The last chapter’s ‘look below the surface’ may well have provoked in some readers an impatient response. ‘That simple supper in the upper room,’ you may be saying, ‘and even the confessedly agonized prayer in the garden and cry from the cross, all admit of much more straightforward explanations. Why must you complicate everything with your tortuous theologizing?’ It is an understandable reaction.
In particular, our insistence that according to the gospel the cross of Christ is the only ground on which God forgives sins bewilders many people. ‘Why should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death?’ they ask. ‘Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross?’ As the French cynic put it, ‘le bon Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.’1 ‘After all,’ the objector may continue, ‘if we sin against one another, we are required to forgive one another. We are even warned of dire consequences if we refuse. Why can’t God practise what he preaches and be equally generous? Nobody’s death is necessary before we forgive each other. Why then does God make so much fuss about forgiving us and even declare it impossible without his Son’s “sacrifice for sin”? It sounds like a primitive superstition which modern people should long since have discarded.’
It is essential to ask and to face these questions. Two answers may be given to them immediately, although we shall need the rest of the chapter in which to elaborate them. The first was supplied by Archbishop Anselm in his great book Cur Deus Homo? at the end of the eleventh century. If anybody imagines, he wrote, that God can simply forgive us as we forgive others, that person has ‘not yet considered the seriousness of sin’, or literally ‘what a heavy weight sin is’ (i.xxi). The second answer might be expressed similarly: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ It is when our perception of God and man, or of holiness and sin, are askew that our understanding of the atonement is bound to be askew also.
The fact is that the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from being exact. True, Jesus taught us to pray: ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’ But he was teaching the impossibility of the unforgiving being forgiven, and so the obligation of the forgiven to forgive, as is clear from the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant; he was not drawing any parallel between God and us in relation to the basis of forgiveness.2 For us to argue ‘we forgive each other unconditionally, let God do the same to us’ betrays not sophistication but shallowness, since it overlooks the elementary fact that we are not God. We are private individuals, and other people’s misdemeanours are personal injuries. God is not a private individual, however, nor is sin just a personal injury. On the contrary, God is himself the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him.
The crucial question we should ask, therefore, is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all. As Emil Brunner put it, ‘Forgiveness is the very opposite of anything which can be taken for granted. Nothing is less obvious than forgiveness.’3 Or, in the words of Carnegie Simpson, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.4
The problem of forgiveness is constituted by the inevitable collision between divine perfection and human rebellion, between God as he is and us as we are. The obstacle to forgiveness is neither our sin alone, nor our guilt alone, but also the divine reaction in love and wrath towards guilty sinners. For, although indeed ‘God is love’, yet we have to remember that his love is ‘holy love’,5 love which yearns over sinners while at the same time refusing to condone their sin. How, then, could God express his holy love? – his love in forgiving sinners without compromising his holiness, and his holiness in judging sinners without frustrating his love? Confronted by human evil, how could God be true to himself as holy love? In Isaiah’s words, how could he be simultaneously ‘a righteous God and a Saviour’ (45:21)? For, despite the truth that God demonstrated his righteousness by taking action to save his people, the words ‘righteousness’ and ‘salvation’ cannot be regarded as simple synonyms. Rather his saving initiative was compatible with, and expressive of, his righteousness. At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God’s holy love was ‘satisfied’.
I am running on too fast, however. The reason why many people give the wrong answers to questions about the cross, and even ask the wrong questions, is that they have carefully considered neither the seriousness of sin nor the majesty of God. In order to do so now, we shall review four basic biblical concepts, namely the gravity of sin, human moral responsibility, true and false guilt, and the wrath of God. We shall thus see ourselves successively as sinful, responsible, guilty and lost. It will not be a pleasant exercise, and our integrity will be tested in the course of it.
The very word ‘sin’ has in recent years dropped from most people’s vocabulary. It belongs to traditional religious phraseology which, at least in the increasingly secularized West, is now declared by many to be meaningless. Moreover, if and when ‘sin’ is mentioned, it is most likely to be misunderstood. What is it, then?
The New Testament uses five main Greek words for sin, which together portray its various aspects, both passive and active. The commonest is hamartia, which depicts sin as a missing of the target, the failure to attain a goal. Adikia is ‘unrighteousness’ or ‘iniquity’, and ponēria is evil of a vicious or degenerate kind. Both these terms seem to speak of an inward corruption or perversion of character. The more active words are parabasis (with which we may associate the similar paraptōma), a ‘trespass’ or ‘transgression’, the stepping over a known boundary, and anomia, ‘lawlessness’, the disregard or violation of a known law. In each case an objective criterion is implied, either a standard we fail to reach or a line we deliberately cross.
It is assumed throughout Scripture that this criterion or ideal has been established by God. It is, in fact, his moral law, which expresses his righteous character. It is not the law of his own being only, however; it is also the law of ours, since he has made us in his image and in so doing has written the requirements of his law in our hearts (Rom. 2:15). There is, thus, a vital correspondence between God’s law and ourselves, and to commit sin is to commit ‘lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4), offending against our own highest welfare as well as against the authority and love of God.
The emphasis of Scripture, however, is on the godless self-centredness of sin. Every sin is a breach of what Jesus called ‘the first and great commandment’, not just by failing to love God with all our being, but by actively refusing to acknowledge and obey him as our Creator and Lord. We have rejected the position of dependence which our createdness inevitably involves, and made a bid for independence. Worse still, we have dared to proclaim our self-dependence, our autonomy, which is to claim the position occupied by God alone. Sin is not a regrettable lapse from conventional standards; its essence is hostility to God (Rom. 8:7), issuing in active rebellion against him. It has been described in terms of ‘getting rid of the Lord God’ in order to put ourselves in his place in a haughty spirit of ‘God-almightiness’. Emil Brunner sums it up well: ‘Sin is defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God,...the assertion of human independence over against God,...the constitution of the autonomous reason, morality and culture.’ It is appropriate that he entitled the book from which this quotation is taken Man In Revolt (p.129).
Once we have seen that every sin we commit is an expression (in differing degrees of self-consciousness) of this spirit of revolt against God, we shall be able to accept David’s confession: ‘Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight’ (Ps. 51:4). In committing adultery with Bathsheba, and in arranging to have her husband Uriah killed in battle, David had committed extremely serious offences against them and against the nation. Yet it was God’s laws which he had broken and thereby ultimately against God that he had chiefly offended.
Perhaps it is a deep-seated reluctance to face up to the gravity of sin which has led to its omission from the vocabulary of many of our contemporaries. One acute observer of the human condition, who has noticed the disappearance of the word, is the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. He has written about it in his book, Whatever Became of Sin? Describing the malaise of western society, its general mood of gloom and doom, he adds that ‘one misses any mention of “sin”’. ‘It was a word once in everyone’s mind, but is now rarely if ever heard. Does that mean’, he asks, ‘that no sin is involved in all our troubles...? Has no-one committed any sins? Where, indeed, did sin go? What became of it?’ (p.13). Enquiring into the causes of sin’s disappearance, Dr Menninger notes first that ‘many former sins have become crimes’, so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman (p.50), while others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least into symptoms of sickness, so that in their case punishment has been replaced by treatment (pp.74ff.). A third convenient device called ‘collective irresponsibility’ has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behaviour from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings (pp.94ff.).
Dr Menninger goes on to plead not only for the reinstatement of the word ‘sin’ in our vocabulary, but also for a recognition of the reality which the word expresses. Sin cannot be dismissed as merely a cultural taboo or social blunder. It must be taken seriously. He takes preachers to task for soft-pedalling it, and adds: ‘The clergyman cannot minimize sin and maintain his proper role in our culture’ (p.198). For sin is ‘an implicitly aggressive quality – a ruthlessness, a hurting, a breaking away from God and from the rest of humanity, a partial alienation, or act of rebellion....Sin has a willful, defiant or disloyal quality: someone is defied or offended or hurt’ (p.19). To ignore this would be dishonest. To confess it would enable us to do something about it. Moreover, the reinstatement of sin would lead inevitably to ‘the revival or reassertion of personal responsibility’. In fact the ‘usefulness’ of reviving sin is that responsibility would be revived with it (pp.178f.).
But is it fair to blame human beings for their misconduct? Are we really responsible for our actions? Are we not more often victims of other agencies than free agencies ourselves, and so more sinned against than sinning? A whole gamut of scapegoats is ready at hand – our genes, our chemistry (a temporary hormonal imbalance), our inherited temper and temperament, our parents’ failures during our early childhood, our upbringing, our educational and social environment. Together these seem to constitute an infallible alibi.
Perhaps no more comprehensive attempt has been made to undermine the traditional concept of personal responsibility than Professor B. F. Skinner’s book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. His thesis is that ‘the terrifying problems that face us in the world today’ (especially the threats of population overgrowth, nuclear war, famine, disease and pollution) could all be solved by ‘a technology of human behaviour’. That is, ‘vast changes in human behaviour’ could be secured by changes in the human environment. Man could be programmed to behave properly. What stands in the way, then? Answer: the concept of ‘autonomous man’, his supposed ‘freedom’ (in that he is held responsible for his actions) and his supposed ‘dignity’ (in that he is given credit for his achievements). But these things are an illusion, for ‘a scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment’ (pp.9–30). Man must have the courage to create a social environment or culture which adequately ‘shapes and maintains the behaviour of those who live in it’ (p.141). This is essential for the survival of humankind, which is more important than the traditional, ‘flattering’ concept of our ‘freedom and dignity’ (p.208). To be sure, C. S. Lewis called this ‘the abolition of man’. What would be abolished, however, is only ‘autonomous man, ...the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity’. Indeed, ‘his abolition has been long overdue’ (p.196). Peering into the future, in which man creates an environment which controls him, and so performs ‘a gigantic exercise in self-control’, B. F. Skinner ends his book with the words: ‘We have not yet seen what man can make of man’ (p.210). It is a chilling prospect of self-determined determinism.
The human spirit rebels against it, however. The concept of ‘diminished responsibility’ we certainly accept, but not the total dissolution of all responsibility, except in the most extreme circumstances. The parallel between moral responsibility and legal liability is instructive at this point. Generally speaking, the criminal law assumes that people have it in their power to choose whether they will obey or break the law, and it treats them accordingly. Nevertheless, responsibility for crime can be diminished, and even excluded, by certain ‘excusing’ conditions. In his essays in the philosophy of law entitled Punishment and Responsibility, H. L. A. Hart defines the principle as follows: ‘In all advanced legal systems liability to conviction for serious crimes is made dependent, not only on the offender having done those outward acts which the law forbids, but on his having done them in a certain frame of mind or with a certain will’ (p.187).6 This state of mind and will is known technically as mens rea which, though a literal translation would be ‘a guilty mind’, really refers to the person’s ‘intention’. For example, the distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide, that is, between murder and manslaughter, goes right back to the Mosaic law. The principle also has a wider bearing. If a person commits an offence while insane, under duress or as an automaton, criminal liability cannot be established. Provocation may reduce murder to manslaughter. The plea of insanity has been accepted for centuries, and has been interpreted since the MacNaghten Rules of 1843 as ‘disease of the mind’, leading to such ‘a defect of reason’ that the offender either did not know ‘the nature and quality of the act he was doing’ or, if he did know it, ‘did not know he was doing what was wrong’.
The Rules were criticized, however, for concentrating on the ignorance of the offender, rather than on his lack of capacity for self-control. So the Infanticide Act of 1938 made provision for acts done by a woman when ‘the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth...’, and the Homicide Act of 1957 provided that a person ‘shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind...as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts...’. So, too, the British Parliament has decided that no child under ten years can be held guilty of an offence, while between the ages of ten and fourteen it has to be proved specifically that an offending child knew that what he or she was doing was seriously wrong.
Thus, legal liability depends on mental and moral responsibility, that is, on mens rea, the intention of mind and will. But pleas based on lack of consciousness or control will always need to be precisely defined, and exceptional. An accused person certainly cannot plead his genetic inheritance or social upbringing as an excuse for criminal behaviour, let alone personal negligence (‘I simply wasn’t thinking what I was doing’). No, generally speaking, the whole procedure of trying, convicting and sentencing in the courts rests on the assumption that human beings are free to make choices and are responsible for the choices they make.
It is the same in everyday situations. Admittedly we are conditioned by our genes and upbringing, but the human spirit (not to mention the Christian mind) protests against the reductionism which declares a human being to be nothing but a computer (programmed to perform and respond) or an animal (at the mercy of his instincts). Over against these concepts we appeal to the ineradicable sense which men and women have that within reasonable limits we are free agents, able to make up our own minds and decide our own actions. Faced with an alternative, we know we are able to choose. And when we make a wrong choice, we reproach ourselves, because we know we could have behaved differently. We also act on the assumption that other people are free and responsible, for we try to persuade them to our point of view, and ‘we all praise or blame people from time to time’.7
Sir Norman Anderson is, I think, right to draw attention to this human sense of responsibility. On the one hand, he writes, we can speculate about the extent to which people are ‘preconditioned by the constitution and condition of their brains, by the psychological make-up they have inherited or acquired, by the blind and inevitable course of “nature” or by the sovereignty of a Creator God, to behave in the way they do’. But on the other hand it is possible ‘unequivocally to affirm that there is no reason whatever to suppose that ordinary men and women are mistaken in their firm conviction that they have, within limits, a genuine freedom of choice and action, and that this necessarily entails a corresponding measure of moral responsibility’.8
The three contributors to the 1982 London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity, entitled Free to Be Different, came to the same conclusion. Professor Malcolm Jeeves spoke and wrote as a psychologist, Professor Sam Berry as a geneticist, and Dr David Atkinson as a theologian. Together they investigated the respective influences on human behaviour of ‘nature’ (our genetic inheritance), ‘nurture’ (our social conditioning) and ‘grace’ (God’s loving and transforming initiative). They agreed that these things evidently both shape and constrain our behaviour. Nevertheless, their lectures were a vigorous, interdisciplinary rejection of determinism and assertion of human responsibility. Although the whole subject is admittedly complex and it is not possible neatly to disentangle all the threads, yet the three contributors were able to express this common conclusion:
We are not automata, able to do nothing but react mechanically to our genes, our environment or even God’s grace. We are personal beings created by God for himself....Moreover, what God has given us is not to be regarded as a static endowment. Our character can be refined. Our behaviour can change. Our convictions can mature. Our gifts can be cultivated....We are indeed free to be different....9
When we turn to the Bible, we find the same tension, of which we are aware in our personal experience, between the pressures which condition and even control us, and our abiding moral responsibility nonetheless. There is a strong biblical emphasis on the influence of our inheritance, of what we are ‘in Adam’. The doctrine of original sin means that the very nature we have inherited is tainted and twisted with self-centredness. It is, therefore, ‘from within, out of men’s hearts’, Jesus taught, that evil thoughts and actions come (Mark 7:21–23). It is not surprising that he also described the sinner as ‘a slave to sin’ (John 8:34). We are, in fact, enslaved to the world (public fashion and opinion), the flesh (our fallen nature) and the devil (demonic forces). Even after Christ has liberated us and made us his slaves instead, we are not yet entirely rid of the insidious power of our fallenness, so that Paul can conclude his argument in Romans 7 with the summary: ‘So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin’ (v. 25b).
Scripture recognizes the subtlety and strength of these forces, which indeed diminish our responsibility. It is because God ‘knows how we are formed’ and ‘remembers that we are dust’ that he is patient towards us, slow to anger, and ‘does not treat us as our sins deserve’ (Ps. 103:10, 14). Similarly, God’s Messiah is gentle with the weak, refusing to break bruised reeds or to snuff out smouldering wicks.10
At the same time, the biblical recognition that our responsibility is diminished does not mean that it is destroyed. On the contrary, Scripture invariably treats us as morally responsible agents. It lays upon us the necessity of choice between ‘life and good, death and evil’, between the living God and idols.11 It exhorts us to obedience and remonstrates with us when we disobey. Jesus himself pleaded with recalcitrant Jerusalem to acknowledge and welcome him. Often, he said, addressing the city in direct speech, ‘I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing’ (Matt. 23:37). He thus attributed Jerusalem’s spiritual blindness, apostasy and coming judgment to her obstinacy. It is true that he also said ‘no-one can come to me unless the Father...draws him’, but only after he had said ‘you refuse to come to me’.12 Why is it that people do not come to Christ? Is it that they cannot, or is it that they will not? Jesus taught both. And in this ‘cannot’ and ‘will not’ lies the ultimate antinomy between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. But however we state it, we must not eliminate either part. Our responsibility before God is an inalienable aspect of our human dignity. Its final expression will be on the day of judgment. Nobody will be sentenced without trial. All people, great and small, irrespective of their social class, will stand before God’s throne, not crushed or browbeaten, but given this final token of respect for human responsibility, as each gives an account of what he or she has done.
Emil Brunner is surely right to emphasize our responsibility as an indispensable aspect of our humanness. ‘Today our slogan must be: no determinism, on any account! For it makes all understanding of man as man impossible.’13 Man has to be seen as ‘a thinking – willing being’, responsive and responsible to his Creator, ‘the creaturely counterpart of his divine self-existence’. Further, this human responsibility is in the first instance ‘not...a task but a gift,...not law but grace’. It expresses itself in ‘believing, responsive love’ (p.98). So then, ‘one who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man. Responsibility is not an attribute, it is the “substance” of human existence. It contains everything..., [it is] that which distinguishes man from all other creatures....’ (p.50). Therefore ‘if responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears’ (p.258).
But has not the Fall seriously weakened man’s responsibility? Is he responsible for his actions any longer? Yes, he is. ‘Man never sins purely out of weakness, but always also in the fact that he “lets himself go” in weakness. Even in the dullest sinner there is still a spark of decision’, indeed of defiant rebellion against God. So man cannot shuffle off his responsibility for his own wickedness. ‘No Fate, no metaphysical constitution, no weakness of his nature, but himself, man, in the centre of his personality is made responsible for his sin’ (pp.130–131).
If human beings have sinned (which they have), and if they are responsible for their sins (which they are), then they are guilty before God. Guilt is the logical deduction from the premises of sin and responsibility. We have done wrong, by our own fault, and are therefore liable to bear the just penalty of our wrongdoing.
This is the argument of the early chapters of the letter to the Romans. Paul divides the human race into three major sections, and shows how each knows something of its moral duty, but has deliberately suppressed its knowledge in order to pursue its own sinful course. As John put it, ‘This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:19). Nothing is more serious than this deliberate rejection of the light of truth and goodness. Paul begins with decadent Roman society. Its people have known God’s power and glory from the creation, and his holiness from their conscience, but they have refused to live up to their knowledge. Instead, they have turned from worship to idolatry. So God has given them over to immorality and other forms of anti-social behaviour (Rom. 1:18–32).
The second section of humanity that Paul addresses is the self-righteous world, whose knowledge of God’s law may be either in the Scriptures (Jews) or in their hearts (Gentiles). In either case they do not live up to their knowledge (2:1–16). The third section is the specifically Jewish world, whose members pride themselves on the knowledge they have and on the moral instruction they give to others. Yet the very law they teach they also disobey. This being so, their privileged status as God’s covenant people will not render them immune to his judgment (2:17 – 3:8).
What, then, is the conclusion? Paul answers his own question. ‘We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin’ (3:9). Old Testament Scripture confirms this verdict. We are all without excuse, since we have all known our duty, and none of us has done it. Every protest is silenced, and the whole world is guilty and accountable to God (3:19–20).
Is this a rather morbid viewpoint? Christians have often been criticized (not least evangelical Christians) for continuously harping on sin, for becoming obsessed with it in our own lives and, particularly in our evangelism, for trying to induce in others a sense of their guilt. Nietzsche, for example, bitterly complained that ‘Christianity needs sickness....Making sick is the true hidden objective of the Church’s whole system of salvation procedures....One is not “converted” to Christianity – one must be sufficiently sick for it.’14 Nietzsche was partly correct, namely that Christianity is medicine for the sin-sick. After all, Jesus himself defended his concentration on ‘tax collectors and sinners’ by saying ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick’. ‘I have not come to call the righteous,’ he added, ‘but sinners’ (Mark 2:17). We vigorously deny, however, that it is the church’s role to ‘make’ people sick in order to convert them. Instead, we have to make them aware of their sickness, so that they will turn to the Great Physician.
Yet the criticism persists that Christians are unhealthily preoccupied with sin. An eloquent spokesman of this viewpoint is the BBC’s former Religious Affairs Correspondent, Gerald Priestland. One of his talks in the radio series Priestland’s Progress was entitled ‘Guilt-edged Religion’. He told us how at the age of ten he thought Christianity was about sin and that by the time he was fifteen he was having ‘glimpses into the abyss of depression’, accompanied by fears of divine vengeance for his ‘unnameable secret crimes’, fears which kept growing for the next thirty years. His Christianity gave him no help. ‘When I looked at the Cross, with its suffering victim, its only message to me was: “You did this – and there is no health in you!”.’ His equivalent of a Damascus Road conversion came to him at last ‘on the psychiatrist’s couch’, for that was where he learnt ‘the missing element of forgiveness’. Since then he confesses to ‘a fairly low level of personal guilt and relatively little interest in the matter of sin’ (pp.59–60).
That is not the whole of Gerald Priestland’s story, but it is enough to illustrate the grievous damage done by half-truths. How could anyone imagine that Christianity is about sin rather than about the forgiveness of sin? How could anyone look at the cross and see only the shame of what we did to Christ, rather than the glory of what he did for us? The prodigal son had to ‘come to himself’ (acknowledge his self-centredness) before he could ‘come to his father’. The humiliation of penitence was necessary before the joy of reconciliation. There would have been no ring, no robe, no kiss, no feast if he had remained in the far country or returned impenitent. A guilty conscience is a great blessing, but only if it drives us to come home.
This does not mean that our conscience is always a reliable guide. There is such a thing as a morbid, overscrupulous conscience, and it would be mischievous to seek deliberately to create one. Not all guilt feelings are pathological, however. On the contrary, those who declare themselves sinless and guiltless are suffering from an even worse sickness. For to manipulate, smother and even ‘cauterize’ (1 Tim. 4:2) the conscience, in order to escape the pain of its accusations, renders us impervious to our need for salvation.
Is it, then, healthy or unhealthy to insist on the gravity of sin and the necessity of atonement, to hold people responsible for their actions, to warn them of the peril of divine judgment, and to urge them to confess, repent and turn to Christ? It is healthy. For if there is ‘false guilt’ (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also ‘false innocence’ (feeling good about the evil we have done). If false contrition is unhealthy (an ungrounded weeping over guilt), so is false assurance (an ungrounded rejoicing over forgiveness). It may be, therefore, that it is not we who exaggerate, when we stress the seriousness of sin, but our critics, who underestimate it. God said of the false prophets in Old Testament days: ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace.’15 Superficial remedies are always due to a faulty diagnosis. Those who prescribe them have fallen victim to the deceiving spirit of modernity which denies the gravity of sin. To make a true diagnosis of our condition, however, grave as it is, could never be unhealthy, provided that we go on immediately to the remedy. So the law which condemns us is nevertheless God’s good gift, because it sends us to Christ to be justified. And the Holy Spirit came to ‘convict the world of guilt’, but only in order that he might more effectively bear witness to Christ as the Saviour from guilt (John 16:8; 15:26–27). There is no joy comparable to the joy of the forgiven.
It is here that some American psychologists and psychiatrists go wrong, for they go only half-way. They start right, however, even some who make no Christian profession, for they insist that we must take sin, responsibility and guilt seriously. This is certainly great gain, but to diagnose well without being able to prescribe well is to embrace a dangerous and disillusioning half-measure.
Dr Hobart Mowrer, who was Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois when his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion was published (1961), rejected the notion that ‘psychoneurosis implies no moral responsibility’. For ‘just so long as we deny the reality of sin, we cut ourselves off...from the possibility of radical redemption (“recovery”)’ (p.40). Dr Mowrer created quite a stir within his profession by his use of the word ‘sin’. But he persisted in teaching the fact of sin and the need for an acknowledgment of it.
Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged, and unexpiated guilt, he cannot...‘accept himself’....He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred. But the moment he...begins to accept his guilt and his sinfulness, the possibility of radical reformation opens up, and with this...a new freedom of self-respect and peace (p.54).
A few years later, also rebelling against the Freudian insistence that guilt is pathological, Dr William Glasser began in Los Angeles to develop a different approach in treating juvenile delinquents and others which he called ‘Reality Therapy’. His thesis was that a person who is ‘unable to fulfil his essential needs’, especially love and self-worth, denies the reality of the world around him and acts irresponsibly. So the therapist seeks ‘to make him face a truth he has spent his life trying to avoid: he is responsible for his behaviour’.16 Dr Mowrer in his Foreword sums up the essence of Dr Glasser’s therapeutic method as ‘a psychiatric version of the three R’s, namely reality, responsibility and right-and-wrong’ (p.xii).
Similarly, ‘sin must be dealt with in the private courts of the human heart’, writes Karl Menninger.17 Well and good. But how? Especially, he goes on, by ‘repentance, reparation, restitution and atonement’. Karl Menninger here betrays his very partial grasp of the gospel. For those four words cannot be bracketed in this way. The first three do indeed belong together. Reparation (a general word for making amends) and restitution (the more particular restoration of what has been stolen) are both necessary to signify the genuineness of repentance. But ‘atonement’ is not something we can do; only God can atone for our sins, and indeed has done so through Christ.
It is true that Dr Menninger mentions the forgiveness of God once or twice in passing (though without any basis in Christ’s cross). Dr Hobart Mowrer, however, studiously avoids both the word and the concept. Like Karl Menninger he concentrates on the acknowledging of faults and the making of restitution. He calls his therapy groups ‘integrity groups’ because their foundation is personal integrity in the acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Initiation into a group is by means of ‘a complete unqualified self-disclosure’ which he calls exomologēsis. When, during a personal conversation with Dr Mowrer at the University of Illinois in 1970, I mentioned that exomologēsis is the Greek word for ‘confession’, and that in the Christian tradition the purpose of confession is to receive forgiveness from the injured party, he immediately responded, ‘Oh, we never talk about forgiveness.’ His concept of sin is that in each case it is the breach of a contractual obligation for which the guilty person must make restitution. Forgiveness is therefore unnecessary, either by the injured person or even by God.
Although, as has been pointed out, Dr Menninger does not share Dr Mowrer’s inhibition about mentioning forgiveness, neither of them ever refers to the cross, let alone regards it as the only and sufficient ground on which God forgives sins. To recover the concepts of human sin, responsibility, guilt and restitution, without simultaneously recovering confidence in the divine work of atonement, is tragically lopsided. It is diagnosis without prescription, the futility of self-salvation in place of the salvation of God, and the rousing of hope only to dash it to the ground again.
A full acknowledgment of human responsibility and therefore guilt, far from diminishing the dignity of human beings, actually enhances it. It presupposes that men and women, unlike the animals, are morally responsible beings, who know what they are, could be and should be, and do not make excuses for their poor performance. This is the thesis of Harvey Cox in his book On Not Leaving it to the Snake. Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, he urges, was not so much her disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit as her feeble surrender of responsibility which preceded it, not her pride but her sloth. Although Dr Cox is surely mistaken in his refusal to accept the biblical view of sin as essentially pride, and is tainted with the ‘man come-of-age’ misconception, he nevertheless makes an important point when he says that ‘apathy is the key form of sin in today’s world....For Adam and Eve apathy meant letting a snake tell them what to do. It meant abdicating...the exercise of dominion and control of the world’ (p.xvii). But decision-making belongs to the essence of our humanness. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man, by shuffling off responsibility for our actions. ‘Let’s not let any snake tell us what to do’ (p.xviii). The commonest defence of the Nazi war criminals was that they were merely following orders. But the court held them responsible all the same.
The Bible takes sin seriously because it takes man (male and female) seriously. As we have seen, Christians do not deny the fact – in some circumstances – of diminished responsibility, but we affirm that diminished responsibility always entails diminished humanity. To say that somebody ‘is not responsible for his actions’ is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions. Then, when we also acknowledge our sin and guilt, we receive God’s forgiveness, enter into the joy of his salvation, and so become yet more completely human and healthy. What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.
In his justly famous essay ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, C. S. Lewis bemoans the tendency to abandon the notion of just retribution and replace it with humanitarian concerns both for the criminal (reform) and for society as a whole (deterrence). For this means, he argues, that every lawbreaker ‘is deprived of the rights of a human being. The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from punishment the concept of desert. But the concept of desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust.’ Again, ‘when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a “case”.’ By what right may we use force to impose treatment on a criminal, either to cure him or to protect society, unless he deserves it?
To be ‘cured’ against one’s will, and cured of states which we may not regard as disease, is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.18
We have considered the seriousness of sin as rebellion against God, the continuing responsibility of men and women for their actions, and their consequent guilt in God’s sight and liability to punishment. But can we think of God as ‘punishing’ or ‘judging’ evil? Yes, we can and must. Indeed the essential background to the cross is not only the sin, responsibility and guilt of human beings but the just reaction of God to these things, in other words his holiness and wrath.
That God is holy is foundational to biblical religion. So is the corollary that sin is incompatible with his holiness. His eyes are ‘too pure to look on evil’ and he ‘cannot tolerate wrong’. Therefore our sins effectively separate us from him, so that his face is hidden from us and he refuses to listen to our prayers.19 In consequence, it was clearly understood by the biblical authors that no human being could ever set eyes on God and survive the experience. They might perhaps be permitted to see his ‘back’ but not his ‘face’, the sunshine but not the sun.20 And all those who were granted even a glimpse of his glory were unable to endure the sight. Moses ‘hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God’. When Isaiah had his vision of Yahweh enthroned and exalted, he was overwhelmed by the sense of his uncleanness. When God revealed himself personally to Job, Job’s reaction was to ‘despise’ himself and to ‘repent in dust and ashes’. Ezekiel saw only ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD’, in burning fire and brilliant light, but it was enough to make him fall prostrate to the ground. At a similar vision Daniel also collapsed and fainted, with his face to the ground. As for those who were confronted by the Lord Jesus Christ, even during his earthly life when his glory was veiled, they felt a profound discomfort. For example, he provoked in Peter a sense of his sinfulness and of his unfitness to be in his presence. And when John saw his ascended magnificence, he ‘fell at his feet as though dead’.21
Closely related to God’s holiness is his wrath, which is in fact his holy reaction to evil. We certainly cannot dismiss it by saying that the God of wrath belongs to the Old Testament, while the God of the New Testament is love. For God’s love is clearly seen in the Old Testament, as is also his wrath in the New. R. V. G. Tasker correctly wrote: ‘It is an axiom of the Bible that there is no incompatibility between these two attributes of the divine nature; and for the most part the great Christian theologians and preachers of the past have endeavoured to be loyal to both sides of the divine self-disclosure.’22 Yet the concept of an angry God continues to raise problems in Christian minds. How can an emotion, they ask, which Jesus equated with murder, and which Paul declared to be one of the ‘acts of the sinful nature’ of which we must rid ourselves, possibly be attributed to the all-holy God?23
One attempted explanation is associated particularly with the name of C. H. Dodd, and with his commentary on The Epistle of Paul to the Romans. He pointed out that, although alongside references to God’s love Paul also writes that he ‘loved’ us, yet alongside references to God’s anger he never writes that he ‘is angry’ with us. In addition to this absence of the verb to ‘be angry’, the noun orgē (anger or wrath) is constantly used by Paul ‘in a curiously impersonal way’ (p.21). He refers to ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’ without specifying whose wrath it is, and thus almost absolutizes it. For example, he writes of ‘the day of God’s wrath’, of how ‘law brings wrath’, and of how wrath ‘has come upon’ disbelieving Jews, while believers will be rescued from ‘the coming wrath’ through Jesus Christ.24 Dodd’s deduction from this evidence was that Paul retained the concept of wrath ‘not to describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’ (p.23).
Professor A. T. Hanson has elaborated C. H. Dodd’s thesis in his comprehensive biblical survey The Wrath of the Lamb. Drawing attention to ‘a marked tendency’ among post-exilic biblical authors ‘to speak of the divine wrath in a very impersonal manner’, he defines it as ‘the inevitable process of sin working itself out in history’ (pp.21 and 37). Coming to the New Testament, he writes: ‘there can be little doubt that for Paul the impersonal character of the wrath was important; it relieved him of the necessity of attributing wrath directly to God, it transformed the wrath from an attribute of God into the name for a process, which sinners bring upon themselves.’ For wrath is ‘wholly impersonal’ and ‘does not describe an attitude of God but a condition of men’ (pp.69 and 110).
That expression ‘relieved him of the necessity’ is revealing. It suggests that Paul was uncomfortable with the notion of God’s personal wrath, looked round for an escape from having to believe and teach it, and was ‘relieved’ of his burden by discovering that wrath was not a divine emotion, attribute or attitude, but an impersonal historical process affecting sinners. In this Professor Hanson seems to be projecting on to Paul his own dilemma, for he is candid enough to confess that he has just such an a priori problem himself. Towards the end of his discussion he writes: ‘If we once allow ourselves to be led into thinking that a reference to the wrath of God in the New Testament means that God is conceived of as angry..., we cannot avoid maintaining that in some sense the Son endured the wrath of the Father, we cannot help thinking in forensic terms, with all the strain and violence to our God-given sense of moral justice that such a theory involves’ (pp.193–194). He seems to be saying that it is in order to overcome these ‘appalling difficulties’ that he has reinterpreted the wrath of God. To say that Christ bore ‘wrath’ on the cross, he maintains, means that he ‘endured the consequences of men’s sins’, not their penalty (p.194).
We must watch our presuppositions, therefore. It is perilous to begin with any a priori, even with a ‘God-given sense of moral justice’ which then shapes our understanding of the cross. It is wiser and safer to begin inductively with a God-given doctrine of the cross, which then shapes our understanding of moral justice. I hope later to demonstrate that it is possible to hold a biblical and Christian concept of ‘wrath’ and ‘propitiation’ which, far from contradicting moral justice, both expresses and safeguards it.
The attempts by C. H. Dodd, A. T. Hanson and others to reconstruct ‘wrath’ as an impersonal process must be declared at least ‘not proven’. To be sure, sometimes the word is used without explicit reference to God, and with or without the definite article, but the full phrase ‘the wrath of God’ is used as well, apparently without embarrassment, by both Paul and John. Without doubt also, Paul taught that God’s wrath is being revealed in the present both through the moral deterioration of pagan society and through the state’s administration of justice.25 These processes are not identified with God’s wrath, however, but declared to be manifestations of it. The truth that God’s wrath (i.e. his antagonism to evil) is active through social and legal processes does not necessitate the conclusion that it is itself a purely impersonal continuum of cause and effect. Perhaps the reason for Paul’s adoption of impersonal expressions is not to affirm that God is never angry, but to emphasize that his anger is void of any tinge of personal malice. After all Paul sometimes refers to charis (grace) without referring to God. He can write, for example, of grace ‘increasing’ and of grace ‘reigning’ (Rom. 5:20–21). Yet we do not on that account depersonalize grace and convert it into an influence or process. On the contrary, grace is the most personal of all words; grace is God himself acting graciously towards us. And just as charis stands for the gracious personal activity of God himself, so orgē stands for his equally personal hostility to evil.
How, then, shall we define anger? Writing particularly of righteous human anger, James Denney called it ‘the instinctive resentment or reaction of the soul against anything which it regards as wrong or injurious’ and ‘the vehement repulsion of that which hurts’.26 Similarly, God’s wrath in the words of Leon Morris is his ‘personal divine revulsion to evil’ and his ‘personal vigorous opposition’ to it.27 To speak thus of God’s anger is a legitimate anthropomorphism, provided that we recognize it as no more than a rough and ready parallel, since God’s anger is absolutely pure, and uncontaminated by those elements which render human anger sinful. Human anger is usually arbitrary and uninhibited; divine anger is always principled and controlled. Our anger tends to be a spasmodic outburst, aroused by pique and seeking revenge; God’s is a continuous, settled antagonism, aroused only by evil, and expressed in its condemnation. God is entirely free from personal animosity or vindictiveness; indeed, he is sustained simultaneously with undiminished love for the offender. Charles Cranfield’s summary is that God’s orgē is ‘no nightmare of an indiscriminate, uncontrolled, irrational fury, but the wrath of the holy and merciful God called forth by, and directed against, men’s asebeia (ungodliness) and adikia (unrighteousness)’.28
What is common to the biblical concepts of the holiness and the wrath of God is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. So sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin. Several vivid metaphors are used in Scripture to illustrate this stubborn fact.
The first is height. Frequently in the Bible the God of creation and covenant is called ‘the Most High God’, and is personally addressed in several Psalms as ‘Yahweh Most High’.29 His lofty exaltation expresses both his sovereignty over the nations, the earth and ‘all gods’,30 and also his inaccessibility to sinners. True, his throne is called ‘the throne of grace’ and is encircled by the rainbow of his covenant promise. Nevertheless, it is ‘high and exalted’ and he himself is ‘the high and lofty One’, who does not live in man-made temples, since heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool; so sinners should not presume.31 True again, he condescends to the contrite and lowly, who find security in his shadow. But proud sinners he knows only ‘from afar’, and he cannot stand the high and haughty looks of the arrogant.32
The ‘high’ exaltation of God is not literal, of course, and was never meant to be taken literally. The hue and cry about abandoning a God ‘up there’ was largely superfluous. The biblical writers used height as a symbol of transcendence, just as we do. It is more expressive than depth. ‘The Ground of Being’ may speak of ultimate reality to some people, but ‘the high and lofty One’ conveys God’s otherness more explicitly. When thinking of the great and living God, it is better to look up than down, and outside than inside ourselves.
The second picture is that of distance. God is not only ‘high above’ us, but ‘far away’ from us also. We dare not approach too close. Indeed, many are the biblical injunctions to keep our distance. ‘Do not come any closer,’ God said to Moses out of the burning bush. So it was that the arrangements for Israel’s worship expressed the complementary truths of his nearness to them because of his covenant and his separation from them because of his holiness. Even as he came down to them at Mount Sinai to reveal himself to them, he told Moses to put limits for the people around the base of the mountain and to urge them not to come near. Similarly, when God gave instructions for the building of the Tabernacle (and later the Temple), he both promised to live among his people and yet warned them to erect a curtain before the inner sanctuary as a permanent sign that he was out of reach to sinners. Nobody was permitted to penetrate the veil, on pain of death, except the high priest, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and then only if he took with him the blood of sacrifice.33 And when the Israelites were about to cross the Jordan into the promised land, they were given this precise command: ‘Keep a distance of about a thousand yards between you and the ark; do not go near it’ (Josh. 3:4). It is against the background of this plain teaching about God’s holiness and about the perils of presumption that the story of Uzzah’s death must be understood. When the oxen carrying the ark stumbled, he reached out and took hold of it. But ‘the LORD’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act’,34 and he died. Commentators tend to protest at this ‘primitive’ Old Testament understanding of God’s wrath as ‘fundamentally an irrational and in the last resort inexplicable thing which broke out with enigmatic, mysterious and primal force’ and which bordered closely on ‘caprice’.35 But no, there is nothing inexplicable about God’s wrath: its explanation is always the presence of evil in some form or other. Sinners cannot approach the all-holy God with impunity. On the last day, those who have not found refuge and cleansing in Christ will hear those most terrible of all words: ‘Depart from me.’36
The third and fourth pictures of the holy God’s unapproachability to sinners are those of light and fire: ‘God is light’, and ‘our God is a consuming fire’. Both discourage, indeed inhibit, too close an approach. Bright light is blinding; our eyes cannot endure its brilliance, and in the heat of the fire everything shrivels up and is destroyed. So God ‘lives in unapproachable light’; ‘no-one has seen or can see’ him. And those who deliberately reject the truth have ‘only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God....It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’37
The fifth metaphor is the most dramatic of all. It indicates that the holy God’s rejection of evil is as decisive as the human body’s rejection of poison by vomiting. Vomiting is probably the body’s most violent of all reactions. The immoral and idolatrous practices of the Canaanites were so disgusting, it is written, that ‘the land vomited out its inhabitants’, and the Israelites were warned that if they committed the same offences, the land would vomit them out as well. Moreover what is said to be the land’s repudiation of evil was in reality the Lord’s. For in the same context he is represented as declaring that he ‘abhorred’ the Canaanites because of their evil doings. The identical Hebrew word is used of him in relation to the stubborn disobedience of Israel in the wilderness: ‘For forty years I was angry with (literally ‘loathed’) that generation.’ Here too the verb probably alludes to nauseating food, as it does in the statement, ‘we detest this miserable food!’ Our delicate upbringing may find this earthy metaphor distinctly embarrassing. Yet it continues in the New Testament. When Jesus threatens to ‘spit’ the lukewarm Laodicean church people out of his mouth, the Greek verb literally means to ‘vomit’ (emeō). The picture may be shocking, but its meaning is clear. God cannot tolerate or ‘digest’ sin and hypocrisy. They cause him not distaste merely, but disgust. They are so repulsive to him that he must rid himself of them. He must spit or vomit them out.38
All five metaphors illustrate the utter incompatibility of divine holiness and human sin. Height and distance, light, fire and vomiting all say that God cannot be in the presence of sin, and that if it approaches him too closely it is repudiated or consumed.
Yet these notions are foreign to modern man. The kind of God who appeals to most people today would be easygoing in his tolerance of our offences. He would be gentle, kind, accommodating, and would have no violent reactions. Unhappily, even in the church we seem to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter’s sobering words: ‘Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives...in reverent fear.’39 In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry ‘Hallelujah’ with authenticity only after we have first cried ‘Woe is me, for I am lost’. In Dale’s words, ‘it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’.40
We must, therefore, hold fast to the biblical revelation of the living God who hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it, and refuses ever to come to terms with it. In consequence, we may be sure that, when he searched in his mercy for some way to forgive, cleanse and accept evil-doers, it was not along the road of moral compromise. It had to be a way which was expressive equally of his love and of his wrath. As Brunner put it, ‘where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored, there also will there be no understanding of the central conception of the Gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the Mediator’.41 Similarly, ‘only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy’.42
All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and man. If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to his, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God, and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely ‘hell-deserving sinners’, then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.
The essential background to the cross, therefore, is a balanced understanding of the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. If we diminish either, we thereby diminish the cross. If we reinterpret sin as a lapse instead of a rebellion, and God as indulgent instead of indignant, then naturally the cross appears superfluous. But to dethrone God and enthrone ourselves not only dispenses with the cross; it also degrades both God and man. A biblical view of God and ourselves, however, that is, of our sin and of God’s wrath, honours both. It honours human beings by affirming them as responsible for their own actions. It honours God by affirming him as having moral character.
So we come back to where we began this chapter, namely that forgiveness is for God the profoundest of problems. As Bishop B. F. Westcott expressed it, ‘nothing superficially seems simpler than forgiveness’, whereas ‘nothing if we look deeply is more mysterious or more difficult’.43 Sin and wrath stand in the way. God must not only respect us as the responsible beings we are, but he must also respect himself as the holy God he is. Before the holy God can forgive us, some kind of ‘satisfaction’ is necessary. That is the subject of our next chapter.