The Danger of Penal Substitution

The topic of “penal substitution” is an idea that few Christians would think to challenge yet I see three good reasons to: First, it does not align with the overall picture of God in scripture; second, it unknowingly degrades God to a dependent deity; thirdly, it has now become woven into mainstream comprehension of salvation.

         The doctrine of penal substitution says that our sin is so sordid that God in His infinite holiness could no longer stand to have us in His presence.  Never mind the fact that He managed to tabernacle with the Hebrews and it was more to their detriment to come too close to His holiness than the other way around (Exod. 33:20).  Nonetheless, human sin was to the extent that God (while loving us) was also angry with us and desired blood-payment as retribution.  Thus, the solution was for Jesus to enter into the flesh and blood dynamic as our substitute and become a punching-bag of sorts for His Father’s wrath thereby transactionally embodying the payment for our debt.  This is based on the scriptures that say Christ who knew no sin bore our sin, became sin for us and redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming the curse (Isa. 54:12; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).  

The problem with this interpretation is twofold in that it, first, runs contrary to everything else said about God and imposes a view that believes this is for the purpose of transforming how God views us rather than making the attempt to transform us.  Secondly, we are told that God forgave us our sins upon our repentant confession thereof (Matt. 6:12; 1 Jn. 1:9).   So was our debt paid for us, or did God forgive us by offering full remission of our debt?  They cannot both be true.  Let’s say you are my close friend who stole money from me and I demand repayment, so somebody else pays it for you, but then I say, “You are now forgiven.”  I would expect you to hit me with a dictionary.  However, if you could not repay the debt and apologized and I realized both your sincerity of regret and helplessness to the situation, I could respond with compassion and release you from having to pay it back so long as we work toward building a new relationship/friendship that respects and cares for each other the right way (i.e. reconciliatory forgiveness).

This should raise the question, then why did Jesus die?  Perhaps we should consider one of the more symbolic actions that occurred just prior to the crucifixion, the last supper.  To draw from N.T. Wright, the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all say the last supper happened on Passover, which actually falls in line with Talmudic records that attest to Jesus’ crucifixion.  Alternatively, John’s gospel says the last supper happened the day before Passover, but this could be an intentional misaligned date so to make a theological point about Jesus dying on the same day as all the other Pascal lambs.[1]  Nevertheless, each gospel account saw a correlation between the Passover and the crucifixion.  Why is this pertinent?  Because the Passover occurred when the Hebrew slaves were being free from the tyranny of Egyptian bondage.  Jesus is making a statement, not that He is equal to the Passover, but more profoundly that He is the new Passover and His crucifixion, like the Pascal lamb, will initiate the new Exodus from a deeper bondage and this Passover will be remembered and retold through His story.[2]

Therefore, we have misunderstood why Jesus died and took our sins onto Himself because we have fundamentally misunderstood the effect of sin as merely being a nasty stain, but in its reality is a ultimately a permanent bondage to a hopelessness and while living in temporary enslavement to the rulers of darkness for the duration of our lives.  In Four Views of the Atonement, Greg Boyd’s view (known as the Christus Victor model) expounds on this by making the case that sin was the human shortcoming which enslaved us, rather than an incident that changed God’s mind in regards to how He felt about us.  To illustrate this, Boyd shows that the one who took ownership of us in our captivity was Satan and he was the one demanding blood all along.[3]

To briefly explain this statement, we often think the animal sacrifice was God’s idea, but this was a practice endemic throughout the ancient world. The Hebrews were clearly doing it prior to any covenants with God. This rhetoric is evident when God puts an end to their making sacrifices to a demon of the ancient world (Lev. 17:7).  So also, the first time a sacrificial offering occurs in Scripture it was not because God demanded it rather Cain and Abel do it on their own volition (Gen. 4).  Again, this suggests a worldview and practice within a fallen humanity that believed sacrificing life was the submissive and even humble thing to do for their god.  However, instead of demanding it to stop, God has a more permanent solution that allows them to keep the cultural practice for a time, but redirects their use of it in a way that will eventually beat evil at its own game.

 

Thus, back to Boyd’s point, it was through Christ’s death that this divine Son and Father used the Son’s sharing in human flesh and blood to defeat Satan and his cohorts who held the power of death over flesh and blood (Heb. 2:14; 1 Jn. 3:8).  This action ransomed humanity and reconciled the entire world back to God in a way that, much like my forgiveness anecdote, understood  human helplessness and in compassion did not count our sins against us (2 Cor. 5:18-19; Col. 1:20-22).  Accordingly, God made the decision to forgive us (Eph. 1:7), offered healing for our sinful nature (1 Pet. 2:24) and empowered us with His Spirit to live in relation with Him again (Rom. 8:2-16).[4]   Therefore, Jesus was not sent to change the way God feels about us because God was always full of love for us; nor did Jesus change God’s view of us because His view of our worth always exceeded what we could comprehend.  Jesus came to release us from a broken situation, broken feelings toward God and each other and a broken view (Luke 4:18). 

So, to my original point, penal substitution is a dangerous idea because throughout the Bible the story is always revealing (both intentionally and unintentionally) a God that does not resemble any of the other deities.  Yet, penal substitution shows an inferior picture of a God who needs His needs met, specifically a need for revenge on those He supposedly loves.  Thank God this is not true.  The real portrait of Israel’s God changed it all by revealing Himself to be the only God who was so self-sufficient that He could operate in mode of redemption, recreation, reconciliation and most wonderful of all invite His subjects as friends to be active participators in it while being effectually shaped by it.  The only satisfaction God and Jesus were aiming for was that of our freedom. 

                       

[1] N.T. Wright. Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press 1996), 554-555.

[2]Ibid, 558-559.

[3] James Beilby & Paul R. Eddy. Four Views: The Nature of the Atonement (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press 2006), 23.

[4] Ibid.

Rethinking Divine Judgment & Wrath

For quite some time there have been certain scriptural-interpretations and subsequent doctrines in the Church that have not always added up or set well with me, especially in light of reading scripture for myself.  My initial reaction was that perhaps I was the one misunderstanding it (and undoubtedly there has been and will be times where I miss the mark).  However, the more time I spend researching the many academic currents in biblical and historical scholarship I find that I am far from the only one who thinks we have arrived at a telos in our understanding. 

    

It is no secret that Western theology has been widely shaped by St. Augustine and many of his contemporaries in the 4^th and 5^th century (which by the way cannot be said for all Christian traditions around the globe).  In turn, many of the Reformers based much of their doctrine on the Augustinian conclusions.  The growing consensus, however, is the early church fathers got quite a few things wrong specifically about the Jewish people’s self-identity, relationship to God and even misunderstood what the broader picture revealed about God.  Now obviously there are those today who, for whatever reason, will not budge on these issues (e.g. personal conviction, unconvinced by the evidence, clinging to their certainty or whatever) but I think it is at least worth it to hear each other. 

I am saying all this in hopes of prefacing some future posts to come concerning doctrines of “justification” and “penal substitution”, but more immediately in discussing God’s wrath and judgment.  It seems like I cannot go anywhere without this angry, wrathful God topic coming up and there has been a lot of conflict surrounding it when contrasted with the idea of a loving God.  So, I want to share a summary of a sermon on this topic presented by a well known New Testament scholar and pastor who puts it very succinctly.  I do this in hopes that it will help others who have struggled with this:

Many have had fears about God being angry with us and fears of hell have been pervasive throughout Christian culture. A monstrous picture of God, best described in Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, is not an accurate picture of God’s wrath. The opposite is true as well—those that abandon the idea of God’s wrath, and adopt a picture of a friendly Grandpa who doesn’t have wrath—have an equally inaccurate picture of God’s wrath.

God’s wrath is best described as a judgment boomerang. When someone throws a boomerang, it comes back to them. Last week, we learned that when we act outside of God’s intentions for our lives, we encounter decay and suffering through the natural consequences of our actions. When we sin, it acts like a boomerang that will eventually come back and hit us in the face. If we commit affairs, it will break up marriages. If we hurt others, hurt will come back to us.

God does not personally rage against us when we sin. We see this when we look at Jesus. Jesus never raged against his enemies, and God wasn’t raging against Jesus on the cross. God never lifted a finger against Jesus. Rather, God withdrew his protection and handed Jesus over to those who acted violently against Jesus. Standing in our place as sinners, Jesus experienced the God-forsaken quality of wrath. God withdrew his protection and let evil run its course. In the same way, we experience God’s wrath when evil is allowed to run its course. Instead of stopping the boomerang from coming back, God allows it to smack us in the face, and this is how God’s judgment works.

Sin functions to separate us from God. Every act of sin is us pushing away from God. And the Bible tells us that our sin causes destruction in our lives. God, in his mercy, works to protect us from the consequences of our sin. God’s judgment and wrath is not an external consequence like a judge throwing someone into prison. Rather, God’s judgment and wrath is a natural, intrinsic consequence of our sin. It is the same as a when a liver fails because someone drank every day for 30 years. Sin and evil carry the seeds of their own punishment.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see pictures of a God who promises his wrath and destruction on people that don’t follow his way of life for them. While it looks like God is doing all of this on the surface, we see that other forces are doing the actions of wrath. Other nations take over Israel. This was because there are other forces at work in the lives of humans. Evil, supernatural authorities and powers are at work in this world. When God’s judgment and wrath were given in the Old Testament (Psalm 7:15-16; Habakkuk 2:17; Hosea 8:7) we see that these evil powers are simply allowed to do what they do. God withdrew his protection, and it resulted in evil things happening.

We need to understand that God’s wrath is a very real thing, but it has often been misunderstood. God doesn’t act violently, and he weeps over his people when he is forced to withdraw his protection. It is never his intention that we are hurt. God loves you, and his anger is not directed towards you, but rather towards the effects of our sin that boomerang back to us.[1]

[1] Woodland Hills Church: Greg Boyd. The Boomerang Judgment http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/the-judgement-boomerang (Accessed July 11, 2014).

A Tale of Two Freedoms

           

 Before I begin, let me say this not a frivolous bashing of America and I am very thankful to live in a country where I have freedoms (in speech, religion, education, politics and the many other opportunities we can often take for granted).  I know there are people around the world who may never get to experience this.  Moreover, I think we should be responsible with how we use our freedom because we do have a unique opportunity and platform in our world which is great as far as that goes.

With that said my question then is can Christians say that our American social freedom stands vis-à-vis Christian freedom, as many have portrayed it?  Are not life, liberty and happiness what God envisioned for all people?  I would say to some degree, yes, this is true, but there is an inherent danger when we attempt to marry Church and Empire by Christianizing the features of national and political culture.  Certainly, it seems alright for everyone to work together for a peaceable and just world, but that can only happen when we are talking about the same thing which is exactly what I am suggesting we are not doing.

Governing or Being Governed?

Fittingly, I am writing this on the weekend of July 4^th in which we celebrate America’s independence/freedom, but freedom from what?  This depends on who you ask.  Some will say this was the separation from the tyrannical British government who kept imposing its demands on the colonists of America while others will say a bunch of rich landowners just didn’t want to pay their taxes.  Nevertheless, we can agree that this was the date Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence which was the document that outlined the reasons for the colonial’s disconnect from Europe.   The justification John Adams and Thomas Jefferson appealed to in their draft seemed to point to human rights as a whole.  We see this in their stating that governments in general only have the ability to wield just Powers because the people consent to it and thus the people under a government are entitled to “alter or abolish” any government that deny their “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.[1]  This was meant to give way to a government and society that would prove its efficacy by defending its life and rights by any means necessary, that would live according to its free will and as one sees fit, so long as no one gets hurt, and a place that would do whatever necessary to find personal happiness.[2]  Based on what follows in the D.O.I. (pertaining to what Europe was and wasn’t doing for its people) it would seem that a bit of Epicurean thought was motivating their action as their conception of freedom was based in personal pleasure and further associated with the improvement of their material-goods and personal situations. 

Today, it could be argued that this has helped to create our hedonistic society that emphasizes worth in individualism, pleasure in greed, need for excess, self-centeredness and self-maximization which raises the question: are we really acting and living freely or have we become slaves to our own vices?   It seems when we pick at someone’s vice/idol it lashes out at us revealing both its slave and their master.  So, for us to put such societal-values on a pedestal and then defend and kill for them says something about what or who we are loyal to.  Apart from my own opinion, however, there was and is a central ideology that stands behind what constitutes as “American freedom” which still plays itself out to greater and lesser degrees and moderated by our justice system.

Freedom from a Deeper Bondage

In Stanley Hauerwas’ book, A Peaceable Kingdom, he points to the idea of societal freedom as a type of ethic for both Christian and non-Christian.  Throughout his book the point Hauerwas keeps returning to is that Christian ethics requires a qualifier.  This is to say, Christians often appeal to any truthful ethic from God as being absolute and thereby true for everybody, but the problem arises when we think our definition of the ethic means the same thing as it does for the non-Christian who is also working for a free and equitable social order.  The difference is Christian freedom is intrinsically informed by the story of God’s relationship with Israel, the Messiah’s life death and resurrection, and a basic conviction that both are true.  Subsequently, God’s freedom has destabilized humankind’s understanding of freedom and does not look like what the D.O.I. proposes. While we might say that both were trying to bring freedom from bondage, one attacks the symptom of bondage (Though don’t forget it created bondage for others like the Native Americans, Africans and so forth) while God actually defeated the ultimate source of our bondage, our sin.  

We thus must challenge the belief that Christian social ethics is first and foremost to create a more peaceable and just world.  The church has been called to first be the servant-community that lives faithfully as the church even when its effectiveness is not so apparent and outcomes look grimm.[3]   This means the essence of our freedom is to be faithful to God which may, as Hauerwas points out, sound self-serving, but being a faithful church means a being faithful manifestation of God’s peaceable Kingdom in the world.  Therefore, we do not have a set of ethics we adhere to, but are a community that embodies an ethic.[4]  As we come to relocate ourselves within God’s narrative, the freedom from sin inaugurates many new freedoms: we become rooted in a self-less love that frees us to be peaceable, faithful, patient, kind, gentle, self controlled. We also become free to no longer need to cling and violently defend our idols such as money, power, comforts of life or whatever it is our hope has come to rest in because our hope is no longer self-interpretive. Our hope, freedom and equality are now given its content through our tradition that is faithfully participating in God’s story. 

[1] George B. Tindall & David E. Shi.  America: A Narrative History (New York W.W. Norton & Company 2010), 139-140.

[2] Greg Boyd. The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 2009), 84-86.

 [3] Stanley Hauerwas. The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana University of Notre Dame 1983), 99.

[4] Ibid.