking the welfare of others, the mystery [of salvation] comes forth to meet the individual, as well, giving him or her a concrete, nonstransferable name. . . . In giving us names, God enters into a personal relationship with us. It is perhaps of no coincidence then that King Benjamin, whose farewell speech to his people emphasized that salvation is found in serving the poor, told his people: And now, because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name;

therefore, ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters. . . . And it shall come to pass that whosoever doeth this shall be found at the right hand of God, for he shall know the name by which he is called; for he shall be called by the name of Christ (Mosiah 5:7-9). To summarize, then, the Archetypal Theory of Atonement, sin and its effects are not simply acts that violate Gods commands, which have the effect of tainting or harming us in some metaphysical or super-material way that separates us from God. Instead sin and its effects are primarily the oppressive and abusive ways in which we treat each other and cause very real and very material suffering. As such, salvation is ultimately salvation from oppression for both the oppressor and oppressed. This salvation is the salvation of Christ, and the salvation that Jesus of Nazareth, God incarnate, embodied. In doing so, he became the archetype of Christ, showing us what it is to be divine, what it means to love others, and what salvation consists of. It is by being freed from oppression (as either oppressor or oppressed), that we come to understand Christ and seek to also embody that archetype through our allegiance to those in need. And it is by doing so that we symbolically take up the cross and actually become Christ, and in the highest form of worship we are crucified with him, becoming as saints, the body of Christ.