Atonement, Vengeance & the Hope of Zion

In a scene both viscerally vivid and powerfully symbolic, Moses 7 presents the consummation of the Godhead’s grand design for the universe: “We will receive them into our bosom and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made” (Moses 7:63–64). This moment of climactic (re)unification captures the ultimate achievement for which Christ labors, a community fully integrated in love and harmony, bound to each other and to their God, after a harrowing but educative journey through mortality. Zion is the goal toward which humankind, in collaboration with the Godhead, is striving. All humanity—having been battered and bruised psychologically, emotionally, and physically during their mortal sojourn—are made whole through the atonement. Zion is the concrete manifestation of a universal at-one-ment eventuating in a new world, immersed in the light of the Holy Spirit.

This vision of at-one-ment culminating in Zion is one of the key interventions of Restoration teachings, one that represents a powerful and potentially novel conception of atonement as a comprehensive and universal project of reconciliation and healing. This theology has rich implications for how Latter-day Saints can enact these understandings of woundedness and healing in our social and political systems—including in Latter-day Saint attitudes toward contemporary penal practices. However, a Restoration project begun so auspiciously has yet to break completely from atonement theologies that undergird much of the Western Christian tradition and fulfill this radical potential. In this essay, I make the argument that Restoration atonement teachings come into tension with atonement frameworks inherited from other Christian traditions. Starting with Tertullian, a legalistic view of salvation infiltrated and soon dominated Western atonement theology, evident not only in the theological language of sin and retributive punishment but also strikingly manifest in penal codes and practices. Restoration teachings (and etymological insights) provide the means of a different conception, shifting from sin and retribution to woundedness and healing as the polarities that atonement might be reconceived to address. In our current time, the differences between the inherited and restored atonement theologies compel us to wrestle with new ways of living in community.

Origins of Retributive Justice

Theologies of atonement and penal practice are tightly intertwined in Western Christian culture. Satisfaction theory, first articulated by Anselm, is one of the most dominant and enduring atonement theories, stipulating that human sin offended “the honor of God and brought disharmony and injustice into the universe” and required a “debt payment . . . to restore God’s honor or to restore order and justice in the universe.” As J. Denny Weaver explains, the “voluntary death of Jesus paid or satisfied a debt to God’s honor that sinful humans had no way of paying themselves.”¹ In his book, God’s Just Vengeance, Timothy Gorringe asserts that the penal system in England, for example, has its roots in this especially virulent version of atonement theology, which “provided one of the subtlest and most profound of . . . justifications, not only for hanging but for retributive punishment in general.”² More specifically, he argues that the “connection of satisfaction theory with the retributive justice theory of punishment was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century theology. . . . In fact, satisfaction theory emerged in the eleventh century, at exactly the time as the criminal law took shape.”³ Satisfaction theory, in other words, finds its penal equivalent in retributive justice.

Retributive justice became central to North American Protestantism after the Reformation. As Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “One of the most important consequences of the European Reformation was the export of a militant form of English Protestantism to North America,”⁴ of which retributive justice was an element. As late as the nineteenth century, theologian William Paley explicitly linked the divine infliction of pain to the satisfaction of justice: “By the satisfaction of justice, I mean the retribution of so much pain for so much guilt; which . . . we expect at the hand of God, and which we are accustomed to consider as the order of things that . . . justice dictates and requires.”⁵ The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of the psychology behind such versions of justice seems accurate: “Every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit. . . . To what extent can suffering balance debts of guilt? To the extent that to make suffer was in the highest degree pleasurable [emphases original].”⁶ Therefore, Christ’s suffering provides the satisfaction necessary to zero out the sum total of human offense, resulting in a state of equilibrium. In this view, not only is the suffering and crucifixion of Christ necessary to repair the damage initiated by Adam’s sinful fall, satisfaction theology emphasizes that only the punishment inflicted upon the innocent Christ at the behest of the Father can assuage his anger toward Adam and Eve and their subsequent human family.