If we look to the story of the prodigal son, we see both a case against substitutionary atonement, and a case for it.  On the one hand, we have a remorseful prodigal and a father who forgives without punishment, but at the same time we still have the offended protests of the good brother who feels actions should have consequences. 

If we look at the substitution of 4 Maccabees, we can see Jesus as a sin fine payment to appease God’s righteous anger.  Debt to society and the making-whole of the victim and their family, even if just figuratively, must be paid.

On the other hand, this is monstrous, for if sinless Jesus is as innocent as an innocent child, how is justice served by putting to death a child in Palestine for the crimes of a serial killer in Rome? 

By contrast, the prodigal’s father forgives without payment or punishment, like in the Lord’s prayer, the penitential psalms, and the story of Jonah.  This father’s love is a love of widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than self, as Jesus and Stephen in Luke-Acts don’t pray for God to send a legion of angels to save them from their grisly deaths, but for God to forgive their enemies.

But the monstrous consequence of this perspective is that Hitler may be partying in heaven right now to the horror of his victims if he repented on his death bed or, if you’re Catholic as Goicoechea and Caputo are, after a few days in purgatory.

In fact, justice is not sin punishment, nor sin forgiveness, but an integration of the two. 

Caputo argues,

I am more interested in answering to what calls to us in the name of God than in what answers to that name.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 320). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

This call overtakes us, calls upon us, calls up what is best in us, and calls for a response, while we ourselves are the ones who have been called upon, made responsible, called to hear, called to act, asked to heed the call, which means both to hear and to act. As to the “ultimate” source of this call, the “identity” of the caller of this call—is it in fact God or the soul, language or the world?—well, if we knew that, we would know everything. It is precisely the non-knowing that we find so painful and unsettling… In a theology of the weakness of God we track the weak force of the call for justice or for love—rather than a strong force that stops the sun in its tracks (so to speak!), parts the sea, or cures the cancerous tumors of the faithful. This weakness is to be translated into strength, into the strength and courage of a response.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 321). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.   

The event that stirs within the name of God is of a call that calls for us to transform the world in the image of God, to make up what is “missing” in the event of God, which as event ever wants actuality. (We see this kind of structure in the letter to the Colossians when the author speaks of filling up what is missing, “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” [Col 1:24].)  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 322). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

And so, with the question of justice, we are back with Plato and his book on justice, the most famous book in the ancient world, the Republic, and the allegory of the cave.  We can see ourselves going along with our appropriating, guiding perspective (such as the traditional definition of marriage), when something beyond this ousia/Being comes along that can’t be appropriated such as LGBTQ+ rights, and we are amazed (thaumazein) and “called” to deconstruct and reconstruct out guiding perspective in a more just, inclusive way.  Caputo comments,

A good case in point for me is homosexuality. If you have two people, two consenting adults, that is, who love each other but their love offends others, where would Jesus be as regards that situation? If you look at the New Testament, where was he? There was the mainstream religion, and then there were the people who were out. Where was Jesus? Not with the mainstream but with the people who were out. So where would Jesus be today? Defending homosexual rights, that’s my bet. The wrath of the Christian Right against homosexual love is a good example of “producing” evil where there is no evil. Where’s the evil in homosexuality except in the evil that is committed against homosexuals, in what is done to them. It’s not in what homosexuals are doing, which is loving one another. But they don’t love one another in a way that suits others. That’s too bad for these others: they’ll have to get over that. When you taunt and attack and impose yourself upon that kind of thing then you’re producing evil where there is no evil. The evil in that situation is being created gratuitously by people who don’t respect the right to be different.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 341). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I once challenged Goicoechea as to why he considered himself a Catholic Universalist who championed LGBTQ+ rights, but not that Catholic priests should be allowed to marry LGBTQ+ couples.  His response is that it is better for kids not to endure the social ramifications of what he saw as societal taboo of LGBTQ+ parents.  Monstrous!

Thanks for reading my series on the anthology by and about John Caputo’s Cross and Khora!