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Does God Demand a Payment We Can’t Afford?

HERE’S ANOTHER STORY I heard multiple times in youth group: There’s a man who operates a train switching station. He sits all day in the switch house, watching trains come and go, and he operates the switch that makes them go down one track or another. Both of the tracks he oversees send trains over bridges. At the time this story takes place, one of the bridges is out, so he can only send trains down the other set of tracks.

The man has a young son, a toddler. One day, the man looks out of his window and sees his son playing on the tracks. He also sees a train barreling down the tracks. The train conductor is drunk, as are many of the train’s passengers. They’re also gambling and fornicating and lying and cheating one another and fighting. It’s a train of debauchery.

The man looks at his son on the tracks, and he looks at the train steaming toward the boy. There’s not enough time for him to leave the switch house, run down the hill, and move his son off the tracks. He’s got a choice: he can either switch the tracks, sending the train plummeting over the broken bridge and all of the passengers to certain death, or he can let the train go on its way, crushing his son to death before his very eyes. The switchman chooses the latter.

The youth pastor concludes this anecdote by saying, “The drunken, lying, cheating, stealing fornicators rolled right over the innocent son. They didn’t even have any idea that they were responsible for his death. But the father knew, and he chose to save them instead of his own son.

“It’s the same with Jesus. God made the choice to let his own son die because it was the only way to save us, even in the midst of our own sin.”

When we hear metaphors of Jesus’ death like that one, we can see why feminist theologians have called the Payment/Penalty/Punishment view of the atonement “cosmic child abuse” and “divine child abuse.”¹ You can also see why youth pastors and preachers like it so much—whether it’s the judge with the electric chair or the dad in the switch house, it really lends itself to some dramatic sermon illustrations. But rather than winning us over, maybe these metaphors should make us squeamish.

Earlier we learned the rather bulky theological phrase penal substitutionary atonement. The penal part is the more recent development, communicating the idea that Jesus didn’t just have to stand in as a substitute for all of us sinners but also had to pay the penalty that our sin incurs: the first sin I commit excludes me from heaven, and every subsequent sin only adds more years to my sentence, more dollars to my fine; it would be impossible for me to pay enough of a penalty even for that first sin, much less to make up for the myriad sins that I’ve committed since that first one. So in order to preserve his perfect sense of justice, God needs to find someone who can pay that penalty in full, and the only one capable is Jesus, God’s perfect son. In the words of Anselm, “Everyone who sins is under an obligation to repay to God the honour which he has violently taken from him, and this is the satisfaction that every sinner is obliged to give to God.”² This, according to Anselm and his heirs, is the demand of justice.

The problem with this whole scheme is not that difficult to see: it makes justice more powerful than God. Or, to put it conversely, it makes God subservient to justice. Our sin forces God to respond in a certain way.

Another problem is that this understanding of the atonement is built on a human sense of justice. It is surprisingly difficult to suss out God’s sense of justice from the Bible, because in the Bible God is not particularly consistent in his application of justice. Sometimes God demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and other times God decides to let sinners off the hook in a twist we call grace (in the New Testament) or steadfast love (in the Hebrew Bible).

In fact, God is not subservient to anything—not justice, not law, not commandments. God can do whatever God wants (making it all the more confounding that God would choose to save the world through the death of his Son—that’s a mystery that we’ll continue to unravel in coming pages).

Lately, evangelicals have been turning up the volume on the Penalty/Punishment aspect of this version of the atonement. In 2011, outspoken Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll shouted this at his congregation:

           Some of you, God hates you. Some of you, God is sick of you. . . . God hates, right now—personally, objectively—hates some of you. . . . The Bible speaks of God not just hating sin, but sinners. Because sin is of our nature. Sin is not just a mistake that we make. . . .

                You are the problem, not the solution. You and I are sinners, and by our nature are objects of wrath. That’s a quote from the Bible. . . . God doesn’t just hate what you do, he hates who you are. My job is to tell the truth, your job is to make a decision.³

Or consider Driscoll’s compatriot, John Piper, pastor emeritus of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, who preached to his congregation, “Consider that any offense and any dishonor to an infinitely honorable and infinitely worthy God, is an infinite offense and an infinite dishonor. Therefore, an infinite punishment is deserved.”⁴ Or this: in May, 2006, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, Christianity Today, planted its flag in the sand with a cover that heralded, “No Substitute for the Substitute.” In the cover story, Washington, D.C., pastor Mark Dever made a vociferous defense of Penalty/Punishment as the only true and biblical understanding of Christ’s death: “Apart from Christ’s atoning work, we would be forever guilty, ashamed, and condemned before God. But not everyone these days sees it that way.”⁵

Controversy has reared its head on the other end of the Protestant spectrum as well. In 2013, the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational song decided to leave a song out of its new hymnal. The song, “In Christ Alone,” contains the stanza, “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the wrath of God was satisfied.” The committee asked the song’s authors if they could change those lines to “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the love of God was magnified.” The songwriters rejected the change, leaving the committee to debate the merits of the hymn and of that particular stanza. One committee member reported, “It would do a disservice to this educational mission, the argument ran, to perpetuate . . . the view that the cross is primarily about God’s need to assuage God’s anger.”⁶ The committee voted to remove the song from the hymnal.

Six Questions for Payment

It’s time to put our list of questions to this version of the atonement.

What does the Payment model say about God?

The Payment model requires a God who, paradoxically, both knows the future perfectly (predestination), but is also sorely disappointed that humans sin. In some versions, that disappointment evolves into wrath. This does not paint an appealing image of God, nor is it very reasonable.

Centuries ago, Augustine argued that if God knows something’s going to happen, then it necessarily has to happen, because God is never wrong. And because it has to happen the way God knows it’s going to happen, then God is actually causing that thing to happen. Augustine said foreknowledge equals forecausal.⁷ So, according to the progenitor of Payment atonement, God caused Adam and Eve to sin, caused original sin to enter humanity, and caused the ultimate death of his son to satisfy his own wrath. That’s right: God set up the whole system, including his own wrath and the death of his son.

If we are supposed to learn about love from God, then the idea that God predestined us to sin, which results in our eternal damnation and requires God’s Son to die on the cross, teaches us very little about love.

What does it say about Jesus?

The main facts of this drama are God’s wrath and justice, our sin, and the need for Jesus to die to appease God’s wrath. In this scheme, Jesus is little more than a helpless victim, dragged to the altar as Isaac was by Abraham generations before. Jesus’ birth, ministry, teachings, and miracles all become secondary to the essential fact of his death. Even Jesus’ resurrection isn’t necessary, being merely the cherry on top of the accomplishment of the crucifixion, proving the efficacy of his death. The potency of Jesus’ life is exclusively in his death. Needless to say, this does not seem to accord with how the Gospels portray the importance of Jesus’ life and teachings or how central the resurrection is to the New Testament.

What does the Payment model say about the relationship between God and Jesus?

The Payment view relies on a hierarchical parent-child relationship similar to that of Abraham and Isaac. While many who hold this view contend that Jesus went to the cross willingly, if this sacrifice of the perfect victim was the one and only way to pay the penalty, then it seems that Jesus really had no choice at all. Even the Son couldn’t go against God Almighty. Jesus is subservient to the Father’s will, a mere cog in the machine built by God to satisfy God. If Jesus represents love, then he stands in contrast to God’s justice and wrath. Jesus and God are not reflections of each other in this model.

How does it make sense of violence?

Payment—especially when penalty and punishment are added—requires violence. God is violent, and the means by which we’re forgiven of our sins is violent, and necessarily so. In this view, violence is the very means of achieving God’s holy demands. Because of our sin, we deserve nothing less than an eternity of conscious, painful torment, so the only way for us to escape that is for a sinless person to experience that torment in our place. With so much violence built into this system of salvation, it’s no surprise that advocates are also supporters of war, the death penalty, and even torture.⁸ Like a rock thrown into the middle of a pond, the ripples of violence emanate out from the cross to every aspect of life.

What does it mean for us spiritually?

In addition to embracing violence as the means of salvation and thereby perpetuating violence, Payment teaches that God’s anger burns against you because of your sin (sin that he created you to be susceptible to). That’s enough to screw up anyone’s relationship with God. As I was told as a youth, when God looks at me, he doesn’t even see me—he only sees Jesus standing between us. That means my identity is not “in Christ,” as Paul so often wrote, but my identity is Christ. And if God were to look around Christ and catch a glimpse of me, it would only rekindle his wrath. “God hates some of you!” the pastor screams. Who wants to pray to a God like that?

Where’s the love?

Proponents of this view claim that God’s love is only worth anything because it’s just and demanding. Love without justice, they say, is cheap love. For years, whenever Billy Graham preached, picketers would stand outside the stadium, holding signs and protesting that Graham preached “easy believism” and “cheap grace.” They thought that Graham was making it too easy to be a Christian when he asked people to come forward, recite a simple prayer, and be accepted into eternal life. Christianity is tougher than this, they countered, requiring serious and costly changes in lifestyle.

This has been debated since the early church—even the New Testament holds both opinions: Paul writes that we’ve been saved by unmerited grace, but James counters that faith without works is dead. The question that each one of us needs to ask is this: Does love demand a payment? Core to Payment theory is that God, even in love, demands remuneration for the honor that our sin has stolen from him. Is that how we are to understand love? I hope not.

Evaluating Payment

Key to all of the recent back-and-forth about the Payment/Penalty/Punishment version of the atonement is God’s wrath. Those who think that God demands a penalty to be paid as a result of human sin—and not just that he demands a penalty, but that he’s angry about it—feel comfortable with nothing less than Payment and Payment alone.

The problems with this focus on God’s wrath are several. First and foremost, it contradicts the experience that most of us have with God. Our experience of God is not of wrath, but of love. In fact, that’s how most people experience God even before they accept the idea that Christ stands between us and God. The Bible goes so far as to say, “God is love.” So it seems odd to first have to convince people that God’s wrath burns against them, then to convince them that Jesus willingly took on that wrath.

Second, this model paints a dysfunctional image of God. God is really, really mad about human sin (even though he knew from the beginning of creation that we would sin). So God looks around for someone to punish for that sin. God sends laws and patriarchs and prophets, and people still don’t get it. They sin, worship false idols, and fail to sacrifice correctly. So God sends tornadoes and earthquakes and cancer as punishment, but God’s anger still isn’t sated.⁹ Finally he finds an innocent victim—who happens to be his own son—and only after killing his son does God’s anger finally abate.¹⁰

And consider this. If the whole point of Jesus was that a perfect God-man be sacrificed to pay a debt, why did Jesus live for thirty-three years before being executed? Sure, Jesus’ teachings and miracles were great, and he was able to pick some disciples to tell his story. But if all God needed was an innocent, sinless victim, he may just as well have had the baby’s throat slit in the manger (Merry Christmas!). At least then there would be no doubt about the real meaning of Jesus’ death.

Finally, and adding to the irony, most people who hold this view, like Augustine and Calvin, believe in predestination, the doctrine that before the foundation of the world, God predetermined who would be saved and who would be damned to hell. So what’s the point of all of it? The Garden? The law? The kings and prophets? Jesus and the crucifixion? Why go to all that trouble when everyone’s eternal destiny has already been decided? As a test, basically, to see how strong our faith really is? That’s one answer. The other is the old standby: God’s ways are not our ways, so stop asking questions.

These days, the church in America is in decline. That’s true of Protestants, both evangelical and mainline, and Catholics. Fewer people go to church every year. Why? Could it be the prevalence of the Payment/Penalty/Punishment view of Jesus’ death and the image of a wrathful God it requires? In an earlier age, when people feared God as they feared the weather or the lord on the hill, it made sense to preach a wrathful, vengeful, bloodthirsty God. In the Puritan colonies of New England, a drummer marched through town on Sunday morning, and every villager fell in behind him and trooped to church—missing church was against the law. Once in the meetinghouse, parishioners stood through a service that lasted up to four hours, with a sermon of an hour or more. The message was that God disapproved of just about everything you did or thought. Thank God for Christ, who took on God’s wrath for us!, they preached. In Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he told his congregation,

           That God will execute the fierceness of his anger, implies, that he will inflict wrath without any pity. When God beholds the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be so vastly disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed, and sinks down, as it were, into an infinite gloom; he will have no compassion upon you, he will not forbear the executions of his wrath, or in the least lighten his hand; there shall be no moderation or mercy, nor will God then at all stay his rough wind; he will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful lest you should suffer too much in any other sense, than only that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires.¹¹

We’ve come a long way since the days of Puritan drummers and scarlet letters and God holding you over the pit of hell as a spider on a thread. We no longer attend church because it’s the law, and we no longer think that God created us in such a way that he was bound to be disappointed by and angry at us. Many of the accoutrements of the Puritan faith have been discarded, but the theology of Jesus’ death remains. And this has cost us. Lacking the entire worldview on which the Payment view is premised, that theology serves only to remove all incentive to worship and pray. The Payment model of Jesus’ death stands alone, a single cut flower in a vase that no longer holds any water. In the past, Christians worshipped and prayed out of fear and obligation and a deep commitment to the institution of the church that taught such things. But is that really the ultimate revelation of love?

Before we move on, we might consider whether the crucifixion can be a Payment, even without God’s wrath. That is possible if human sin causes a rupture in the God-human relationship. If that were the case, and if it would be unseemly or even cosmically impossible for God to let that sin go unpunished, then Jesus’ payment on our behalf becomes redemptive.

But as theologian Richard Beck points out, the strangeness at the root of the Payment/Penalty/Punishment model is that God has to save us from God. At its root, love often involves suffering for each other and for the sake of each other. Love often accepts suffering and pain intended for others. Love often involves protecting and shielding others, even when those others might be “getting what they deserve.” If something bad were going to happen to my children I’d rush to substitute myself. That’s what love does. So it’s not surprising that God does the same thing.¹²

But where does this suffering come from? Why is it necessary at all? And if God both initiates the suffering and supplies the only means of escape from it, that’s self-serving.

In the end, the God behind Payment/Penalty/Punishment is a quid pro quo God. God won’t do this unless his subjects do that. But his subjects are constitutionally incapable of doing what he demands. Instead of realizing that fact and coming up with an alternative solution to his problem, God looks around for someone else who can satiate his thirst for justice, and he settles on his own son.

God swings the barrel of his gun away from us, takes aim at Jesus, and fires.

That’s the God of the Payment model. He may be a God to be feared, but he’s not a God to be loved.