Christ, with a crown of kingship and a crown of thorns

 

Christ astonished the people by speaking like a sovereign.

 

For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

-Matthew 7:29

 

He sounded like a sovereign because he didn’t cite some authority to justify his views. That is one definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the man who doesn’t cite someone else as his justification for acting. In our system, we say that the people our sovereign because the question “who gave the people authority to elect representatives?” has no answer.

Another common definition of sovereignty is lawmaking

Another compelling definition of sovereignty comes from not-entirely-respectable thinker Carl Schmitt. He said that the sovereign was the one who could make exceptions to the rules. If you get pulled over by a cop, the cop is the one in charge, because he’s the one who can cut you a break if he decides to. That’s just a little exception to the rules, so the cop only has a little sovereignty. There are bigger exceptions, and bigger sovereigns.

The biggest exception of all is the Atonement. On the one hand we have an authoritative and universal system called justice. On the other hand, we have the infinite mercy and repentance that the Atonement offers. In the Atonement, Christ offers us exceptions to the law of justice not just seven times, or seven times seven, but seventy times seven. In a sense, then, we can say that Christ’s infinite suffering was the ultimate claim to rulership.

Schmitt doesn’t have the whole story of sovereignty, nor is the view that the atonement makes exceptions to justice all there is to say about the atonement. But there is enough truth in both of them to think that together they offer a partial explanation for the paradox that the ultimate submission of the atonement was also the ultimate act of divinity.


Continue reading at the original source →