No two words in the theological vocabulary of the cross arouse more criticism than ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’. Yet it is in defence of these words that this chapter and the next are written. In combination (‘satisfaction through substitution’) they may even seem intolerable. How, people ask, can we possibly believe that God needed some kind of ‘satisfaction’ before he was prepared to forgive, and that Jesus Christ provided it by enduring as our ‘substitute’ the punishment we sinners deserved? Are not such notions unworthy of the God of the biblical revelation, a hangover from primitive superstitions, indeed frankly immoral?
Sir Alister Hardy, for example, formerly Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford, who was friendly to all kinds of religious experience because he spent a lifetime investigating it, nevertheless expressed his inability to come to terms with the ‘crude’ beliefs he thought ‘so many orthodox churchmen’ entertain. In his 1965 Gifford Lectures, published under the title The Divine Flame, he asked whether Jesus himself would be a Christian if he were to live today. ‘I very much doubt it,’ Sir Alister replied. ‘I feel certain that he would not have preached to us of a God who would be appeased by the cruel sacrifice of a tortured body....I cannot accept either the hypothesis that the appalling death of Jesus was a sacrifice in the eyes of God for the sins of the world, or that God, in the shape of his son, tortured himself for our redemption. I can only confess that, in my heart of hearts, I find such religious ideas to be amongst the least attractive in the whole of anthropology. To me they belong to quite a different philosophy – different psychology – from that of the religion that Jesus taught’ (p.218).
Sir Alister Hardy was right to say that Jesus would not (because he did not) explain his death in those crude terms, but wrong to suppose that ‘many orthodox churchmen’ do so. He caricatured the Christian understanding of the cross in order the more readily to condemn it. The real question is whether we can hold fast to the saving efficacy of the death of Jesus, and to its traditional vocabulary (including ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’), without denigrating God. I believe we can and must. To be sure, neither ‘satisfaction’ nor ‘substitution’ is a biblical word, and therefore we need to proceed with great caution. But each is a biblical concept. There is, in fact, a biblical revelation of ‘satisfaction through substitution’, which is uniquely honouring to God, and which should therefore lie at the very heart of the church’s worship and witness. That is why Cranmer included a clear statement of it at the beginning of his Prayer of Consecration (1549). In consequence, for 400 years Anglicans have described Jesus Christ as having made on the cross, by his ‘one oblation of himself once offered’, ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.
But the way in which different theologians have developed the concept of satisfaction depends on their understanding of the obstacles to forgiveness which need first to be removed. What demands are being made which stand in the way until they are satisfied? And who is making them? Is it the devil? Or is it the law, or God’s honour or justice, or ‘the moral order’? All these have been proposed. I shall argue, however, that the primary ‘obstacle’ is to be found within God himself. He must ‘satisfy himself’ in the way of salvation he devises; he cannot save us by contradicting himself.
The notion that it was the devil who made the cross necessary was widespread in the early church.1 To be sure, Jesus and his apostles did speak of the cross as the means of the devil’s overthrow (as we shall consider in a later chapter). But some of the early Fathers were extremely injudicious in the ways in which they represented both the devil’s power and how the cross deprived him of it. They all recognized that since the Fall, and on account of it, mankind has been in captivity not only to sin and guilt but to the devil. They thought of him as the lord of sin and death, and as the major tyrant from whom Jesus came to liberate us.
But with the benefit of hindsight we may say that they made three mistakes. First, they credited the devil with more power than he has. Even though they portrayed him as a rebel, a robber and a usurper, they tended to speak as if he had acquired certain ‘rights’ over man which even God himself was under obligation to satisfy honourably. Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century was one of the few early theologians who vigorously repudiated this idea. He called it an ‘outrage’.2
Secondly, they therefore tended to think of the cross as a divine transaction with the devil; it was the ransom-price demanded by him for the release of his captives, and paid to him in settlement of his rights. This was a very popular belief in the early centuries of the church.
Thirdly, some went further and represented the transaction in terms of a deception. Theologically, they pictured the devil as having over-reached himself. Although in the case of us sinners he ‘holds the power of death’ (Heb. 2:14), he had no such authority over the sinless Jesus, and in hounding him to death he shed innocent blood. Therefore, having thus abused his power, he was deprived of it. Some Fathers added at this point that he did not altogether realize what he was doing, either because he did not recognize who Jesus was, or because, seeing Godhead in human form, he thought he now had a unique opportunity to overpower him. But he was deceived. Origen was the first to teach unequivocally that the death of Jesus was both the ransom-price paid to the devil and the means of his deception and overthrow. Gregory of Nyssa, a shy Cappadocian scholar of the fourth century, further developed these ideas in his Great Catechism or Catechetical Oration, using vivid imagery:
God,...in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him (sc. the devil) who required it...was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death,...(the devil) might vanish.3
To us the analogy of the fish-hook is grotesque, as is also Augustine’s sermonic use of mousetrap imagery. Peter Lombard was to use it centuries later, affirming that ‘the cross was a mousetrap (muscipula) baited with the blood of Christ’.4 To be sure, these theologians may well have developed such pictures as a concession to the popular mind, and the early Fathers saw a certain justice in the idea that he who had deceived the human race into disobedience should himself be deceived into defeat. But to attribute fraudulent action to God is unworthy of him.
What is of permanent value in these theories is first that they took seriously the reality, malevolence and power of the devil (the ‘strong man, fully armed’ of Luke 11:21), and secondly that they proclaimed his decisive, objective defeat at the cross for our liberation (by the ‘someone stronger’ who attacked and overpowered him, Luke 11:22).5 Nevertheless, R. W. Dale was not exaggerating when he dubbed them ‘intolerable, monstrous and profane’.6 We deny that the devil has any rights over us which God is obliged to satisfy. Consequently, any notion of Christ’s death as a necessary transaction with, let alone deception of, the devil is ruled out.
Another way of explaining the moral necessity of the divine ‘satisfaction’ at the cross has been to exalt the law. Sin is ‘lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4), a disregard for God’s law and a disobedience of it. But the law cannot be broken with impunity. Sinners therefore incur the penalty of their law-breaking. They cannot simply be let off. The law must be upheld, its dignity defended, and its just penalties paid. The law is thereby ‘satisfied’.
A popular illustration of this truth is the story of King Darius in the book of Daniel (chapter 6). He appointed 120 satraps to rule Babylonia, and set three administrators over them, of whom Daniel was one. Further, such were Daniel’s exceptional qualities and distinguished service that the king planned to promote him over all his colleagues. This aroused their jealousy, and they immediately began to plot his downfall. Watching him like hawks, they tried to find some inconsistency or inefficiency in his conduct of public affairs, so that they could lodge charges against him. But they failed, ‘because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent’ (v. 4). So they turned their scrutiny upon his private life; their only hope, they reckoned, was to find him guilty of some technical fault in connection with his regular religious devotion. They managed to persuade the king to ‘issue an edict and enforce the decree that anyone who prays to any god or man during the next thirty days’, except to the king himself, would be thrown into the lions’ den (v. 7). With incredible naivety the king fell into their trap. By putting the decree into writing he even made it unalterable, ‘in accordance with the laws of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be repealed’ (vv. 8–9).
The publication of the decree reached Daniel’s ears, but did not lead him to change his routine. On the contrary, he continued three times a day to pray to his God. His practice was to do so kneeling in his upstairs room, whose windows opened towards Jerusalem. There he was visible to passers-by, and there his enemies duly saw him. They went back to the king immediately, and reported Daniel’s flagrant breach of the royal decree. ‘When the king heard this, he was greatly distressed; he was determined to rescue Daniel and made every effort until sundown to save him’ (v. 14). But he could find no solution to the legal problem he had created for himself. His administrators and satraps reminded him that ‘according to the law of the Medes and Persians no decree or edict that the king issues can be changed’ (v. 15). So Darius reluctantly bowed to the inevitable and gave the order for Daniel to be thrown into the lions’ den. The law had triumphed.
Many are the preachers (myself among them) who have used this story to highlight the divine dilemma. Darius respected Daniel and laboured long to find some way of saving him, but the law must take its course and not be tampered with. So God loves us sinners and longs to save us, but cannot do so by violating the law which has justly condemned us. Hence the cross, in which the penalty of the law was paid and its sanctity vindicated. As one recent exponent of this view, I cite Henry Wace, Dean of Canterbury from 1903 to 1924:
A law which has no sanction, in the technical sense of that expression – in other words, a law which can be broken without an adequate penalty, is no law at all; and it is inconceivable that God’s moral law can be violated without entailing consequences of the most terrible kind. The mere violation of one of his physical laws may entail, whether men intend the violation or not, the most lasting and widespread misery; and can it reasonably be supposed that the most flagrant and wilful violation of the highest of all laws – those of truth and righteousness – should entail no such results?7
Again, ‘God cannot abolish that moral constitution of things which he has established.’ It is true that Dean Wace went on to qualify these statements, by reminding us that the moral world is not ‘a kind of moral machine in which laws operate as they do in physical nature’, and that ‘we have to do not simply with an established order but with a living personality, with a living God’. Nevertheless, he refers again to ‘the penalty necessarily involved in the violation of the Divine law’.8
I am not wanting to disagree with this language, and indeed I continue to use it myself. It has, in fact, good scriptural warrant. For Paul quotes Deuteronomy with approval to the effect that every law-breaker is ‘cursed’, and then goes on to affirm that ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:10, 13). If therefore Paul was not afraid to use an impersonal expression like ‘the curse of the law’, we should not be either.
The fourth-century Latin Fathers such as Ambrose and Hilary regularly expounded the cross in these terms. Going further than Tertullian, who was the first to use the legal terms ‘merit’ and ‘satisfaction’ of the Christian’s relation to God, they interpreted texts such as Galatians 3:13 in the light of ‘the satisfactio of the Roman public law, which means the endurance of the law’s sentence’.9 The sixteenth-century Reformers developed this further. They rightly emphasized that Jesus Christ’s personal submission to the law was indispensable to our rescue from its condemnation. They also taught that his submission took two forms, his perfect obedience to it in his life and his bearing of its penalty in his death. They called the first his ‘active’ and the second his ‘passive’ obedience. These adjectives are inexact, however, since Jesus’ obedience unto death on the cross was just as ‘active’ (i.e. voluntary and determined) as his obedient submission to the moral law. His obedience to the Father’s will is one and the same, whether in his conduct or mission, his life or death. The value of continuing to speak of Christ’s ‘double’ obedience is that we then distinguish between his fulfilling the demands of the law and his enduring the condemnation of the law. Both kinds of submission to the law were essential to the efficacy of the cross.
Nevertheless, we need to be alert to the dangers of law-language and to the inadequacy of likening God’s moral law either to the civil laws of the country or to the physical laws of the universe. True, a part of the glory of a constitutional monarchy is that even the monarch is not above the law but under it, being required to obey its provisions and (if in breach of them) to bear its penalties. Darius provides a good example of this. Yet the decree he made was rash and foolish, since it contained no religious conscience clause, and so led to the punishment of a righteous man for a righteous deed which the king had never intended his decree to make a punishable offence. We cannot think of God as caught in a technical legal muddle of this kind. Nor is it wise to liken God’s moral laws to his physical laws and then declare them equally inflexible. For example, ‘if you put your hand in the fire it will be burnt, and if you break the ten commandments you will be punished’. There is truth in the analogy, but the concept of mechanical penalties is misleading. It may be true of the laws of nature, even though strictly they are not ‘laws’ which bind God’s action but a description of the normal uniformity of his action which human beings have observed. The real reason why disobedience of God’s moral laws brings condemnation is not that God is their prisoner, but that he is their creator.
As R. W. Dale put it, God’s connection with the law is ‘not a relation of subjection but of identity...In God the law is alive; it reigns on his throne, sways his sceptre, is crowned with his glory’.10 For the law is the expression of his own moral being, and his moral being is always self-consistent. Nathaniel Dimock captures this truth well in the following words:
There can be nothing...in the demands of the law, and the severity of the law, and the condemnation of the law, and the death of the law, and the curse of the law, which is not a reflection (in part) of the perfections of God. Whatever is due to the law is due to the law because it is the law of God, and is due therefore to God himself.11
If the early Greek Fathers represented the cross primarily as a ‘satisfaction’ of the devil, in the sense of being the ransom-price demanded by him and paid to him, and the early Latin Fathers saw it as a satisfaction of God’s law, a fresh approach was made by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, who in his Cur Deus Homo? made a systematic exposition of the cross as a satisfaction of God’s offended honour. His book was ‘epoch-making in the whole history of our doctrine’, wrote R. S. Franks, ‘in that it for the first time in a thoroughgoing and consistent way applies to the elucidation of the subject the conceptions of satisfaction and merit’.12 James Denney went further and called it ‘the truest and greatest book on the atonement that has ever been written’.13
Anselm was a godly Italian, who first settled in Normandy, and then in 1093 following the Norman Conquest was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He has been described as the first representative of medieval ‘scholasticism’, which was an attempt to reconcile philosophy and theology, Aristotelian logic and biblical revelation. Although he included in his writings a number of biblical quotations, however, and referred to Holy Scripture as ‘a firm foundation’, his overriding concern was to be ‘agreeable to reason’ (ii.xi). As his imaginary interlocutor Boso put it, ‘the way by which you lead me is so walled in by reasoning on each side that I do not seem able to turn out of it either to the right hand or the left’ (ii.ix).
In Cur Deus Homo?, Anselm’s great treatise on the relationship between the incarnation and the atonement, he agrees that the devil needed to be overcome, but rejects the patristic ransom-theories on the ground that ‘God owed nothing to the devil but punishment’ (ii.xix). Instead, man owed something to God, and this is the debt which needed to be repaid. For Anselm defines sin as ‘not rendering to God what is his due’ (i.xi), namely the submission of our entire will to his. To sin is, therefore, to ‘take away from God what is his own’, which means to steal from him and so to dishonour him. If anybody imagines that God can simply forgive us in the same way that we are to forgive others, he has not yet considered the seriousness of sin (i.xxi). Being an inexcusable disobedience of God’s known will, sin dishonours and insults him, and ‘nothing is less tolerable...than that the creature should take away from the Creator the honour due to him, and not repay what he takes away’ (i.xiii). God cannot overlook this. ‘It is not proper for God to pass by sin thus unpunished’ (i.xii). It is more than improper; it is impossible. ‘If it is not becoming to God to do anything unjustly or irregularly, it is not within the scope of his liberty or kindness or will to let go unpunished the sinner who does not repay to God what he has taken away’ (i.xii). ‘God upholds nothing more justly than he doth the honour of his own dignity’ (i.xiii).
So what can be done? If we are ever to be forgiven, we must repay what we owe. Yet we are incapable of doing this, either for ourselves or for other people. Our present obedience and good works cannot make satisfaction for our sins, since these are required of us anyway. So we cannot save ourselves. Nor can any other human being save us, since ‘one who is a sinner cannot justify another sinner’ (i.xxiii). Hence the dilemma with which Book i ends: ‘man the sinner owes to God, on account of sin, what he cannot repay, and unless he repays it he cannot be saved’ (i.xxv).
Near the beginning of Book ii, the only possible way out of the human dilemma is unfolded: ‘there is no-one...who can make this satisfaction except God himself....But no-one ought to make it except man; otherwise man does not make satisfaction.’ Therefore, ‘it is necessary that one who is God-man should make it’ (ii.vi). A being who is God and not man, or man and not God, or a mixture of both and therefore neither man nor God, would not qualify. ‘It is needful that the very same Person who is to make this satisfaction be perfect God and perfect man, since no-one can do it except one who is truly God, and no-one ought to do it except one who is truly man’ (ii.vii). This leads Anselm to introduce Christ. He was (and is) a unique Person, since in him ‘God the Word and man meet’ (ii.ix). He also performed a unique work, for he gave himself up to death – not as a debt (since he was sinless and therefore under no obligation to die) but freely for the honour of God. It was also reasonable that man, ‘who by sinning stole himself away from God as completely as he possibly could do so, should, in making satisfaction, surrender himself to God as completely as he can do so’, namely by his voluntary self-offering unto death. Serious as human sin is, yet the life of the God-man was so good, so exalted and so precious that its offering in death ‘outweighs the number and greatness of all sins’ (ii.xiv), and due reparation has been made to the offended honour of God.
The greatest merits of Anselm’s exposition are that he perceived clearly the extreme gravity of sin (as a wilful rebellion against God in which the creature affronts the majesty of his Creator), the unchanging holiness of God (as unable to condone any violation of his honour), and the unique perfections of Christ (as the God-man who voluntarily gave himself up to death for us). In some places, however, his scholastic reasoning took him beyond the boundaries of the biblical revelation, as when he speculated whether Christ’s payment was exactly what sinners owed or more, and whether the number of redeemed humans would exceed the number of fallen angels. Moreover, his whole presentation reflects the feudal culture of his age, in which society was rigidly stratified, each person stood on the dignity which had been accorded him, the ‘proper’ or ‘becoming’ conduct of inferiors to superiors (and especially to the king) was laid down, breaches of this code were punished, and all debts must be honourably discharged.
When God is portrayed, however, in terms reminiscent of a feudal overlord who demands honour and punishes dishonour, it is questionable whether this picture adequately expresses the ‘honour’ which is indeed due to God alone. We must certainly remain dissatisfied whenever the atonement is presented as a necessary satisfaction either of God’s ‘law’ or of God’s ‘honour’ in so far as these are objectified as existing in some way apart from him.
It was during the twelfth century that three distinct interpretations of the death of Christ were clarified. Anselm (died 1109), as we have seen, emphasized the objective satisfaction to the honour of God which had been paid by the God-man Jesus, while his younger contemporary Peter Abelard of Paris (died 1142) (Abelard’s teaching is considered in greater detail on pp.252ff.) emphasized the subjective moral influence which the cross has on believers. Meanwhile, Bernard of Clairvaux (died 1153), the mystic theologian, continued to teach that a ransom-price had been paid to the devil. It was the Anselmian view, however, which prevailed, for careful students of Scripture were unable to eliminate from it the notion of satisfaction. So the ‘scholastics’ or ‘schoolmen’ (so-called because they taught in the recently founded medieval European ‘schools’, i.e. universities) further developed Anselm’s position – both the ‘Thomists’ who were Dominicans looking to Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) and the ‘Scotists’ who were Franciscans looking to Duns Scotus (died 1308). Although these two groups of ‘schoolmen’ differed in details, they both taught that the demands of divine justice were satisfied by Christ’s cross.
With the Reformation, and the Reformers’ emphasis on justification, it is understandable that they stressed the justice of God and the impossibility of a way of salvation which did not satisfy his justice. For, as Calvin wrote in the Institutes, ‘there is a perpetual and irreconcilable disagreement between righteousness and unrighteousness’ (II.xvi.3). It was necessary therefore for Christ ‘to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment’.14 Thomas Cranmer in his ‘Homily of Salvation’ explained that three things had to go together in our justification: on God’s part ‘his great mercy and grace’, on Christ’s part ‘the satisfaction of God’s justice’, and on our part ‘true and lively faith’. He concluded the first part of the homily: ‘It pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.’15
This same teaching can be found in Luther’s works. After his death, however, the Protestant ‘scholastics’ systematized the doctrine of the death of Christ into a double satisfaction, namely of God’s law and of God’s justice. God’s law was satisfied by Christ’s perfect obedience in his life, and God’s justice by his perfect sacrifice for sin, bearing its penalty in his death. This is rather too neat a formulation, however. Since God’s law is an expression of his justice, the two cannot be precisely separated.
Then was God’s concern to satisfy the ‘moral order’? This concept, like that of ‘law’, is an expression of the justice or moral character of God. It is perhaps at once more general and more broad than ‘law’, since it embraces not only moral standards but a built-in system of sanctions. It rests on the belief that the holy God who rules the world rules it morally. He has established an order in which the good is to be approved and rewarded, while the evil is to be condemned and punished. To approve the evil or to condemn the good would subvert this moral order. In such a world the unprincipled forgiveness of sins would be equally subversive.
The beginnings of this concept in relation to the death of Christ may be seen in Hugo Grotius (died 1645), the Dutch lawyer and statesman, who deplored Christian controversies and divisions, and dreamt of a reunited, reformed Christendom. His understanding of the atonement was something of a compromise between Anselm and Abelard. Sometimes he taught an almost Abelardian view of the subjective influence of the cross, which leads sinners to repentance and so enables God to forgive them. Usually, however, he preserved the objectivity of the cross, and saw it as a satisfaction of God’s justice. In addition, he had a jurist’s concern for public morality, both the preventing of crime and the upholding of law. He saw God neither as the offended party, nor as creditor, nor even as judge, but as the Supreme Moral Governor of the world. So public justice was more important to him than retributive justice, and it was this in particular which he believed was satisfied at the cross. To be sure, Christ died for our sins in our place. But what part or office did God occupy in this? he asked. ‘The right of inflicting punishment does not belong to the injured party as injured’ but rather ‘to the ruler as ruler’.16 Again, ‘to inflict punishment...is only the prerogative of the ruler as such,...for example, of a father in a family, of a king in a state, of God in the universe’ (p.51). So Grotius developed his ‘rectoral’ or ‘governmental’ interpretation of the cross. He taught that God ordained it ‘for the order of things and for the authority of his own law’ (p.137). He was preoccupied with the public vindication of God’s justice. ‘God was unwilling to pass over so many sins, and so great sins, without a distinguished example’, that is, of his serious displeasure with sin (p.106). ‘God has...most weighty reasons for punishing’, but chief among them in Grotius’ mind was the resolve to uphold the established order of law, so that we might ‘estimate the magnitude and multitude of sins’ (p.107).
Several twentieth-century theologians have taken up Grotius’ vision of God as ‘the moral governor of the world’ and developed it further in relation to the atonement. P. T. Forsyth, for example, wrote of ‘this cosmic order of holiness’, and added: ‘God’s moral order demands atonement wherever moral ideas are taken with final seriousness, and man’s conscience re-echoes the demand.’17
Another example is B. B. Warfield, who drew attention to the universal sense of guilt among human beings. It is a ‘deep moral self-condemnation which is present as a primary factor in all truly religious experience. It cries out for satisfaction. No moral deduction can persuade it that forgiveness of sins is a necessary element in the moral order of the world. It knows on the contrary that indiscriminate forgiveness of sin would be precisely the subversion of the moral order of the world....It cries out for expiation.’18
But the most striking statement of the inviolability of the moral order has been made by Emil Brunner in his famous book The Mediator. Sin is more than ‘an attack on God’s honour’, he wrote (p.444); it is an assault on the moral world order which is an expression of God’s moral will.
The law of his divine Being, on which all the law and order in the world is based,...the logical and reliable character of all that happens, the validity of all standards, of all intellectual, legal and moral order, the Law itself, in its most profound meaning, demands the divine reaction, the divine concern about sin, the divine resistance to this rebellion and this breach of order....If this were not true, then there would be no seriousness in the world at all; there would be no meaning in anything, no order, no stability; the world order would fall into ruins; chaos and desolation would be supreme. All order in the world depends upon the inviolability of his (sc. God’s) honour, upon the certitude that those who rebel against him will be punished (pp.444–445).
Later Brunner drew an analogy between natural law and moral law, asserting that neither can be infringed with impunity. Forgiveness without atonement would be a contravention of logic, law and order more serious and vast ‘than the suspension of the laws of nature’ (p.447). How is forgiveness possible, then, if ‘punishment is the expression of the divine law and order, of the inviolability of the divine order of the world’ (p.449)? Since law is ‘the expression of the will of the Lawgiver, of the personal God’ (p.459), then, if it is broken, it cannot and does not heal by itself. Sin has caused a ‘break in the world order’, a disorder so deep-seated that reparation or restitution is necessary, that is, ‘Atonement’ (p.485).
Here, then, are five ways in which theologians have expressed their sense of what is necessary before God is able to forgive sinners. One speaks of the overthrow of the devil by ‘satisfying’ his demands, others of ‘satisfying’ God’s law, honour or justice, and the last of ‘satisfying the moral order of the world’. In differing degrees all these formulations are true. The limitation they share is that, unless they are very carefully stated, they represent God as being subordinate to something outside and above himself which controls his actions, to which he is accountable, and from which he cannot free himself. ‘Satisfaction’ is an appropriate word, providing we realize that it is he himself in his inner being who needs to be satisfied, and not something external to himself. Talk of law, honour, justice and the moral order is true only in so far as these are seen as expressions of God’s own character. Atonement is a ‘necessity’ because it ‘arises from within God himself’.19
To be sure, ‘self-satisfaction’ in fallen human beings is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon, whether it refers to the satisfying of our instincts and passions or to our complacency. Since we are tainted and twisted with selfishness, to say ‘I must satisfy myself’ lacks self-control, while to say ‘I am satisfied with myself’ lacks humility. But there is no lack of self-control or humility in God, since he is perfect in all his thoughts and desires. To say that he must ‘satisfy himself’ means that he must be himself and act according to the perfection of his nature or ‘name’. The necessity of ‘satisfaction’ for God, therefore, is not found in anything outside himself but within himself, in his own immutable character. It is an inherent or intrinsic necessity. The law to which he must conform, which he must satisfy, is the law of his own being. Negatively, he ‘cannot disown himself’ (2 Tim. 2:13); he cannot contradict himself; he ‘never lies’ (Titus 1:2, RSV: apseudēs, ‘free from all deceit’), for the simple reason that ‘it is impossible for God to lie’ (Heb. 6:18); he is never arbitrary, unpredictable or capricious; he says ‘I will not...be false to my faithfulness’ (Ps. 89:33, RSV). Positively, he is ‘a faithful God who does no wrong’ (Deut. 32:4). That is, he is true to himself; he is always invariably himself.
Scripture has several ways of drawing attention to God’s self-consistency, and in particular of emphasizing that when he is obliged to judge sinners, he does it because he must, if he is to remain true to himself.
The first example is the language of provocation. Yahweh is described (and indeed describes himself) as ‘provoked’ by Israel’s idolatry to anger or jealousy or both. For example, ‘they made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols’.20 The exilic prophets, such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel, were constantly employing this vocabulary.21 They did not mean that Yahweh was irritated or exasperated, or that Israel’s behaviour had been so ‘provocative’ that his patience had run out. No, the language of provocation expresses the inevitable reaction of God’s perfect nature to evil. It indicates that there is within God a holy intolerance of idolatry, immorality and injustice. Wherever these occur, they act as stimuli to trigger his response of anger or indignation. He is never provoked without reason. It is evil alone which provokes him, and necessarily so since God must be (and behave like) God. If evil did not provoke him to anger he would forfeit our respect, for he would no longer be God.
Secondly, there is the language of burning. Under this heading may be mentioned the verbs which depict God’s anger as a fire and speak of its ‘kindling’, ‘burning’, ‘quenching’ and ‘consuming’. It is true that human beings are also said to ‘burn with anger’.22 But this vocabulary is much more frequently applied in the Old Testament to Yahweh, who ‘burns with anger’ whenever he sees his people disobeying his law and breaking his covenant.23 In fact, it is precisely when he is ‘provoked’ to anger that he is said to ‘burn’ with it,24 or his anger is said to ‘break out and burn like fire’.25 In consequence, we read of ‘the fire of his anger’ or ‘the fire of his jealousy’; indeed God himself unites them by referring to ‘the fire of my jealous anger’.26 As with the provocation of Yahweh to anger, so with the fire of his anger, a certain inevitability is implied. In the dry heat of a Palestinian summer fires were easily kindled. It was the same with Yahweh’s anger. Never from caprice, however; always only in response to evil. Nor was his anger ever uncontrolled. On the contrary, in the early years of Israel’s national life ‘time after time he restrained his anger and did not stir up his full wrath’.27 But when he ‘could no longer endure’ his people’s stubborn rebellion against him, he said: ‘The time has come for me to act. I will not hold back; I will not have pity, nor will I relent. You will be judged according to your conduct and your actions, declares the Sovereign LORD.’28
If a fire was easy to kindle during the Palestinian dry season, it was equally difficult to put out. So with God’s anger. Once righteously aroused, he ‘did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah’. Once kindled, it was not readily ‘quenched’.29 Instead, when Yahweh’s anger ‘burned’ against people, it ‘consumed’ them. That is to say, as fire leads to destruction, so Yahweh’s anger leads to judgment. For Yahweh is ‘a consuming fire’.30 The fire of his anger was ‘quenched’, and so ‘subsided’ or ‘ceased’, only when the judgment was complete,31 or when a radical regeneration had taken place, issuing in social justice.32
The imagery of fire endorses what is taught by the vocabulary of provocation. There is something in God’s essential moral being which is ‘provoked’ by evil, and which is ‘ignited’ by it, proceeding to ‘burn’ until the evil is ‘consumed’.
Thirdly, there is the language of satisfaction itself. A cluster of words seems to affirm the truth that God must be himself, that what is inside him must come out, and that the demands of his own nature and character must be met by appropriate action on his part. The chief word is kālah, which is used particularly by Ezekiel in relation to God’s anger. It means ‘to be complete, at an end, finished, accomplished, spent’. It occurs in a variety of contexts in the Old Testament, nearly always to indicate the ‘end’ of something, either because it has been destroyed, or because it has been finished in some other way. Time, work and life all have an end. Tears are exhausted by weeping, water used up and grass dried up in drought, and our physical strength is spent. So through Ezekiel Yahweh warns Judah that he is about to ‘accomplish’ (AV), ‘satisfy’ (RSV) or ‘spend’ (NIV) his anger ‘upon’ or ‘against’ them.33 They have refused to listen to him and have persisted in their idolatry. So now at last ‘the time has come, the day is near....I am about to pour out my wrath on you and spend my anger against you’ (Ezek. 7:7–8). It is significant that the ‘pouring out’ and the ‘spending’ go together, for what is poured out cannot be gathered again, and what is spent is finished. The same two images are coupled in Lamentations 4:11, ‘The LORD has given full vent (kālah) to his wrath; he has poured out his fierce anger.’ Indeed, only when Yahweh’s wrath is ‘spent’ does it ‘cease’. The same concept of inner necessity is implied by these verbs. What exists within Yahweh must be expressed; and what is expressed must be completely ‘spent’ or ‘satisfied’.
To sum up, God is ‘provoked’ to jealous anger over his people by their sins. Once kindled, his anger ‘burns’ and is not easily quenched. He ‘unleashes’ it, ‘pours’ it out, ‘spends’ it. This three-fold vocabulary vividly portrays God’s judgment as arising from within him, out of his holy character, as wholly consonant with it, and therefore as inevitable.
So far the picture has been one-sided, however. Because of the history of Israel’s apostasy, the prophets concentrated on Yahweh’s anger and consequent judgment. But the reason why this threat of national destruction is so poignant is that it was uttered against the background of God’s love for Israel, his choice of them and his covenant with them. This special relationship with Israel, which God had initiated and sustained, and which he promised to renew, had also arisen out of his character. He had acted ‘for the sake of his name’. He had not set his love upon Israel and chosen them because they were more numerous than other peoples, for they were the fewest. No, he had set his love upon them only because he loved them (Deut. 7:7–8). No explanation of his love for them could be given, except his love for them.
So there is a fourth way in which Scripture emphasizes the self-consistency of God, namely by using the language of the Name. God always acts ‘according to his name’. To be sure, this is not the only criterion of his activity. He also deals with us ‘according to our works’. By no means invariably, however. Indeed, if he did, we would be destroyed. So ‘he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities’.34 For he is ‘the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness’ (Exod. 34:6). Although he does not always treat us ‘according to our works’, however, he always does ‘according to his name’, that is, in a manner consistent with his revealed nature.35 The contrast is deliberately drawn in Ezekiel 20:44: ‘You will know that I am the LORD, when I deal with you for my name’s sake and not according to your evil ways and your corrupt practices, O house of Israel, declares the Sovereign LORD.’
Jeremiah 14 expresses with emphatic thoroughness the recognition that Yahweh is and always will be true to his name, that is to himself. The situation was one of devastating drought: the cisterns were empty, the ground cracked, the farmers dismayed and the animals disorientated (vv. 1–6). In their extremity Israel cried to God: ‘Although our sins testify against us, O LORD, do something for the sake of your name’ (v. 7). In other words, ‘although we cannot appeal to you to act on the ground of who we are, we can and do on the ground of who you are’. Israel remembered that they were God’s chosen people, and begged him to act in a way which would be consistent with his gracious covenant and steadfast character, for, they added, ‘we bear your name’ (vv. 8–9). In contrast to the pseudo-prophets, who were preaching a lopsided message of peace without judgment (vv. 13–16), Jeremiah prophesied ‘sword, famine and plague’ (v. 12). But he also looked beyond judgment to restoration, convinced that Yahweh would act, he said to him, ‘for the sake of your name’ (v. 21).
The same theme was further developed in Ezekiel 36. There Yahweh promised his people restoration after judgment, but was disconcertingly candid about his reasons. ‘It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name’ (v. 22). They had profaned it, caused it to be despised and even blasphemed by the nations. But Yahweh would take pity on his great name and once more demonstrate its holiness, its uniqueness, before the world. For then the nations would know that he was the Lord, the Living One (vv. 21, 23). When God thus acts ‘for the sake of his name’, he is not just protecting it from misrepresentation; he is determining to be true to it. His concern is less for his reputation than for his consistency.
In the light of all this biblical material about the divine self-consistency, we can understand why it is impossible for God to do what Christ commanded us to do. He told us to ‘deny ourselves’, but ‘God cannot deny himself’.36 Why is that? Why is it that God will not do, indeed cannot do, what he tells us to do? It is because God is God and not man, let alone fallen man. We have to deny or disown everything within us which is false to our true humanity. But there is nothing in God which is incompatible with his true deity, and therefore nothing to deny. It is in order to be our true selves that we have to deny ourselves; it is because God is never other than his true self that he cannot and will not deny himself. He can empty himself of his rightful glory and humble himself to serve. Indeed, it is precisely this that he has done in Christ (Phil. 2:7–8). But he cannot repudiate any part of himself, because he is perfect. He cannot contradict himself. This is his integrity. As for us, we are constantly aware of our human inconsistencies; they usually arouse a comment. ‘It’s so uncharacteristic of him’, we say, or ‘you are not yourself today’, or ‘I’ve come to expect something better from you’. But can you imagine saying such things to or about God? He is always himself and never inconsistent. If he were ever to behave ‘uncharacteristically’, in a way that is out of character with himself, he would cease to be God, and the world would be thrown into moral confusion. No, God is God; he never deviates one iota, even one tiny hair’s breadth, from being entirely himself.
What has this to do with the atonement? Just that the way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to himself must, first and foremost, be fully consistent with his own character. It is not only that he must overthrow and disarm the devil in order to rescue his captives. It is not even only that he must satisfy his law, his honour, his justice or the moral order: it is that he must satisfy himself. Those other formulations rightly insist that at least one expression of himself must be satisfied, either his law or honour or justice or moral order; the merit of this further formulation is that it insists on the satisfaction of God himself in every aspect of his being, including both his justice and his love.
But when we thus distinguish between the attributes of God, and set one over against another, and even refer to a divine ‘problem’ or ‘dilemma’ on account of this conflict, are we not in danger of going beyond Scripture? Was P. T. Forsyth correct in writing that ‘there is nothing in the Bible about the strife of attributes’?37 I do not think he was. To be sure, talk about ‘strife’ or ‘conflict’ in God is very anthropomorphic language. But then the Bible is not afraid of anthropomorphisms. All parents know the costliness of love, and what it means to be ‘torn apart’ by conflicting emotions, especially when there is a need to punish the children. Perhaps the boldest of all human models of God in Scripture is the pain of parenthood which is attributed to him in Hosea, chapter 11. He refers to Israel as his ‘child’, his ‘son’ (v. 1), whom he had taught to walk, taking him in his arms (v. 3) and bending down to feed him (v. 4). Yet his son proved wayward and did not recognize his Father’s tender love. Israel was determined to turn from him in rebellion (vv. 5–7). He therefore deserved to be punished. But can his own father bring himself to punish him? So Yahweh soliloquizes:
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboiim?My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.For I am God, and not man –
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.(Hos. 11:8–9)
Here surely is a conflict of emotions, a strife of attributes, within God. The four questions beginning with the words ‘how can I...?’ bear witness to a struggle between what Yahweh ought to do because of his righteousness and what he cannot do because of his love. And what is the ‘change of heart’ within him but an inner tension between his ‘compassion’ and his ‘fierce anger’?
The Bible includes a number of other phrases which in different ways express this ‘duality’ within God. He is ‘the compassionate and gracious God....Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished’; in him ‘love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other’; he announces himself as ‘a righteous God and a Saviour’, besides whom there is no other; and in wrath he remembers mercy. John describes the Word made flesh, the Father’s one and only Son, as ‘full of grace and truth’; and Paul, contemplating God’s dealings with both Jews and Gentiles, invites us to consider ‘the kindness and sternness of God’. In relation to the cross and to salvation Paul also writes of God demonstrating his justice ‘so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’, and he finds nothing anomalous about juxtaposing references to God’s ‘wrath’ and God’s ‘love’, while John assures us that, if we confess our sins, God will be ‘faithful and just’ to forgive us.38 Here are nine couplets, in each of which two complementary truths about God are brought together, as if to remind us that we must beware of speaking of one aspect of God’s character without remembering its counterpart.
Emil Brunner in The Mediator did not hesitate to write of God’s ‘dual nature’ as ‘the central mystery of the Christian revelation’ (p.519). For ‘God is not simply Love. The nature of God cannot be exhaustively stated in one single word’ (pp.281–282). Indeed, modern opposition to forensic language in relation to the cross is mainly ‘due to the fact that the idea of the Divine Holiness has been swallowed up in that of the Divine love; this means that the biblical idea of God, in which the decisive element is this twofold nature of holiness and love, is being replaced by the modern, unilateral, monistic idea of God’ (p.467). Yet ‘the dualism of holiness and love,...of mercy and wrath cannot be dissolved, changed into one synthetic conception, without at the same time destroying the seriousness of the biblical knowledge of God, the reality and the mystery of revelation and atonement....Here arises the “dialectic” of all genuine Christian theology, which simply aims at expressing in terms of thought the indissoluble nature of this dualism’ (p.519, footnote). So then, the cross of Christ ‘is the event in which God makes known his holiness and his love simultaneously, in one event, in an absolute manner’ (p.450). ‘The cross is the only place where the loving, forgiving merciful God is revealed in such a way that we perceive that his holiness and his love are equally infinite’ (p.470). In fact, ‘the objective aspect of the atonement...may be summed up thus: it consists in the combination of inflexible righteousness, with its penalties, and transcendent love’ (p.520).
At the same time, we must never think of this duality within God’s being as irreconcilable. For God is not at odds with himself, however much it may appear to us that he is. He is ‘the God of peace’, of inner tranquillity not turmoil. True, we find it difficult to hold in our minds simultaneously the images of God as the Judge who must punish evil-doers and of the Lover who must find a way to forgive them. Yet he is both, and at the same time. In the words of G. C. Berkouwer, ‘in the cross of Christ God’s justice and love are simultaneously revealed’,39 while Calvin, echoing Augustine, was even bolder. He wrote of God that ‘in a marvellous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us’.40 Indeed, the two are more than simultaneous, they are identical, or at least alternative expressions of the same reality. For ‘the wrath of God is the love of God’, Brunner wrote in a daring sentence, ‘in the form in which the man who has turned away from God and turned against God experiences it’.41
One theologian who has struggled with this tension is P. T. Forsyth, who coined – or at least popularized – the expression ‘the holy love of God’.
Christianity (he wrote) is concerned with God’s holiness before all else, which issues to man as love....This starting-point of the supreme holiness of God’s love, rather than its pity, sympathy or affection, is the watershed between the Gospel and...theological liberalism....My point of departure is that Christ’s first concern and revelation was not simply the forgiving love of God, but the holiness of such love.
Again,
If we spoke less about God’s love and more about his holiness, more about his judgment, we should say much more when we did speak of his love.42
Yet again,
Without a holy God there would be no problem of atonement. It is the holiness of God’s love that necessitates the atoning cross....43
This vision of God’s holy love will deliver us from caricatures of him. We must picture him neither as an indulgent God who compromises his holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh, vindictive God who suppresses his love in order to crush and destroy us. How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins? How can God satisfy his holy love? How can he save us and satisfy himself simultaneously? We reply at this point only that, in order to satisfy himself, he sacrificed – indeed substituted – himself for us. What that meant will be our concern in the next chapter to understand.
Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand –
The shadow of a mighty rock
Within a weary land....
O safe and happy shelter!
O refuge tried and sweet!
O trysting-place, where heaven’s love
And heaven’s justice meet!