atonement

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In the context of a religion, atonement refers to actions through which individuals or groups seek to compensate for religious offenses (“ sins ”) in relation to a god and / or to members of their own religion. The science of religion generally defines atonement as a ritual "de-interference or corrective action" that is intended to enable or bring about the healing of a disturbed relationship to God. This can also include ritual sacrifices .

In the legal context, an act is referred to as atonement by which a person recognizes and compensates a guilt or injustice committed by him in order to settle the dispute caused or to repair the damage. The German colloquial language uses the terms “atonement”, “ punishment ” and “ penance ” largely synonymously .

The word “atonement” and the associated verb “atonement” come etymologically from the Old High German word suona for “court, judgment, trial, conclusion of peace”. The root of the word “atonement”, “atonement” or “atonement” is related to “ reconciliation ” and “reconciliation”. The Middle High German word Mutsühne is derived from this .

Religious context

Greco-Roman antiquity

Atoning victims were in cults of antiquity no human compensation after a ruling. Rather, sacrificial rites were understood as the offer of the deity (s) to purify or eliminate human guilt, also to replace the forfeited life by transferring guilt to a sacrificial animal. Touting the trade with offerings that Barker as releasing and healing of injustices, met with Greek philosophers since Heraclitus to an early critique of religion : Victims could allow the abuse to buy their injustice and bribe the gods to try. Sacrifice as a means of influencing the gods and buying their favor was therefore understood in antiquity as a false, repulsive form of atonement. Rather, sacrificial cults gave a framework to the utterance and admission of guilt and the appeal to the deity to remit punishment without directly bringing about this divine remission of guilt.

Human sacrifice was practiced in Greco-Roman antiquity in emergency situations as the expulsion of people into a murderous situation in order to save a community from the wrath of the gods. These rites were called pharmakós ("healing"). They have come down to us from Athenaios (13,602c), Ovid (Ibis 467f.), Caesar (Bellum Gallicum 6,16), Statius (Aen. 3,57), Plutarch (mor.171C-E) and others. There were self-sacrifices above all in the context of the heroic “dying for the fatherland ” (since Horace , with atonement motifs in Titus Livius ). The Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus described the heroic death of his leading figure Cato Uticiensis with the words: "This blood triggers the peoples, through this violent death whatever the Roman customs have deserved to suffer / deserve to pay will be atone."

Judaism

In the Tanach , the Bible of Judaism , the Hebrew stem kpr is mostly translated as “atone”, “atone”, “reconciled” / “reconciliation”. As examples the dictionary calls Gesenius about Gen 32,21  EU where Jacob about his brother Esau said, "I want to propitiate (literally. Atonement for his face with the gift, walking in front of me)." In Ps 78.38  EU 's it about YHWH : "And he is merciful, he forgives (literally reconciled ) an offense and does not destroy it." Lev 16.17  EU commands the ritual of the high priest in the Jerusalem temple on the annual Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement):

“And everyone should not be in the tent of meeting, with his [scil. Aarons / the high priest] going into atonement (literally to reconcile ) in the sanctuary until it leaves. And he made an atonement for himself (literally he should reconcile for himself), and for his house and for the entire congregation of Israel (Jisra'el). "

The word field kpr in the Tanach always denotes an action aimed at “reconciliation”. In the cultic context, however, human atonement (the sacrifice) can never directly bring about or force this reconciliation. Reconciliation with God as the goal of sacrifice is and remains God's free decision. That is why the biblical sacrifices are not designed to appease a divine anger.

In biblical Judaism, atonement rites are requests to God to release what is considered a deserved punishment by admitting one's own guilt and being willing to repent . In doing so, God remains free to grant or deny reconciliation. God does not need a “replacement” in order to be able to forgive the guilt. This difference to non-Jewish cults and to the Germanic legal tradition has tried to take into account linguistically representatives of German Jewry in their Bible translations .

The Torah commands various animal sacrifices. Unintentional offenses should by "sin offering" (Heb. Chattat , gross willful offenses by "guilt offering" (Heb.) Ascham be expiated). Which aspect of the sacrifice brings about atonement is not performed by the respective commandments. The main controversial issue is whether the sacrificial animal (such as the scapegoat according to Lev 16.21  EU ) was also killed on behalf of the person or people who made the sacrifices, who actually deserved death.

The Old Testament scholar Hartmut Gese results for Lev 1.4  EU to: There is every Israelites commanded the laying on of hands for the slaughter of the victim. Gese interprets this gesture as the identification of the victim with the sacrificial animal and the transfer of his sins to the animal, which then accepts and suffers the death penalty due to him . Gese also refers to Lev 17.11  EU :

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood. And I myself put it on the altar for you, in order to obtain reconciliation for your life; for it is the blood that brings about reconciliation through life. "

This should only be understood in such a way that the animal blood is the atonement because the animal dies instead of humans. The Old Testament scholar Walther Eichrodt objected :

  • The sacrificial animal should be holy and flawless, but would have become impure through the transmission of sin.
  • According to Lev 1,4 the sinner, not the high priest, was allowed to choose the sacrificial animal and carry out the slaughter. The sacrifice treated there cannot be combined with guilt offerings at the temple.
  • Destitute Israelites were allowed to sacrifice flour instead of animals. You couldn't transfer sins to it, and flour couldn't be killed.
  • Animal sacrifices could not atone for crimes worthy of death.
  • Lev 17:11 establishes the general prohibition to enjoy blood in the context: Because God created all life, the blood as the seat of vitality belongs to him alone and is not made available to humans for eating, only for sacrifice as an exception.

Whether one or some of the biblical types of sacrifice understand atonement as personal substitution cannot therefore be clearly inferred from the biblical commandments of sacrifice.

From kpr also derived the Hebrew noun is kaporät : This refers to the Tanakh, the cover plate of the ark as the location of the immediate presence of God (Ex 25.17 to 22). The high priest was to sprinkle this covering with the blood of the sacrificial animal on Yom Kippur in order to cleanse himself, the sacrificial altar and the Israelites (Lev 16: 2, 13-15). The Septuagint (abbreviated LXX, around 250 BC) translated kaporät with the substantiated Greek adjective hilastärion ("place of atonement", "means of atonement"). In 4Makk 17:21 and other pre- and post-Christian Jewish texts, hilastarion generally designates “a reconciling or atonement, a means of atonement or atonement”.

Human sacrifices are strictly forbidden in the Torah ( Lev 18.21-30  EU ; 20.1-5 EU ) and replaced by animal sacrifices ( binding of Isaac , Gen 22.1-19  EU ). Atonement through human blood was therefore impossible. However, Jews experienced acute persecution of their religion in the Maccabees period (~ 160–63 BC) in which precisely those who obeyed and defended the Torah were forcibly killed. From this experience they developed a diverse martyr theology. According to Dan 3,40 , Azariah, one of Daniel's friends , prays in the face of his near death:

"Like burnt offerings and sacrifices of rams and bulls and like thousands of fat lambs, so may the slaughter of us today be a pleasure before you, so that all who profess you do not perish shamefully!"

In 2 Makk 7,18,32 EU the tortured Torah loyal sons of an Israelite confess their hope of resurrection to the foreign ruler  :

“Don't be fooled for anything! Because we are to blame for our suffering because we have sinned against our God. [...] Because we only suffer because we have sinned. Even if the living Lord is angry with us for a short time in order to educate us through punishment, he will be reconciled with his servants. "

For the first time in Judaism it was expected that the death of a righteous Jew would atone for his sins (not those of others) so that God would raise him up. But cultic expressions for it were avoided. Only in the fourth Book of Maccabees (around 100 AD), which was not included in the Bible canon of the Tanakh, does the priest Eleazar, who is presented as ritually pure, ask God (4 Makk 6: 29f.):

“Be gracious to your people. Let yourself be satisfied with the punishment we take for them. Make my blood a cleansing offering for them, and take my life as a substitute for their life. "

In 4 Makk 17.20ff. it says in retrospect:

"Yes, through the blood of those pious and the means of atonement / the consecration of their death [...] the divine Providence saved Israel."

The transfer of the sins of Israel to a righteous, innocent Jew expresses the fourth servant song . In Isa 53,10.12  EU it says:

“If you, God, commit his life as a guilt offering, he will see offspring and live long. […] My servant, the righteous one, makes the many righteous; he charges her guilt. That is why I give him a share among the great and he shares the booty with the mighty, because he gave his life to death and let himself be reckoned among the apostates. He lifted the sins of the many and stood up for the apostates. "

Verse 10 uses the Hebrew word for guilt offering ( asham ). Since the Jerusalem temple cult still existed at that time, the question arose of how the servant of God could assume the guilt of those people and atone for whom there was the possibility of animal sacrifices at the temple. According to the Torah, guilt offerings also had to be offered by the priest. So the killing of a guiltless person by guilty people would not have been a legitimate guilt offering. That is why later Bible manuscripts (1 Q Isa, LXX) tried to weaken the vicarious atonement of the servant of God or to balance it with the priestly service.

Christianity

In the New Testament (NT) the gift of life of Jesus Christ on the cross is interpreted as a unique, perfect "atoning death", which he suffered on behalf of Israel and the peoples, thus taking over and eliminating their sin and thus achieving an unconditional reconciliation of the world with God. Only later Christian theology unified the variety of images and ideas with which early Christianity interpreted Jesus' death and created overall categorical terms such as representation, justification and satisfaction , which do not appear in the NT.

An atonement for the death of Jesus is indicated above all by those NT texts that are derived from the Greek verb hilaskomai (“atone”) and that refer to cultic expressions ( hilasmos , hilastärion ) in the LXX . So says Rom 3:25  EU about the crucified:

“God raised him up as an atonement [ hilastarion ] - effective through faith - in his blood, to show his righteousness through the forgiveness of sins which were committed earlier, in the time of God's patience; ... "

It is assumed that Paul of Tarsus took up a pre-stamped confession of Jewish Christians , which interpreted Jesus' death on the cross as God's forgiveness of the "previously committed sins" of Israel, i.e. renewal of the broken covenant . Paul probably supplemented their statement with the addition “through faith” and with Rom 3:26  EU , which expresses his own theology: “... yes to prove his righteousness in the present time, to show that he himself is just and makes him just who lives by faith in Jesus. "

1 Jn 1,7  EU says: “... the blood of his son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.” Building on this, 1 Jn 2,2  EU concludes : “He is the atonement [ hilasmos ] for our sins, but not only for our sins but also for those of the whole world. " 1 Jn 4,10  EU affirms:" This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as atonement for our sins. "These statements interpret Jesus' entire mission as an atonement, but refer primarily to his violent death when using the keyword “blood”.

Behind it stands the theology of the Gospel of John : It depicts Jesus' mission into the world as a struggle between the light of truth and life with the darkness of lies and death. The struggle culminates in the death of Jesus, in which apparently darkness, but in truth light and life triumph because here the Son of God bears God's judgment over all sin and thus defeats the cosmic power of death. This mission of Jesus expresses Joh 1,29  EU and again in Joh 1,36 with the metaphor :

"See, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"

Accordingly, Joh 19,16.32-36  EU dates Jesus' death to the hour when the Passover lambs were slaughtered in the Jerusalem temple .

The Passover offerings did not serve as atonement for religious offenses, but as gratitude for the experienced rescue from slavery , which was then celebrated by eating the sacrificed animals together. Accordingly, Paul describes Jesus in 1 Cor. 5 : 7  EU as pascha to establish the new, liberated life of Christians. Joh 1,29 denotes the “Lamb of God” with the Greek word amnos : In the LXX it denotes the tamid sacrifice in Ex 29,38-42  EU . The verb “take away” or “carry away” (Greek arein ) does not denote a cultic sacrifice at all, but according to Mi 7.18  EU (LXX) God's future, comprehensive, final elimination and destruction of sin through incomparable forgiveness. This verb is also found in 1 Jn 3 : 8  EU : “The Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil .” This is how these interpretive words mark Jesus' death in the exodus tradition of Israel , the liberating effect of which the Son of God through his self- giving into the vicarious judicial death beyond every cultic sacrifice to the whole world.

This universal liberating forgiveness is in the NT as in the Hebrew Bible God's own, exclusive work. In Jesus' death, according to John 3:16  EU , God reveals his true being as a "gift":

"Because God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him would not perish but have eternal life."

The "giving up" statements are derived from the Greek verb paradidonai , which in the LXX usually denotes God's surrender to the judgment of wrath. In the NT, statements of surrender are far more frequent and older than explicit statements of "expiation". They come from the tradition of the early Christian Lord's Supper ( Mk 14.24  EU ) and can be traced back to real statements made by Jesus of Nazareth such as Mk 10.45  EU :

"For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

In the NT, too, God is the one who creates the reconciliation that no other human being could bring about: “God reconciled the world to himself in Christ…” ( 2 Cor 5:19  EU ). The reformers Martin Luther , Ulrich Zwingli , Johannes Calvin and others rediscovered this message and moved it as the “Gospel” of the “justification of sinners through Christ alone and by grace ” to the center of the teaching and life of the Church. At the same time, they rejected all practices of “ work righteousness ” with which people try to acquire “merits” and a claim to God's grace through atonement .

Legal context

In modern administrative law , atonement is defined analogously to penance or punishment as compensation for a culpably caused imbalance, if no direct reparation is possible. By paying off a debt and serving a sentence, the person affected by the wrong should experience satisfaction . If the punishment does not do this sufficiently, guilty or guilty persons can request or provide an additional atonement.

Unlike punishment and atonement or reparation, “atonement” in the strict sense also includes the punished person's insight into his guilt and his active acceptance of the compensation. The Germanic legal tradition, from which the word “atonement” originates, emphasizes the reactive retaliation of an evil act: the necessary atonement (punishment) is intended to inflict evil on the perpetrator in order to compensate for his willful violation of a legal norm.

literature

Wikiquote: Atonement  - Quotes
Judaism
  • Hartmut Gese: The atonement. In: Hartmut Gese (ed.): On biblical theology. Old Testament Lectures. Christian Kaiser, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-459-01098-3 , pp. 85-106
  • Bernd Janowski: Atonement as a salvation event: Studies on the atonement theology of the priestly scriptures and on the root of KPR in the Old Orient and in the Old Testament. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1982, ISBN 3-7887-0663-5
Christianity
  • Otfried Hofius : Art. Atonement IV: New Testament. Theologische Realenzyklopädie Volume 32, 2001, pp. 342-347
  • Cilliers Breytenbach : Art. "Atonement". In: Theological glossary of terms for the New Testament (ThBLNT), 2nd edition 2000, pp. 1685–1691
  • Cilliers Breytenbach: Reconciliation, substitution and atonement. In: New Testament Studies (NTS) 39/1993, pp. 59–79
  • Cilliers Breytenbach: Reconciliation: a study on Pauline soteriology. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1989, ISBN 3788712694
  • Martin Hengel : The vicarious expiatory death of Jesus. In: Martin Hengel: Studies on Christology. Small writings IV. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-16-149196-3 , pp. 146-184
  • Karl Wallner : Atonement: Search for the meaning of the cross. Media Maria Verlag, 2015, ISBN 978-3-94540-172-9
  • Jürgen Werbick : Atonement. In: Konrad Baumgartner et al. (Ed.): Lexicon for Theology and Church Volume 9, 3rd edition, Herder, Freiburg 2017, ISBN 3-451-37900-7 .
  • Gary A. Fox: Understanding Atonement: Maybe It's Time to Rethink Atonement without Giving Up Jesus. Resource Publications, 2019, ISBN 1-5326-8833-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dorothea Sitzler-Osing: Art. Atonement I: Religionsgeschicht. In: Gerhard Krause, Gerhard Müller (Hrsg.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie Volume 32.De Gruyter, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-11-016715-8 , p. 332
  2. ↑ Duden: Atonement, the.
  3. ↑ Duden - The dictionary of origin: Etymology of the German language. 6th edition 2020, ISBN 3-411-04076-9 , p. 902
  4. ↑ Martin Karrer : Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1997, pp. 119f.
  5. ↑ Martin Karrer: Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Göttingen 1997, p. 125 f. and footnotes 151-153
  6. ^ André Zempelburg: Reconciliation in Judaism , 2019, pp. 21-23
  7. ↑ Gerd Theißen: The cross as atonement and offense. Two interpretations of the death of Jesus by Paul. In: Dieter Sänger, Ulrich Mell (eds.): Paulus and Johannes: Exegetical studies on Pauline and Johannine theology and literature. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2006, ISBN 3-16-149064-9 , pp. 427–456, here p. 427
  8. ^ André Zempelburg: Reconciliation in Judaism , 2019, pp. 24-26
  9. ↑ Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ in the understanding of the New Testament. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, pp. 50-56
  10. ↑ Adolf Deißmann: "hilastärios" and "hilastärion". Journal for New Testament Science (ZNW) 4, 1903, pp. 193–212; quoted by Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ as understood by the New Testament. Neukirchener Verlag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, ISBN 3-7887-1410-7 , p. 38 f., Fn. 43 and 45
  11. ↑ Martin Karrer: Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Göttingen 1997, pp. 123-125; Quotations from ibid. In Dan 3,40 the standard translation enters the cultic expressions “sacrifice” and “atonement”, which are missing in the Hebrew wording.
  12. ↑ Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ in the understanding of the New Testament. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, pp. 38-41
  13. ↑ Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ in the understanding of the New Testament. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, p. 38
  14. ↑ a b Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ in the understanding of the New Testament. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, p. 145
  15. ↑ Martin Karrer: Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Göttingen 1997, pp. 103-105
  16. ↑ Gerhard Barth: The death of Jesus Christ in the understanding of the New Testament. Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, pp. 43-47
  17. ↑ Joachim Jeremias: The ransom for many (Mk 10.45). In: Joachim Jeremias: Abba. Studies in New Testament Theology. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1966, pp. 216–229
  18. ↑ Gerhard Jankowski: The great hope. Paul to the Romans - An Interpretation. Alektor, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-88425-069-8
  19. ↑ Gunther Wenz: Reconciliation: Soteriological case studies. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 3-525-56713-8 , p. 62
  20. ↑ André Zempelburg: Reconciliation in Judaism: A religious studies perspective on the concept of reconciliation in relation to God, the neighbor, the other and oneself. Tectum, 2019, ISBN 3-8288-7232-8 , p. 22 f.