5 Satisfaction for Sin
5
Satisfaction for Sin
No two words in the theological vocabulary of the cross arouse more criticism than ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’. Yet it is in defence of these words that this chapter and the next are written. In combination (‘satisfaction through substitution’) they may even seem intolerable. How, people ask, can we possibly believe that God needed some kind of ‘satisfaction’ before he was prepared to forgive, and that Jesus Christ provided it by enduring as our ‘substitute’ the punishment we sinners deserved? Are not such notions unworthy of the God of the biblical revelation, a hangover from primitive superstitions, indeed frankly immoral?
Sir Alister Hardy, for example, formerly Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford, who was friendly to all kinds of religious experience because he spent a lifetime investigating it, nevertheless expressed his inability to come to terms with the ‘crude’ beliefs he thought ‘so many orthodox churchmen’ entertain. In his 1965 Gifford Lectures, published under the title The Divine Flame, he asked whether Jesus himself would be a Christian if he were to live today. ‘I very much doubt it,’ Sir Alister replied. ‘I feel certain that he would not have preached to us of a God who would be appeased by the cruel sacrifice of a tortured body....I cannot accept either the hypothesis that the appalling death of Jesus was a sacrifice in the eyes of God for the sins of the world, or that God, in the shape of his son, tortured himself for our redemption. I can only confess that, in my heart of hearts, I find such religious ideas to be amongst the least attractive in the whole of anthropology. To me they belong to quite a different philosophy – different psychology – from that of the religion that Jesus taught’ (p.218).
Sir Alister Hardy was right to say that Jesus would not (because he did not) explain his death in those crude terms, but wrong to suppose that ‘many orthodox churchmen’ do so. He caricatured the Christian understanding of the cross in order the more readily to condemn it. The real question is whether we can hold fast to the saving efficacy of the death of Jesus, and to its traditional vocabulary (including ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’), without denigrating God. I believe we can and must. To be sure, neither ‘satisfaction’ nor ‘substitution’ is a biblical word, and therefore we need to proceed with great caution. But each is a biblical concept. There is, in fact, a biblical revelation of ‘satisfaction through substitution’, which is uniquely honouring to God, and which should therefore lie at the very heart of the church’s worship and witness. That is why Cranmer included a clear statement of it at the beginning of his Prayer of Consecration (1549). In consequence, for 400 years Anglicans have described Jesus Christ as having made on the cross, by his ‘one oblation of himself once offered’, ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.
But the way in which different theologians have developed the concept of satisfaction depends on their understanding of the obstacles to forgiveness which need first to be removed. What demands are being made which stand in the way until they are satisfied? And who is making them? Is it the devil? Or is it the law, or God’s honour or justice, or ‘the moral order’? All these have been proposed. I shall argue, however, that the primary ‘obstacle’ is to be found within God himself. He must ‘satisfy himself’ in the way of salvation he devises; he cannot save us by contradicting himself.