7. Salvation: Fall, Sin, Redemption, Atonement, Justification
7 SALVATION: FALL, SIN, REDEMPTION, ATONEMENT, JUSTIFICATION
‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good’ (Genesis 1:31).
Thank God for that basic truth at the very beginning of our Bible. But regrettably, we also know that it is not the last word. There follows the story of what we call the Fall. As Christians we understand our world as a good creation which has ‘fallen’, and the human race as made in God’s image and therefore ‘good’, but ‘fallen’ and in ‘rebellion’. It is at this point that we are very strongly criticised by our culture.
To call someone a sinner is the greatest sin one can commit, as Gandhi once suggested when he remarked, ‘To call people sinners is to undermine their humanity.’ Many of our contemporaries would say that people need to be encouraged and told that they have great dignity and worth, and to label them sinners is a deep offence against their humanity.
Certainly from the time of the Renaissance onwards, European culture has tried to take an optimistic view of human nature. At the beginning of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence there occurs that momentous ‘self-evident’ statement that all people are created equal with equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This was truly a great statement. And happiness was the glorious new buzzword of the eighteenth century.
In the Middle Ages people did not expect happiness on earth, only the first taste of it. They expected happiness to come at the end. But especially from the Renaissance onwards that idea of happiness coming only at the end was regarded as a form of sedition, a sort of treason against humanity. Human nature was good. Of course there were bad people, but basically human nature was good and the task was to tell people so and encourage them to believe it.
We all know about sin. We know it especially because we are able to recognise other people as being sinners. We pass judgment on others and we have a strong tendency to identify sin with particular groups. For example, in the 1945 celebrations on VE Day we were reminded of the appalling evil of Nazi Germany before and during the Second World War. People thought then that this demonic evil must not, could not, and would not ever recur. But we know that evil of this nature is still going on in many parts of the world. It has happened in Bosnia and continues to occur just about everywhere else. There is no doubt at all that the Bible speaks of us as sinners, although as a matter of fact there are very few references to the Fall in the Old Testament, except at the beginning of Genesis.
What grounds do we have for talking of sin? It is there in Genesis 3, but ultimately all Christian doctrine has to be validated at the centre point of the gospel. This is the point of the incarnation, death, resurrection and the victorious Ascension of Jesus Christ. To put it candidly and rather bluntly, we know we are sinners because of what happened on Good Friday. That is the ultimate ground for our affirming that as a whole we are all sinners.
To use an illustration, I once had an experience that was meaningful to me: I used to travel back and forth by ship from England to India and sometimes the voyage would take three or even four weeks. I especially remember one voyage during the second world war when there were enemy submarines about. Those on board all knew that there might come the terrifying cry of ‘submarines!’ Whenever we went on that ship we all had to carry our lifejackets at all times.
On a long voyage, a ship’s company becomes and inhabits a little world of its own. Small groups, cliques and coteries form in the usual way and there are nice people and those who are not so nice. People naturally make distinctions between one another. We made friends with some while inevitably there were others we did not want to know. But we all knew that if the cry ‘Submarines!’, went up then all of that superficial social grouping would instantly disappear. Only one central issue would remain: Life or Death. In that we were all together, literally in the same boat, whatever we thought of one another. And in life itself it is the same, we are all in this together in the same situation.
That illustration, of life together aboard ship in those circumstances, is a way of expressing what the cross means. Because what happened on Good Friday was this: when Almighty God personally met us, the human race face to face, it was, for practical purposes, the unanimous decision of that representative company of the human race that he must be destroyed.
The crucifixion of Jesus was not the deed of a few bad people. It was, on the contrary, the work of those who were, and are, accounted the ‘best’ people: the righteous, the priests, scribes, governing officials and, of course, the crowd in the streets. So unless we take the view that we are a very special case, we must consequently conclude that essentially what happened was that the human race came face to face with its Creator and its response was to seek to destroy him.
That utterly crucial and central moment in universal history is the ground on which we are compelled to say that all of us, the good and bad together, are sinners. If that was the last word, then there could be no future for the human race. The only authentic response to what happened would be what Judas did when he went out and hanged himself. What future is there for humanity if that is what we are? But, of course, it is not the last word, because the crucifixion of Jesus, while on the one hand the act of sinful men and women, on the other hand was the work of Christ himself who went deliberately to that meeting point to give himself up for the life of the world.
It is at that point where we are judged and condemned without distinction. The cross cannot be used as a banner for one part of humanity against another. It is the place where we are all, without distinction, unmasked as the enemies of God. But it is also the place where to all, without distinction, there is offered the unlimited kindness and love of God.
While in a sense the first reaction to the cross is that it is a death sentence upon all of us, it is nevertheless at the same time the gift of life. So that Paul says, ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). This life that I now have is not an extension, a kind of period of prolongation, given to that old self that put Jesus on the cross. It is on the contrary the gift of a new life because he who is the Creator of all life has died in order that I might live. Therefore, Paul has this to say: ‘I am crucified with Christ, I am finished. I belong to a world which has no further entitlement to exist, and yet I live. But I live not because I live but because he died that I might live, so that the life that I now live is not mine but his, or rather it is a life that I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.’
We can only know that we are sinners because we have been forgiven. That seems to me to be absolutely fundamental. We teach the doctrine of original sin because we have been forgiven. Apart from that, the doctrine would simply be unbelievable and impossible, because it is sin itself which blinds us to sin. It is only the forgiven who can truly repent because sin blinds our eyes to the reality of who we are.
So the first and fundamental thing to be said is that we must speak of sin as something that affects and involves all humanity. This is not because we are in a position to pass judgment on anybody else, or because we have looked around the world and seen for ourselves that people are sinners. Of course, we can do that but the sinners always turn out to be other people. Rather, it is because of what happened on Calvary all those years ago that we can, and must, acknowledge that in the presence of God we have no standing except as forgiven sinners. I think that it is utterly essential to state that first, otherwise all other attempts to talk about sin puts us in the position of being judges of others.
The most systematic account of the matter is the long section in St Paul’s letter to the Romans (Chapters 1–7). It is after that wonderful sentence which begins, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes’ (Romans 1:16) that Paul invites his readers to take a look at the world. No doubt with their full agreement, he paints a picture of that pagan world where all around there was depravity, licentiousness, fighting, quarrelling, warring factions and endemic corruption.
No doubt there would be many, especially among his Jewish readers, who would wholeheartedly agree. But he later turns upon his Jewish readers and declares in words to this effect: ‘You who judge others, what about you?’ (Romans 2:1). And relentlessly he convicts them of the same types of sin and finally sums up that whole section, beginning with the first part of chapter 3, with a series of quotations from the Psalms which ultimately affirm, ‘There is no-one righteous, not even one’ (Romans 3:10). We all bear the same condemnation.
When he set out to examine what was at the root of that awful situation, he did not, as so many pagan thinkers did, identify the essence of sin in such things as sexual immorality, sensuality, pride or dissenting factions. No, all of the things he describes are the fruit of a root that is fundamentally unbelief. We have become corrupt because collectively we turned our backs on the Creator and failed to trust him, instead putting our trust in things that were made. And that is a faithful rendering of the story as we have it in Genesis 3.
The essence of the story of the Fall, as it is told in that chapter, is that God called upon his created family of Adam and Eve to live simply in love and obedience and to trust him to do what was good for them. When he forbade them the fruit of that tree, the knowledge of good and evil, the essence of the temptation to which they fell was contained in the words, ‘…you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (Genesis 3:5). In other words, do not just take it on trust but find out for yourself and make sure that you yourself know what is right or wrong. Do not take it on trust from anybody else.
That, says our Bible, is the root from which all the terrible harvest of sin ultimately comes. It is the breaking of the relationship of love, obedience and trust for which we were created, and the attempt to be our own masters and judges and to have a righteousness of our own. This is why Paul identifies the heart of the gospel as being the gift of a righteousness from God – a righteousness that is not my possession, but God’s gift. That is the heart of what Paul has to say about the root, the origin, of human sin and this explains what he would later say about the righteousness of God.
Then in Romans 5–6 Paul goes on to speak about our solidarity in sin. As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive. In Adam we all sin. That statement, of our solidarity in sin, has been grievously misunderstood. This is partly because of some words of St Augustine. There are two points to notice here. First of all, in that crucial verse which says that death passed from Adam to all people, in that all sinned (Romans 5:12), the Greek words for ‘in that’ can, and have been, easily misunderstood or misprinted as ‘in whom’ – as though the sin of Adam automatically made us all guilty, which is a meaningless concept.
The true text, and all later theologians agree on this, means that it is because, in that we have all sinned that we are in solidarity with Adam. Secondly, Augustine disastrously connected this with Psalm 51:5 (KJV): ‘and in sin did my mother conceive me’. When read in the context of the psalm this is simply a vivid way of saying, ‘I am a sinner from the very beginning.’ It does not mean that sin is transmitted through the act of sexual intercourse, but Augustine came close to saying something like it. And this is another misunderstanding that has distorted Western thinking on the doctrine of original sin.
What St Paul was saying – and what we surely have to recognise as truth – is that apart from conscious, individual sins resulting from our deliberate choice, we are all together, as human beings, involved in a sinful network of relationships in which we become victims of sin from the very beginning. This doctrine of original sin is something many people find abhorrent and distasteful and regard as a form of treason or breach of faith against humanity.
But any parent coping with a small child having tantrums because he or she cannot get what they want understands very well what is meant by original sin! We are all together in this network of sinful relationships which existed before we were born, and into which we are born. We are incorporated within it in the way we are brought up. We are all in this together. It is the human condition.
What is the answer to this? The answer is a righteousness from God by faith, as expressed in that fundamental verse (Romans 5:17). To put it another way, it is the gift of a relationship. It is not the gift, as it were, of a new being to ourselves as individuals. It is the gift of a new relationship to replace the one that we have broken. And here, I think, it is so tremendously important to repeat again that all our thinking has been very much shaped by the Greek conception of substance. This is the idea that behind everything that we know, or think we know, there is a kind of underlying substance which is the thing itself, and that everything, including all people and human nature, is to be understood in terms of that which is its essential substance.
But the truth, as it is in the Bible, is otherwise. The truth to be found within the Bible is that what we are constituted by are relationships. We are human beings by virtue of the fact that we are related, that we are children of God. We are all the brothers and sisters, the parents and children, of one another. Human nature does not exist except in a pattern of relationships. These relationships are intrinsic to humankind.
To make clear what I mean, consider this illustration from physics. We all know that for centuries scientists and thinkers had sought to identify the atom as the essential unit of matter, beyond which it was not possible to go. The atom was the ultimate substance underlying all matter. We now know that the atom is not just the smallest particle of a chemical element but part of a network of dynamic relationships between particles which are not themselves matter, but electrical charges. So even matter itself ultimately consists of a pattern of intricate relationships. At the other end of the cosmic scale when we use the word ‘God’ we are not, properly speaking, referring to some kind of divine substance. We are instead more truthfully and accurately referring to a pattern of relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit in complete and absolute love and communion. This is the proper designation of the word ‘God’.
From this point of view we can see that the Fall is essentially the attempt by human beings, whose only reality lies in their relationship of dependence upon God, to establish a reality for themselves. This, so to speak, enables them to stand on their own feet in relation to God and to make up their own minds on good and evil and not simply exist in a relationship of love and obedience to the Creator.
That is why the answer to the appalling fact of sin is precisely the establishment of a new relationship: a righteousness from God by faith. This does not involve a righteousness which is mine so that I can say I am a righteous person, but is of a different kind of righteousness. It is a righteousness that comprises the fact that God has accepted us in Jesus Christ and that in faith we believe and accept. It is that relationship between holy God and sinful us which constitutes the only righteousness that there can ever be.
How has this been brought about? First of all we need to look at the Old Testament background to the story told in the Gospels. The Old Testament is full of terrible accounts of the wickedness of human beings, from the first family where one brother murders the other to all those evil acts that finally caused God to try to wipe out the whole world in a flood, preserving only a righteous remnant. Again he destroyed the Tower of Babel when the human family attempted to establish its own authority with a tower that reached up to heaven.
In a sense the whole theme of the Old Testament can be described as God’s response – the ‘passion of God’. It is the passion of a holy God over his sinful family. It begins with that terrible cry in the Garden of Eden on that first evening when God called out for Adam, ‘Where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9). It is the agonised cry of a parent whose child has gone astray and is lost.
Throughout the Old Testament there is this passion of God calling upon a family to leave its home, to leave the things that are seen and relied upon and to learn to live a new life simply by faith. That family had been safeguarded and rescued out of slavery in Egypt and brought into a good and pleasant land, but that family defiled this land with their sin and rebelled time and again against their loving Creator. God, in his agony, sometimes threatened them with dreadful punishments, sometimes putting his family under terrible disciplines and then again repenting and wooing its members like a lover pursuing his bride. This is seen in that marvellous passage in Hosea: ‘How can I give you up, Ephraim … all my compassion is aroused’ (Hosea 11:8).
Then you have those marvellous passages in the latter part of Isaiah, the so-called ‘servant songs’, which picture the servant of the Lord – which should have been Israel if it had been true to its calling – as bearing all the sin of the world in that servant’s own heart. Finally, we come to our Lord himself in whom all these prophecies signalling the passion of God are made flesh and blood in the life of this human being, Jesus Christ. We see him calling Israel to fulfil the purpose for which it was called – to be God’s servant people for all the nations. When that calling was denied, Jesus went alone to his cross to bear in his own body and soul the passion of God for this sinful world.
So the one who is Lord of all was humiliated, cursed, cast out and executed as a criminal and blasphemer. And in his agony and desolation he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ (Matthew 27:46). Entering right into the God-forsaken state of this sinful family of God, descending into the very depths so that nothing of God’s creation might be left unredeemed, God raised him from the dead to a new life and exalted him to heaven as Lord. He sent forth the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost to fill the church with the knowledge that this crucified man, rejected by the world, was the mighty God and the Lord of all. And so the church sets forth on its mission to proclaim the mystery of salvation.
What I am trying to explain is that what happened is a fact. God’s victory is to be considered an actuality before we begin to advance our theories on how to explain it. It is a fact of history that these things occurred. In the outpouring of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, the church was given the assurance and authority to preach to the world that the power of sin had been broken. The righteousness of God had been given to us so that we, the unholy, might live in the love and fellowship of the holy God.
I am absolutely sure that when we speak of the atonement wrought in Jesus Christ we are talking of things that go beyond human language, because language is simply not up to the job of explaining or articulating something which is ultimately the contradiction of all reason, and that is the concept of sin. If we could, as it were, incorporate sin into a coherent rational structure of thought, it would no longer be sin. We are dealing with an ‘ultimate’, a ‘surd’, something which simply cannot be apprehended by linguistic or even mathematical structures and fitted into any rational scheme. All our attempts to comprehend what was done through the atonement, in terms of fully thought out conceptual patterns, must therefore fall short of the truth. These attempts, however, can point us towards the truth.
One of the great metaphors of reconciliation used in the Scriptures is the notion of ransom which often depicts the redeeming of a slave from his or her master through the generosity of another. It is an image used by our Lord himself. This metaphor was charged with enormous emotional weight in a society where slavery was so common. But if you try to push this metaphor to its logical conclusion, the question arises, ‘To whom was the ransom paid?’ Some early theologians suggested it was paid to God while others insisted it went to the devil. But neither can be accepted because to argue that it was a ransom paid to God implies that God had to be placated in order to forgive us. And that would assume that there was antagonism between the Son and the Father, which is wholly contrary to the Christian faith. To argue that it was paid to the devil overstates Satan’s authority.
Another metaphor is that of substitution – of another who has died in our place. This again embraces a deep and intrinsic element of truth. And yet it cannot finally explain what happened. It is so clear in the teachings of our Lord himself that while he goes before us, and it is he alone who can meet the ultimate enemy in that final battle, we are not excused from that encounter. It is precisely the opposite – that we may be enabled to follow him, to take up the cross and go the way that he has gone.
There is next the metaphor of sacrifice. This is fully developed in the letter to the Hebrews which so clearly fulfils the Old Testament regulations with regard to sacrifice. We see Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice to the Father. But, once again, we must be careful not to understand or express this as if antagonism existed between the Son and the Father, as though the Father needed to be placated.
It is one of the significant little features of the Old Testament use of the word ‘expiation’ or ‘atonement’ that the Hebrew verb, constantly used in relation to God, is never used in the form which puts God as the object. It is used, for example, where Jacob wanted to placate Esau, who was on his way to meet him with an armed band, and Jacob sent a collection of gifts ahead of him. There the word was used as he tried to placate his brother, but it was never used with God as its object. We find that it is always used in a subtle, indirect form – that God has provided a sacrifice, to make atonement concerning sin – so that there is no question of the Son, as it were, placating the Father. On the contrary, the atoning work of Christ is also the work of the Father.
Although we can never fully explain the atonement by using human language, all these different metaphors nevertheless help us get a little closer to the centre of this mystery. I have often said that one of the most helpful of them, is the one concerning the Old Testament Hebrew word for the ‘mercy seat’, the place where the sinner could be received by the holy God. This is translated in Romans 3 as the ‘place of propitiation’. Surely here we come near to the heart of what was done there. It has created a place where we who are sinners, and we are still sinners, can nevertheless be in fellowship with God who is holy, because in this act the Son of God, in loving obedience to the Father, has taken his place right where we are in our lost state. He has therefore made possible a koinonia, a communion, in the Holy Spirit, in which we share the very life of God himself, sinners though we are.
This word koinonia which we translate as ‘fellowship’, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, is actually a word which means common sharing in a property. If I and three brothers jointly own a field it would be said that we had koinonia in that field. When we refer to the fellowship of the Holy Spirit we are speaking of a shared participation in the actual life of God the Holy Spirit. That place, of course, is the church. This is where we gather in the name of Jesus. We hear his words, and in the sacrament which he has ordained, we partake of his dying and his victorious resurrection and triumph over death. This is the place where we know and experience justification and sanctification.
Justification is being recognised by God. This is not because we are in ourselves just, or righteous, but because in this act in Jesus Christ he has accepted us as just, as righteous. It is a righteousness which is on the one hand the sheer gift of God and on the other hand is accepted in faith. It is never our possession, but something received moment by moment, by faith in what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
It is also the place of sanctification. Again, this does not mean that sanctification is a process by which we gradually become holy in ourselves, as though we could obtain a holiness which was not simply God’s gift, but was our personal characteristic. That would be a contradiction at the very heart of the gospel. It is interesting to note that when Paul puts the words for justification and sanctification together it is sanctification which comes first: ‘You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified … ’ (1 Corinthians 6:11). Both the words sanctification and justification refer to a relationship with God, not to something that we possess within ourselves. The holiness which is the proper mark of a disciple of Jesus is not, and can never be, something that we possess in that way. So we can never assert that perfect holiness, something which was so central to John Wesley’s preaching in the eighteenth century is, so to speak, a designation, a kind of personal possession. That perfect holiness is simply the relationship of faithful dependence upon the sanctifying grace of God.
It seems to me that this all adds up to a most joyful way of preaching the doctrine of original sin. G. K. Chesterton, that quick witted and provocative English critic, novelist and poet, talked about ‘the good news of original sin’. What did he mean by that? Let me put it in a rather jocular way. If the whole lot of us are nothing more than a bunch of escaped convicts, which by analogy is what we are, then there is room for an enormous amount of joy, of celebration of being alive and of much merriment in the life of the church. We do not have to go around pretending to be righteous. We have no place at all except as forgiven sinners who have been embraced, accepted and loved by the holy God. And as the Psalms so often remind us, this is something which can only lead us onwards to singing and dancing.
We are delivered from the unbearable burden of trying to be ourselves, wrapped up in our own righteousness. We have one thing and one thing only to do, to believe and to give our lives in a moment by moment offering of thanks to the one who loves us and who laid down his life for us. And that is what the Christian life is. Yes, it’s good news!