The Wholesome Spirit of promise that the Father has given because of the Son’s obedience unto death, to immerse us welcomingly and fill us repeatedly during our earthly sojourn, is the earnest (arrabon), surety, pledge, guarantee, or down payment, that is, firstfruits (aparche) of our full inheritance (kleronomia) of salvation and the Kingdom of God. For this reason alone, if for no other, we may and ought to expect signs and miracles and powers to hold a significant place in current Christian experience. These elements are themselves pledges-in-kind of the future reality of God’s Kingdom whose power was most fully manifested historically in Christ’s Resurrection from the dead. Talk about “healing in the Atonement” misses the mark by comparison, especially when the Lord’s Resurrection is left out of the picture (as it is in the orthodox Anselmian, Lutheran, and Calvinistic variations on atonement).
It is because our great salvation is what it is that signs, miracles, and powers are what they are. They are cut from the very same cloth. The Proclamation (“gospel”) that informs us of that salvation is an empty letter without all the power manifestations that illustrate it in kind! Signs and miracles are not some sort of extrinsic proof of the Proclamation; they are the intrinsic proofs that such a salvation has in fact historically arrived, in part, to confirm and corroborate its full and absolutely certain future advent in kind.
People who do not understand that the Resurrection, not the Crucifixion, is the central saving moment of the Proclamation of God, also find it hard to compute the Biblical language about Jesus’ own salvation. Their soteriology (doctrine of salvation) is literally CROSS-wired! For it is when we ask the decisive question, “When was Jesus saved?” that we discover the “grave” (pun intended) weakness of the medieval doctrines of the Atonement. However, Jesus was not saved by the Cross; he was destroyed by it! He was only saved come his Resurrection! And that is likewise our salvation…in kind!
It follows that healing—a lesser sign and miracle—must likewise, then, be a part of such a salvation. To substitute the words, “such an atonement,” here reveals the traditional misapprehension of the larger truth that only a sound, Biblical pattern of explanations can clarify and restore. Salvation, signs, miracles, healing, prophecy, etc., constitute one seamless garment of wholesomeness being restored to this disrupted creation.
The New Testament never talks about “the power of the Cross.” It speaks about “the Explanation which is of the Cross” (1 Cor. 1:18) as being the power of God, but that is a very different matter! The power of the Cross is only a power of death for it was an instrument of torture and public execution. But the Proclamation of God never glorifies that; in fact it pronounces the triumph of Resurrection power over the weakness exhibited in Christ’s Crucifixion, in the wisdom of God’s overruling plan (2 Cor. 13:4). The Cross of Christ is thereby transformed into a symbol of human viciousness neutralized and overwhelmingly reversed; of a treasonous act playing gullibly into God’s hands; of a Divine jujitsu deftly countervailing the clumsy lunges and ill-aimed momentum of the Great Dragon. It is forever the symbol of the stupidity of a blustering usurper and his failed coup. By contrast, the New Testament veritably bristles with the power of the Savior’s Resurrection that overcomes Death and its fright—the only “power” the Cross can ever claim. We should cease using misleading, deceiving metaphors and instead discipline ourselves to stick with sound explanations, even those of the apostles and the Scriptures.
Think only of the book of Romans, where the theme of resurrection recurs like a steady cadence, but where no term for “cross” is ever used by Paul anywhere. Or how about the book of Acts, where words for “cross” are occasionally used (when any such word is used at all!), but where “raise” or “resurrection” occur without fail in every public address!
To speak of “the power of Christ’s death” is very misleading because it distracts the understanding from the saving power of his Resurrection. This strange language (from a Biblical standpoint!) is a reflex of the death-centered view of the Atonement inherited from the medieval theory of Anselm, cinched up by Luther’s ill-conceived theologia crucis, and severely reinforced by the penal theory of Calvin. In such a view, indeed, one can never discover “healing in the Atonement” for in such an atonement there is no healing! Healing is most certainly a facet of our salvation, even on an orthodox reading (although attended with an acute sense of inner contradiction plus endless jangling and wrangling), yet human theories have separated what God has joined together, for salvation and atonement belong together. So when an “atoning death” is explained apart from the saving Resurrection (and exactly to that extent, since there are variations on this theme), resort is being taken to a lame rationalization whereby even salvation may sometimes (by the figure of metonymy) be predicated of the instrument of destruction, though ironically (but oxymoronically if taken literally!), rather than in spite of or “through” that instrument, as the apostles express the matter. [10/10/96]
The Premial Atonement 