Alan Mann, who has just started blogging at www.alanmann.wordpress.com, published “Atonement for a ‘Sinless’ Society – Engaging with an Emerging Culture”, with Paternoster UK in 2005.
Alan was co-author with Steve Chalke in the controversial book, “The Lost Message of Jesus”.
Mann opens with the challenge of translation of the gospel into a post-industrialized, post-Christian, postmodern context. He suggests we need a new Pentecost experience to help us speak in the languages of those around us.
Mann suggests that we have lost much of the meaning of ‘sin’, in wider society as well as in the church. He writes that it would have far greater meaning if we described sin as an absence of mutual, intimate, undistorted relating that ultimately leads the post-modern self into a lack of ontological or narrative coherence.
Alan says one of the key reasons for the loss of sin awareness is the increasing absence of the ‘Other’ in our understandings of the self. He traces this postmodern lack of awareness back to the expressionism of the Romantic era. Many in the postmodern context see little relevance in Christian doctrine that stresses our falling short of God’s mark.
Rather than being aware of our sinfulness, we are more likely to be conscious of being victims who have been ‘sinned against’. We hunger an approach to atonement that grapples more with a chronic sense of shame (self-judgment) and alienation than with guilt.
“How can a community help the chronically shamed person if the only narratives of healing and atonement they have to offer are ones based upon a reduction of sin and guilt to moral misdemeanour.”
Mann writes about atonement for shame being a process in which the once-for-all act that opens reconciliation, healing and fullness is lived out in a series of healing moments. I would suggest that we would be well served by considering the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as a series of moments as well. The final breath of Jesus does not stand isolation to the rest of his life.
Robin Parry, in his response to Mann, points out that many Christians struggle with shame as they agonize over the chasm between their ideal selves and their everyday actuality. He wonders if we need to do away with the concept in favour of the concept of shame. Parry advocates for a retention of accountability to God and ‘sin’ as a God-related doctrine.
Mann points out that the word ‘sin’ is either meaningless or tainted by layers of shame. Maybe we need to develop an alternative vocabulary that does justice to the self-Other relationship, focused not on condemnation but on potential.
It would be helpful if we did in fact have a model of atonement that focused on gospel for this life, good news for living each day. That’s something I’ll pick up as I write on Mann’s engagement with narrative therapy in another post.