The last couple of months I’ve visited a few churches and been struck by how central the idea that Jesus died to pay the penalty for our sins is in their worship. It’s there in the songs they sing, in the prayers they pray, in the words of the worship leader, and inevitably makes an appearance in the sermon preached. It is the central and defining message.
Yet, as I’ve argued in an earlier post, it’s not, to my reading, the way the New Testament articulates the good news. And it matters. Substitionary, penal atonement makes sin, guilt and retribution the central themes of faith. It gives us an anthropology that focuses on what’s wrong with us, which issues in language declaring we are unlovable (but phew, God who is love, loves us despite our unloveliness), culpable (you struggle to find any sense that our problem might be the power of sin, or the systems in which we live), incapable (but we can do things in Christ’s strength, whatever that means – I have never been able to figure that one out) and is so firmly fixed on the individual – Christ died to save sinners – that the collective is easily ignored.
Substitutionary, penal atonement gives us a God who can only effect the salvation of sinners through an act of violent retribution. Holiness, understood as an implacable opposition to sin, becomes the central characteristic of God and retribution becomes the central theme in God’s dealing with humankind, opening up visions of a hard God who punishes unconfessed sin and an eternity in which the bulk of humankind suffer the most bitter torments for eternity.
But what if we made resurrection the centre of the gospel? What if at the centre of the universe lay not an act of retribution but God’s declaration that he will break the cycle of violence and retribution by absorbing whatever evil we throw at him, forgiving and creating new life and a renewed world? Would it not change the way we frame faith, the way we speak of ourselves, the way we relate to God and engage with the world?
Hey Scott, I understand what you’re trying to say. The importance of the resurrection is well pointed out by Paul in 1 Cor 15. But I still get stuck on 2 Cor 5:21 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might have the righteousness of God” and Heb 9:11f which shows Christ as our Day of Atonement lamb when he entered the Holy of Holies with his own blood and Jesus as our Passover lamb.
Subsitutionary Atonement, like all human endeavours to neatly package theology, doesn’t answer all the questions but I’m yet to find an alternative I’m happy with.
Bless you
Andy (and Scott), have a read of Darrin Balousek’s “Atonement, Justice and Peace”. An extremely comprehensive analysis of penal substitutionary atonement and presents alternatives. Darrin is coming to Aus next May/June and will be speaking in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
http://www.amazon.com/Atonement-Justice-Peace-Message-Mission/dp/0802866425/ref=la_B0058LYWWI_1_1/180-0865320-6825834?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382482460&sr=1-1
Hi Andy,
I get why people hold to penal substitution. There are verses that read well through this lens. my problem is that it has become the almost exclusive lens for framing the gospel, when the NT makes the resurrection the major lens. And so we’ve become unhealthy and imbalanced.
The main issue I have with penal substitution is that its foundation is a concept of justice that Jesus explicitly rejected.
Moses’ often repeated logic was eye for eye, tooth for tooth and life for life; do not show mercy. Justice on this foundation means that sin must be punished; that it is fundamentally unjust not to punish. This is the conundrum leading to the “balance” God has to keep between love and justice: He wants to love sinners but justice demands that he punish them so he takes out the punishment on Jesus and voila: love and justice are satisfied.
If this is the case then God is actually unable to forgive, because forgiveness is to ‘send away’ or overlook the sin. Penal substitution says that God has to have his pound of flesh one way or another and if he doesn’t get it from the guilty party he will get it from someone else. Jesus refuted this using the explicit Rabbinic tool of binding and loosing – “you have heard it was said” (bind up the old), “but I say to you” (loose the new). He bound up the old false concept that God (like every surrounding god and the basest drives in human nature) had to avenge sin, loosing instead the new concept of justice as restoration.
So justice for a sinner is not punishment of the sinner, but justification – making the sinner into a just person. Justice for a murderer is not to murder them (life for life), but to heal the broken thing in them and restore the image of God that loves. Jesus taught that this is achieved when sinners encounter love, when their sins are disregarded, treated as irrelevant and love is returned for their hate. Love for hate = the cross; the unmasking of God.
So the question is not whether other ideas of atonement fit with certain verses or not, but whether our interpretation of those verses fits with this message that Jesus called the gospel.
Hi Philip,
Yep, I agree that penal substitution is fundamentally at odds with the restorative/liberative model of justice we find in Jesus. So I find the penal model unconvincing.
But even if we were to accept the penal model, it has become an absolutising narrative in a way that it is not in the NT even on a penal reading.
Thanks for the provocations, Scott (though I realise you’re not just provoking, but genuinely believe and advocate this).
I agree with you that the resurrection needs to be restored to a more central place along with ‘messianic’ themes and the kingdom of God.
I think ‘substitution’ needs to be rethought in a more nuanced way – e.g. substitution is a moment within a broader notion of representation (Oliver O’Donovan). But ‘substitution’ remains an aspect of Christ’s achievement on our behalf.
Nonetheless, the haphazard deployment of metaphors of payment and punishment in our worship is extremely troubling. And many of the defences of ‘penal substitution’ are also unnerving despite their pedigree and popularity.
I like Chris Marshall’s idea of Jesus’ “redemptive solidarity” as a way to think about his representative work and the aforementioned substitutionary moment.
Thanks for these thoughts Scott, and you others…
I remember my little nephew, after obviously far too much of a “cross-focused” Sunday School diet, asking why we would pray to Jesus – because he’s dead!
I loved studying about all the different views on the atonement, and realising that there were different views, with all their implications… And you are right, Scott, the implications of our focus are far-reaching, and influence us so deeply on a daily level (my nephew’s observation is just one example!). I have a lot of thoughts on this, but here’s a little sample:
The cross is the great doorway we are meant to walk on through/into the blessed Kingdom life, and all our King still wants to do/It’s not a dogged wait until our death will set us free/Cause we’ve been raised with Christ, we’ve begun eternity!
“For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.” Rom. 2:13 Forget substitutionary atonement, penal atonement etc. Salvation is dependent upon the faith of obeying that law Paul is referencing and he is not referencing the Sinai code.
Struth! what if I gave my life to Jesus then immediately dropped dead?
then you’d go to heaven and God would ask, not in judgement but provocative nonetheless, “What took you so long?” This more modern idea of “giving our lives to Jesus, seems to gloss over the whole justification issue because we can believe we are working our way to heaven or that we have faith which saves us or a kind of obeying the law, whi we think is what the phrase means. At least Romans uses more noticable language of being “slaves to righteousness” and that phrase is given some context between versus used to suport the substitutionary view as well as the recapitation view. Of course the hly languge is not exact enough to satisfy most theologians and I ahd a mental mess of it last night. Until “haply I thought on ye” and found this website.