At-One-Ment

Dan McClellan They're doing that with AI now.

Dan Beecher I know.

Dan McClellan They're using a lot of the Gen Z slang and everything.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan So, I think it's so funny when they've got Moses, the sea has been split, and people are like, "Oh." And he's like, "I told y'all, trust the process." And I was like, "Oh my gosh."

Dan Beecher Jesus has mad TikTok rizz, y'all.

Dan McClellan We are in the dumbest timeline. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Rocking and rolling. Rocking and rolling.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Just out here making the world a groovy place.

Dan McClellan And the construction going on next door to you has settled for the evening. Has settled for the evening, yes.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan They've been bedded down for the night.

Dan Beecher You and I have been forced to push our recordings to evening, even though you prefer afternoon because- ...

Dan McClellan for the foreseeable future, there is building- They're building a spaceship right next to you, or- They are ... something like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Something. How high is it reaching? The foundation has been poured already?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I assume.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Well, they're still in the process of pouring, so.

Dan McClellan Oh, okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah, it's a fascinating thing to watch. It's one of my favorite shows.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I've been fascinated to see how the construction of a six or seven-story apartment building starts.

Dan McClellan And then stalls.

Dan Beecher But it's also very loud and whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anyway. Hey, let's do a show.

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher Today, one of the things that we're going to talk about, first, we're going to do a What's That?

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher And this week's What's That is a biggun. It's the granddaddy of Christian theology.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher We're going to talk about atonement. At-one-ment, for- Oh, man ...

Dan McClellan for the initiated.

Dan Beecher We'll get into that. We'll get into that because- Yes ... I had a whole thing. And then, towards the end of the show, we're going to talk about translation, and we're going to talk specifically about what it is. What goes into it? What's the process of translating a scripture?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Because it's a- Or many scriptures.

Dan Beecher Or all the scriptures.

Dan McClellan The whole Bible, in fact.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Beecher So, we'll get to that in the latter half of the show. But first, What's That? Here's the thing, as you said, you said at-one-ment.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Now, I have looked at the word atonement and seen at-one-ment and thought- Yes ... "That's a funny joke."

Dan McClellan At-one-ment.

Dan Beecher And then I've also heard people say it means at-one-ment, and I thought, "Okay, they're just dumb."

Dan McClellan And then today- ...

Dan Beecher as I'm prepping for this show- Yeah ... I look it up, and the etymology is that it's at-one-ment.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher That's the actual etymology of the word, and now I'm furious.

Dan McClellan Yeah, that one was a little on the nose. But yeah, the idea is the idea of reconciliation, satisfaction, reparation of a breach, or an injury, or something like that. Reconciliation meaning to re-sit down with.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan So, yeah, the idea of atonement is that bringing back together and repairing of that breach. So, yeah, we come from the same religious tradition wherein that is a popular way to explain atonement, and I, too, when I first started hearing that, was like, "Yeah, that's not true."

Dan Beecher Yeah. That can't be right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I know a lot about language. I've studied language. That's just never how it works. Oh, it is? Okay, fine.

Dan McClellan Screw you for judging me. That's a deep cut. I don't know if anybody is going to know where that comes from.

Dan Beecher No. Are you going to give a hint or not?

Dan McClellan That comes from a comedy album.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan That's it.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan Just a hint.

Dan Beecher That's a hint.

Dan McClellan That's a hint.

Dan Beecher All right.

Dan McClellan A comedy- At the end of the show, if either of us remembers- Which will not happen- We won't ...

Dan Beecher for sure. But don't worry.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Go to the YouTube comment section, or if you're a patron, go to the comment section of this- ... on Patreon, and maybe someone will have come up with it.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Or you can at least ask the question, remind us to explain it, and we'll pop on. I'll make Dan pop on and explain it.

Dan McClellan Anyway.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Back to atonement, or the at-one-ment.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Maybe we should start by just talking about what it means.

Dan McClellan Where it's coming.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Well, I don't know.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Where does it come from?

Dan McClellan Because- So, yeah, it's a translation of mainly a Hebrew word, but also, there's a related Greek word. Because you have in the King James Version, you have atonement seat, and you have all these other words related to atonement.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And let me see. King James Version, "And they shall eat those things wherewith the atonement was made, to consecrate and to sanctify them: but a stranger shall not eat thereof, because they are holy." So, atonement is a word that we find in the Hebrew Bible, and there it's based on a verbal root, kaphar.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which can mean, in one of the what's called a stem, to smear with pitch.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So, Noah's ark, what he does to the outside of it is kaphar it with pitch, in order to make it waterproof- Right ...

Dan Beecher ish. Pitch is like asphalt or- Tar.

Dan McClellan Tar. Yeah, something like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But there's another stem, the P-L, where it is used to mean something like appease or make amends. And the P-L is what's called the factitive stem- Okay ... where it means to put something into the state of being X.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So put in the state of being smeared with pitch. But the idea seems to be to cover over breaches.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan To seal up- Right ... the- Not make sticky? No, not make sticky. But by figurative extension, it has to do with repairing these breaches.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, the idea seems to be that it is a way for humanity to reestablish, to be reconciled with deity through these offerings and all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot that goes into how, in ancient Israel and Judah, they understood the nature of this breach, the mechanism for its repair, and that whole conceptual framework that makes up what they would've understood as atonement. Now, they don't really talk that much about atonement in the theology of the Hebrew Bible, but once we get to the New Testament, we have, I think, two verses that use a word that could be translated atonement.

Dan Beecher Okay. One of them is- Two is not many.

Dan McClellan Well, yeah, and it depends on your translation as well. So we have hilastērion in Romans 3:25, and that's translated in the King James Version propitiation- Oh ... and atonement in the NRSVUE and a lot of other translations. But the idea is the place of atonement.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then I think we have in Hebrews 2:17, what is the word that we have there? We have hilaskomai, which means to pardon or be propitious. So, reconciliation is how the King James Version translates it, atonement in the NRSVUE. So they're kind of somewhat related in the Greek, but the idea of atonement is really a framework for understanding this reconciliation that is achieved, that in the New Testament is achieved by Jesus.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And I think this is one of the reasons it's critical to understand that the Bible is not univocal. And within cognitive linguistics, we talk a lot about metaphor theory because most language is metaphorical. There's an argument to make that all language is metaphorical, but, in a general sense, most language is metaphorical because what we're generally doing is trying to communicate in the most efficient and effective way possible. And a lot of times, we're trying to communicate about things that are rather abstract.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so we commonly use more concrete metaphors as analogies in order to communicate more efficiently and effectively about abstract things.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So we can plot or map certain abstractions against more concrete schemata or schemas, if you like. And the idea there is to just take something that's a little more complex and make it a little more easy to understand. So, for instance, we talk about temperature going up and down. Temperature doesn't go up or down. It's a question of molecules vibrating- Right ... more rapidly or more slowly. But we map this notion of temperature against a thermometer, basically, and the mercury goes up or down, and the numbers go up or down- Right ... and so we talk about temperature going up or down.

Dan Beecher So that's a way- I think it's interesting that you chose that metaphor specifically because I believe, someone could correct me, but one of the guys who was originally making thermometers, was it Mr. Fahrenheit himself? I don't know, but actually flipped it from the way we think of it.

Dan McClellan Oh, really?

Dan Beecher He had cold numbers at the top, and it got hotter going downward.

Dan McClellan Oh, really?

Dan Beecher And, I don't remember quite how that worked. Anyway- Oh, that's funny ... it would've blown all of our minds.

Dan McClellan And yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah, you're right. We think of north as up a lot of the time.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that's just an arbitrary decision about, or maybe not entirely arbitrary, but there's no reason why north is up on the Earth and- Yeah ... south is down, other than perhaps some sociopolitical choices made- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan in order to- Well, even that relies on another image schema.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Up is good, down is bad.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Up is healthy, down is sick. There are all kinds of these things. And when it comes to atonement, this is a complex constellation of ideas. And so what you really want is a way to take this and say, "Think of it like this." And that's a way to say, all this complexity, we can distill it down to something that's simple. And so that is your atonement theory, and the problem is- Every different author of a biblical text was also using their own theory of what was going on, and when they talk about them, they talk about them according to their own idiosyncratic conceptualizations. And so now we've got to look at this cacophony of conceptualizations and somehow find a way to harmonize all of it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so we have different models or theories of atonement, and usually it comes down to what do we want to emphasize and what do we want to kind of push to the back?

Dan Beecher And the- I want to get very basic about sort of the concept that we're usually talking about when we say the word atonement in this context.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Because what we're usually talking about is something along the lines of, and maybe you'll find better words than I am, but something along the lines of humans being reconciled or made at one with God through Jesus, through some mechanism that has to do with Jesus.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think if we take as the foundation what it says about Jesus in the nativity, "You will name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins." In what sense does Jesus save people from sins?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan What is the mechanism? What has sin done to us?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan How does that affect our relationship with God, and what does Jesus do to repair whatever has gone on there? And probably one of the earliest ones, the one that I think is kind of explicitly made in Mark, at least in one of the more idiosyncratic conceptualizations that Mark presents, is the ransom theory.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan "The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many." And I think this is probably one of the earliest, because we already have the idea of ransom in not only the Hebrew Bible, but elsewhere in the New Testament. And redemption is associated with ransom.

Dan Beecher But not redemption in some sort of moral way or something, but redemption as in literally, I'm redeeming this person for the money you're giving me or something. We're talking literal ransom. Well, in the- That's the metaphor is just like someone's being held hostage- Yeah ... and then someone else pays, and the hostage is released.

Dan McClellan Yes. So to ransom means to buy back. And so the idea is that somebody is at some distance from their people, whatever the exact nature of their relationship, and they need to pay money to get them back. Now, one of the guiding frameworks for the concept of redemption in the Hebrew Bible is enslavement. It develops based on the post-exilic notion that the exile was God's selling their people to another nation and that other nation's gods, and then the return from exile was God's redemption buying back their slaves from the other nation. So we were sold to the other nation, and now we're being redeemed. God has paid the ransom so that we can come back- Right ... and we can be enslaved to the benevolent master.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So you see this in Deutero-Isaiah quite explicitly, that they were sold into slavery, I'm buying them back. Not manumitting them, but buying them back from the wicked slave master so that they can serve the benevolent slave master. And we see this in the New Testament as well. Paul talks about this a lot as well, that you were bought with a price, and you have become enslaved to Jesus, and he repeatedly identifies himself as a slave of Jesus.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan And so the ransom theory, when people talk about it today, they generally kind of elide the enslavement- Right ... dimension of it. But the idea is that Jesus's death paid the ransom. And one interesting thing to point out is that some early Christians seem to think that the-- And so instead of exile, it's sin or Satan. And so Jesus paid, and Satan said, "Thank you. Here's your change." In other words, the ransom was paid to Satan- Right ... to the devil, and so the devil was like, "Here are your people back."

Dan Beecher Yeah. This stems from this idea that somehow the devil was in charge of the world- Mm-hmm ... and somehow owned humanity in some way, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Is that sort of the idea?

Dan McClellan Yeah. You have the devil as the God of this world in some sense in different parts of the Bible, and as kind of the master of sin and- Mm-hmm ...

Dan Beecher all of that.

Dan McClellan When you fall into sin and you are subject to death, you are basically subject to the devil. And if you extrapolate out the logical end of this framework, it's like, so God is like, "Here, you're going to be born so that you can be enslaved to the devil. But I'm going to redeem this coupon- Right ... later on, so go be with the devil for a while." And this was challenged by a lot of folks who were like, "Do we really want to suggest that Satan has that much power and that this is a transaction?"

Dan Beecher Right ...

Dan McClellan between Jesus and Satan, where Jesus is like, "Here is what I owe you," and the devil is like, "Thank you very much." There were folks who were like, "Ah, that's dumb."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And, the Gregory of Nyssa apparently used the metaphor of a divine bait and switch.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Where, Jesus' humanity was the bait to deceive Satan, so that he could be paid back.

Dan Beecher So it's- And it's almost the idea of, and I think we'll encounter this a lot as we talk about the concepts of redemption or of atonement.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher But it's like only the divine could actually redeem humans.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But somehow, I also was looking a little bit from Gregory of Nyssa, and the explanation that I read about was basically just that sort of Jesus sneaks divinity into Satan's realm, and the bait and switch is Satan thinks he's getting the best of the mortals, and then Jesus is like, "Psych, I'm actually divine. I'm out."

Dan McClellan And- Bit of a Trojan horse.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Exactly. It's like, "Oh no, don't take me.

Dan Beecher Got you."

Dan McClellan Ha.

Dan Beecher You released all of the other humans for nothing, idiot.

Dan McClellan Makes me think of, do you remember the Steven Seagal movie, I want to say, was it Under Siege where he was on the train?

Dan Beecher No, Under Siege was on the- No, that's on the- ...

Dan McClellan submarine ...

Dan Beecher submarine.

Dan McClellan Yeah. What was it where the guy was on the train?

Dan Beecher Oh, gosh.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh. I can't remember what it is, but there's a porter who is one of the goofy sidekicks for- Right ... Steven Seagal in the movie, and at the end, he's got a gun, and the bad guy confronts him, and he's like, "What's in your pocket?" He's like, "I don't have anything in my pocket." "Search your ass." And then pulls out his gun and shoots him.

Dan Beecher Oh, man. Now you just gave this episode a PG-13 rating. I hope you're satisfied. I hope you're happy.

Dan McClellan I'd like to think that's kind of the lowest common denominator of our show, but- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher So, there's the ransom view, and that was actually held for quite a long time. That was kind of the theological idea of the atonement- Yeah ... was that.

Dan McClellan I think that made an awful lot of sense to people because they were surrounded by a world where you had enslaved folks who would get sold and bought back. It was in the air enough that it made it a very cognitively cheap, efficient way to communicate about this.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is a period when most Christians are probably not as philosophically sophisticated, and a lot of these other theories start to develop as philosophical and theological sophistication begins to ramp up.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And so particularly in the medieval and reformation period. So I think the ransom theory was probably just one of the easier things for everybody to gain some purchase on, get a grip on. And then we move on to, what do you have on your list? You said you found five different frameworks.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Look, I read a bunch of things, but the framework that worked well for me, there was an article on Medium by a guy named Andrew Springer, and it seemed like a good way of looking at it.

Dan McClellan Anyways- Okay ...

Dan Beecher so the next thing he has is the medieval view, Christ as substitute, as written by Anselm of Canterbury.

Dan McClellan I think that there's another one that I think we should talk about- Oh ... which is a slight variation. Well, it's the Anselmian one I think is related, called Christus Victor, and I think that name is something that was given much later to this idea.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan But it's related to the ransom theory, and the idea is basically that it's kind of leaning into the notion that Jesus got one over on Satan. This is Christ as victor over the powers of sin and death- Mm ... and the devil. And so this is all about him just enabling humanity to participate in the divine life because he was the one who won the gold.

Dan Beecher Well, I had seen this Christus Victor idea, but the article that I was looking at had it as sort of this Swedish theologian talking about it in the 1930s. You're saying it's an- Yeah ... older idea than that.

Dan McClellan Well, I think he tries to make the case that this is a better way to frame the theory as it was understood by- The ransom theory. Yeah, by folks like Irenaeus and Athanasius.

Dan Beecher So- Okay ...

Dan McClellan I think he's saying we shouldn't call them ransomists or whatever. We should say it's a little closer to this since they were talking about this idea of Jesus's victory- Okay ... over sin and death. Because these theories, a lot of times, it's not like they were consciously saying, "I'm a proponent of the ransom theory," back in the 4th century CE. I think it's how we characterize what they're doing up until much more recently. So yeah, whether or not they would've distinguished the ransom theory from the Christus Victor theory, I don't know we can say for sure, but that's one of the models that has been proposed for how to understand- Yeah ... those early theories.

Dan Beecher Okay. Let's get on to sort of substitutionary theory, which is the one that comes out of St. Anselm of Canterbury and maybe other sources.

Dan McClellan Yes. So this is 11th century. I think he was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109 when he died.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But yeah, I have seen it referred to as the satisfaction theory, and so I think the idea is that Jesus backhands you with a glove and demands satisfaction from you.

Dan Beecher Sir, I will have satisfaction.

Dan McClellan I demand satisfaction. Yeah, and the idea here is that Jesus's death satisfies the demands of God's justice. So if you want to look at it legalistically, or in some way human sin has offended his sensitivities, they are repaired, they are satisfied by Jesus's death. And this relates to the next theory that comes up once we get into the Reformation.

Dan Beecher Right. I'm going to be very open and honest with all of our listeners. Having done quite a bit of reading about this throughout my life, but also just in preparation for this segment, I have never felt like I understood what the hell we're talking about. I've never felt like I had a decent understanding of what... There's this sense that something is owed or there is a debt to be paid, and I don't know what that means in terms of sin, because to my mind, the greatest sins are things like murder or whatever, and that is a sin against another person. So I very much understand if I steal something from you, I have created a disparity between you and me, and so somehow there is a debt there. And maybe because I've hurt you more than just the thing that I took, it's a greater debt than just if I take $20 from you, but you needed that $20 for a thing. I understand a debt that I owe you.

Dan McClellan Uh-huh.

Dan Beecher If I kill someone, I understand that some reciprocity makes sense between me and that person's family, or that person themselves, even though they're dead.

Dan McClellan I don't know.

Dan Beecher But this is so much bigger than that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher This is a thing between us and God, and I still really struggle to understand what that is. And is there a framework in the Bible that helps us understand this, or is this all post-biblical discussion?

Dan McClellan I think you certainly have different ideas about what sin does to people socially.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan But I think what you've probably got is a way to try to offload the problem to something that is transcendent and to say, "God's telling us this. This is not our understanding of how we can get along best as a society. This is God telling us this." And obviously, ultimately, it is just people speaking on behalf of God, people coming up with their own ways to do this. But then once you get into the Persian period and you've got the problem of evil is becoming a big question, and people are wondering why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, and then you develop this notion that all of the accounts will be squared in the afterlife, whether that means reward or punishment, then you're kind of creating this alternative reality where all of this is ultimately being controlled and where all of this will ultimately be resolved. And so I think it's that creation of these alternate realities that is kind of the fulcrum of all of this. We've created these realities. We're passing them on to the rising generations. They've got to deal with them in ever-changing circumstances, and cumulatively, they're just adding more and more to these alternate realities. And I think the people just start thinking in more general terms about how to unify all of this, how to make this all make sense in a way that works out best for the people who are doing what we determine they're supposed to be doing. Because in pre-exilic Israel, and even to some degree with the Sadducees and in Job and things like that, it's kind of like, hey, to quote the great poet, "Shit happens." And you're serving God so that you'll have good things happen to you in life maybe, and then that's it, and then that's the end of things.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But once we project everything into these alternate realities, I think that makes for a larger scene and a larger backdrop, and now we've got to unify that with everything that's going on here. And yeah, people have to just, they're reading the scriptures and they're interpreting it in ways that make the text of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament meaningful and useful to them. And they're just coming up with different frameworks for unifying it all.

Dan Beecher And- Yeah, I guess there's this idea that somehow our sin separates us from God, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And so somehow we need something, some mechanism to at one us with God and- Mm-hmm. But okay, so the substitution there, we need to get back into... We're not going to get through this thing- ... if we're not careful.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well- The substitutionary idea- It was always taking a bigger bite than we could- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher chew.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But- This is, we could just go on and on forever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And neither of us is a theologian, so that- No ... so that's a tricky thing as well. But the substitutionary thing is basically somehow, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's something like Jesus was able to satisfy in some way the debt that our sin accumulated- Yeah ... to God.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Whether you understand it in a legalistic sense or in an honor-shame sense, that's one way people understand it as well. What Jesus does is, Jesus is the substitute for what we owed. So, Jesus steps in and takes the place of the debt that we cannot pay, which leads us in the Reformation period to penal substitution theory.

Dan Beecher And- Not, oh my gosh, my brain immediately jumps to penile? No, penal. P-E-N-A-L.

Dan McClellan Well, my brain jumps to, "What league you been playing in? California Penal."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So that's major league.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But this is the idea that it is the punishment that Jesus takes on in place of us, satisfying God's wrath and justice. So it's not just separation, it's not just like God's like, "Oh, I miss those guys." It's that God is like, "I'm coming for you because of what you did."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And Jesus steps in the way, and takes the punishment. Penal substitution is the idea.

Dan Beecher Right. Sort of like the oldest child who doesn't let dad beat his younger siblings or something.

Dan McClellan Something like that.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And we talked about Romans 3:25, God presented Christ as a propitiation, which could be the idea of the substitute for the target of God's wrath. "He was pierced for our transgressions" is Isaiah 53, according to a Christological interpretation of that passage that originally had nothing to do with any future Messiah.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But all these are ways to interpret these different passages that are coming at the idea from different angles. And I think if we could go back and actually talk to the authors of Isaiah or of Mark or of Romans or whatever, and be like, "All right, tell me how you would answer these questions." Like they would not come up with the theories that we come up with. It would be entirely different. You don't think they'd be Calvinists and- No, because ultimately what folks like Calvin were doing is looking at the whole of the text and trying to unify it all. And of course, you have to give priority and preference to certain passages, and you have to subordinate others. But ultimately, like Paul, Paul didn't really care about any of the other things that folks were saying. Paul was going to be Paul.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And the pastoral epistles and Colossians and Ephesians and maybe 2 Thessalonians, they weren't even Paul, so- Right. But yeah, it would be interesting to be able to talk to those folks and be like, "If you could just break it down."

Dan Beecher Yeah. Can you- Just- Settle a bet for me.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, but penal substitution theory is very Calvinistic, where God's wrath plays a central role in this.

Dan Beecher And- And so yeah, now we're getting very much, rather than a sort of idea of God's honor being reconciled, it's that there is a, like you said, a legalistic idea here where an infraction has been committed. There's a set sentence- Yes ... for that infraction. And rather than us having to do that, Jesus somehow stepped in and- Stepped in.

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher and I, again, I don't know what the mechanism is, like what Jesus... I mean, I guess it was his death.

Dan McClellan Well, it's the death on the cross, yeah.

Dan Beecher But other people died on the cross, and it didn't do anything. So I don't, so that doesn't mean- ... that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Dan McClellan Well, his death was probably amplified.

Dan Beecher It was special. It was special.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan The God was like, "This is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me." And that's kind of the point. Now I'm quoting a Batman comic book.

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan When Joker kills Robin, beats him to death with a crowbar, he says, "This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me."

Dan Beecher Joker kills Robin?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Spoiler alert.

Dan McClellan Wow. Oh, God. This is from, like what, '89 or '90, '91, something like that.

Dan Beecher I've never read a comic book in my life.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh.

Dan Beecher I know.

Dan McClellan I'm leaving for Comic-Con tomorrow.

Dan Beecher I'm a heretic in all of the ways, Dan.

Dan McClellan I understand that. But we have even more.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan More. But wait, there's more.

Dan Beecher Don't stop now.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Tell them what else they get, Dan.

Dan Beecher Yeah. They get Christ as an example.

Dan McClellan As a- Yes ...

Dan Beecher moral influence.

Dan McClellan Yes. The moral influence theory. I was about to say moral influencer theory just to be fun.

Dan Beecher But- Yeah, sure.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Jesus on his TikTok like, "Hey, Christian gang."

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh. They're doing that with AI now.

Dan Beecher I know.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh. And it is so bizarre to see the one I-- Because they're using a lot of the Gen Z slang and everything.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan So I think it's so funny when they've gotten Noah, not Noah, Moses, the sea has been split and people are like, "Oh," and he's like, "I told you all, trust the process." And I was like, "Oh, my gosh."

Dan Beecher Jesus has mad TikTok rizz, y'all.

Dan McClellan We are in the dumbest timeline.

Dan Beecher Anyway.

Dan McClellan Anyway.

Dan Beecher Talk about the moral influence thing.

Dan McClellan Yes. So the idea here is that Jesus's death demonstrates God's love, and this inspires humanity to repent and to live morally. So the main deliverable is this inspiration, this moral influence on humanity. So it is less about satisfying divine justice or wrath or paying the ransom and more about offering a catalyst for the transformation of the hearts of humanity. And in a way, this is kind of taking what some biblical authors suggested the purpose of the law was- Mm ... and saying that's the purpose of Jesus's atonement.

Dan Beecher Okay. And so- Can I ask a question about that?

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Yes, you may.

Dan Beecher Okay. I guess my question is just when? Can it kick in ever, please? Because I would very much like for-- Look, I'm very happy for Jesus's atonement to mean that everyone sort of takes his example and just acts nice to each other.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just anytime. Just kick it in- Yeah ... anytime now. That would be great.

Dan McClellan Yes. These days, we are just a couple of days removed from another one of those... Oh, shoot. Now I don't even remember the organization.

Dan Beecher Jubilee. Oh, yes.

Dan McClellan One of the Jubilee things with Mehdi Hasan- Yeah ... where you had people who were up there like, "Yes, I'm a fascist."

Dan Beecher I'm- "100%."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And they're like, "I'm Catholic." And then you've got fired, and now he's raising money- Yeah ... on some GoFundMe light place.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And a bunch of people are like, "We got to support our own." And it's like, "Your own what?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. If that's your own, you're in trouble.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And so- That's bad ...

Dan McClellan to the degree that the fourth commandment means you are a representative of Jesus and don't do stupid stuff while you are bearing Jesus's name, there's an awful lot of commandment breaking going on- Yeah ... these days.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, yeah, that's probably a strike against the moral influence theory.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I mean, we had the WWJD bracelets for a while.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But that didn't stick.

Dan Beecher So- Didn't seem to move the needle much- No ... on that.

Dan McClellan No.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, and that kind of brings us up to today. Those are sort of the main theories that we've had thus far, it seems.

Dan McClellan Mm.

Dan Beecher I'm still a little mystified.

Dan McClellan I'm going to be honest.

Dan Beecher You haven't gotten me there. So- Just in terms of understanding. Well, I mean, I understand- Yeah ... what each of these theories is. I just don't understand what we're talking about.

Dan McClellan Well, we didn't even get to governmental theory.

Dan Beecher Ooh.

Dan McClellan Or the scapegoat theory.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Which is the idea, it's the mimetic theory. René Girard, based on his anthropological insights, the idea is that Christ's death exposes and breaks the cycle of scapegoating violence in human societies. So as the innocent victim, he reveals the injustice of scapegoating and recognizes- But isn't he literally, in this case, a scapegoat?

Dan Beecher A scapegoat?

Dan McClellan I didn't come up with the theory.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan I'm just pointing out there are other theories out there.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan So- Okay. Well- And then the governmental theory is basically like, there's this bureaucracy of righteousness and morality, and this is just part of the process.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher I admit to being quite mystified by theologies in general.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher They all feel like they break down fairly quickly and easily when pressed even slightly.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Which I think it makes a lot of the folks out there who are so convinced that their particular approach is right, it's like once you get into atonement theory, you see very quickly that you've got a lot of ground to cover.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And it's not looking good.

Dan Beecher Okay. Well, as is our tradition here on the show, I feel that we have not made anything better, nor have we explicated this in any real way that's helpful.

Dan McClellan So- We've muddied the water, and now we're going to scurry away.

Dan Beecher Now we scurry away. So let's move on to our next segment, Lost in Translation And today's Lost in Translation, we're literally talking about translation.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think a lot of the problems with people getting in trouble with the Bible happens when people believe that their interpretation isn't an interpretation, but is rather actually just what the Bible says.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And your book talks about this- Yeah ... at length, about the Bible doesn't say anything. But that's a tricky thing to explain in a short amount of time. But what we're talking about is just sort of the Bible is the authors of the Bible were trying to transmit meaning to other people, in the form of written language and not everybody... And so yeah, there's the problem of just that. I write words, and then you read them in the same language and hope I... And there's still plenty of opportunity for us not to understand each other just from that.

Dan McClellan Oh.

Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan Nobody's ever been on a family text chain where they understood what everybody else was saying at all times.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan I've got family in-laws, that I know I'm not going to understand their texts. I hear the ding, and I see the face come up, and I'm like, "Here we go. I don't know what they're going to say."

Dan Beecher So, yeah.

Dan McClellan There's even people who people go to therapy- Yeah ... to figure out how to learn to communicate in ways that their spouse can understand. Not that I've done that, but- No. Spoiler, I have done that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Exactly.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan But a lot of people don't understand the role of translation in what's going on, because there are a bunch of decisions that have been made before you even get to a Bible that you can open and read.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I just wanted to briefly go over some of the process of translating the Bible. And I was talking with you, Dan, prior to hitting record about how we could talk about what I was involved in, which is translating the Bible into other languages- Right ... that either don't have a lot of translations or don't have any translations at all of the Bible. But we also have Bible translations into languages that have a lot of translations, and the one that most of us, if you're listening to this show, have some grasp of is English.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And we've got hundreds and hundreds of translations of the Bible into English, and the process of creating one of those is very different most of the time from the process of creating a Bible into... I said Nhevi Kley when I was giving you an example, and you were like, "Nhevi what?"

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan Which is a language that also, I think probably more commonly in previous generations was referred to as Chalupí. But that's spoken- Nice.

Dan Beecher That's spoken in- I like both of those names. Those are both- Yeah ... those are my two favorite languages, and they're the same language.

Dan McClellan When you get to say names of languages like that, it's a fun job. But that's a language that's spoken in some of the grasslands of the area around Uruguay and Argentina and Paraguay. But anyway, there are a bunch of decisions that have to be made before even a translator decides how to translate a passage as well, because they need a source text.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the first step for if you're going to sit down and say, "I'm going to translate the Bible," which oddly enough is something that I have done. It's a long process, but- Yeah ... when you sit down to do that, you need a source text, and there are a handful of different ways that you can go about that. If you want to do as little work as possible, then you can just go find yourself a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible and a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. And then you have what is widely considered an acceptable base text, an acceptable source text.

Dan Beecher Maybe tell me what is a critical edition. What separates a critical edition from a non-critical? One of them's like, "I don't like what you're wearing."

Dan McClellan So, a critical edition means that it's the kind of edition that a scholar could use to translate the Bible. But it's generally going to contain what's called a critical apparatus, and this is where editors will go through, and they will provide significant variant readings in the footnotes. And some people who don't know a ton about the Bible, if they flip through a critical edition and see that there are variant readings in virtually every verse- Yeah ... of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that might spook them a little bit.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But these critical editions, there are also two different kinds of critical editions. We can broadly distinguish what's called an eclectic edition from a diplomatic edition. And so the Hebrew Bible, mostly scholars use a diplomatic edition, and what that means is it is reproducing a single ancient manuscript, and then you- I see ... you just deal with it from there.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so for the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex from about 1008 CE is generally considered your starting point. And so a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, like the BHS or something like that, is going to be reproducing the text of the Leningrad Codex exactly.

Dan Beecher I feel like a lot of our listeners just sort of had their minds blown by the fact that it was 1,000 years after Jesus, and that's the earliest text, or that's the text that people are using.

Dan McClellan Yes. That's the earliest complete manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Right. And if that's the case, then we're talking it's almost 2,000 years after when some of that Hebrew Bible was meant to have been written, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Very small fragments of it.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But yeah, it's pretty recent. And so, scholars who are going to translate the Hebrew Bible are going to compare what they're seeing to earlier editions. So, one of the main things they're going to compare to is what's known as the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, because we have manuscripts that contain pretty much the entire Hebrew Bible in Greek translation that go back to around 325, 375, 400 CE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, we can move back six-ish centuries if we just look in a Greek translation.

Dan Beecher But it's already been translated.

Dan McClellan Right. And so when you see differences between the Leningrad Codex and the Septuagint, you've got to figure, well, is this because the translator may be interpreting it in a weird way?

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Or if it's a result of their source text reading differently in Hebrew. And so you have this continuum from what they call translator exegesis all the way to variant source text, and what is most likely there. And there are a lot of times when people will say, "I think the Septuagint had a different Hebrew source text, and I think that Hebrew source text is probably more original than what is in the Leningrad Codex." And so you might decide, "I'm going to translate what's in the Septuagint rather than what's in the Leningrad Codex." Or you might go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are even earlier than most manuscripts of the Septuagint, and point to some things in there. And there are a lot of places where scholars are in widespread agreement, this preserves an earlier reading than what's in the Leningrad Codex. So, if you're translating the Hebrew Bible, you have to grapple with these variant readings from earlier manuscripts.