Adam Kotsko offers a socio-political variation on the Christus Victor atonement theory in his 2010 study, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation. He does this by explaining “the devil” in terms of the Hegelian concept of “objective spirit,” Geist.
As Kotsko puts it, Geist “refers to a kind of deposit of cultural norms and practices that a given subject finds already existing independent of any particular person – to put it differently, social life somehow seems to have ‘a life of its own'” (190). There is a spiritual – a geistlich – aspect to all social life, and “the spiritual names the fact that humanity continually determines the form of life together while being determined by it” (192).
Language provides an example. No single person is responsible for inventing English; it preexists English speakers. Yet, by speaking English, English speakers alter the language. “Language determines how we speak, but how we speak also determines language” (190). Kinship provides another illustration of Geist: “the social function of kinship relationships far exceeds the simple fact of having been born to a particular set of parents. Kinship carries with it certain forms of loyalty or obedience, lays down lines of inheritance, regulates possible marriage pairings, and in some cases determines who is the legitimate political ruler. The patristic authors indicated this double-duty aspect of kinship by highlighting the destructive socio-political consequences of being Adam’s progeny.” There is a spiritual aspect not only to our interactions with other humans, but also to our relation to the physical universe. Even “such necessities as eating and drinking become the site of cultural creativity” (192).
For Kotsko, the devil is a “kind of stand-in for the spiritual (cultural and political) sphere rather than . . . a self-directed independently existing agent” (195). Human beings were created to enjoy God, one another, and the creation; the fall destroys this enjoyment. Kotsko “allegorizes” the fall story, picking out the fact that the devil disrupts humanity’s relationship with God through deception. The devil creates a breach in the relational fabric of reality, tearing human beings from their Creator, from one another, from the creation. Individuals become isolated from one another, and possession rather than love begins to characterize human interactions. He links this with his understanding of Geist by noting that “Humanity does not simply recoil in horror from the destruction it has wrought, but that destruction then becomes something that is somehow self-reinforcing. It becomes the structuring principle of humanity’s social existence, taking on a ‘life of its own.’ . . . A world in which relationship is negated and in which relationships become mutually exclusive is a world of scarcity and insecurity. Fear is the predictable reaction to such a world, but fear is also what creates the vicious circle, because fear becomes a motivation for further negation of relationship. Instead of occasions for enjoyment, others (human or otherwise) become threats” (196).
Who can save us from this body of death?
Kotsko argues that the solution must take the form of “persuasion” rather than force, and then asks what makes Jesus persuasive, that is, Savior? Jesus lives in defiance of the separations wrought by the devil, by the distorted objective spirit of human society. He restores connections, but does not take possession of others. He forgives sins. He enjoys himself and others; even when confronting enemies, “he very often seems to be playing with them” (200). His appeal is not from rational argument but “his general way of being in the world,” and this way of being is infectious. He is possessed of a “contagious sovereignty” that empowers those around him (200).
Jesus confronts and resists the devil. When seduction fails, the devil (=Geist) turns violent and tries to wipe him out. Jesus, though, lives without fear. He neither submits to the fear that dominates the dialectic of master/slave, but He also refuses to fight back. Thus, “he much more radically subverts the order of fear than if he had somehow raised an army to defeat Rome directly.” He “does all this openly and publicly, in the shared space of our life together, precisely because his mission is to open up the possibility of a radical overhaul of the form of that life” (201-2). He is executed, but “something happened that convinced a group of Christ’s followers that death had not been the last word in this case” (202). Infected by Jesus’ fearlessness, they formed communities free of the devil’s rule – communities without fear and domination, a “body” of members in relationship with one another and with God. Through Jesus, communities of enjoyment took form.
Now, Kotsko makes this case in a “religionless” mode. There’s no real personal devil; there’s no resurrection since it’s not important to know “precisely what happened to convince the disciples that Christ had somehow overcome the bonds of death” (202); there is a Geist but Kotsko doesn’t say anything much about a heilige Geist. An atonement theory without resurrection and pneumatology is, shall we say, unsatisfying.
But he does capture an important line of the story of Jesus in His confrontation with regimes of fear, fragmentation, and domination. And we can recover a good bit of what Kotsko says in a more theologically robust form by reinserting what he neglects: The disciples were convinced Jesus overcame death because He did so; they shared His fearlessness because He poured out His Spirit on them. Kotsko would charge that I’m going anthropomorphic, mythical, religious. I think I’m just going historical: This is the way things actually happened, and the result was the formation of a “church” (a term he avoids) that lives beyond the fear of death.
Kotsko has a point too when he raises the question of whether the communities claiming the name of “church” have actually perpetuated Jesus’ conquest of “the devil,” of the “objective spirit” that damages human existence. He’s right that too often the church has exchanged the Holy Spirit for the objective spirit, and has perpetuated the fear it is called to overcome.
His book reminds us that one of the key upshots of the atonement is Jesus’ assurance, “Fear not. I have overcome the world.”