Sin, Satisfaction and Substitution
3 THE CROSS OF CHRIST
Explaining Calvary
What does the cross mean? Probably every real Christian since the beginning of Christianity has sooner or later been stirred to the depths by Jesus when he is at his most human - when he is dying. 'May I never boast', exclaimed Paul on behalf of us all, 'except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world' (Galatians 6:14). And there have been as many personal responses as there have been Christians. A response at that depth cannot be the mere endorsement of an 'atonement theory' which means nothing for one's personal existence. Paul's response can be understood readily as arising out of his life 'in Christ' but even images or theories which seem very strange to others sprang out of someone's experience. Someone's life was crossed.
Few people today have much respect for the theory that the devil was tricked into accepting the death of Jesus as the ransom due to him for the liberation of sinners, while all along Jesus was stronger than death, being divine. Dr Stott thinks it 'intolerable, monstrous and profane' (CoC, pp. 113-14). But this theory, eloquently expounded by many teachers of the Church including Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century and Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth, and outlined earlier by Irenaeus and Origen, had some substance in it. It could appeal to Scripture. Jesus, we are told, 'saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven' (Luke 10:18). The letter to the Colossians refers to 'the powers and authorities', apparently meaning supernatural beings (as in Ephesians 6:12), and says that having disarmed them Christ 'made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross' (2:15). The letter to the Hebrews declares that by his death Jesus destroyed 'him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil' (2:14). And the first letter of John affirms that 'the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work' (3:8). And the theory could appeal to experience. Christians then saw life as a vast, cosmic struggle of good against evil and knew that Christ had won a victory which meant that evil could not really hurt them. They had this experience in the setting of a society where evil was thought of as the work of the devil, where God was thought to be so just that he must deal justly with the devil himself, and where shrewd bargains were struck in business and shopping so that the idea of a bargain with the devil did not seem strange. In his Christus Victor (translated into English in 1931) Gustav Aulen re-created that whole world of thought. Europeans could understand it to some extent after their own experiences of 'demonic' evil in the two great wars. In Africa and elsewhere twentieth-century Christians have often experienced their faith primarily as liberation from the power of evil spirits. And if we revise this atonement theory to say that the devil was conquered, not tricked or paid, on Calvary - as Augustine, for example, did - surely we are saying something which is not obviously ridiculous. We are saying that the darkness of this world, with its rulers, whoever they may be, has been overcome so that we can live in the light.
Another theory was proposed some seven hundred years after Gregory of Nyssa by a great theologian and archbishop, Anselm of Canterbury. He developed the idea of a second-century lawyer turned theologian, Tertullian, that Christ's death provided a satisfactio (a Roman legal term). He was sure that God owed nothing to the devil except punishment. But he was also sure that sin meant 'not to render God his due' - and he lived in a feudal world where kings insisted on very harsh justice if what was due to them was not paid to them. In the Church of his time the appropriate act of penance and restitution was required if the law of God had been broken by sin. So he taught that the death of God the Son was the satisfaction or compensation due to God the Father whose honour had been insulted by the whole of human sin. This theory can be greatly improved by insisting that it was God's justice, not merely his honour conceived in feudal terms, that was satisfied (Thomas Aquinas taught that). And it is good to be reminded by the experts that none of the ancient or medieval theologians who were for a time greatly honoured by the Church taught one theory to the complete exclusion of all others. Quoting an odd-sounding sentence or two from their works can give an unfair impression of the richness and profundity of their thought. We may - indeed, I am sure that we should - reject some of their phrases. We should not dismiss these Christians entirely. They were pioneers in the theological task which must be ours.
What are we to put in the place of their discarded theories? Few sensitive Christians would nowadays think it adequate to say merely that Christ is our teacher and example. That was the main theory of the apologists who pioneered a more philosophical type of Christian theology in the second century, and it was revived eloquently as an alternative to Anselm's theory by Peter Abelard, who died in 1142. Abelard, whose love for Heloise is an immortal story, taught that 'our redemption is that greatest love kindled in us by Christ's passion', for 'kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace, love should not be afraid to endure anything for his sake'. And this 'exemplarist' theory appealed to many Christian teachers who were determined to make their message thoroughly rational and ethical in modem times, the classic statement in English being The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology by Hastings Rashdall (1919). But Christian reflection has usually seen that this is unsatisfactory, particularly under the many shocks of twentieth-century tragedies. Human sin is so great that any at-one-ment between the Holy God and us sinners must be something achieved by God much more than by sinners. It must be (in the traditional word) 'objective', not merely subjective. That is likely to be our modern (or post-modern) conviction if we are Christians, arising out of many disil-lusionments, and it has opened many eyes to the unsentimental teaching of the New Testament. Thus a modem, liberal theologian such as Professor John Knox went so far as to permit himself to say that the conceptions of the cross as a victory won and a sacrifice offered 'belong to the very warp and woof of the New Testament' while 'there is no evidence whatever that the early Church entertained the view that the purpose of Christ's death was to disclose the love of God' ( The Death of Christ, 1959, pp. 147-8). Yet it is surely wrong to reject the 'exemplarist' insight entirely. For it is a simple and glorious fact that many sinners, moved by the teaching and example of the Jesus who laid down his life because of his great love, have learned to love, and even to imitate, him. They also have begun to love and obey God the Father because that death is 'how God showed his love among us' (1 John 4:9). 'God', wrote Paul, 'demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us' (Romans 5:8). And 'Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. . . that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him. . . Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!' (2 Corinthians 5:14-17). So Abelard's exemplarist theory has been generated by real Christian experience - which is stronger than sentimentality. As John Knox went on to say, it is the Christian experience that 'in Christ - that is, in the entire event - the love of Christ was not simply made known, as a fact is made known, to our understanding; it was actually "poured into our hearts" (Romans 5:5)'.
Obviously many Christians, and very many people finding their way into Christianity, have felt it to be a problem that Jesus should have been put to death in a way so painful, horrifying, disreputable and isolated. Cicero called crucifixion 'a most cruel and disgusting punishment'. Martin Hengel's study of The Cross and the Son of God (in English, 1986) shows in detail how this form of execution was viewed in the ancient world as totally degrading. Its victims were automatically regarded as the worst of criminals. The gospels are full of the disciples' bewilderment about the startling expectation of Jesus that the cross was his destiny and Paul did not have to explain in his first letter to Corinth why the cross of Jesus, who was claimed to be Messiah and Lord, was 'a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles' (1:23). But neither did he have to explain why the cross was needed in order to deal with sin. He simply reminded Christians that Christ died 'for our sins according to the Scriptures' (1 Corinthians 15:3) or 'was delivered over to death for our sins' (Romans 4:25). It was part of the tradition he had received at his conversion, which seems to have been within five years of that death. And many people who have never gone so far as to be baptised have gone to Calvary in admiring love. A famous example is Gandhi, one of the many millions whose heartfelt devotion has been sung out in the hymn 'When I survey the wondrous cross'.
Some readers may doubt whether a 'liberal' like me can take the cross seriously enough. It may help if I briefly state that I can still remember vividly how moved I was as a boy when I went to church on Good Friday. While I was studying theology I was full of doubts about many doctrines but I always tried to keep my feet on the rock of indisputable history and experience which I had found on Calvary - many years before I saw the actual rock in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (almost certainly the authentic site of the crucifixion). When I had been ordained I thought I understood enough about the subject to write a book called God's Cross in Our World, published a quarter of a century ago. Today I realise how little experience of sin or suffering or sorrow, other people's or my own, I had then; but I can record with utter honesty that the cross of Christ has continued to be the one unconquerable light which has enabled me - as it has enabled so many others - to walk through this dark world.
When I read John Stott's The Cross of Christ soon after its publication in 1986, 1 found that most of it expressed the convictions that had already arisen in my own heart and mind out of my own experience and out of the experience of the Christian centuries (so far as I now know them). But Dr Stott wrote with all the eloquence of a first class preacher whose life is in total harmony with his message - something I can only admire. In particular I admired in his book an emphatic chapter on 'the centrality of the cross'; the great emphasis on the gravity of sin making the cross necessary; the insistence that amid the sin it is God's love that we see placarded on the cross; the equal insistence that confronted by sin this is holy, not sentimental, love; the wonder at the bitter cost involved for Christ and at the suffering of the Father; and the description of the Christian fellowship as the community of celebration at the foot of Christ's cross. In all these pages and in many others I found reflected the truths which I have been taught by life and by the gospel. Dr Stott sums it all up in three truths: 'our sin must be extremely horrible, God's love must be wonderful beyond comprehension, Christ's salvation must be a free gift' (CoC, p. 83).
I am sure that this strange wisdom of the cross is wiser than a great deal of philosophy and of theology has been in ancient or modem times. The cross is so central in Christian experience and understanding because it is only on Calvary that we see fully how terrible is the power of the evil in the heart of man and how great is the holy love of the God who forgives, defeats and removes that evil. Too many philosophers, and even Christian theologians, have taken too shallow a view of such realities. Luther in 1518 rightly attacked the 'theology of glory' of the medieval Church by insisting on the 'theology of the cross'. Even in our own century, the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, of pollution and starvation, some have remained optimistic that a political or technical solution could be achieved which would one day mean that humanity had got these public problems licked by brain-power and willpower. And even in our cruel age of so many millions of abortions and divorces - an age which has aborted so many hopes of private happiness and has divorced so many from family joys and fulfilling work - the anxiety, loneliness, envy, greed, lust and their evil consequences have been thought conquerable by better education, social arrangements and psychological or physical medicine. The wisdom of the cross, however, is that although the skills of politicians, scientists, social reformers, teachers, doctors and other benefactors of suffering humanity can reduce the problems, basically what is wrong in all history is the heart's inclination to evil. We can so easily be disastrously selfish and short-sighted as individuals and even more aggressive and destructive when herded together in societies. We are often glad to see people who are our moral superiors pulled down. And we love violence or at least are fascinated by its portrayal. We often twist religion itself so that it may justify our self-interest or our depraved passions. And the only answer that has any hope of being completely and permanently successful must come from God. Only if God forgives, only if he exercises his creative and sovereign power, only if he communicates his power so that people doomed by their own crimes and follies can break out of the trap, can there be a human prospect of ultimate victory. Precisely that is found when Jesus, abandoned by his followers, stripped of all his clothes and of all normal dignity, broken down publicly, cursed, is tortured to death by men who act on the orders of the local political and religious leadership. Calvary sees the supreme drama of evil's power - and of God's. When Jesus forgives, we see God forgiving the worst intensity of evil. When Jesus finishes his work, we see how God triumphs. So Jesus does for us sinners something which we cannot do for ourselves. And it is something more significant than anything else -however bad or good - in all history. All this is said by John Stott more effectively than I can say it and I need not expound it further.
Clearly the death of Jesus was a sacrifice in some sense.
Obviously he sacrificed his life in a way tragically familiar to us in the twentieth century, a period which has seen more lives laid down in the cause of patriotism, and also more Christian martyrdoms, than any previous century. And obviously Jesus and the first Christians would compare this self-sacrifice not only with the deaths of human martyrs but also with the sacrifices of the animals in the temple which dominated Jerusalem. The animals were killed in vast numbers because their owners wanted to prove the sincerity of their devotion to God. Deliberately these were costly sacrifices. In the early years after the death of Jesus his followers who like him were Jews, and who now lived in Jerusalem, continued to take part in the sacrificial worship in the temple. But within about forty years of his death the situation had changed radically. Not only was the temple destroyed by the Romans after a revolt which the Christians had refused to support, so that its sacrifices came to a permanent end. Both Jews and Christians ceased to sacrifice - Jews, because their religious law (Deuteronomy) forbade sacrifices outside the temple, and Christians, because the conviction grew that Jesus had already made the perfect and all-sufficient sacrifice (a conviction authoritatively expressed within the New Testament in the letter to the Hebrews). So Christian thinkers had to ask themselves: With which of the old sacrifices should the death of Jesus be compared? In 'pagan' or 'primitive' religion - which of course survived the events of the first Christian century and has been much studied by modem anthropologists and other scholars - sacrifices have been offered for a number of purposes, in order to bribe, feed, placate, thank, eat or simply have joyful communion with the god. Hebrew or Jewish sacrifices were no doubt offered for the same variety of purposes to begin with, and although great efforts were made to purge them of any ideas unworthy of the worship of Yahweh the God of Israel they remained actions with more than one motive. So what was the purpose of the sacrifice on Calvary?
I am particularly grateful that Dr Stott rejects theories which have been endorsed by many eminent teachers and preachers but which seem incompatible with the faith that God is love. Not only does he criticise all the theories I have already mentioned. He also attacks a theory which is still very much alive and which is still often thought to be the Evangelical doctrine. I need call only two witnesses to the content and the vigour of this theory. In her excellent short book on Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975, p. 11), a British theologian, Frances Young, pointed out that a common interpretation of the death of Christ runs something like this: 'God was angry with sinners. The Jews had tried to placate his anger by symbolically offering the lives of animals to him in place of their guilty selves. But this was inadequate and so Jesus offered a perfect sacrifice. He died as our substitute to appease God's anger.' Dr Young commented: 'With certain degrees of sophistication, this is the general picture one gets from listening to sermons or reading the majority of easily available books.' And in the 1984 Evangelical Dictionary of Theology the American contributor of the article on 'Evangelicalism', R. V. Pierard, wrote (p. 379):
God himself provided the way out of the human dilemma by allowing his only Son, Jesus Christ, to assume the penalty and experience death on man's behalf. . . Christ's substitutionary or vicarious atonement was a ransom for mankind's sins, a defeat of the powers of darkness, and a satisfaction for sin because it met the demand of God's justice.
In considerable contrast, Dr Stott teaches plainly that if Christ is pictured as 'intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation', or if God is thought of as punishing 'the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment', such presentations 'denigrate' the Father, who is seen as a 'pitiless ogre' (CoC, p. 150). 'We must not speak of God punishing Jesus,' he says (CoC, p. 151). 'Any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role - the guilty party, the punitive judge and the innocent victim - is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence' (CoC, p. 158). He protests against any idea that God is 'subordinate to something outside and above himself which controls his actions, to which he is accountable, and from which he cannot free himself' (CoC, p. 123). He insists that there is in God 'no change of mind or heart secured by Christ. On the contrary, the saving initiative originated in him' (CoC, p. 151). 'It cannot be emphasised too strongly that God's love is the source, not the consequence, of the atonement' (CoC, p. 174). And he says vigorously that God's love is suffering love. God is
the cosmic sadist who delights in making us squirm. It is this terrible caricature of God that the cross smashes to smithereens. We are not to envisage him on a deck-chair, but on a cross. The God who allows us to suffer, once suffered himself in Christ, and continues to suffer with us and for us today. (CoC, p. 329)
In so emphatically dissociating himself from some of the teachings of fathers of the Church such as John Chrysostom, of many medieval theologians, of the great Protestant Reformers (most notably Calvin), and of many Evangelical writers and preachers since the eighteenth century, Dr Stott is not alone among contemporary Evangelical leaders. I am aware that many Evangelicals simply repeat that 'by becoming our substitute, taking our place and dying our death, Jesus perfectly satisfied both the justice and the love of God' without adding the safeguards on which Dr Stott insists. (I have quoted from his own Presidential Address to the British Isles Conference of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship in 1982, published as Make the Truth Known.) But Dr Stott would not be trusted so widely by Evangelicals if many did not completely agree with him. In The Empty Cross of Jesus (1984) Michael Green, for example, says that 'God is not anywhere in the New Testament said to be reconciled to us by the death of Christ' (p. 82). 'Though the New Testament does speak of the cross as propitiation, it never says that Christ propitiated God the Father. Though the New Testament does speak of Christ's bearing our sins, it does not call this, as Calvin does, "the penalty which we had incurred" or "the price of satisfaction to the just judgement of God". Indeed, the New Testament does not use the word punishment, kolasis, of the death of Christ. Though the New Testament is strong on the wrath of God, it does not apply the verb orgizomai, "be wrathful", to God, and certainly does not go so far as Calvin did in saying "God in his character as Judge is hostile to us". Nor does the New Testament talk of the "merits" of Christ being put to our account (p. 65). Ά great deal of harm has been done by teaching that God is a wrathful Judge, determined to punish somebody, who takes it out of Jesus rather than us' (p. 78).
These are all highly significant corrections to much traditional teaching. They deserve very close and widespread study.
But John Stott also rejects ('respectful') the explanation of the cross given by (for example) the British Student Christian Movement in its 'Aim and Basis' in 1919. 'It is only when we see on Calvary the price of suffering paid day by day by God himself for all human sin', the SCM then declared, 'that we can enter into the experience of true penitence and forgiveness, which sets us free to embark on a wholly new way of life.' Seventy years or so ago, it was claimed excessively that 'this is the meaning of the atonement'. Dr Stott rightly denies that this can be the one and only meaning - and he lays his finger on its defect. The meaning of the atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, he says, 'but rather in what God did' (CoC, p. 9). So what did God do?
Providing his own summary of The Cross of Christ in his Preface, Dr Stott states that 'Evangelical Christians believe that in and through Christ crucified God substituted himself for us and bore our sins, dying in our place the death we deserved to die, in order that we might be restored to his favour and adopted into his family' (CoC, p. 7). And another Evangelical leader, Jim Packer, is quoted as having 'rightly written that this belief “is a distinguishing mark of the world-wide evangelical fraternity"' since 'it takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel' (CoC, p. 7). Dr Packer's teaching is set out in chapter 18 of his book, Knowing God. The chapter is called 'The Heart of the Gospel'.
The Heart of the Gospel?
This restatement of Evangelical belief seems to me a great improvement both on the theory that 'God punished Jesus' and on the theory that what matters is our response. How right Dr Stott is to say that this is God's action, God's cross in our world, the cross on which the Father loves and suffers in the love and the suffering of the Son! But my question is whether even this improvement is 'the' meaning of the atonement, to the exclusion of all other attempts to explain the self-sacrifice of Christ.
One reason why I ask is that, like Dr Stott himself, I am sure that 'a full-scale atonement doctrine' is missing from 'the apostolic preaching' (CoC, p. 34). Dr Stott wisely says that 'beyond the images of the atonement lies the mystery of the atonement, the deep wonders of which, I guess, we shall be exploring throughout eternity' (CoC, p. 168). What takes place on Calvary is nothing less than the supreme meeting between God in his holiness and man in his sin. No possible formula in human words could be an adequate account.
Teachers of the Church all seeking to be loyal expositors of the New Testament have reached no complete agreement, for the situation in the New Testament is accurately described by Frances Young: 'We find no rationale or explanation of how Christ's blood could purify sin, nor was an explanation sought after' {Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, p. 73). At the end of the most sublime and most sustained piece of theology that he ever wrote, the greatest of all Christian theologians exclaimed to the Romans (11:33-34):
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counsellor?
No council of the undivided Church stated 'the' Catholic, orthodox doctrine of the atonement. None of the fathers of the early Church wrote a book on the subject that we know about; we have no ancient equivalent of Dr Stott's The Cross of Christ. The nearest equivalent was written by Athanasius in about 315, but it contains no full theory of the atonement and is traditionally referred to as a book on The Incarnation of the Word. Athanasius taught that the law of God was that all men, having sinned in and since Adam, must die. The power of this law was 'fully spent in the Lord's bod/, but he did not explain this in any detail. He freely referred to the fragments of other explanations outlined in the New Testament, as when he declared that
the Word of the Father was both able to re-create everything and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be ambassador for all with the Father... He offered his sacrifice on behalf of all, yielding his temple to death in the place of all, in order firstly to make men quit and free of their own trespass and further to show himself more powerful even than death, displaying his own body incorruptible as first fruits of the resurrection of all.
Yet in spite of the richness of this collection of theories, he reached no clear conclusion: 'it is better not to aim at speaking of the whole where one cannot do justice even to a part' (7,20,54).
About the truth that the atonement achieved by Christ's self-sacrifice is a mystery which should not be reduced to a formula, all thoughtful Christians are at one. But it is of course tempting for convinced Christians to express their convictions in a manner which may suggest that they have temporarily forgotten that all theories including their own must be inadequate. Conscious of my own temptations, I ask whether Dr Stott has always resisted his.
Another reason why I question the adequacy of his teaching is that the theory which he expounds is not one which is the plain teaching of the Bible as the Bible can be read by the plain man. I regret that in The Cross of Christ Dr Stott, who has been found by many to be a warmly sympathetic pastor, shows little sympathy with attempts to communicate at least something of what the Bible does say to the many people who would find his own theory difficult and even unintelligible. There are passages in this book which I find hard to reconcile with his approach at, for example, the National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Nottingham in 1977. In his Evangelicals Tomorrow (1977, p. 40), John Capon recorded that Dr Stott caused some alarm among conservatives. 'Although in himself Christ does not and could not change, we change and the world changes; and therefore the Christ whom we perceive and whom the world needs is bound to change also.' Questioned about this statement which he admitted was phrased 'slightly loosely7, he explained: 'In my own ministry I tend to present Christ as Liberator or as one in whom authentic love and humanness are found. Both these understandings of Christ are a response to the current age.' There speaks, as we should expect, the voice of a Christian who wants to communicate.
In The Cross of Christ, however, the tone sometimes seems harsher. He says that to honour Jesus as teacher instead of as Lord is to honour him 'for the wrong reason' (CoC, p. 51); that Jesus 'did not die as a martyr' (CoC, p. 60); that 'it is not only anomalous, but actually impossible, to associate our sacrifices with his, or even to think of asking him to draw ours up into his' (CoC, p. 271); that the message that the Holy Spirit can bring 'into focus in Jesus Christ a shape already glimpsed in human experience' - the shape of pain and joy, suffering and security, betrayal and love, winter and spring - 'is not the gospel of the New Testament' (CoC, p. 325). And I have to say that when he writes in this dismissive manner he is being more 'biblical' than the Bible - an extraordinary charge for a liberal like me to make, as I admit.
'Teacher' is an inadequate title for Jesus but Dr Stott has himself observed that it expresses a 'fundamental reality' (CtC, p. 209). 'Martyr' is also not enough, but 'greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends' (John 15:13). A scholarly introduction to Pauline Christianity, by John Ziesler (1983), notes that while Paul 'never says that the cross was necessary to turn away God's anger' it is increasingly being suggested that what he did say 'owed a good deal ... to the idea of the righteous martyr whose death was believed to have a cleansing effect.' And 'Paul's major contribution to the theology of the cross and resurrection is that believers participate in them' (pp. 88-90). Paul wrote to the Philippians about 'the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings' (3:10) and the letter to the Colossians even includes the bold idea that something was lacking in the sufferings of Christ which Christians can 'fill up' (1:24). The first letter of Peter tells Christians to 'rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ' (4:13). And some 'fellowship' with him, however limited, can surely be experienced by non-Christians. John, the most exclusive of all the early Christian theologians, was sure that 'the true light. . . gives light to every man' (1:9), while Acts presents Paul as building on pagan knowledge or half-knowledge of that light, in his speech in Athens (17:16-31). Indeed, unless the Holy Spirit can bring into focus 'a shape already glimpsed' outside the Bible and the Church, no appeal to common ground is possible and therefore no evangelism can be persuasive.
I find it sad that in The Cross of Christ so little attention is given to those who want, as a preliminary to a convincing account of the work of Christ, some serious reckoning with scientific and historical knowledge of the human situation. It seems to be a vital part of Dr Stott's theory that 'Jesus Christ, who being sinless had no need to die, died our death, the death our sins had deserved' (CoC, p. 65). This idea, we are told, follows from the view taken in 'the Bible everywhere' that death is not a natural but a penal event, not part of God's 'original intention for humankind . . . God seems to have intended for his human image-bearers a more noble end, akin perhaps to the "translation" which Enoch and Elijah experienced, and to the "transformation" which will take place in those who are alive when Jesus comes' (CoC, p. 65). The doctrine that 'the wages of sin is death' because of Adam's fall was certainly held and taught by Paul (Romans 5:12-14; 6:23) and by many of his Jewish contemporaries. And there were many roughly similar doctrines in this field. Although no mention is made of Adam, the book called The Wisdom of Solomon (probably written by an Alexandrian Jew in the first century bc) declares that 'God created man for immortality, and made him the image of his own eternal self; it was the devil's spite that brought death into the world, and the experience of it is reserved for those who take his side' (Wisdom 2:23-24 neb). But the implication there seems to be that the devil caused those on his side to die eternally, while the righteous only seem to die when they die physically. We are told that 'the souls of the just are in God's hand' although 'in the eyes of foolish men they seemed to be dead' (3:1-2). This passage illustrates the variety of meanings which could be given by Jews of Paul's time to the idea that the devil introduces death. The less precise cluster of thoughts that everyone is a sinner, that everyone dies, and that everyone deserves to die in God's sight, was widespread. But the direct link between Adam's fall and all humanity's physical or spiritual deaths is rare. It is not included in the recorded teaching of Jesus and it occurs only once in the Old Testament, in the story of God's curse in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:19).
In Genesis (chapter 5) it is said that Adam lived 930 years and that even Enoch, whom God 'took away', was 365 years old - which scarcely suggests a consistent tradition that the patriarchs' lives were cut short. Indeed, the reduction of the human lifespan to a mere 120 years is said in Genesis to have been punishment for intercourse between bad angels and the beautiful daughters of men (6:1-4). And even within the story of Adam and Eve there are traces of a variety of traditions. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil' (2:17) is, as the commentaries show, a tree in whose branches many theorists have built their nests. Probably it is a symbol of the end of innocence with the knowledge of the difference between good and evil. If so, it seems to be implied that the previous obedience to God's command not to touch it was automatic rather than saintly, because 'good' and 'evil' were alike unknown. One consequence of eating this forbidden fruit is the knowledge of good and evil in sexuality-which maybe regarded as moral progress rather than as 'the fall'. (If Adam and Eve had had children through shameless sex, would it have been God's will for the sex lives of their children to be shameless? Would incest, for example, have been approved?) And the punishment decreed for the trespass is not only death understood as a return to 'dust' but also a variety of phenomena - the facts that snakes crawl on their bellies and are sometimes poisonous, their appearance of eating dust, pain in childbirth, female heterosexuality, male dominance, the painful toil of tilling the fields in order to eat. But I understand that not many 'Bible believers' have recently blamed all these phenomena on Adam and Eve.
Most people who are able to put such stories in the context of other ancient literature think it obvious that the sagas of Adam and Enoch are mythological and should not be relied on as accurate history. Why, then, should we not be at liberty to regard the whole notion of death as a punishment either for Adam's fall, or for sin in general, as one tradition in the developing Jewish culture which Paul inherited and used but which is not compulsory for us? Dr Stott can write that 'God himself' spoke to the serpent in the garden of Eden (CoC, p. 231) and forbade Noah to eat meat with the blood still in it (CoC, p. 138), but he may not intend these references to mean more than that he is quoting these Hebrew myths. Certainly many Christians are amongthose who do not want any account of the human situation to depend on taking ancient myths as straightforward history. The fossil record indicates that predation and death existed in the animal kingdom before the creation of man/ as Dr Stott notes (CoC, p. 65), and we have no sound reason to believe that death has been anything other than natural since man's emergence in evolution. All biology says that life is impossible without it. This is 'the way of aU the earth' (1 Kings 2:2). It must therefore seem unlikely that Jesus was punished on the cross by being deprived of his exemption from the human lot of death.
However, we can readily understand why the fact that to be human is to be mortal is so often regarded as a tragedy; why Paul's first letter to Corinth proclaims the vision that 'the last enemy to be destroyed is death' (15:26). Death's ignoble reality is obviously alien to man's hopes, specially when it comes painfully or by violence or accident, or by a disease which strikes an innocent person who is not old. None of us needs to be told that. This profound and universal emotion rebelling against the dominion of death has been the theme of poetry without end. It was expressed in the great Genesis myth associating mortality with alienation from the Creator and from paradise. Indeed, because death is so commonly dreaded and hated, as something always inescapable but often evil, in the Bible as in all other records which reflect human experience, it is startling to read in The Cross of Christ, without discussion, that throughout Egypt before the exodus of Israel the first-born son in each house was spared by God 'only if a lamb was slain in its place' (CoC, p. 72).
I can see why Dr Stott takes that story (Exodus 12:29-31) literally. Not only does he wish, in principle, to treat historical statements in the Old Testament as factual. He is also, of course, acutely aware of the 'Lamb of God' passages in the New Testament. John's gospel gives us the famous exclamation by the Baptist about Jesus: 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!' (1:29). There are twenty-six references to Jesus as 'the Lamb' in the Revelation of John. Jesus was crucified at Passover time; the Last Supper was in some sense a Passover meal; the exodus of Israel from Egypt was recalled very solemnly at Passover when a lamb was eaten; and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus have often been compared with the exodus. Paul's first letter to Corinth, for example, announced that 'Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed' (5:7). In his own recorded teaching, however, Jesus never spoke of himself as the Lamb and no mention of eating a lamb is included in any narrative of the Last Supper although almost certainly one was the centrepiece of the meal. If we are to go by the recorded self-understanding of Jesus, we have no need to insist that he was slain like a lamb in order to avert God's wrath. And if we are to accept the picture of God given in the teaching of Jesus, we have no right to assert that God really killed all the first-born sons throughout Egypt except where he saw that a lamb had been killed. The God who is proclaimed by the Bible taken as a whole is not a God who is a butcher like Pharaoh (who orders all Hebrew boys to be thrown into the Nile immediately after birth at Exodus 1:22), or like Herod, who arouses horror because he massacres the male infants of just one village (Matthew 2:16-18). He is the God of mercy, the God who can be heard to bless 'Egypt my people' (Isaiah 19:25).
In The Cross of Christ John Stott insists that as he was dying Jesus was 'absolutely alone, being now also Godforsaken', for
... an actual and dreadful separation took place between the Father and the Son; it was voluntarily accepted by both the Father and the Son; it was due to our sins and their just reward; and Jesus expressed this horror of great darkness, this Godforsakenness, by quoting the only verse of Scripture which accurately described it, and which he had perfectly fulfilled, namely, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'. (CoC, p. 81)
Basic Christianity tells us that 'God turned away his face. . . Our sins sent Christ to hell. He tasted the torment of a soul estranged from God' (BC1, p. 93). Accordingly Dr Stott rejects explanations of that quotation of Psalm 22:1 which to him are not 'simple and straightforward'. We are told that it cannot have been a cry of anger, unbelief or despair by one who imagined that he was forsaken when actually he was not. To suggest that is 'denying the moral perfection of the character of Jesus'. It cannot have been a cry of loneliness, for 'the words of Psalm 22:1 express an expression of being, and not just feeling, God-forsaken'. And it is 'far-fetched' to interpret it as a cry of victory. Admittedly Psalm 22 does end with 'great confidence, and even triumph' - but 'why should Jesus have quoted from the Psalm's beginning if in reality he was alluding to its end?' So Dr Stott asks, being convinced that the Father abandoned the Son.
I am one of the innumerable Bible students and preachers who have found it difficult to expound - or to understand -the meaning of these terrible words. But I want to plead that John Stott's explanation is not the only one that is possible. I do not think that Jesus was 'in hell' in the sense indicated when it is said that God had turned away his face from him, for I do not believe that the God revealed by Jesus would keep anyone 'in hell' who cried to him not with a curse but with a prayer: 'My God, my God . . .' And I do not think that devout Christians need reject the idea that Jesus felt emotions which were somewhat like the fears which many people have when approaching death, particularly death in agony and defeat. Dr Stott, commenting on the anguish of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, is convinced that the cup from which he shrank was 'the spiritual agony of enduring the divine judgement which the sins of the world deserved'. He finds it 'ludicrous to suppose that he was now afraid of pain, insult and death' (CoC, pp. 74-6). He refers to Socrates, who died 'without fear, sorrow or protest', and to the Christian martyrs for whom pain and rejection were 'a joy and a privilege, not an ordeal to be shrunk from in dismay'. He asks: 'So was Socrates braver than Jesus?' Here is loyalty to Jesus, but if I may say so it seems to be misplaced. Dr Stott himself quotes Samuel Johnson: 'No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension' (CoC, p. 243). There is much evidence that many Christians have felt anger, unbelief, despair, utter loneliness and panic when suffering acutely and when about to die. It seems possible that the historical Socrates did; the account of his death to which Dr Stott refers is a piece of fine literature by Plato, a disciple more interested in philosophy than in history. So far as we know, however, most martyrs and other Christians under great stress have conquered their fears (as Dr Johnson finally did), relying on God's grace received through prayer. The author of Psalm 22 did - and Jesus, although he quoted only the first verse of that psalm, prayed to 'my God, my God'. He felt forsaken by the Father - but whether he really was forsaken, he did not know at that moment. Deliberately identifying himself with a psalmist, he entered fully the human darkness.
The cry of dereliction is nowhere explained in the New Testament. The earliest of the gospels gives it as the only cry from the cross, the last words from the central figure in the gospel about 'Jesus Christ, the Son of God' (Mark 1:1) -and the reader is not offered an explanation why the centurion who 'heard his cry and saw how he died' said: 'Surely this man was the Son of God!' (15:39). It may be that many of the early Christians refused even to attempt to explain the mystery of the death of Christ, 'because they were afraid' (Mark 16:8). But presumably the writer to the Hebrews had Gethsemane in mind, if not this cry from the cross, when he taught that 'during the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered' (5:7-8). And since on the cross Jesus was supremely obedient, the simple and straightforward conclusion from what the New Testament as a whole says about God is that Jesus when dying in agony because he did the Father's will was not forsaken by the Father. In the seventeenth century Blaise Pascal absorbed part of the truth of Calvary when in his distress he heard the silent voice of God: 'Be comforted. You would not seek me if you had not already found me.' Hans Kiing seems to me to sum up the thinking - and, far more important, the experience - of countless Christians when he writes: 'Suffering too is encompassed by God; suffering too, even though it seems like being forsaken by God, can become the point of encounter with God. The believer knows no way to avoid suffering, but he knows a way through it' (On Being a Christian, in English 1978, p. 434).
Of course I believe that it is not enough to say that Jesus was a man who in his agony felt God-forsaken. I am one of those who believe that the divine 'Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us' (John 1:14). That is why I believe that the cross of Jesus shows the suffering love of the Father. But I am also one of those who are extremely hesitant when offered speculations about the relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit, a subject beyond human understanding, and I console myself with the fact that the New Testament itself is very reticent. As Dr Stott observes, for the practical purposes of the average Christian who is not a speculative theologian
it would be wiser... to say what the New Testament authors said, faithfully echoed by the Apostles' Creed, namely that he who 'was conceived by the Holy Spirit, bom of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and was buried' was not 'God', still less the Father, but 'Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord'. (CoC, p. 156)
So I ask whether it is 'the' necessary meaning of the atonement that 'in and through Christ crucified God substituted himself for us and bore our sins' and 'took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us' (CoC, p. 175). What do the Scriptures say? I cannot find Dr Stott's theory taught plainly anywhere in them. If it is 'the heart of gospel', is it not extremely strange that it is not mentioned in any of the gospels?
Mark (10:45) gives a saying of Jesus: 'For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom [in Greek lutron] for many.' Scholars are generally agreed that 'for many7 (in Greek anti pollon was a Jewish way of saying 'for all'. In the New Testament the death of Christ is elsewhere referred to as being 'on behalf of' (in Greek huper) and not 'instead of (in Greek anti) sinners, so that this teaching which means that Jesus must die 'instead of all' is specially significant. 'Ransom' is not always used in the Bible to refer to the payment of a price. The Lord did not pay Pharaoh a price when he 'ransomed' Israel from Egypt (Exodus 6:6) and no price is expected when a new exodus is predicted (Isaiah 35:9; 41:14; 43:1, 14). When Luke's gospel speaks about the ransoming of Israel by Jesus (1:68; 2:38; 24:21), probably 'liberation' is intended in a general sense. But I accept the conclusion of most scholars that at Mark 10:45 (as at 1 Timothy 2:6; Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 1:18) the price of a death is implied, as a substitute for the continuing imprisonment or enslavement of 'many'. That is not a difficult idea, provided that we do not ask to whom the payment was due. In the world of Jesus and his early followers the freedom of slaves or captives was often purchased either by themselves or by well-wishers. Jewish literature then of recent date referred to the Maccabean martyrs' lives being 'ransoms' for others. Greek and Roman literature said much the same about the martyrdoms of other heroes who died 'for' their cities or families. But the ransom idea is not developed by Mark or in any other gospel. In this passage it is given as the explanation of a practical command: 'Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant7 (10:43). No doubt Mark regarded the value of the ransom paid by Jesus in his death as utterly unique, but in the same passage he reported Jesus as saying to James and John: 'You will drink the cup I drink' (10:39). The implication seems to be clear.
This is the cup of human suffering, known to indude a martyr's death in the case of James. The suffering which the followers of Jesus must undergo is not wholly unlike the cross of their Lord. As Paul reminded the Corinthians in his second letter, 'the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives' (1:5).
So Jesus drank his cup of suffering and death in order that 'man/ or all might go free. It was literally true at once, for the execution of Jesus was reckoned to be enough by Pontius Pilate and none of the disciples was killed or, we are told, even arrested. The spiritual meaning is also obvious and no Christian who feels liberated by Jesus can be surprised that words which include the idea of a ransom (for example, Paul's word a 'redemption') are used nine times in the New Testament. But the idea is of limited relevance to the cross of Christ and Dr Stott seems to acknowledge this limitation when he makes the valid and very important point that 'the New Testament never presses the imagery to the point of indicating to whom the ransom is paid' (CoC, p. 179). Christian theologians ought never to have taught that the ransom was paid either to the devil or to God. That cannot be the meaning of Christ's self-sacrifice.
Mark also tells us that at his last supper with his disciples Jesus took the cup and said: 'This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for man/ (14:24). The background in the Hebrew Scriptures is further hinted at when Jesus is said to have declared that 'the Son of Man will go just as it is written about him' (Mark 14:21). Paul's first letter to Corinth, which is earlier, gives fewer words: 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood' (11:25). But Matthew's gospel slightly expands Mark's: 'This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins' (26:28). Matthew is here attributing to Jesus the only saying in the gospels which directly connects the death of Jesus with the forgiveness of sins. Many scholars, noticing these differences, believe that some (at least) of these words do not exactly record what Jesus said but reflect the Church's thought about what he did. I share this belief but see no good reason why the historical Jesus should not have regarded his life, culminating in his death and vindication, as the inauguration of a new covenant or agreement between God and his people, making them 'at one' again, as prophesied by Jeremiah (31:31-34). Nor would there be anything strange in the belief that Jesus could not accomplish his reconciling work without sacrificing his life. That self-sacrifice could be compared with the sacrifice of young bulls killed by the young men on behalf of Moses at the inauguration of an earlier covenant (Exodus 24). But these passages do not explain why the sacrifice was necessary and why the blood had to be shed. Here is no theory of the atonement.
Those who regard the cross as the payment of a penalty due to God or the acceptance of a punishment by God -either in the senses which Dr Stott rejects, or in the way which he expounds - are right to ask the rest of us to consider seriously the Song of the Suffering Servant in the book of Isaiah (52:13-53:12).
This passage is often quoted in the New Testament outside the gospels, although not every reference to God's 'servant' need refer to this particular passage, and it is almost certain that it was the main Scripture in the minds of those who formulated the gospel which Paul repeated in his first letter to Corinth. 'What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures . . .' (15:3). The Song of the Suffering Servant says that this 'man of sorrows' who was (it does not lie in the future) despised, rejected, pierced and killed 'poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors' (Isaiah 53:12). Almost certainly this passage was in the minds of Mark and Matthew as they reported the tradition that Jesus said at his last supper that his life was to be 'poured out for many'. I see no good reason why it should not have been in the mind of Jesus. But it does not seem to follow that the passage in its entirety was central to his self-understanding. On the contrary, 'we can say with confidence that it appears only on the margin of the synoptic tradition' - or so C. K. Barrett declared (Jesus and the Gospel Tradition, 1967, p. 41).
Jesus seems to have referred to himself as the Son of Man, not as the Servant of the Lord (which seems to have been an early Christian title for him, as in Acts 3:13; 4:30). His recorded teaching includes only one direct quotation from the Song of the Servant. 'He was numbered with the transgressors' is quoted in Luke's gospel (22:37) in comment on the carrying of swords by the disciples, but Luke does not quote 'poured out for man' in his account of the Last Supper. Luke also does not say 'a ransom for many' in his equivalent of Mark 10:45; and in his account of the study of the Song of the Suffering Servant by the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:32-33 he does not quote any of the verses about an atoning sacrifice. If Jesus was reserved in his use of the Song, the explanation is not difficult. An intensely moving poem, inspired by deep emotion about deep suffering, it is the clearest vision in the Hebrew Scriptures of the way of the cross, through suffering to glory. It begins from the fact of a martyrdom. Because innocent martyrs sacrificed their lives they were often regarded in the ancient world, Jewish or Gentile, as 'making atonement' for the sins of others, turning away the wrath of God or the gods. The Song says that the servant of the Lord 'was led like a lamb to the slaughter' (Isaiah 53:7); that 'the Lord has laid on him the inquity of us all' (verse 6); that 'it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer' (verse 10); that 'the Lord makes his life a guilt offering' (verse 10). It is not clear, however, whether this suffering servant is an anonymous individual or is the embodiment of the sufferings of the Jewish people. Nor is it clear what will reward this sacrifice. 'He will sprinkle many nations' (52:15) is a translation now generally abandoned by scholars. 'He will see his offspring and prolong his days' (53:10) is hard to interpret since the servant was killed. That he will be given 'a portion among the great' (53:12) is modest. The people who sing this Song are converted as they see the servant's reward after his suffering, but no systematic theology is worked out there or in any Jewish comment on the poetry. And it is hard to see how all the ideas in the Song could be pursued systematically without damaging the highest ideas about God taught in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew consonantal text of verse 10 reads: 'Yahweh was pleased to crush him the sickness.' Already when the Greek translation (the Septuagint) was made, devout Jews felt morally compelled to translate this as: 'The Lord was pleased to cleanse him from sickness.' Nor is this the only difficulty in making calm, rational and moral 'sense' of the turbulent poetry. That the Song of the Suffering Servant has often seemed mysterious is attested by the number of places where the text is a problem, suggesting that copyists made well-intentioned corrections. There is a large literature commenting on the many obscurities and M. D. Hooker's Jesus and the Servant (1959) pointed out the New Testament problems.
In the rest of the New Testament we find definite or possible references to the Song but these do not necessarily mean that every word in that passage is taken literally and applied to Jesus. In his gospel, when Matthew has reported that Jesus healed all the sick he quotes from the Song, 'he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases' (8:17). But he does not mean that Jesus was infirm or diseased; he is speaking poetically about a general identification with the sick. Daring new thoughts are mentioned, rather than developed systematically, as Christians meditated on the horror of the death which their Lord had accepted for their sakes. Thus Paul told the Galatians (3:13) that Christ became a 'curse' on our behalf, quoting Deuteronomy 21:23 ('anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse'). His second letter to Corinth (5:21) said that 'God made him who had no sin to be sin for us'. However, he did not pause to explain what he meant by such startling expressions. The most likely explanation seems to be that he marvelled that Christ so identified himself with sinful humanity that he consented to be executed as if he had been an accursed sinner. But as D. E. H. Whiteley judiciously observed in his text book on The Theology of St Paul (1974, p. 136), 'it is too easy to read this verse in the light of whatever theory we may hold'.
A Greek noun for which the traditional English translation was 'propitiation' ( hilasterion) was used about Christ's sacrifice in Paul's letter to the Romans (3:25). The corresponding verb (1hilaskesthai) comes in the letter to Hebrews (2:17). A closely similar noun (hilasmos) was used twice in the first letter of John (2:2; 4:10). Such nouns may mean no more than 'place' or 'means' of atonement, since in the only other use of hilasterion in the New Testament the word clearly refers not to any particular sacrifice but to the 'mercy seat', the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, on which sacrifices were offered in the Jerusalem temple (Hebrews 9:5). The verb may mean 'to expiate' - that is to deal with sin, to wipe out its guilt and to remove its pollution, not necessarily 'to propitiate', which means 'to appease God'. But these words probably would have reminded those being addressed of the propitiatory sacrifices which, it was hoped, removed the divine wrath, for such sacrifices were familiar to pagans and (to a much lesser extent) to Jews. I acknowledge the truth of this point made by Dr Leon Morris among others. However, 'propitiation' is related to Christ only once by Paul and only by very brief references in two other documents. That seems significant because the word is dangerous. It can suggest that the anger of God can be ended, or his justice influenced, by the gift of an animal or a human being whether or not there is a repentance for sin. As Dr Stott stresses, in the Old Testament the sacrifices were not thought of as magically compelling God to forgive. They 'did not make God gracious; they were provided by a gracious God in order that he might act graciously towards a sinful people. And this truth is yet more plainly recognised in the New Testament (CoC, p. 174). It is in order to guard against the danger of a less than biblical view of God that Dr Stott so emphatically teaches that the sacrifice of Calvary was not only provided but actually made by the Father. If this sacrifice is thought to propitiate the wrath of the Father who is often referred to simply as 'God', Christians have to guard against some highly misleading ideas.
The letter to Hebrews - the New Testament document which is fullest on the idea of sacrifice - never says that the sacrifice of Calvary is made by God in order to propitiate his own wrath. Its teaching is that the Son of God, although 'the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being' (1:3), was a man, 'not ashamed to call [men] brothers' (2:11). Summoned by God, he became 'a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God', in order that 'he might make atonement for the sins of the people' (2:17). 'He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself' (7:27) and his blood will 'cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God' (9:14). He 'died as a ransom to set them free from sins committed under the first covenant (9:15). He is thought of as saying to God: 'a body you prepared for me . . . Here I am ... I have come to do your will' (10:5,7 - which is a quotation from the Greek version of Psalm 40). The teaching is that men's consciences and actions needed to be cleansed and changed - exactly how is not said. Here the author is deficient in comparison with Paul. He is so unclear about the nature of God's forgiveness that in chapter 6 he advances a theory, which the Church rejected, that sins after baptism cannot be forgiven. He dwells on the Day of Atonement because then the Jewish high priest purified the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, in the temple by sprinkling the blood of the sacrificed goat, but he does not mention the other goat in this ritual, the scapegoat. This was driven away into the wilderness, being thought to 'bear' the sins of the people committed during the past year, and it was compared with Christ in the second-century letter of Barnabas and in much subsequent theology and devotion. The important point for us at the moment is that in the letter to Hebrews there is no full atonement theory. It is never mentioned that God's wrath needed to be satisfied or that God himself made the propitiatory sacrifice. What is affirmed is that God's will needed to be done. It was done by the Son of God who as a man had 'learned' perfect obedience. He, the perfect high priest, provided the perfect sacrifice. And in this letter, the idea of 'sacrifice' seems to remain as richly varied in meaning as it is in the Old Testament itself.
Is Dr Stott's theory necessarily implied in the first letter of Peter when in a possible translation (in the New International Version, for example) it is said that Christ 'bore our sins in his body on the tree' (2:24)? In the Old Testament, as Dr Stott points out, 'to "bear sin" means specifically to endure its penal consequences, to undergo its penalty' (CoC, p. 143). He is also right to note in this passage a reference to the Song of the Suffering Servant ('by his wounds you have been healed'). But the passage may also be translated 'he carried our sins to the gibbet' (as in the New English Bible) - and as Dr Stott observes, 'the references to the cross in Peter's first epistle are asides' since here again the concern is 'more ethical than doctrinal' (BC1, p. 87). The emphasis is, indeed, that Christ suffered, 'leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. . . so that we might die to sins and live to righteousness' (2:21,24). Certainly there is a comparison between Christ's death and the sacrifices in the temple. Sinners were 'redeemed from the empty way of life . . . with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect' (1:18-19). But these asides may well mean no more than that Christ was killed as if he had been a sinner. Certainly when this letter says that 'Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God' (3:18), it does not add that in consequence 'we enjoy the righteous status which God has conferred on us' - which is for Dr Stott 'the true meaning of justification (CoC, p. 185). It says that 'God's elect' are 'shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time' (1:1,5). It says, 'you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially' (1:17). It urges, 'above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins' (4:8). It warns, 'it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God' (4:17). So this letter does not teach the theory that Christians can be forgiven because Christ, or God himself, has already endured the just penalty of sin.
The idea of the wrath of God - or 'the wrath', not explicitly stating its divine origin - is biblical. We are told that it can be found in the Old Testament more than 580 times. It is also found in the teaching of Jesus, although the idea is not expounded systematically; it is expressed by pictures of human anger in the parables and by very solemn warnings to repent. An unforgettable example is: 'Fear him who, after killing the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him' (Luke 12:5). But in his teaching Jesus does not clearly promise that God's wrath will be appeased by his death. His parables leave the warning without detailed explanation. An example is the parable about the unmerciful servant: 'In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart' (Matthew 18:34-5). Here no explanation is offered about how the servant can be expected to accumulate a fortune in order to repay his debt while being tortured in prison. The torture is a touch in the story-teller's art.
In the third century the great theologian Origen devoted a great deal of attention to the purification of this idea in the light of Christ and since then many similar efforts have seemed necessary. For generation after generation of thoughtful Christians it has been vital to 'consider . . . the kindness and sternness of God' (Romans 11:22) - and to remember that the sternness arises out of the kindness, as it usually does in a human parent. As Dr Stott repeatedly stresses, God's love, not his anger, must be the controlling idea. It is characteristic of the New Testament that the first letter of John mentions 'propitiation' in the context of a great emphasis on God's love (4:10). And it deserves notice that in John's gospel the Greek words translated as 'forgiveness' and 'forgive' do not occur except in the promise to the apostles that 'if you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven' (20:23) - so little is John preoccupied by the need to find forgiveness in order to escape wrath.
Some theologians (C. H. Dodd was among them) have sought to reduce the dangers in the idea of the wrath of God. They have explained that the 'wrath' is not God's personal anger but a more mechanical process, the inevitable and inescapable working out of the consequences of sin. Up to a point, this seems a helpful explanation - for the tragic consequences of human choices of evil must often be taken very seriously indeed, while the picture of an angry God can be ridiculed. The process by which evil steadily leads to disaster surely is impersonal. But Dr Stott is, I believe, right to teach that the 'wrath of the Lamb' (Revelation 6:16) is also personal. For God deals with sin personally. Countless sinners have felt that God's forgiveness of that sin is personal. They would say, too, that his condemnation of it is personal. For they have felt that sin is a personal affront to God, as in Psalm 51:4 -
Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.
There is an element of truth in the dangerous idea of personally appeasing the personal 'wrath of God'. This can be learned by the bitter experience of a disrupted human relationship. A lover, husband, wife, parent, child or friend may grieve that a very precious relationship has been broken by someone else and may be unable to restore the relationship unless that person removes the barrier by admitting what was wrong - for a relationship is a two-way traffic. No doubt every human being is up to a point in the wrong, so that one sinner should never condemn another; but there remains a difference between right and wrong.
One person may be more in the wrong than another; that person may guiltily know it deep down; that person may hold up the traffic of the relationship until the fault is acknowledged; and if the acknowledgement is ever made, that guilty person may rightly think of it as pleasing or even 'appeasing' or 'satisfying' the one who has been wronged. If this can be true of a human relationship between two sinners, how much more may a repentant sinner feel that it is true of a relationship with the God who is 'holy, holy, holy'! A deeply penitent sinner knows what the New Testament is talking about, as when the letter to the Colossians says: 'Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight' (1:21-2). Our hostility to God was such that we thought he was our enemy and we could not see that he was our friend, until the dying Christ reconciled us to his Father. This profound experience is at the heart of Evangelicalism as of many other forms of Christianity. Out of it Dr Stott wrote The Cross of Christ. I want to make it completely clear that I am not disputing his right to express his experience in his own way. What I am respectfully questioning is his right to claim that he has expressed the 'heart of the gospel' which all his fellow-Christians ought to believe.
But I am aware that I have not yet reached the heart of The Cross of Christ, for as I understand it the heart is Dr Stott's conviction that the doctrine which he expounds is the teaching of Paul, which authoritatively expounds the significance of Jesus. And I also acknowledge that in his doctrine there are elements of Pauline thought. The scholars who have argued this are neither incompetent nor dishonest. But the plea which I shall submit is that the doctrine is not taught with anything like the clarity and centrality which would be necessary in order to make it compulsory for Christians.
Paul, unlike Jesus, was a professional theologian. Yet even he never explained exactly how God's wrath was ended: for him as for his Lord, the important question was spiritual and ethical, not theological. His use of hilasterion comes without discussion in a passage which has rightly been called 'one of the most obscure and difficult in the whole epistle' (Ernst Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, in English, 1980, p. 92), but the main thrust of his letter to the Romans (1:18-5:19) is clearer:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity. . . Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath . . . No-one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law . . . But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!. . . Through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
It is not said that God has satisfied his own wrath. What is said is that we 'will be saved' in the future and have already been declared righteous ('justified') by the fact that Christ died for us 'while we were yet sinners', thus demonstrating God's love for us. What interested Paul was not how to understand, but how to escape, the wrath of God.
He tells the Romans that God presented Jesus as a hilasterion in order 'to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished' (3:25). In its context this is a celebration of the mercy in God's justice, which already before the life and death of Jesus has left all the sins of the human race 'unpunished' although there has been 'no-one righteous, not even one' (3:10). Another celebration bursts out when Paul says that God sent his Son to deal with sin when the Law of Moses had failed. 'To be a sin offering' is a possible translation of Romans 8:3, as in the New International Version, but the New English Bible's vaguer 'as a sacrifice for sin' more accurately reflects the Greek. And when Paul moves to the climax of his argument, he still dwells on the mercy of God, which we must trust. Quoting Genesis 15:6, he says that the faith of Abraham 'was credited to him as righteousness' (4:3). He seems to mean that Abraham's trust in God's mercy enabled God both to treat him as if he had been righteous and to make him righteous. So Abraham became 'the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised' (4:11). Such Christians believe, Paul says, in Jesus who was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus . . . While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! (4:25; 5:1,8-9)
What Paul does not clearly say here should be noted. He does not clearly say what Evangelicals have often said. As Leon Morris has observed in his fine study of The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (1965, p. 282), Paul 'never says in so many words that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers, and it may fairly be doubted whether he had this in mind in his treatment of justification'. Dr Morris adds that 'it may be held to be a corollary from his doctrine of the identification of the believer with Christ', but if the belief that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believing Christians only, resulting in their (and only in their) salvation, had been as central in Paul's gospel as has often been claimed, surely it would have been taught explicitly. Instead of offering a clear explanation, Paul hurries back to his theme of God's mercy. The Jews became disobedient in order that they might 'all' receive God's forgiving mercy together with the 'full number of the Gentiles'. This is an advance on earlier teaching as recorded in the first letter to the Thessalonians, where the Jews 'who killed the Lord Jesus and prophets and also drove us out' are said to 'displease God' and to be 'hostile to all men', so that their sins are heaped up to the limit and 'the wrath of God has come upon them at last' (2:15-16). The mature Paul is not content with the idea that only a minority, the Christians to whom Christ's righteousness is imputed, can be saved.
In his final celebration of God's inexhaustibly faithful mercy as he 'justifies the ungodly', Paul echoes his Lord's proclamation of the Father's forgiveness. I regret that Leon Morris, who changed his mind on a number of points in response to criticisms, defended to the end the belief that Christ 'truly suffered to reconcile his Father to us' (the belief set out in the sixteenth century in the Augsburg Confession of Lutheranism and in Article II of the Church of England's Articles of Religion). Leon Morris claimed:
It is certainly using language which goes beyond that of the New Testament. But it is not giving expression to teaching that is foreign to that of the New Testament. We cannot get a glimmering of an understanding of what the New Testament understands by Christ's atoning work unless we see that God is hostile to every evil thing and every evil person. (The Atonement, 1983, p. 138)
Here he seems to contradict Jesus. So does Dr Stott himself when he writes that 'the reason why wrath, revenge and retribution are forbidden us is not because they are themselves wrong reactions to evil, but because they are God's prerogative, notours' (IFCT, p. 87). Of course Dr Stott refers to Paul's exhortation to 'leave room for God's wrath' since God will avenge (Romans 12:19). But that*cannot be the end of the matter for a Christian. Whether or not Paul fully possesses the 'mind of Christ' in his own teaching at this point, the teaching of Jesus must take precedence over Paul.
According to the gospels Jesus repeatedly says that God the Father offers his forgiveness to all. Jesus shows this by his fellowship with tax-collectors, prostitutes and other 'sinners' at table as much as by any words. In none of the miracle stories is a demand for the confession of sins and penitence made before the healing act. We read, for example, that Jesus declared that a paralytic's sins were forgiven before that man had uttered a word (Mark 2:1-12). Here, as many scholars have commented, is a major difference between the teaching of Jesus and what was normally taught in the Judaism of that period. Of course the rabbis believed in the mercy of God: that was a central theme of the Hebrew Scriptures. But usually it was thought of as compassion and forgiveness for the penitent. According to Mark the climax of the confrontation of Jesus with his critics comes when he declares that all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them except continuation of the 'blasphemy against the Holy Spirit' which causes spiritual blindness and therefore the incapacity either to receive or to understand God's forgiveness. This blindness is shown when people call the healings performed by Jesus the work of an evil spirit (3:20-30). In saying that about Jesus, they are not merely criticising him. They are implying that he must be killed, for the Jewish religious law decreed that the man who says 'Let us follow other gods' after performing a miracle 'must be put to death' (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). The warning is about spiritual blindness that is utterly hostile to good and completely scornful of its appeal. Where people are not blind to that extent, the message of Jesus is the message that God forgives.
In Matthew's gospel we read that the Father is perfect and shows this by causing his sun to rise on the evil as well as good (5:43-48). Human parents know how to give good gifts to their children - 'How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!' (7:9-11). The Father is like a master who cancels his servant's debt simply because he is asked to do so (18:21-35), or who pays a living wage simply because every worker needs it (20:1-15), or who invites to a banquet everyone in the streets (22:1-10). It is the Father's will that all the 'righteous' in all the nations will be admitted to eternal life, although they never recognised the presence of the Son of Man among them (25:31-46). Those who enter the kingdom of heaven will be those who do the will of the Father, 'not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord' (7:21). In Luke's gospel Jesus, solemnly beginning his public work, quotes the prophet's words that he had been sent to preach good news to the poor, etc (4:14-19), but not the prophet's words (Isaiah 61:2) about 'the day of vengeance of our God'. His teaching is: 'Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. . . Forgive, and you will be forgiven,' for all who love their enemies 'will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked' (6:32-37). Those who give a banquet to the poor will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous (14:14). Even those whose claim is that they have used their wealth wisely will be 'welcomed into eternal dwellings' (16:9). The one who shows mercy, for example a good Samaritan (10:25-37), is the one who obeys God's law, for God himself is like the man who seeks the lost sheep or the woman who seeks the lost coin or the father who runs towards his lost son 'while he was still a long way off' (15:1-32). Anyone who simply prays 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner' is 'justified' (18:9-14) - which is the only use of the term in the gospels. In Greek the prayer means 'God, be propitiated for me,' but the means of propitiation is not mentioned. The Lord's own prayer, taught to his disciples, adds only one qualification to the petition 'Forgive us our sins'. It is: 'for we also forgive everyone who sins against us' (11:4). As he is nailed to the cross, Jesus prays for his executioners, 'Father, forgive them' - not because he is about to appease the Father's righteous anger by dying as their substitute but 'for they do not know what they are doing' (23:34).
In the light of this teaching it is strange to be told by Dr Stott that 'God forgives us only when we repent' (CMMW, p. 51) and that 'we are not permitted to cheapen forgiveness by offering it prematurely when there has been no repentance' (CoC, p. 296). The sentence in Luke's gospel (17:3) quoted by Dr Stott ('rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him') is immediately followed by the teaching that 'your brother' is to be forgiven if 'he sins against you seven times in a day' and 'comes back to you and says, "I repent"' -which scarcely suggests that the repentance has been genuine every time. Matthew's gospel (18:22) drives the real point home by saying that there must be forgiveness 'not seven times, but seventy-seven' times. The teaching of Jesus, taken as a whole, does not make the offer of forgiveness depend on prior repentance. Indeed, the opposite is taught clearly. What seems to have misled Dr Stott is the fact that since forgiveness is the removal of all barriers to fellowship it cannot be effective until the barriers have been dismantled on the other side too. So the Father cannot effectively forgive those who by being unforgiving themselves show that they are not willing to pull down the barriers (Mark 11:25; 18:35, etc.). But the Father has a forgiving spirit before his child repents, before the lost sheep is found - and Jesus teaches we must be like the Father, ourselves always willing to forgive whatever the injury, even before the person who has wronged us admits the wrong and seeks reconciliation. That can be crucifying-but that is Christianity.
It seems necessary to add only one point to this piece of critical Bible study which has had to be shorter than the seriousness of the subject requires. Dr Stott (CoC, pp. 154, 181) quotes Acts 20:28: 'Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.' But as the New International Version notes, many manuscripts read 'the church of the Lord'·, and this is the reading preferred by the New English Bible. Another possible translation is 'with the blood of his own'. It seems unlikely that the Bible's one reference to God shedding his own blood - a startling idea -should be introduced unobtrusively in the course of an exhortation to the elders of the church in Ephesus. The passage refers to the ransom-like self-sacrifice of Jesus, the supreme martyr.
In the New Testament there is, I conclude, no dear statement that providing the appeasement or satisfaction of the just wrath of God was the mission of Jesus. The gospels tell us that some time before he 'resolutely set out for Jerusalem' for the last time (Luke 9:51) Jesus was already challenging anyone who would 'come after me' to 'take up his cross and follow me' (Mark 8:34) and was pondering scriptures which warned him that he 'must suffer much and be rejected' (Mark 9:12). There is nothing at all unlikely in such expectations. Jesus lived under Roman occupation and could expect to suffer under Roman 'justice' since he was a disturber of the peace who announced the arrival of the kingdom of God. He could also expect to be rejected by fellow-Jews who owed their positions to their collaboration with the Romans. And there is nothing at all unlikely in the idea that Jesus believed that it was within the purposes of his Father that he should accept such a death as an integral part of his mission - indeed, as its climax. Presumably he could have avoided execution, or greatly lessened the risk of it, by abandoning his public mission, by being much more guarded in his teaching or at least by not confronting his enemies by going to Jerusalem at Passover time. But, as Dr Stott rightly insists, he chose to die. It is consistent with the whole known character of Jesus to believe that he drank this cup of suffering because he came to be convinced that it was his Father's will. It is also in keeping with everything known about Jesus to believe that he trusted the Father to vindicate him by making his ransom-like self-sacrifice the prelude to a new covenant with humanity, the crucial event before the coming of the kingdom. We can reasonably believe that all this was in the mind of Jesus even if the 'predictions of the passion' ascribed to him in the gospels and quoted in The Cross of Christ have been edited by the Church. (Resurrection 'after three days' is predicted, but the story of the crucifixion contains no hint that either Jesus or his followers then held such a confident hope.) However, Jesus is not said in the gospels to have explained why his death was necessary to the Father's purposes. Later, Christians did begin to explain. They had become sure that 'Jesus of Nazareth', 'a man accredited by God' had been 'handed over ... by God's set purpose and foreknowledge' (Acts 2:22-3). But their explanations were fragmentary and, as I hope I have shown, did not clearly include the explanation said by Dr Stott to be 'the heart of the gospel'. I repeat his own wise teaching that 'a full-scale atonement doctrine is missing from the apostolic preaching' (CoC, p. 34).
Dr Stott is undeniably motivated by the desire to be faithful to Scripture. 'My first anxiety', he writes in his Preface to The Cross of Christ, 'has been to be true to the Word of God, allowing it to say what it has to say and not asking it to say what I might want it to say' (CoC, pp. 11-12). This is in keeping with his conviction that 'it would obviously be very misleading to read back into Scripture the notions of a later age', for 'a text cannot with any possible legitimacy mean to me something substantially different from what it meant to its original author and readers' (UB, pp. 171,175). In his 1982 address, Make the Truth Known, he again declared: 'The Evangelical faith is original, biblical, apostolic Christianity. At least that is what we believe it to be, and I for one would not hold it if I were not convinced about this.' But repeatedly the references in Scripture to the meaning of the death of Christ can be interpreted in more than one way. Dr Stott has decided to interpret them in the light of his intense conviction that the wrath of God needs to be propitiated. He believes that God once literally struck Uzzah dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant (CoC, p. 107). In his eyes the sins of the world cannot be taken away except by a propitiation so great that God himself must provide it. But merely to 'provide' this sacrifice in the shape of the innocent Jesus would make God a 'pitiless ogre' - a suggestion which Dr Stott repudiates 'with the utmost vehemence'. So he teaches that God actually makes the propitiation himself, although there he says something which is not said in the Bible. What has happened, I suggest, is that his interpretation of particular biblical passages has been influenced by how the Bible taken as a whole speaks to his reason and his conscience. So now I want to submit some reasons for a conscientious conviction that his own theory cannot be 'the heart of the gospel' in our time.
Moral Objections
One problem is that we no longer assume that everyone crucified or otherwise executed is under God's curse. In his great Institutes of the Christian Religion (11.6-13) Calvin starts his central discussion of Christ's death: 'The cross was accursed, not only in human opinion but by decree of God's law. Hence, when Christ is hanged upon the cross, he makes himself subject to the curse.' From this beginning Calvin concludes that Christ had 'to undergo the severity of God's vengeance, to appease his wrath and to satisfy his just judgement'. But crucifixion was a Roman punishment. It is deeply offensive to reason and conscience to claim that every one of those condemned to death by the rulers of the Roman empire was also condemned by their Maker and Father, and it is doubly offensive to claim this about Jesus, who was condemned by Pontius Pilate although he had never committed or advocated any crime. It also seems monstrous to argue that God himself cursed all those condemned under Jewish law, first stoned to death and then displayed dead on a tree or stake - which is the narrower meaning of the text about the hanged being accursed (Deuteronomy 21:23). That text comes immediately after a law which encourages parents whose son 'will not listen to them when they discipline him' to demand that 'all the men of his town shall stone him to death'. The idea that God always endorses such human 'justice' is particularly abhorrent in a century which has seen miscarriages of justice on a colossal scale. All the blood shed by the cruel tyrants of our time cries out in contradiction. Our solidarity with all the innocent victims of 'justice' compels many of us to apply to the theory that the cross was accursed the great declaration by Paul that 'no-one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, ''Jesus be cursed"' (1 Corinthians 12:3).
Nor is it morally acceptable to say that if an innocent person suffers unjustly it is a sign that God is punishing him in place of the guilty. Every principle of true justice is outraged by the idea that there must be some punishment no matter who is punished. And what is essential in criminal or civil law is also essential when considering the suffering of a whole people. The Jewish people, for example, have suffered very terribly because they were made the scapegoats by evil societies. There is a sense in which their agonies contributed to a happier outcome both for their own people (in that the Holocaust stimulated the establishment and recognition of the state of Israel) and for Europe (in that all sensitive Europeans became ashamed of antisemitism and of any persecution of a racial minority). But no one attempting to comment on these tragedies in the spirit of Jesus, or in the spirit of common morality, would ever say that God punished the Jewish people by bringing about the Holocaust because the penalty for the sins of Europe had to be paid by someone, whether guilty or innocent. All the eloquence of the Song of the Suffering Servant, and of some Christian theories of the atonement, cannot obscure the simple and elementary fact that it is immoral to punish anyone who is not guilty.
Only a minority of people nowadays thinks about the relationship between God and man in terms which include propitiating the wrath of God by any kind of sacrifice. Not even a minority any longer believes in human sacrifices -which are, of course, repeatedly denounced in the Hebrew Scriptures as abhorrent to God. But even a theory which compares the death of Jesus with animal sacrifices is, as Dr Stott often notes, 'unpopular'. The reason needs to be set out. Otherwise people who hold this theory may not appreciate why, as Dr Stott also notes, a distinguished scientist who was 'friendly to all kinds of religious experience' (Sir Alister Hardy) could write that 'the hypothesis that God, in the shape of his son, tortured himself for our redemption' was among the least attractive of religious ideas 'in the whole of anthropology' and belonged to 'quite a different philosophy - different psychology - from that of the religion that Jesus taught' (CoC, p. 111).
In the religion of ancient Israel as purified by the prophets and later by the Scriptures, and in the Judaism which Jesus and his first followers knew, it was always taught that propitiatory sacrifices were of no avail without sincere repentance, and when the Jerusalem temple was destroyed within half a century of the death of Jesus these sacrifices were abandoned (with one small exception, in Ethiopia) - never to be restored. Similar sacrifices do occur among some animists (believers in many 'spirits' in nature) and among some adherents of other religions, but it is significant that they are never condemned when a religion is being advertised in a style which seeks to be educated and reasonable. The contrast is great with the history of the ancient Middle Eastern and European world, and of most other pre-modern societies, where religious sacrifices were universal. So fully has humanity moved out of that world where animal sacrifices seemed normal that in our time not even expert scholars or anthropologists can be sure of the original meaning of all the details in a sacrificial system such as the Hebrews'. The very term 'propitiation' is 'to most of us just plain incomprehensible', as Leon Morris noted in his book on The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance (p. 151). Its usage is particularly problematic in the interpretation of the New Testament, where the meaning 'propitiating God' (or gods), normal in other ancient literature, is always avoided. In the New International Version of the Bible it has to be translated as 'sacrifice of atonement' or 'atoning sacrifice' and in the New English Bible 'the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death' or as 'the remedy for the defilement of our sins'. People can understand what a 'covenant' or specially solemn and binding agreement is. But the practice in ancient Israel of sacrificing an animal on the occasion of a covenant, cutting it in two and walking between the parts (as illustrated by the story of Abraham's sacrifice in Genesis 15:10-17), requires some understanding and it is significant that scholars are not agreed about how the Hebrews did understand it.
Dr Stott is, of course, aware of all this. Discussing blood sacrifices, he has said:
today these categories make sense only among Hindus and animists who sacrifice animals, and among the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia who still perform sacrifices. Secular audiences in the West, however, not only lack the background to understand such phraseology, but in addition often feel squeamish at the mention of blood. What I am urging is this. The truth that through Christ's death for us and instead of us we may be forgiven and receive new life is indispensable to the Gospel. But we can proclaim this good news with entire faithfulness without ever mentioning the shedding or the sprinkling of Christ's blood. Only later shall we need to teach converts the meaning of these expressions . . . (ARBMW, p. 12)
But the problem arises not only from unfamiliarity with animal sacrifices but also from a moral revulsion and from the clear conviction that God does not want them. Most Christians and others now feel with a prophet of ancient Israel, Micah. It was not only that Micah 'wondered if he should bring burnt offerings, animals, rivers of oil or even "my firstborn"', showing that he 'understood the substitutionary principle well', as Dr Stott says (CoC, p. 137); for Micah was sure that God required not sacrifices of any sort but 'to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God' (Micah 6:8). Isaiah declared that the word of the Lord was: 'Stop bringing meaningless offerings!' (1:13). Hosea, too, saw that God desires 'mercy, not sacrifice' (6:6) - which is quoted twice in Matthew's gospel (9:13; 12:7). Whether such attacks were aimed at the sacrificial system as a whole or only at sacrifices without sincere piety and morality is debatable. What is not in question is that the sacrificial system was being criticised on religious and moral grounds long before it disappeared. Are modem people who are similarly impatient with all talk of propitiatory sacrifices, who want 'rational worship' (Romans 12:1), to be excluded from any understanding of the heart of the gospel because, as is alleged, they fail to see the permanent significance of Christ's work? If so, the barrier seems somewhat like the barrier which some Christians tried to erect in Paul's day in order to keep out converts who did not understand, and were not willing to accept, the Jewish rite of circumcision.
Even greater is the problem which all but a few Christians and others have with the particular form of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity which is necessary to the argument of The Cross of Christ. Dr Stott accepts the orthodoxy of the councils of Nicea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, so that he believes that Jesus Christ was God the Son, 'of one substance with the Father'. Indeed, in The Authentic Jesus (1985) he endorsed the words of B. B. Warfield that 'the Chalcedo-nian Christology is only a very perfect synthesis of the biblical data' (AJ, p. 31). Yet he has to maintain that the Father not only punished but also forsook the Son, quoting the Victorian theologian R. W. Dale to the effect that 'the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering' (CoC, p. 159). But as Dr Stott has written, 'precisely how God can have been in Christ while he made Christ to be sin for us, I cannot explain' (BC1, p. 94). And I have to say that in common with many other Christians I find the idea of God sacrificing himself to himself not only inexplicable but also incomprehensible. That could be because we are confronted by something that is real but too big for our minds to absorb, like the incarnation itself. But whereas we can begin to see the truth that God was in Christ loving, teaching, healing and dying for our sakes because there is nothing offensive to reason or conscience in the idea of God expressing his love in the morally sublime life of a loving, teaching, healing martyr, Dr Stott's doctrine of the atonement seems far more questionable. I gladly acknowledge that it is far less offensive than the theory that 'God punished Jesus' instead of us, because it says that God, who is love, has loved us so much that he himself has suffered a cruel death for our sakes. But many of us find it impossible to understand the idea of God punishing himself.
Dr Stott's theory suggests that God has done something which would be crazy or wrong for a good man or woman to do. A judge would not be respected if having convicted a criminal and sentenced him to death or imprisonment for life he underwent execution or served the sentence himself. He would be thought to be perverting the course of justice. A father or mother who declared that the children could not be forgiven until he or she had appeased and satisfied his or her wrath by committing suicide might be reported to a society for the prevention of cruelty to children and admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Self-punishment of this sort by a mentally healthy person is inconceivable. Of course God's sense of justice must be both stronger and more justified than any human judge's or parent's. But precisely because God's justice is the justice of holy love, it seems all the more difficult to think that he could do something which would be condemned if done by a good judge or a good parent. Certainly this type of teaching is unlike the style of Jesus, who repeatedly taught the people about the Father by speaking in parables based on everyday experience and by emphasising that the Father is good, is like a good human parent - only more so. The teaching of Jesus did not fall below the level of the psalm which says that God is merciful like a human father pitying his young children (103:13).
In The Cross of Christ Dr Stott considers the teaching given to the Colossians that through the Son 'God was pleased ... to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross' (1:19-20). Rejecting any suggestion that 'all' created things or human beings or 'evil cosmic intelligences' have already been reconciled to God - for in his view 'it is not a universal reconciliation that Christ achieved or that Paul proclaimed' (GNS, p. 98) - he comments: 'We cannot be sure to what Paul was alluding' (CoC, pp. 195-6). And many will sympathise with his puzzlement. This was one of the key texts inspiring the first chapter of F. W. Dillistone's powerful study of The Christian Understanding of Atonement (1968), where the cosmic significance of Christ's work was explored with the aid of modem literature. Many of us, however, have moved right away from the world of ideas familiar to the author and readers of that letter to the Colossians. And we cannot be sure to what Dr Stott's own theory of the atonement is 'alluding'. That, too, belongs to a world which we do not know; it belongs to the world where sacrifices propitiated the wrath of gods. The world which we have entered either through education or through daily experience ('culture') insistently teaches us that such ideas are either ridiculous or else actually blasphemous. Do we constitute a public which has to be reckoned with in evangelism - where, as Dr Stott says finely and truly, 'an incarnation means entering other people's worlds, their thought-worlds, and the worlds of their alienation, loneliness and pain' (CoC, p. 291)? Or can the gospel not be understood by us?
The reply may be that sooner or later we simply have to learn to understand these allusions to God's wrath and its propitiation, appeasement or satisfaction by the sacrifice of the cross. So, very briefly, I want to outline an alternative theory. It is not merely my own theory. It has often been expounded by far more authoritative teachers - to give only one example, by Vincent Taylor after his long reflection on the New Testament's evidence (perhaps his clearest summary being in Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 1941, pp. 193-4). Although I trust that I have learned from Leon Morris and other critics of Taylor's detailed exegesis, I deliberately refer to a theologian who was convinced that 'the persistence of theories of substitution and satisfaction reveals the immense strength of a felt religious need' (p. 205). It is my hope and prayer that such a need can be met without these theories.
Atonement
Professor C. F. D. Moule allows me to quote from a very wise letter in which he summarises his conclusions (worked out in, for example, his Essays in New Testament Interpretation, 1982):
It seems to me that dust is thrown in our eyes whenever we forget that sacrifice, ransom, acquittal, cleansing, paying of debts, etc., are all only analogies, each with a limited function. If we forget that, we may try to make them do more than they are meant to do, we may treat them as sacrosanct and be timid about replacing them by other analogies more telling for our day, and we may even elevate the biblical analogies into an authoritative story, turning them into a system independent of the great reality they are meant to illuminate. Once it is realised that forgiveness and reconciliation anywhere and at any time (before Christ and outside the Church, as well as since the incarnation and within the Church) involve an output of forgiving 'energy' met by an output of repentance, such that forgiver and forgiven are bonded together in a work of new creation, then it may be realised that, in Christ, these creative processes are totally implemented (so far as is possible in time and space); and all this ought to deliver us from the tyranny of overgrown analogies, and make the idea of penal substitution unthinkable.
But a few more words can be said about this fathomless mystery.
'God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them' (2 Corinthians 5:19). The Good News Bible splendidly conveys what Paul means: Our message is that God was making all mankind his friends through Christ. God did not keep an account of their sins. . .' The eternal God inspired, guided, dwelt in and worked in his Son or Word. Jesus, having embodied the divine love and the divine patience in his life and teaching, embodied them supremely as he died. And it cost him not less than everything. 'When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly' (1 Peter 2:23). Because the Father is also the just Judge, he was not punishing the innocent. The victim of a miscarriage of human justice, Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, not under the Father. But the dying Jesus soaked up the evil as a sponge soaks up water. He prayed for the forgiveness of his deluded executioners. He entered the depths of the physical and psychological suffering which evil causes. He became the brother of all the doubters, all the defeated, all the tormented and all the guilty. But he died as he had lived, in obedient dependence on 'my God, my God'. He trusted in 'Abba, Father' (Luke 23:46). In victory he finished the work which had been given to him by the Father (John 19:30).
That work won the spiritual freedom of all who will accept the Father's constantly offered forgiveness and love. It won it by an apparently powerless patience which perfectly expressed the divine patience of the Creator, a patience revealed in the whole of modem scientific knowledge of the space and time required by evolution. It won it by a self-sacrifice somewhat like the sacrifices with which the twentieth century is entirely familiar when they are made by martyrs, soldiers, rescue and health workers, parents and so forth. This self-sacrifice was also somewhat like the payment of a ransom to free hostages or victims of kidnapping. It did not change God at all. But because it changed the spiritual situation of humanity, because it decisively dealt with human sin ('expiation'), it changed the Father's relationship with the whole of the human race. For the Father can now make his always forgiving love known in the minds and hearts of sinners. Drawn by the Jesus who is 'lifted up' on his cross, and spiritually united with him, people accept that love, are released from the burden of guilt, are declared righteous ('justified'), and are made righteous ('sanctified'). Such people are Christians - who should hope and pray that in the end all of humanity will respond, Christians being only the first fruits of the coming harvest or the spring flowers of humanity's summer. That certainly is the will of God, the Creator of all and the merciful Father and Lover of all.
The cross has been well called 'the meeting place of God and man'. In Christ crucified as in no one else, all can find the glory of man as well as the glory of God. 'Here is the man!' (John 19:5). The life and death of Jesus pray perfectly to the Father for, and on behalf of, all humanity. In penitent humility all can join their own lives and deaths to his. They can know what Paul means when he tells the Galatians: Ί have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me' (2:20). So 'Christ crucified' is the supreme representative of humanity - supreme, because in his total outpouring of loving obedience he is nearest to the Father. And when what holds folk back is the thought that the Creator is complacently aloof from the suffering of the world, that he is exempt from the sacrifices which all his creatures must make for each other, age after age, if life is to be continued and fed, that he is not involved in the mess or the pain of it and takes no responsibility for it, then here, too, the cross is the answer. For Jesus, who represents man to God, also represents God to man. The living Jesus interprets the silence of eternity by love. And the dyingjesus shows what it means in such a world of sacrifice to say that God, too, suffers, for God is love. There are clues to the mystery in the words of Donne and Blake:
God cloth'd himself in vile man's flesh,
that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O! He gives to us his joy That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan.
JOHN STOTT'S RESPONSE TO CHAPTER 3
My dear David,
I was touched by reading your personal testimony to the importance of the cross in your own life, beginning on Good Fridays when you were a boy, keeping your feet on the rock when you were a theological student, and continuing today as 'the one unconquerable light' which has enabled you 'to walk through this dark world'. I could say the same. Although I am afraid our understandings of the death of Jesus diverge widely, we can at least agree that the central reality of the cross is greater than all our human formulations.
I am also grateful for a number of statements you make in your chapter: that, when you first read The Cross of Christ, you found that 'most of it' expressed your own convictions (although, in view of the severe strictures you express later, that surprises me); that you liked ('admired' is your gracious word) the 'emphatic chapter' on the centrality of the cross, the insistence on the revelation of God's love, and the equal insistence that his love is 'holy love'; and that in 'any at-one-ment between the Holy God and us sinners' the initiative and achievement must be his. Thank you too for faithfully reflecting, indeed quoting, my sentence that 'any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role - the guilty party, the punitive judge and the innocent victim - is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence'.
I agree with you that contemporary Christians should honour the pioneers of Christian thinking about the atonement, even if we do not find their constructions entirely satisfactory. I am sorry, therefore, that you find me 'dismissive' of other viewpoints and even pastorally 'harsh' towards those who hold them. I did not mean to be. You also seem to suggest that I have been unfair in my representation of some of their positions (which I struggled not to be) and have not recognised the element of truth which may be found in each of them. But this last criticism is not, I think, fair to me! I am at pains in The Cross of Christ not to oblige people to choose between Anselm, Abelard and Aulen. I write:
In fact all three of the major explanations of the death of Christ contain biblical truth and can to some extent be harmonized, especially if we observe that the chief difference between them is that in each God's work in Christ is directed towards a different person. In the 'objective' view God satisfies himself, in the 'subjective' he inspires us, and in the 'classic' he overcomes the devil. Thus Jesus Christ is successively the Saviour, the Teacher and the Victor, because we ourselves are guilty, apathetic and in bondage. (CoC, p. 230)
P. T. Forsyth drew attention to this as 'the threefold cord'. Indeed, you may recall that in the book's third section entitled 'The achievement of the cross' there are three chapters called 'the salvation of sinners', 'the revelation of God' and 'the conquest of evil' in which these three themes of the cross are developed.
This leads me to say that it is in this your third chapter that I have felt most acutely the limitations of the methodology we are following. If you felt that I was being unfair to earlier expositors, I have felt that you were being unfair to me! I do not mean that you have deliberately misrepresented me, for you are scrupulous in your endeavour not to, but that a degree of misrepresentation is inevitable because it is inherent in our format. For I am required to respond to your criticisms of me, whereas I wish our readers would read me first (in The Cross of Christ) and then you (in this book), instead of reading your critique first and then my response, while the original remains unread! To begin with, you are selective (again, inevitably because of space limitations; I'm blaming the way the dialogue is set up, not you). Thus you make virtually no reference to the long chapter in which I seek to expound carefully the meaning of the four images or models of salvation, and their implications for our understanding of the cross, namely 'propitiation', 'redemption', 'justification' and 'reconciliation'. You hardly allude to the concept of God 'satisfying himself', or to the biblical foundations of it, although it is integral to my thesis. And you mention only as an aside the fact that there are whole chapters on the relation of the cross to the problems of violence ('Loving our enemies') and suffering ('Suffering and glory'). Now I fully understand that you had to concentrate on particular aspects of The Cross of Christ, but the resulting impression does not do justice to the breadth of horizon which I attempted to portray in the book.
Then, although you write about 'propitiation' in several contexts, you nowhere mention the 'three crucial points' I make, in order to distinguish 'a truly biblical doctrine of propitiation' from crude, pagan notions. Let me summarise them. First, the reason why a propitiation is necessary is not that God is irascible, spiteful, capricious or arbitrary, but that evil always provokes his 'wrath', which is 'his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil'. Secondly, it is neither we who make the propitiation (as in a pagan context), nor even Christ (as if by his death he prevailed on God to pardon us); it is God himself who took the initiative in his sheer grace and mercy. Thirdly, the propitiatory sacrifice was not a thing (whether animal, vegetable or mineral) but a person. 'And the person God offered was not somebody else . . . somebody distinct from or external to himself... In giving his Son, he was giving himself.' Thus God himself is at the heart of the divine propitiation. 'It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins/1 conclude: 'There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship' (CoC, pp. 173-5).
Your two major criticisms of The Cross of Christ are that my doctrine is (1) unbiblical and (2) uncommunicable. That is, it is neither true to Scripture nor relevant to modem men and women. It is a pretty damning accusation, especially to one whose whole ministry (especially in recent years) has been dedicated to the task of bridge-building, i.e. of relating the word to the world in such a way as to be faithful to the one and sensitive to the other. Nevertheless, I will try to respond to your criticisms.
Sin, Satisfaction and Substitution
I begin with these three unpopular words, which in combination are calculated to give many liberal theologians apoplexy. Yet they are all indispensable to my own (biblical, as I believe) understanding of the cross. Faced by human sin, God who is holy love, and who must 'satisfy himself', i.e. be true to himself and not contradict himself, identified himself through Christ with our sins and endured their penalty, in order that we might be righteously forgiven. This kind of formulation, you tell me, goes far beyond what Scripture teaches. Do I not myself concede (as you twice remind me) that 'a full-scale atonement doctrine is missing from the apostolic preaching'? Yes, but I was referring only to the earliest kerygmatic sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Those 'primitive' statements contained only seeds (e.g. 'for our sins', 'according to the Scriptures', 'hanged on a tree' and 'handed over ... by God's set purpose') which came into flower in the later apostolic letters. Do I not also declare, however, that 'beyond the images of the atonement lies the mystery of the atonement', and imply that a mystery cannot be reduced to a formula? Yes, and I meant it. I am sure that the reality which lies behind the statements that 'God was in Christ reconciling the world' and 'God made Christ to be sin for us' is beyond the powers of resolution of our finite minds, and that we shall spend eternity not only worshipping 'God and the Lamb', but exploring the mystery which inspires our worship. Nevertheless, part of the mystery has been revealed, and we must not shrink from attempting to grasp and formulate this.
Still, however, you chide me that the 'theory' I expound is 'not one which is the plain teaching of the Bible as the Bible can be read by the plain man'. And several times you write that 'Jesus did not teach this' or 'Paul did not clearly teach that'. In fact, you conclude one part of your argument by saying that the New Testament contains 'no clear statement that providing the appeasement or satisfaction of the just wrath of God was the mission of Jesus'. (I would not in any case have used this expression, but I let that pass.) Perhaps you are referring to the gospels? For I would claim that the great references to propitiation in the epistles (Paul's in Romans 3:23-26 and John's in 1 John 2:1-2 and 4:10) are quite plain. At the same time, my case does not rest on proof texts, but on a synthesis of the total teaching of Scripture. After all, there is no plain statement for plain people that 'Jesus was God', but taken as a whole the Scriptures indubitably affirm his deity.
I do not think you have allowed our readers to feel the strength of the sustained and cumulative biblical argument that I have tried to develop in the three chapters of Part Two ('The heart of the cross'), which I have entitled respectively 'the problem of forgiveness', 'satisfaction for sin' and 'the self-substitution of God'. The problem of forgiveness ('to man the plainest of duties, to God . . . the profoundest of problems' - Carnegie Simpson) is constituted by 'the inevitable collision between divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are'. For God's love is holy love, 'love which yearns over sinners while at the same time refusing to condone their sin' (CoC, p. 88). So I enlarge on the gravity of sin, human moral responsibility, true and false guilt (drawing on modern psychological insights as well as biblical revelation), and on God's holiness, which cannot coexist with evil. And I end this chapter by asserting that
All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and man . . . The essential background to the cross ... is a balanced understanding of the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. If we diminish either, we thereby diminish the cross. . . Before the holy God can forgive us, some kind of 'satisfaction' is necessary. (CoC, pp. 109-10)
It is not a satisfaction of the devil (who has indeed been dethroned by Christ, though not by a bargain as if he had some hold on God, still less by trickery -1 don't think you quite grasped my argument here). Nor, I suggested, was it God's law, honour or justice or 'the moral order' which needed to be satisfied - or not at least if these
represent God as being subordinate to something outside and above himself which controls his actions, to which he is accountable, and from which he cannot free himself. 'Satisfaction' is an appropriate word, providing we realize that it is he himself in his inner being who needs to be satisfied, and not something external to himself. (CoC, p. 123)
'The law to which he must conform, which he must satisfy, is the law of his own being' (CoC, p. 124). Negatively, he 'cannot disown himself' (2 Timothy 2:13), i.e. contradict himself; positively, he must be himself and act in perfect conformity to his divine nature. And what is his divine nature? It is holy love. Moreover, there are some scriptures which express, and some theologians who concede, the legitimacy of talking (though anthropomorphically) of 'a conflict of emotions, a strife of attributes' within God, between his 'compassion' and his 'fierce anger7 (e.g. Hosea 11:8-9). As Emil Brunner put it, 'The cross is the only place where the loving, forgiving merciful God is revealed in such a way that we perceive that his holiness and his love are equally infinite . . . [The] objective aspect of the atonement . . . consists in the combination of inflexible righteousness, with its penalties, and transcendent love' (CoC, p. 131).
'How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins? . . . How can he save us and satisfy himself simultaneously?' (CoC, p. 132). It is in answer to these inescapable questions that the notion of substitution is revealed, namely that 'in order to satisfy himself, [God] sacrificed - indeed substituted - himself for us'. You say that this is 'not plainly taught anywhere', to which I reply that it is plainly (directly or indirectly) taught everywhere. Marshalling the evidence, I write about sacrifice in the Old Testament, and the significance of the shedding and sprinkling of blood; about the transparently clear substitutionary teaching of the Pass-over (in which the lamb died in place of the first-born), so that we know what 'Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us' means; about the Old Testament vocabulary of 'sinbearing', meaning the bearing of sin's penalty, which is applied to Christ crucified in the New; about the two goats of the Day of Atonement, the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat, which together constituted a single 'sin offering', 'the one exhibiting the means, and the other the results, of the atonement' (T. J. Crawford); about the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, eight verses of which are quoted in the New Testament as fulfilled in Jesus, together with the ransom saying (Mark 10:45) and Jesus' declaration during the Last Supper that his blood would be 'poured out for man/ (Mark 14:24), both of which are echoes of Isaiah 53:12; and about the plain, natural meaning of the 'made him ... to be sin' and 'becoming a curse for us' verses (2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13).
You, I know, criticise my interpretation of some of these passages and texts, as indeed I find some of your interpretation of Scripture arbitrary, so that further progress in mutual understanding will be impossible without some careful exegetical work. But it is the steady build-up throughout Scripture of the substitutionary theme to which
I appeal. In my view it simply cannot be set aside in the way you attempt. I note Dr C. E. B. Cranfield's carefully phrased summary, in his great two-volume ICC commentary on Romans: 'God, because in his mercy he willed to forgive sinful men, and, being truly merciful, willed to forgive them righteously, that is, without in any way condoning their sin, purposed to direct against his own very self in the person of his Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they deserved' (CoC, p. 134).
The Heart of the Gospel
I am not saying that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is 'compulsory for Christians', if by that you mean that people cannot be Christians without believing it. Nor do I forget Charlie Moule's stricture about 'overgrown analogies'. I have clearly stated that propitiation, redemption, justification and reconciliation are all biblical metaphors or images of salvation, each of which teaches particular truths, although I have added that the substitutionary principle is the reality at the heart of all four models (CoC, pp. 202-3). I am not saying that substitution is the one and only meaning of the cross, for the cross speaks also of victory over evil, the revelation of love and glory through suffering. But if you are talking of atonement, the means by which we sinners can be reconciled to the God of holy love, why then, yes, I don't think you or I can escape the truth of the divine substitution.
You respond that this 'theory' (as you - incorrectly, as I think- call the traditional understanding of Scripture) is not only unbiblical, but even 'unintelligible' and consequently uncommunicable. That charge stings, because you know that I am an evangelist at heart and therefore long to communicate the Christian good news meaningfully to my own contemporaries. So I must let you express your criticism in its full outspokenness: Ί find the idea of God sacrificing himself to himself not only inexplicable but incomprehensible', you write. It suggests that 'God has done something which would be crazy or wrong for a good man or woman to do'. 'Self-punishment... is inconceivable.' 'Unintelligible', 'inexplicable', 'incomprehensible', 'inconceivable'. Those are strongly dismissive adjectives, David. What can I say in reply?
First, you have not reported me accurately. I have never written tout court of 'God punishing himself', or of 'God sacrificing himself to himself'. The phraseology I have used is of 'God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us'. I have summed up my position as 'divine self-satisfaction through divine self-substitution'.
Secondly, this notion does not seem to me to deserve your negative epithets, which declare that it cannot be explained, understood or even conceived. For I am only one of many millions of Christians who believe that Scripture requires us to explain Christ's atoning sacrifice in this way, who find it perfectly intelligible and comprehensible, and who rejoice in it as the greatest possible good news, bringing forgiveness, freedom, joy, peace and hope, and calling forth grateful, wondering worship.
Thirdly, the concept is not meaningless to people unfamiliar with the Bible. The essence of it is the inner necessity for God to be God, to respond to our waywardness and rebellion in a way that is perfectly consistent with his own character of holy love, sacrificing neither his love to his holiness nor his holiness to his love. We see this kind of inner moral conflict in every person (like Sir Thomas More, the 'man for all seasons') who has sacrificed himself rather than compromise his principles. We see it even more clearly in parents who are tom apart with conflicting emotions when their children go astray. They long to forgive, but not in such a way as to condone and so encourage wrongdoing. Sometimes there is the necessity of punishment or discipline which is extremely painful to administer. True parental forgiveness is costly. Incidentally, you do not mention Dr Kenneth Bailey's exposition of this theme in the parable of the prodigal son, which he retells 'through the eyes of Middle Eastern peasants'. He shows how 'the father bears the suffering instead of inflicting it' (CoC, p. 223). There is nothing incomprehensible here.
At this point I need to say something about penitence as the condition of pardon, with which you disagree. You write not only of God's unconditional love, which I gladly endorse, but also of his unconditional forgiveness, which I do not believe Jesus taught. Perhaps it is only a misunderstanding between us. Of course the Father has 'a forgiving spirit before his child repents', and of course we must ourselves always be 'willing to forgive' everybody. I have written the same myself. But there is surely a difference between the forgiving spirit or readiness to forgive on the one hand, and on the other the act of forgiveness which restores the forgiven person to fellowship. You say that unlike Judaism, which taught God's merciful forgiveness for penitents, Jesus taught forgiveness for everybody (except those who are blaspheming against the Spirit and in their spiritual blindness cannot receive forgiveness). I wonder if that is accurate. Bishop Stephen Neill wrote, following the Jewish scholar C. G. Montefiore, that, whereas the rabbis promised forgiveness to those who return home in penitence, what was completely new and original in Jesus was his emphasis that the shepherd took the initiative to go out into the desert to seek and find the lost ( Christian Faith Today, 1955, p. 165).
Your own reconstruction of the gospel of the cross I have read and re-read many times. And I heartily agree with most of what you so eloquently express. The cross was indeed the supreme example of non-retaliation, the acceptance of injustice, the soalang up of human evil, an identification with all the oppressed and defeated, and a revelation of the suffering God. These truths move me as much as they move you, and I think you will agree that I have myself expressed them too.
It is not what you write, but what you omit that troubles me and provokes questions. Does your 'theory' do justice to the biblical doctrines of God's holiness and wrath, and to constantly repeated phrases like 'he died for our sins'? Just how did the cross as you portray it 'deal decisively with human sin'? How does it 'release us from the burden of guilt' and 'win spiritual freedom' for us? And how was the cross a revelation simultaneously of God's justice and love, as Paul clearly wrote in Romans 3 and 5? Further, in what sense could your reconstruction of the cross be a stumbling block to sinners, as Paul said it is? I do not find that your story of Christ crucified offers me a radical enough remedy for my needs. I need more than an example, a revelation, a martyr. You yourself admit the inadequacy of the exemplary interpretation; yet I am not clear what more you are offering.
In the end what worries me about your chapter on the cross, as about your chapter on the Bible, is what I have called your 'biblical selectivity', together with the principle which controls your selection. My own genuine claim, whether it can be substantiated or not, is to have given 'an explanation of the death of Jesus which takes into proper scientific account all the available [biblical] data, without avoiding any' (CoC, p. 83). By contrast, your guide seems to be 'the world which we have entered through education and through daily experience ("culture")', which teaches us that certain ideas are 'either ridiculous or else actually blasphemous'. Perhaps the crucial question between us, then, is whether culture is to judge Scripture, or Scripture culture.
I think I shall need to return to this question later.
Yours as ever,
John