Who is the substitute?
Who is the substitute?
The key question we now have to address is this: exactly who was our substitute? Who took our place, bore our sin, became our curse, endured our penalty, died our death? To be sure, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). That would be the simple, surface answer. But who was this Christ? How are we to think of him?
Was he just a man? If so, how could one human being possibly – or justly – stand in for other human beings? Was he then simply God, seeming to be a man, but not actually being the man he seemed? If so, how could he represent humankind? Besides this, how could he have died? In that case, are we to think of Christ neither as man alone, nor as God alone, but rather as the one and only God-man who because of his uniquely constituted person was uniquely qualified to mediate between God and man? Whether the concept of substitutionary atonement is rational, moral, plausible, acceptable, and above all biblical, depends on our answers to these questions. The possibility of substitution rests on the identity of the substitute. We need therefore to examine in greater depth the three explanations which I have sketched above.
The first proposal is that the substitute was the man Christ Jesus, viewed as a human being, and conceived as an individual separate from both God and us, an independent third party. Those who begin with this a priori lay themselves open to gravely distorted understandings of the atonement and so bring the truth of substitution into disrepute. They tend to present the cross in one or other of two ways, according to whether the initiative was Christ’s or God’s. In the one case Christ is pictured as intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation. In the other, the intervention is ascribed to God, who proceeds to punish the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment. In both cases God and Christ are sundered from one another: either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. What is characteristic of both presentations is that they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed upon by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.
Such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping-boy who is punished instead of the real culprit, or as the lightning conductor to which the lethal electric charge is deflected. Even some of our time-honoured hymns express this view:
Jehovah lifted up his rod;
O Christ, it fell on thee!
Thou wast sore stricken of thy God;
There’s not one stroke for me.
There is, of course, some justification in Scripture for both kinds of formulation, or they would never have been developed by Christians whose desire and claim are to be biblical.
Thus, Jesus Christ is said to be the ‘propitiation’ for our sins and our ‘advocate’ with the Father (1 John 2:2, AV), which at first sight suggests that he died to placate God’s anger and is now pleading with him in order to persuade him to forgive us. But other parts of Scripture forbid us to interpret the language of propitiation and advocacy in that way, as we shall see in the next chapter. The whole notion of a compassionate Christ inducing a reluctant God to take action on our behalf founders on the fact of God’s love. There was no Umstimmung in God, no change of mind or heart secured by Christ. On the contrary, the saving initiative originated in him. It was ‘because of the tender mercy of our God’ (Luke 1:78) that Christ came, ‘because of his great love for us’,40 because of ‘the grace of God that brings salvation’ (Titus 2:11).
As for the other formulation (that God punished Jesus for our sins), it is true that the sins of Israel were transferred to the scapegoat, that ‘the Lord laid on him’, his suffering servant, all our iniquity (Isa. 53:6), that ‘it was the Lord’s will to crush him’ (Isa. 53:10), and that Jesus applied to himself Zechariah’s prophecy that God would ‘strike the shepherd’.41 It is also true that in the New Testament God is said to have ‘sent’ his Son to atone for our sins (1 John 4:9–10), ‘delivered him up’ for us,42 ‘presented him as a sacrifice of atonement’ (Rom. 3:25), ‘condemned sin’ in his flesh (Rom. 8:3), and ‘made him...to be sin for us’ (2 Cor. 5:21). These are striking statements. But we have no liberty to interpret them in such a way as to imply either that God compelled Jesus to do what he was unwilling to do himself, or that Jesus was an unwilling victim of God’s harsh justice. Jesus Christ did indeed bear the penalty of our sins, but God was active in and through Christ doing it, and Christ was freely playing his part (e.g. Heb. 10:5–10).
We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of each other or were even in conflict with each other. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment or God the object of Christ’s persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taking the initiative together to save sinners. Whatever happened on the cross in terms of ‘God-forsakenness’ was voluntarily accepted by both in the same holy love which made atonement necessary. It was ‘God in our nature forsaken of God’.43 If the Father ‘gave the Son’, the Son ‘gave himself’. If the Gethsemane ‘cup’ symbolized the wrath of God, it was nevertheless ‘given’ by the Father (John 18:11) and voluntarily ‘taken’ by the Son. If the Father ‘sent’ the Son, the Son ‘came’ himself. The Father did not lay on the Son an ordeal he was reluctant to bear, nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow. There is no suspicion anywhere in the New Testament of discord between the Father and the Son, ‘whether by the Son wresting forgiveness from an unwilling Father or by the Father demanding a sacrifice from an unwilling Son’.44 There was no unwillingness in either. On the contrary, their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrifice of love.
If then our substitute was not Christ alone as a third party independent of God, is the truth that God alone took our place, bore our sin and died our death? If we may not so exalt the initiative of Christ as virtually to eliminate the contribution of the Father, may we reverse their roles, ascribing the whole initiative and achievement to the Father, thus virtually eliminating Christ? For if God has himself done everything necessary for our salvation, does that not make Christ redundant?
This proposed solution to the problem is at first sight attractive theologically, for it avoids all the distortions which arise when Jesus is conceived as a third party. As we saw in the last chapter, it is God who must satisfy himself as holy love. He was unwilling to act in love at the expense of his holiness or in holiness at the expense of his love. So we may say that he satisfied his holy love by himself dying the death and so bearing the judgment which sinners deserved. He both exacted and accepted the penalty of human sin. And he did it ‘so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’ (Rom. 3:26). There is no question now either of the Father inflicting punishment on the Son or of the Son intervening on our behalf with the Father, for it is the Father himself who takes the initiative in his love, bears the penalty of sin himself, and so dies. Thus the priority is neither ‘man’s demand on God’ nor ‘God’s demand on men’, but supremely ‘God’s demand on God, God’s meeting his own demand’.45
Many theologians ancient and modern, representing different traditions, have seen the necessity of emphasizing that God himself was there on the cross, and have therefore expressed their understanding of the atonement in these terms. In the Old English poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’, which may date from as early as the seventh or eighth century, the author tells how in ‘the most treasured of dreams’ he saw ‘the strangest of trees’:
Lifted aloft in the air, with light all around it,
Of all beams the brightest. It stood as a beacon,
Drenched in gold; gleaming gems were set
Fair around its foot....
Then in the dream the cross spoke, telling its own story. Having been cut from the forest, it was carried up the hill. Then it saw what its destiny was to be:
The King of all mankind coming in great haste,
With courage keen, eager to climb me.
Then the young hero – it was God Almighty –
Strong and stedfast, stripped himself for battle;
He climbed up on the high gallows, constant in his purpose,
Mounted it in sight of many, mankind to ransom.
At the end of the poem, having seen God dying for him, the dreamer prays to ‘that blessed beam’ and, putting his trust in it, declares: ‘My refuge is the Rood.’46
‘God dying for man’, wrote P. T. Forsyth. ‘I am not afraid of that phrase; I cannot do without it. God dying for men; and for such men – hostile, malignantly hostile men.’47 Again, because ‘the holiness of God...is meaningless without judgment’, the one thing God could not do in the face of human rebellion was nothing. ‘He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And he chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took his own judgment.’48
It was ‘God himself’ giving himself for us. Karl Barth did not shrink from using those words. ‘God’s own heart suffered on the cross’, he added. ‘Noone else but God’s own Son, and hence the eternal God himself....’49 Similarly, Bishop Stephen Neill wrote: ‘If the crucifixion of Jesus...is in some way, as Christians have believed, the dying of God himself, then...we can understand what God is like.’50 And hymns of popular devotion have echoed it, like this phrase from Charles Wesley’s ‘And can it be’:
Amazing love! How can it be
That thou, my God, should’st die for me?
The reason why both scholarly and simple Christians have felt able to use this kind of language is of course that Scripture permits it. When the apostles wrote of the cross, they often indicated by a tell-tale expression who it was who died there and gave it its efficacy. Thus, he who humbled himself even to death on a cross was none other than he who ‘being in very nature God’ made himself nothing in order to become human and to die (Phil. 2:6–8). It was ‘the Lord of glory’ whom the rulers of this age crucified (1 Cor. 2:8). And the blood by which the robes of the redeemed have been washed clean is that of the Lamb who shares the centre of God’s throne (Rev. 5:6, 9; 7:9). Moreover, the logic of the letter to the Hebrews requires us to say that it is God who died. It plays on the similarity between a ‘covenant’ and a ‘will’. The terms of a will come into force only after the death of the testator. So he who makes promises in his will has to die before the legacies can be received. Since, then, the promises in question are God’s promises, the death must be God’s death (Heb. 9:15–17).
There is one other verse which we must not overlook. It occurs in Paul’s farewell speech at Miletus to the elders of the Ephesian church. The flock over which the Holy Spirit has made them overseers and shepherds, he says, is nothing less than ‘the church of God, which he bought with his own blood’ (Acts 20:28). It is true that the text is uncertain (some manuscripts read ‘the church of the Lord’, referring to Christ, instead of ‘the church of God’), and so is the translation (it might mean ‘the church of God which he bought with the blood of his own’, referring again to Christ). Nevertheless, the context seems to demand the readings ‘the church of God’ and ‘his own blood’. For Paul’s purpose is to remind the elders of the precious value of the church they have been called to serve. It is God’s church. God’s Spirit has appointed them elders over it, and the price paid for its purchase is actually ‘God’s blood’ – an almost shocking phrase which was used by some of the church Fathers such as Ignatius and Tertullian,51 and which medieval churchmen continued to use, albeit often as an oath.
In spite of this biblical justification, however, no verse specifically declares that ‘God himself’ died on the cross. Scripture bears witness to the deity of the person who gave himself for us, but it stops short of the unequivocal affirmation that ‘God died’. The reasons for this are not far to seek. First, immortality belongs to God’s essential being (‘God...alone is immortal’, 1 Tim. 6:16), and therefore he cannot die. So he became man, in order to be able to do so: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil’ (Heb. 2:14). Similarly, he became man in order to be the ‘one mediator between God and men’ (1 Tim. 2:5).
The second reason why it is misleading to say that ‘God died’ is that ‘God’ in the New Testament frequently means ‘the Father’ (e.g. ‘God sent his Son’), and the person who died on the cross was not the Father but the Son. At the beginning of the third century AD some denied this. They had difficulties with the doctrine of the Trinity and could not see how to believe in the Father, the Son and the Spirit without thereby becoming tritheists. So they began by emphasizing the unity of God, and then spoke of Father, Son and Spirit not as three eternally distinct ‘persons’ within the Godhead, but rather as three temporal ‘modes’ in which God successively revealed himself. Hence their name ‘Modalists’. The Father became the Son, they taught, and then the Son became the Spirit. They were also referred to as ‘Sabellians’ because Sabellius was one of their leaders. Another was Praxeas, whose teaching is known to us through Tertullian’s powerful refutation of it. Praxeas taught (or, according to Tertullian, the devil taught through him) ‘that the Father himself came down into the virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered, indeed was himself Jesus Christ’. Because Praxeas also opposed the Montanists, who have been loosely described as the charismatics of that era, Tertullian continued, ‘Praxeas did a twofold service for the devil at Rome; he drove away prophecy and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father’.52 The droll notion that the Father was crucified led the critics of Praxeas’ followers to give them the nickname ‘Patripassians’ (those who taught that the Father suffered). Over against this Tertullian urged: ‘Let us be content with saying that Christ died, the Son of the Father; and let this suffice, because the Scriptures have told us so much.’53
A somewhat similar deviation arose in the sixth century in Constantinople, which came to be known as ‘theopaschitism’ (the belief that God suffered). Its adherents rejected the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) that Jesus, though one person, had two natures, being both truly God and truly man. Instead, they were ‘Monophysites’, teaching that Christ had only one composite nature (physis, ‘nature’), which was essentially divine. Thus underplaying the humanity of Jesus, they naturally emphasized that God suffered in and through him.
Although these controversies seem very remote to us in the twenty-first century, we need to take warning from them. An over-emphasis on the sufferings of God on the cross may mislead us either into confusing the persons of the Trinity and denying the eternal distinctness of the Son, like the Modalists or Patripassians, or into confusing the natures of Christ, and denying that he was one person in two natures, like the Monophysites or Theopaschites. It is true that, since Jesus was both God and man, the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) declared it correct to refer to the virgin Mary as theotokos (‘mother of God’, literally ‘God-bearer’). Similarly, and for the same reason, it seems permissible to refer to God suffering on the cross. For if God could be born, why could he not also die? The value of these expressions is that they eliminate the possibility of thinking of Jesus as an independent third party. Nevertheless, the words theotokos and Theopaschite are misleading, even if technically legitimate, because they emphasize the deity of the person who was born and died, without making any comparable reference to his humanity. It would be wiser instead to say what the New Testament authors said, faithfully echoed by the Apostles’ Creed, namely that he who ‘was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried’ was not ‘God’, still less the Father, but ‘Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord’. The apostles further clarify this by stressing the Son’s willing obedience to the Father.54