Undeception

I thought I was done posting about this subject for a while, but apparently I’m not the only one thinking about this! The following comes from Roger Olson, someone whose views I often find quite compelling. What does he think about the atonement?

…I do think denial of any objective-transactional aspect of the atonement is dangerous to the gospel.  Purely subjective theories fall short; they cannot account for how the atonement takes care of the guilt problem.  They are inextricably tied to an optimistic, perhaps even Pelagian, view of humanity when taken alone.

To me, anyway, the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins in the sense that his death made it possible for God to forgive sinners righteously.  Take that away and the preaching of the cross gradually (or suddenly) fades away.  So does the gospel.

via About the atonement | Roger E Olson

Olson seems to be working from popular but deficient definitions of two words.

The first problematic understanding is of the nature of sin: he still views sin primarily in terms of “guilt”. Then again, maybe it’s his definition of guilt that’s the problem. I believe that sin is real, and that it is the common enemy of God and man. But that’s just it: sin is the enemy, not the sinner. The idea that “the guilt problem” means that mankind with its sinful behavior is a fire that God needs to put out, that is, until Christ died, is the fuzzy logic behind the “objective-transactional” views of governmental and penal substitution theories of the atonement. But it’s not a logic that holds up very well if we take at all seriously the way that Jesus taught us to talk about God, namely as a Father. Any interest I might have in “tak[ing] care of the guilt problem” whenever my young son commits a sin (such as lying) would be nothing less than a perversity on my part. I do care about his guilt, but only insofar as it stems from my real parental concern for his well-being and moral development. He may be an offender, but a good parent first wants to address the fact that his child is a victim of his/her own acts. If my daughter stepped in to offer herself to receive my son’s punishment, and I took her up on her offer, either to demonstrate my sense of “justice” (which sounds disturbingly like the lex talionis superseded by Jesus himself) as in the governmental theory or, admittedly much worse, because I had an otherwise insatiable need to punish someone, anyone, for my son’s misdeeds, I would not be a good parent, much less the wise father of consummate love taught in the New Testament. No, sin is a sickness that must be removed from our souls, not “cancelled” or “paid for” through some clever “transaction”. The sinner must be cured, not left to decay as punishment for being sick. Olson and Piper, as rarely on the same page as they are, unite to disagree with this assessment just as emphatically as I reject theirs. [Note: the preceding paragraph has been edited slightly since publication for clarity.]

The other misunderstanding (puzzling to me in the extreme) that Olson and Piper agree upon is what the gospel is: “…the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins…” Please tell me, then, how Jesus could have been preaching the gospel from the very outset of his ministry! When did he once proclaim his death as the good news? This is massively, bewilderingly wrong, attributable only to the common tendency to allow Pauline theology (esp. from Romans) to trump that of the Gospel writers and their Jesus traditions (in point of fact, I don’t think Paul was so mistaken on that either, but that’s another discussion). The good news of the gospel is of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which was always that God’s heart would soon rule the day: the mighty would be brought low and the lowly exalted. Jesus’ gospel was extremely social; from what we can tell, it was conceived of as a political gospel as well (the return of Israel’s national status), so perhaps it’s best just to say that it was conceived of as a holistic new world order. It didn’t happen quite like they (even Jesus, apparently) thought it would. But in any event, in the Gospels we are never given any indication that Jesus proclaimed that his death was to bring about the Kingdom of God by taking the punishment for our sins. How else could Jesus tell people who called him “Lord” that he never knew them? It was those who “do the will of [the] father,” those who learn to obey their father who take part in the order of the Kingdom. What was Jesus’ solution to the sin problem? In the earliest Gospel’s first statement of Jesus’ ministry in Mark 1.14-15, it was “Repent and believe in the good news!” And notice that “good news” there couldn’t mean “trust in my work upon the cross.”

Olson’s quoted remarks are based on a presupposition: Jesus’ atonement must have been objective, or else Jesus’ death didn’t take care of our guilt. This implies that he is uncomfortable with admitting that perhaps Jesus’ death did not take care of our guilt in a substitutionary fashion, making it possible “for God to forgive sinners righteously.” A righteous father will always forgive his wayward children, will he not? He will punish or love (depending on the circumstance) his children’s misbehavior right out of them; what he will not do is make excuses for it.

Ok, I pledge it: I’m laying off of this subject for the foreseeable future.

Recently I was listening to a pastor describing the gospel in the predominant Reformed fashion as the message that sinners are absolved of guilt because Christ died in order to allow God to punish sin without condemning vile, sinful humanity (at least those of us who are fortunate enough to be among the elect). Under this rubric, “the cross” becomes shorthand for “the way in which Christ received our justly deserved penalty and condemnation”, the so-called penal substitution theory of the atonement. At one point this pastor used Paul’s insistence that he preached nothing but “Christ crucified” as evidence that Paul preached the gospel as defined above.

Have you ever heard that? Someone claiming that the gospel is all Christians need to focus on, all that’s necessary, the only thing we have any business preaching (I do not intend to challenge these assertions here), and in the same breath asserting that “the gospel” means “God punished Jesus in our stead”? Downplaying our utter wickedness and the fact that we deserve to rot in hell for eternity (or even just be consumed) and a primary focus on the ethics of Christianity are seen as tantamount to rejecting the gospel of Christ.

The question that sprang to my mind as I heard the aforementioned pastor, eventually prompting this post, was whether Paul’s phrase “Christ crucified” in 1 Corinthians 1-2 in any way depends upon or implies penal substitution. I believe the answer is a resounding no, so resounding that answering either yes or the more modest yes and no present the danger of propping up a massive distraction from the important message Paul was trying to convey.

The contextual thrust of the passage in which “Christ crucified” is found is unequivocal: Paul is attempting to correct a fundamentally incorrect attitude in the church, an attitude that was hardly unique to Corinth or the first century. He is displeased to have learned that factions have sprung up in the church at Corinth, a faction of Apollos, a faction of Paul, and – with no exemption from criticism – a faction of Christ. Appealing first to those who set themselves up as his followers, he calls attention to the basis of his own leadership, which was not power or eloquence, but humility.

“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” (1.17)

Building cliques around leadership meant calling attention away from the very power source of the “cross of Christ”, namely, submission. That was counter-intuitive to be sure, but…

“…it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’” (1.19)

It is this immediate context in which the assertion that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is first made:

“‘…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1.23-25)

Nowhere present here or within this entire passage is so much as a passing mention of the wrath of God justly levied against our utterly depraved state. The focus is somewhere else entirely: for Paul, this principle of inversion, the reversal of strong/weak, wise/foolish is a thoroughgoing program, the hallmark and curriculum of the Kingdom.

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1.26-29; cf. Philippians 2)

Paul appeals to his own example of self-abasement in the interests of others as the only possible basis for his credibility, which basis simultaneously disqualifies him from exaltation:

“…I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” (2.1-3)

“For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.” (3.4-5)

“So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” (3.21-4.1)

Both to those who uphold and who question his authority, Paul repeats his insistence throughout chapters 1 through 3 (as indeed in various places throughout both letters to the Corinthians) that he wielded a leadership exercised only through and valid only because of his submission, sacrifice, and willingness to be persecuted. It’s a sustained, focused argument: Paul’s focus on the message of a crucified Messiah was intended to show his own Christ-like, “cruciform” bona fides.

When we hear “Christ crucified”, we should avoid losing the focus and intent of that phrase in Paul’s argument. For Paul, Christ’s crucifixion was the exemplar of submission and self-sacrifice, paradigmatic of the whole new world order over which Christ has been made king (again cf. Philippians 2, and also see here). If one insists that “Christ crucified” is the gospel, then at very least the gospel must be defined not as “God punished Jesus in our stead” ¹ but as “the Messiah has through self-abasement become Lord of all.”

However, even framing it that way is anachronistic, for the same reason that it should be manifestly clear that the message of the gospel could not be “that Christ received our justly deserved punishment and condemnation”: the gospel long predates Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus preached the good news of the Kingdom of God from the very beginning of his ministry, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that his own future death was the subject of his main message. The good news, the gospel, was of the coming of the Kingdom of God, an original conception of which was anticipated by other sects of Judaism before him and found its roots in the canonical Old Testament (e.g. Isaiah 40.4-5). Jesus took up the mantle to fulfill those hopes: the oppressed would be vindicated and the oppressors laid low. Originally, and even in the first century, this eschatological corrective was envisaged as taking place by the restoration of national Israel’s political fortunes. However, it seems that the earliest Christians saw in Jesus a Messiah, a divine restorative agent, who did not overcome might with might, but with self-sacrifice.

No one searching for Paul’s unity with the teachings of Jesus should miss this unifying, early Christian motivating vision of the reign of God: mutual submission and voluntary servanthood is at the heart of the Kingdom of which Christ is king. Interestingly, here we find one of the least disputable indications of the content of the historical Jesus’ teachings, since this principle of inversion not only dominates the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, the earliest known Christian writing, but also features prominently in the Synoptics (and, for what it’s worth, the Gospel of Thomas as well).

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¹ Despite my oft stated misgivings with the doctrine, I do not mean to claim that there is no trace of the idea of penal substitution intimated or implied within Paul’s writings. However, the frequent use of the expression “Christ crucified” as a proof that Paul thought the core of Christian soteriology to be God’s wrath against sin appeased through punishing Jesus is surely wrong-headed. For if Jesus was exalted to lordship for accepting the cup, what part would that person play who demands satisfaction for wrongs done him –even if that person was God Himself? Would he not be the last, the lowest, the least Christ-like? Jesus would not in that case be exemplifying the Father to humanity, but showing Him up.

At long last, David Baldwin‘s labor of love has given us an annotated recording of George MacDonald’s theological tour de force, “Justice.” This is definitely MacDonald at his finest; his beliefs on the Atonement, hell, God’s Fatherhood, and, of course, justice are nowhere more compelling than in this masterpiece.

Enjoy, disseminate amongst all your loved ones (friends don’t let friends believe that the gospel = penal substitution), and by all means, subscribe to David’s YouTube channel.

Spurgeon*, eat your heart out!

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* With no offense intended toward the estimable Charles Haddon or his devotees. Spurgeon was a truly great preacher, arguably more consistently so than his contemporary MacDonald, with one decisive discriminator: Spurgeon was much more frequently wrong.

What I come to and insist upon is, that, supposing your theories right, and containing all that is to be believed, yet those theories are not what makes you Christians, if Christians indeed you are. On the contrary, they are, with not a few of you, just what keeps you from being Christians. For when you say that, to be saved, a man must hold this or that, then are you leaving the living God and his will, and putting trust in some notion about him or his will.

To make my meaning clearer,–some of you say we must trust in the finished work of Christ; or again, our faith must be in the merits of Christ–in the atonement he has made–in the blood he has shed: all these statements are a simple repudiation of the living Lord, in whom we are told to believe, who, by his presence with and in us, and our obedience to him, lifts us out of darkness into light, leads us from the kingdom of Satan into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. No manner or amount of belief about him is the faith of the New Testament. With such teaching I have had a lifelong acquaintance, and declare it most miserably false. But I do not now mean to dispute against it; except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat, is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God. Even if your plan, your theories, were absolutely true, the holding of them with sincerity, the trusting in this or that about Christ, or in anything he did or could do, the trusting in anything but himself, his own living self, is a delusion.

Many will grant this heartily, and yet the moment you come to talk with them, you find they insist that to believe in Christ is to believe in the atonement, meaning by that only and altogether their special theory about the atonement; and when you say we must believe in the atoning Christ, and cannot possibly believe in any theory concerning the atonement, they go away and denounce you, saying, “He does not believe in the atonement!” If I explain the atonement otherwise than they explain it, they assert that I deny the atonement; nor count it of any consequence that I say I believe in the atoner with my whole heart, and soul, and strength, and mind. This they call contending for the truth! Because I refuse an explanation which is not in the New Testament, though they believe it is, because they can think of no other, one which seems to me as false in logic as detestable in morals, not to say that there is no spirituality in it whatever, therefore I am not a Christian! What wonder men such as I have quoted refuse the Christianity they suppose such “believers” to represent! I do not say that with this sad folly may not mingle a potent faith in the Lord himself; but I do say that the importance they place on theory is even more sadly obstructive to true faith than such theories themselves: while the mind is occupied in enquiring, “Do I believe or feel this thing right?”–the true question is forgotten: “Have I left all to follow him?”

George MacDonald

from Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 2, “The Truth in Jesus“

Here’s a little thought experiment.

Let’s say you heard tell of a ruler of a foreign country who decreed that all citizens of his country who broke even one of that country’s laws deserved to be, and henceforth would be, locked up and tortured for the rest of their lives.

Additionally, he took the most revered, humble, and law-abiding citizen up on his offer to take all the blame and punishment for all crimes great and small that were perpetrated by a select group of citizens, a group chosen neither by the severity of their crimes nor by any discernible merit on their part (the others were out of luck).

This left pardoned jay-walkers and murderers alike to roam the street and continue doing what they wanted with virtual impunity, although it was hoped that many would turn over a new leaf out of gratitude and the promise of a fatter retirement check. Everyone else would be tortured the moment they committed the most minor infraction, which was hard to avoid given that the laws of the land were intricate and formulated in direct opposition to basic human nature.

What would your response be to such a report?

1. “Injustice! Barbarism!”
2. “The real story here is grace. The demands of the law must be satisfied. Transgressors know what’s coming to them before they commit a criminal act. Justice must be served. The guilty must by no means go unpunished. After all, there’s nothing in Scripture that this violates, and his authority is guaranteed by Romans 13. But what grace the ruler shows by executing vengeance on the innocent, saving (some) from their punishment!”
3. Something else?

Would the report about this ruler’s policies seem more believable or less so if you discovered through close observation that the king otherwise seemed to be a good, tenderhearted man whose ideology and policies were upheld by fair-minded folk to be the very model of fairness? What if, after your own examination, you concluded that his other demonstrations of kindness and even personal affection for his people were unparalleled throughout the world? What if his pardoned citizens upheld his chief virtues to be “justice” and “grace”?

C.S. Lewis once said (on another subject), “…nonsense remains nonsense, even when we say it about God.”

I realize I’m taking on a few different evangelical narratives here, especially penal satisfaction, eternal conscious torment, and election. I also realize that many of my brothers and sisters on an entirely different theological page will answer none of those questions I posed, but will first scramble to make fine distinctions between this hypothetical ruler and God. To them I say: you know very well what I’m getting at, and if you dismiss the legitimacy of my analyzing your doctrine of God’s justice in this way, then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to come right out and honestly answer these questions within this hypothetical  construct. Right? Would such a ruler be a good, just, wise, and merciful ruler?

If you answer, “Your analogy is crude, limited, fanciful, and breaks down at various points,” I will congratulate you. I think this is exactly what happens when we try to weave together the various human approximations of the meaning of the atonement and salvation found in the NT and hold to our construct as the only inviolable doctrine.

Although the term “penal substitution” is not uniformly familiar, the concept itself is something that the majority of American Christians accept as the official summary of how Christian salvation works. In essence, there is tension between God’s justice and His love: our sin offends God in such a way that His wrath can only be appeased through punishment, from which the fortunate among us are exempt by virtue of Jesus’ sacrifice applied to us (= salvation). Yet historically, there are several other ways of thinking about salvation.

Ken Schenck recently pointed out that the Lutheran understanding of justification as “legal fiction” in which God decides to ignore that we ever sinned by the imputation of Jesus’ righteousness to the elect is somewhat in contrast to the OT understanding of what God’s righteousness:

But the Jewish background to the idea of the righteousness of God points in another direction. For example, Psalm 98:2 says that “The LORD has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations.” See how much this verse has in common with Romans 1:17? It mentions God’s righteousness and speaks of it being revealed. It also has a sense of this revelation going out to all the nations, just as Paul understood the gospel to be for the Gentiles as well as Jews. The verse does not speak of us becoming righteous, but of God’s righteousness as he brings about the salvation of Israel.

When we read that God “reveals” His righteousness in Romans 1.17 and His wrath in the next verse, we tend to come away with a picture of God as fed up with sin and on a rampage, His patience and mercy expired and His vengeance overdue. God’s righteousness is both the poison and the antidote: those who fall short of it justly get consumed, but those on whom it is bestowed through identification with Jesus are saved. Yet as we saw in Psalm 98, righteousness and salvation tend to run parallel rather than perpendicularly in Paul’s Scripture, the OT:

This psalm is not the only place where God’s “righteousness” and his “salvation” are mentioned parallel to one another. The second half of Isaiah (chaps. 40-66) was of great significance to the earliest Christians, and Paul himself occasionally alludes to these chapters (e.g., Rom. 15:21). These sorts of parallels between God’s righteousness and the salvation he is bringing permeate them. The Greek version of Isaiah 51:5 Paul used says, “My righteousness draws near quickly, my salvation will come out like a light. The Gentiles will hope on my right arm.”

The bad news is that all have sinned: God’s action to save, the deliverance of God, is the good news.

So when Paul says that “the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel” in Romans 1:17, he is talking about God’s relationship with his people and in particular God’s propensity to save his people, God’s “saving righteousness.” Righteousness is a relational term in Jewish thought. It is not about some abstract quality God has but about a specific way that God relates to his people and the world.

Richard Beck has up a fantastic post composed primarily of quotes from George MacDonald’s “unspoken sermon” entitled Justice, in which Beck’s summary of MacDonald’s view bears a strong resemblance to the above observations:

Too often in discussions about hell and God’s justice it is argued that God’s justice (manifested in sending you to hell) is in tension with God’s mercy and forgiveness. That is, God will either punish you or forgive you. It’s a binary, an either/or. Heaven or hell. Justice or mercy. Punishment or forgiveness.MacDonald rejects all these as false dichotomies. Justice is mercy. Punishment is forgiveness.

This conception of justice has dramatic implications for our view of the atonement. Can eternal punishment satisfy God’s justice? How is God’s anger “righteous” if, as the OT authors believed, it is His righteousness that impels Him to save? Beck says that for MacDonald, “Punishment alone doesn’t bring either ‘justice’ or ‘salvation.’ Punishment is only ever a tool toward these ends.”

This sermon hosts one of MacDonald’s — or anyone‘s — most eloquent missives against penal substitution theory:

The device [of substitutionary atonement] is an absurdity—a grotesquely deformed absurdity. To represent the living God as a party to such a style of action, is to veil with a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy the face whose glory can be seen only in the face of Jesus; to put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather than believe such ugly folly of him whose very name is enough to make those that know him heave the breath of the hart panting for the waterbrooks; rather than think of him what in a man would make me avoid him at the risk of my life, I would say, ‘There is no God; let us neither eat nor drink, that we may die! For lo, this is not our God! This is not he for whom we have waited!’

(His next words give me goosebumps:)

But I have seen his face and heard his voice in the face and the voice of Jesus Christ; and I say this is our God, the very one whose being the Creator makes it an infinite gladness to be the created. I will not have the God of the scribes and the pharisees whether Jewish or Christian, protestant, Roman, or Greek, but thy father, O Christ! He is my God. If you say, ‘That is our God, not yours!’ I answer, ‘Your portrait of your God is an evil caricature of the face of Christ.’

If you’re like me, you’ll struggle to shake off the nagging feeling that MacDonald’s glowing portrait of God and His love might be too good to be true. MacDonald is aware of these misgivings, and explains them:

Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it…Unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his fatherheart, for that they found impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief and the arguing spirit.

You owe it to yourself to read Richard Beck’s entire post.