Reconciliation
Reconciliation
The fourth image of salvation, which illustrates the achievement of the cross, is ‘reconciliation’. It is probably the most popular of the four because it is the most personal. We have left behind us the temple precincts, the slave-market and the lawcourts; we are now in our own home with our family and friends. True, there is a quarrel, even ‘enmity’, but to reconcile means to restore a relationship, to renew a friendship. So an original relationship is presupposed which, having been broken, has been recovered by Christ.
A second reason why people feel at ease with this imagery is that reconciliation is the opposite of alienation, and many people nowadays refer to themselves as ‘alienated’. Marxists continue to speak of the economic alienation of workers from the product of their labour. Others talk of political alienation, a sense of powerlessness to change society. But for many more ‘alienation’ encapsulates the modern mood. They do not feel at home in the materialism, emptiness and superficiality of the western world. On the contrary, they feel unfulfilled and disorientated, unable to find themselves, their identity or their freedom. To them talk of reconciliation sounds like the good news it is.
The first thing that has to be said about the biblical gospel of reconciliation, however, is that it begins with reconciliation to God, and continues with a reconciled community in Christ. Reconciliation is not a term the Bible uses to describe ‘coming to terms with oneself’, although it does insist that it is only through losing ourselves in love for God and neighbour that we truly find ourselves.
Reconciliation with God, then, is the beginning. This is the meaning of ‘atonement’. It alludes to the event through which God and human beings, previously alienated from one another, are made ‘at one’ again. The word occurs only once in the New Testament’s Authorized (King James) Version, namely in the statement that through Christ ‘we have now received the atonement’ (Rom. 5:11), that is to say, ‘the reconciliation’. It is significant that in Romans 5:9–11, which is one of the four great passages on reconciliation in the New Testament, to be reconciled and to be justified are parallels. ‘Since we have now been justified by his blood’ is balanced by ‘if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son’. The two states, though both effected by the cross, are not identical, however. Justification is our legal standing before our Judge in the court; reconciliation is our personal relationship with our Father in the home. Indeed, the latter is the sequel and fruit of the former. It is only when we have been justified by faith that we have peace with God (Rom. 5:1), which is reconciliation.
Two other New Testament terms confirm this emphasis that reconciliation means peace with God, namely ‘adoption’ and ‘access’. With regard to the former, it was Jesus himself who always addressed God intimately as ‘Abba, Father’, who gave us permission to do the same, approaching him as ‘our Father in heaven’. The apostles enlarged on it. John, who attributes our being children of God to our being born of God, expresses his sense of wonder that the Father should have loved us enough to call us, and indeed make us, his children.74 Paul, on the other hand, traces our status as God’s children rather to our adoption than to our new birth, and emphasizes the privileges we have in being sons instead of slaves, and therefore God’s heirs as well.75
‘Access’ (prosagōgē) to God is another blessing of reconciliation. It seems to denote the active communion with God, especially in prayer, which his reconciled children enjoy. Twice Paul brackets ‘access to God’ and ‘peace with God’, the first time attributing them to our justification rather than our reconciliation (Rom. 5:1–2), and the second time explaining ‘access’ as a Trinitarian experience, in that we have access to the Father through the Son by the Spirit (Eph. 2:17–18), and ‘we may approach God with freedom and confidence’ (3:12). Peter uses the cognate verb, declaring that it was in order to ‘bring’ us to God (prosagō) that Christ died for us once for all, the righteous instead of the unrighteous (1 Pet. 3:18). And the writer to the Hebrews borrows from the Day of Atonement ritual, in order to convey the nearness to God which Christ by his sacrifice and priesthood has made possible. ‘Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus,’ he writes, ‘let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith...’ (10:19–22).
Thus, reconciliation, peace with God, adoption into his family and access into his presence all bear witness to the same new relationship into which God has brought us.
But reconcilation has a horizontal as well as a vertical plane. For God has reconciled us to one another in his new community, as well as to himself. A second great New Testament passage (Eph. 2:11–22) focuses on this, and in particular on the healing of the breach between Jews and Gentiles, so that sometimes it is not clear which reconciliation Paul is referring to. He reminds his Gentile Christian readers that formerly they were on the one hand ‘excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise’ and on the other ‘separate from Christ...and without God in the world’ (v. 12). So they were ‘far away’ from both God and Israel, doubly alienated; ‘but now in Christ Jesus’, he goes on, ‘you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ’ – near to God and near to Israel (v. 13). In fact Christ, who ‘himself is our peace’, has broken down the barrier between these two halves of the human race, and ‘made the two one’ (v. 14). He has both ‘abolished’ the law’s regulations which kept them apart and ‘created’ in himself ‘one new man out of the two, thus making peace’ (v. 15). Knowing the mutual bitterness and contempt which Jews and Gentiles felt for each other, this reconciliation was a miracle of God’s grace and power. It has resulted in the emergence of a single, new, unified humanity, whose members through the cross have been reconciled both to God and to one another. Formerly enemies, they have had their reciprocal hostility put to death. They are now fellow citizens in God’s kingdom, brothers and sisters in God’s family (v. 19), fellow members of Christ’s body and sharers together in the Messianic promise (3:6). This complete equality of Jew and Gentile in the new community is the ‘mystery’ which for centuries had been kept secret, but which now God had revealed to the apostles, especially to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles (3:4–6).
Even this does not complete the reconciliation which God has achieved through Christ. In Colossians, which is a sister epistle to Ephesians because the two contain many parallels, Paul adds a cosmic dimension to the work of Christ. Whether the great Christological passage (Col. 1:15–20) is an early Christian hymn, as many scholars believe, or an original composition of Paul’s, it is a sublime statement of the absolute supremacy of Jesus Christ in creation and redemption, in the universe and the church. At the same time, it is aptly addressed to the Colossian heretics who seem to have taught the existence of angelic intermediaries (‘thrones, powers, rulers, authorities’) between the Creator and the material creation, and may have suggested that Jesus was one of them. Paul will not have it. His emphasis is on ‘all things’, an expression he uses five times, which usually means the cosmos, but here evidently includes the principalities and powers. All things were created by God ‘in’, ‘through’ and ‘for’ Christ (v. 16). He is ‘before’ all things in time and rank, and ‘in’ him all things are sustained and integrated (v. 17). Since all things exist in, through, for and under Christ, he is the supreme lord by right. In addition, he is the head of the body, the church, being the firstborn from among the dead, so that he might be pre-eminent in everything (v. 18). And this second sphere of his supremacy is due to the fact that God was pleased for his fullness both to dwell in him (v. 19) and to do his work of reconciliation through him, making peace through his blood shed on the cross. This time what is reconciled is again called ‘all things’, which are further described as ‘things on earth or things in heaven’ (v. 20).
We cannot be sure to what Paul was alluding. The presumption is that the ‘all things’ reconciled (v. 20) have the same identity as the ‘all things’ created (vv. 16–17). But if what was created through Christ needed later to be reconciled through Christ, something must have gone wrong in between. As Peter O’Brien puts it, ‘the presupposition is that the unity and harmony of the cosmos have suffered a considerable dislocation, even a rupture, thus requiring reconciliation’.76 If this is a reference to the natural order, then pehaps its ‘reconciliation’ is the same as the ‘liberation from its bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8:21), although this is a future event. If, on the other hand, the reference is to evil cosmic intelligences or fallen angels, there is no New Testament warrant for expecting that they have been (or will be) savingly reconciled to God. It seems more probable, therefore, that the principalities and powers have been ‘reconciled’ in the sense of the next chapter, namely that they have been ‘disarmed’ by Christ, who ‘made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross’ (Col. 2:15). It is admittedly a strange use of the word ‘reconciled’, but, since Paul also describes this as ‘making peace’ (1:20), perhaps F. F. Bruce is right that he is thinking of a ‘pacification’ of cosmic beings ‘submitting against their wills to a power which they cannot resist’.77 In this case the same situation may be in mind which is elsewhere described as every knee bowing to Jesus and every tongue confessing his lordship (Phil. 2:9–11), and all things being placed by God under his feet until the day when they are brought together ‘under one head, even Christ’ (Eph. 1:10, 22).
So far we have been investigating the objects of God’s reconciling work through Christ. He has reconciled sinners to himself, Jews and Gentiles to one another, and even the cosmic powers in the sense of disarming and pacifying them. We need now to consider how the reconciliation has taken place, and what in the great drama of reconciliation are the respective roles played by God, Christ and ourselves. For light on these questions we turn to the fourth reconciliation passage, 2 Corinthians 5:18–21.
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us – we implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
The first truth this passage makes clear is that God is the author of the reconciliation. In fact, this is the principal emphasis throughout. ‘All (ta panta, “all things”) is from God.’ Perhaps the ‘all things’ look back to the ‘new things’ of the new creation with which the previous verse ended. God is the Creator; the new creation comes from him. Eight verbs follow in this paragraph which have God as their subject. They describe God’s gracious initiative – God reconciling, God giving, God appealing, God making Christ to be sin for us. As the New English Bible translates the first sentence in verse 18: ‘From first to last this has been the work of God.’
Therefore no explanation of the atonement is biblical which takes the initiative from God, and gives it instead either to us or to Christ. The initiative is certainly not ours. We have nothing to offer, to contribute, to plead. In William Temple’s memorable phrase, ‘all is of God; the only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed’. Nor has the primary initiative been Christ’s. No interpretation of the atonement will do which attributes the initiative to Christ in such a way as to take it from the Father. Christ did indeed take the initiative to come, but only in the sense that he could say, ‘Here I am...I have come to do your will, O God’ (Heb. 10:7). The initiative of the Son was in submission to the initiative of the Father. There was no reluctance on the part of the Father. There was no intervention on the part of Christ as a third party. No, the reconciliation was conceived and born in the love of God. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.’
We note here that wherever the verb ‘to reconcile’ occurs in the New Testament, either God is the subject (he reconciled us to himself) or, if the verb is passive, we are (we were reconciled to him). God is never the object. It is never said that ‘Christ reconciled the Father to us’. Formally, linguistically, this is a fact. But we must be careful not to build too much on it theologically. For if we were right to say that God propitiated his own wrath through Christ, we could certainly say that he reconciled himself to us through Christ. If he needed to be propitiated, he equally needed to be reconciled. In other words, it is a mistake to think that the barrier between God and us, which necessitated the work of reconciliation, was entirely on our side, so that we needed to be reconciled and God did not. True, we were ‘God’s enemies’, hostile to him in our hearts.78 But the ‘enmity’ was on both sides. The wall or barrier between God and us was constituted both by our rebellion against him and by his wrath upon us on account of our rebellion. Three arguments support this contention.
First, the language. The very words ‘enemy’, ‘enmity’ and ‘hostility’ imply reciprocity. For example, in Romans 11:28 the word ‘enemies’ must be passive, since it is contrasted with the passive word ‘loved’. Also the ‘hostility’ between Jews and Gentiles in Ephesians 2:14 was reciprocal, suggesting that the other ‘hostility’ (between God and sinners) was reciprocal too. So F. Büchsel writes that we should not interpret enemies ‘unilaterally’, as meaning only ‘hostile to God’, but as including ‘standing under the wrath of God’.79 The second argument concerns the context, both of each passage and of the whole Bible. In or near each major reconciliation passage there is a reference to God’s wrath. The most striking is Romans 5, where ‘saved from God’s wrath’ (v. 9) is immediately followed by ‘we were God’s enemies’ (v. 10). Then there is the wider biblical context. Leon Morris particularly underlines this: ‘there is, on the scriptural view, a definite hostility on the part of God to everything that is evil....Thus, quite apart from details of interpretation of particular passages, there is strong and consistent teaching to the effect that God is active in his opposition to all that is evil.’80 Thirdly, there is the theology. Paul’s logic was that God had acted objectively in reconciliation before the message of reconciliation was proclaimed. So the ‘peace’ which evangelists preach (Eph. 2:17) cannot be that our enmity has been overcome (they are rather preaching in order that it may be), but that God has turned aside from his enmity because of Christ’s cross. He has reconciled himself to us; we must now be reconciled to him.
Emil Brunner expressed himself forthrightly on this matter:
Reconciliation presupposes enmity between two parties. To put it still more exactly: reconciliation, real reconciliation, an objective act of reconciliation, presupposes enmity on both sides; that is, that man is the enemy of God and that God is the enemy of man.81
Brunner goes on to explain that our enmity towards God is seen in our restlessness, ranging from frivolity to open renunciation and hatred of God, while his enmity to us is his wrath. Moreover, ‘God is present in this anger, it is actually his anger’ (p.517).
Secondly, if God is the author, Christ is the agent of the reconciliation. This is crystal clear in 2 Corinthians 5:18 and 19. ‘God...reconciled us to himself through Christ’ and ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ’. Both statements tell us that God took the initiative to reconcile, and that he did it in and through Christ. In this respect the sentences are identical. But the beneficiaries change from ‘us’ to ‘the world’, to show the universal scope of the reconciliation, and the preposition changes from ‘through’ to ‘in’, to show that God was not working through Christ as his agent at a distance but was actually present in him as he did the work.
We have now to notice the past tenses, especially the aorist (‘reconciled’, v. 18). Both verbs indicate that God was doing, indeed did, something in Christ. Let James Denney draw out the implication of this:
The work of reconciliation, in the sense of the New Testament, is a work which is finished, and which we must conceive to be finished, before the gospel is preached....Reconciliation...is not something which is being done; it is something which is done. No doubt there is a work of Christ which is in process, but it has as its basis a finished work of Christ. It is in virtue of something already consummated on his cross that Christ is able to make the appeal to us which he does, and to win the response in which we receive the reconciliation.82
A few years later P. T. Forsyth pungently expressed the same truth:
‘God was in Christ reconciling’, actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair....Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work....He preached something done once for all – a reconciliation which is the base of every soul’s reconcilement, not an invitation only.83
What, then, was it which God did or accomplished in and through Christ? Paul answers this question in two complementary ways, negative and positive. Negatively, God declined to reckon our transgressions against us (v. 19b). Of course we deserved to have them counted against us. But if he were to bring us into judgment, we would die. ‘If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?’ (Ps. 130:3). So God in his mercy refused to reckon our sins against us or require us to bear their penalty. What then has he done with them? For he cannot condone them. No, the positive counterpart is given in verse 21: ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ It is surely one of the most startling statements in the Bible, yet we must not on that account evade it. James Denney was not exaggerating when he wrote of it: ‘Mysterious and awful as this thought is, it is the key to the whole of the New Testament.’84 For our sake God actually made the sinless Christ to be sin with our sins. The God who refused to reckon our sins to us reckoned them to Christ instead. Indeed, his personal sinlessness uniquely qualified him to bear our sins in our place.
Moreover, Christ became sin for us, in order that ‘in him we might become the righteousness of God’. In other words, our sins were imputed to the sinless Christ, in order that we sinners, by being united to him, might receive as a free gift a standing of righteousness before God. Christian disciples down the centuries have meditated on this exchange between the sinless Christ and sinners, and have marvelled at it. The first example is probably in the second-century Epistle to Diognetus, chapter 9: ‘O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single Righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors.’ Then here is Luther writing to a monk in distress about his sins: ‘Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say “Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours. You became what you were not, that I might become what I was not”.’85
Half a century or so later (in 1585) Richard Hooker said in a sermon on Habakkuk 1:4:
Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God himself. Let it be counted folly or frenzy or fury or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man hath sinned and God has suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.86
As an example from the twentieth century let me choose Emil Brunner’s epigram: ‘Justification means this miracle: that Christ takes our place and we take his.’87
Looking back over the paragraph we are studying, it is important to note the paradox constituted by the first and last statements. On the one hand, God was in Christ reconciling. On the other, God made Christ to be sin for us. How God can have been in Christ when he made him to be sin is the ultimate mystery of the atonement. But we must hold both affirmations tenaciously, and never expound either in such a way as to contradict the other.
Thirdly, if God is the author and Christ is the agent, we are the ambassadors of the reconciliation. In considering verses 18 and 19 we have so far looked only at the first part of each sentence. But each is in two parts, the first stating the achievement of the reconciliation (God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself) and the second its announcement (he has committed to us the ministry and the message of reconciliation). Moreover this ministry of reconciliation is itself in two stages. It begins as a proclamation that God was in Christ reconciling and that he made Christ to be sin for us. It continues with an appeal to people to ‘be reconciled to God’, that is, ‘avail yourselves of the offered terms of reconciliation with God’ (cf. Matt. 5:24), or simply ‘receive it’ (cf. Rom. 5:11).88 We must keep these things distinct. God finished the work of reconciliation at the cross, yet it is still necessary for sinners to repent and believe and so ‘be reconciled to God’. Again, sinners need to ‘be reconciled to God’, yet we must not forget that on God’s side the work of reconciliation has already been done. If these two things are to be kept distinct, they will also in all authentic gospel preaching be kept together. It is not enough to expound a thoroughly orthodox doctrine of reconciliation if we never beg people to come to Christ. Nor is it right for a sermon to consist of an interminable appeal, which has not been preceded by an exposition of the gospel. The rule should be ‘no appeal without a proclamation, and no proclamation without an appeal’.
In issuing this appeal, ‘we are...Christ’s ambassadors’ (v. 20). This was particularly true of Paul and his fellow apostles. They were the personal envoys and representatives of Jesus Christ. Yet in a secondary sense it is true of all Christian witnesses and preachers, who are heralds of the gospel: we speak in Christ’s name and on his behalf. Then, as we issue our appeal, another voice is often heard, for it is ‘as though God were making his appeal through us’. It is a remarkable truth that the same God who worked ‘through Christ’ to achieve the reconciliation now works ‘through us’ to announce it.
We have examined four of the principal New Testament images of salvation, taken from the shrine, the market, the lawcourt and the home. Their pictorial nature makes it impossible to integrate them neatly with one another. Temple sacrifices and legal verdicts, the slave in the market and the child in the home all clearly belong to different worlds. Nevertheless, certain themes emerge from all four images.
First, each highlights a different aspect of our human need. Propitiation underscores the wrath of God upon us, redemption our captivity to sin, justification our guilt, and reconciliation our enmity against God and alienation from him. These metaphors do not flatter us. They expose the magnitude of our need.
Secondly, all four images emphasize that the saving initiative was taken by God in his love. It is he who has propitiated his own wrath, redeemed us from our miserable bondage, declared us righteous in his sight, and reconciled us to himself. Relevant texts leave us in no doubt about this: ‘God...loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ ‘God...has come and has redeemed his people.’ ‘It is God who justifies.’ ‘God...reconciled us to himself through Christ.’89
Thirdly, all four images plainly teach that God’s saving work was achieved through the bloodshedding, that is, the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. With regard to the blood of Christ the texts are again unequivocal. ‘God presented him as a propitiatory sacrifice, through faith in his blood.’ ‘In him we have redemption through his blood.’ ‘We have now been justified by his blood.’ ‘You who once were far away have been brought near (i.e. reconciled) through the blood of Christ.’90 Since Christ’s blood is a symbol of his life laid down in violent death, it is also plain in each of the four images that he died in our place as our substitute. The death of Jesus was the atoning sacrifice because of which God averted his wrath from us, the ransom-price by which we have been redeemed, the condemnation of the innocent that the guilty might be justified, and the sinless One being made sin for us.91
So substitution is not a ‘theory of the atonement’. Nor is it even an additional image to take its place as an option alongside the others. It is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself. None of the four images could stand without it. I am not of course saying that it is necessary to understand, let alone articulate, a substitutionary atonement before one can be saved. Yet the responsibility of Christian teachers, preachers and other witnesses is to seek grace to expound it with clarity and conviction. For the better people understand the glory of the divine substitution, the easier it will be for them to trust in the Substitute.