One of the founding figures of our Covenant denomination is Paul Pet(t)er Waldenström. We have constantly retold the story of a conversation Waldenström had with two other Swedish Lutheran pastors in 1870. They were discussing “God’s reconciliation in Christ,” that is, how God was reconciled to human beings through the work of Christ, appeasing His wrath, and turning Him toward human beings with love and grace. Paul Peter’s famous question dropped into that discussion was, “Where is that written?”
I could go off on how the slogan “Where is it written?” became foundational in Covenant life and thought and our attitude toward the Scriptures. But I’m concerned here with the main point of that seminal conversation and Waldenström’s follow up. His question was greeted with a laugh amid the general assumption that God’s reconciliation to human beings was “written all over the Bible.” Yet after great searching of the Bible Waldenström not only did not find the phrase “God reconciled in Christ” anywhere in Scripture, he found the whole idea of the “reconciling of God” missing from both Old and New Testament.
Thus Waldenström launched a theological movement which challenged the reigning Lutheran (and Reformed in general) assumption that the work of Christ on the Cross was a satisfaction of God’s wrath which changed God’s attitude toward us from wrathful to gracious. Instead, maintained Waldenström, the change in state was all on the human side. Jesus reconciled human beings to God, taking away their sins and making them righteous.
To this firmly Covenant (at least on this matter) reader of Scripture, Waldenström’s “discovery” seems obvious in our text for this week from II Corinthians 5:16-21. From the insistence on our being a “new creation” in Christ in verse 17 to verse 18’s declaration that “God… reconciled us to himself through Christ to the entreaty in verse 20, “be reconciled to God,” it seems abundantly clear that reconciliation (and thus the Atonement via the life, death and resurrection of Christ) happens on our side rather than on God’s side.
In our decidedly anti-theological contemporary Christian culture (for which, frankly, Waldenström and other pietists are partly responsible), such distinctions may seem petty and divisive. Yet there remains good reason to insist on the Bible’s overall depiction of God’s attitude toward human beings as love rather than wrath, as seen in our Gospel reading this Sunday of the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. To portray God as filled with a wrath which needs violence against offenders in order to be appeased leads to a way of seeing the world and those around us which makes a shambles of God’s grace and loving kindness as a model for our own behavior.
One aspect of it all, clearly seen in our text, is that Waldenström’s way of looking at reconciliation and the Atonement holds out great hope in God’s work of making something better of us. If the main object of the Cross is to change God’s mind about us, then it seems we remain simply miserable sinners. In fact, the Reformed theology often suggests that our “righteousness” in Christ is simply an “imputation,” a legal fiction by which God merely regards us a righteous when we are not. The Waldenströmian view (as well as of others, like Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump in her big book Atonement) is that the work of Christ changes us in order to make us into fit objects of God’s love. It’s a theology that holds out the hope Paul vividly expresses at the close of our text in verse 21, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Thus God does not simply decide by an arbitrary act of will to pretend that an elect group of people are good and holy when they are not. Instead, He offers in Christ the opportunity to receive a loving forgiveness which slowly transforms us into “a new creation.” That precious hope is what is written in the Bible, no more, no less.