We have located the problem of forgiveness in the gravity of sin and the majesty of God, that is, in the realities of who we are and who he is. How can the holy love of God come to terms with the unholy lovelessness of man? What would happen if they were to come into collision with each other? The problem is not outside God; it is within his own being. Because God never contradicts himself, he must be himself and ‘satisfy’ himself, acting in absolute consistency with the perfection of his character. ‘It is the recognition of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it,’ wrote James Denney, ‘which ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who cannot digest it.’1
Moreover, as we have seen, this inward necessity does not mean that God must be true to only a part of himself (whether his law or honour or justice), nor that he must express one of his attributes (whether love or holiness) at the expense of another, but rather that he must be completely and invariably himself in the fullness of his moral being. T. J. Crawford stressed this point: ‘It is altogether an error...to suppose that God acts at one time according to one of his attributes, and at another time according to another. He acts in conformity with all of them at all times....As for the divine justice and the divine mercy in particular, the end of his (sc. Christ’s) work was not to bring them into harmony, as if they had been at variance with one another, but jointly to manifest and glorify them in the redemption of sinners. It is a case of combined action, and not of counteraction, on the part of these attributes, that is exhibited on the cross.’2
How then could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgment and his love in pardon? Only by providing a divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgment and the sinner the pardon. We sinners still of course have to suffer some of the personal, psychological and social consequences of our sins, but the penal consequence, the deserved penalty of alienation from God, has been borne by Another in our place, so that we may be spared it. I have not come across a more careful statement of the substitutionary nature of the atonement than that made by Charles E. B. Cranfield in his commentary on Romans. Although it summarizes the conclusion towards which this chapter will argue, it may be helpful to quote it near the beginning, so that we know the direction in which we are heading. The quotation is part of Dr Cranfield’s comment on Romans 3:25. He writes:
God, because in his mercy he willed to forgive sinful men, and, being truly merciful, willed to forgive them righteously, that is, without in any way condoning their sin, purposed to direct against his own very self in the person of his Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they deserved (p.217).
The vital questions which must now occupy us are these: who is this ‘Substitute’? And how are we to understand and justify the notion of his substituting himself for us? The best way to approach these questions is to consider the Old Testament sacrifices, since these were the God-intended preparation for the sacrifice of Christ.
‘The interpretation of Christ’s death as a sacrifice is imbedded in every important type of the New Testament teaching.’3 Sacrificial vocabulary and idiom are widespread. Sometimes the reference is unambiguous, as when Paul says Christ ‘gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering (prosphora) and sacrifice (thysia) to God’ (Eph. 5:2). At other times the allusion is less direct, simply that Christ ‘gave himself’ (e.g. Gal. 1:4) or ‘offered himself’ (e.g. Heb. 9:14) for us, but the background of thought is still the Old Testament sacrificial system. In particular, the statement that he died ‘for sin’ or ‘for sins’ (e.g. Rom. 8:3, RSV and 1 Pet. 3:18) self-consciously borrows the Greek translation of the ‘sin offering’ (peri hamartias). Indeed, the letter to the Hebrews portrays the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as having perfectly fulfilled the Old Testament ‘shadows’. For he sacrificed himself (not animals), once and for all (not repeatedly), and thus secured for us not only ceremonial cleansing and restoration to favour in the covenant community but the purification of our consciences and restoration to fellowship with the living God.
What did the Old Testament sacrifices signify, however? And did they have a substitutionary meaning? In order to answer these questions, we must not make the mistake of turning first to anthropological studies. To be sure, priests, altars and sacrifices seem to have been a universal phenomenon in the ancient world, but we have no right to assume a priori that Hebrew and pagan sacrifices had an identical meaning. They may well have had a common origin in God’s revelation to our earliest ancestors. But it would be more consonant with a recognition of the special status of Scripture to say that the Israelites (despite their backslidings) preserved the substance of God’s original purpose, whereas pagan sacrifices were degenerate corruptions of it.
Sacrifices were offered in a wide variety of circumstances in the Old Testament. They were associated, for example, with penitence and with celebration, with national need, covenant renewal, family festivity and personal consecration. This diversity warns us against imposing on them a single or simple significance. Nevertheless, there do seem to have been two basic and complementary notions of sacrifice in God’s Old Testament revelation, each being associated with particular offerings. The first expressed the sense human beings have of belonging to God by right, and the second their sense of alienation from God because of their sin and guilt. Characteristic of the first were the ‘peace’ or ‘fellowship’ offering which was often associated with thanksgiving (Lev. 7:12), the burnt offering (in which everything was consumed) and the ritual of the three annual harvest festivals (Exod. 23:14–17). Characteristic of the second were the sin offering and the guilt offering, in which the need for atonement was clearly acknowledged. It would be incorrect to distinguish these two kinds of sacrifice as representing respectively man’s approach to God (offering gifts, let alone bribes to secure his favour) and God’s approach to man (offering forgiveness and reconciliation). For both kinds of sacrifice were essentially recognitions of God’s grace and expressions of dependence upon it. It would be better to distinguish them, as B. B. Warfield did, by seeing in the former ‘man conceived merely as creature’ and in the latter ‘the needs of man as sinner’. Or, to elaborate the same distinction, in the first the human being is ‘a creature claiming protection’, and in the second ‘a sinner craving pardon’.4
Then God is revealed in the sacrifices on the one hand as the Creator on whom man depends for his physical life, and on the other as simultaneously the Judge who demands and the Saviour who provides atonement for sin. Of these two kinds of sacrifice it was further recognized that the latter is the foundation of the former, in that reconciliation to our Judge is necessary even before worship of our Creator. It is therefore significant that in Hezekiah’s purification of the Temple, the sin offering ‘to atone for all Israel’ was sacrificed before the burnt offering (2 Chr. 29:20–24). Further, it may be that we can discern the two kinds of offering in the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, although both are termed minha, a gift offering. The reason why Cain’s was rejected, we are told, was that he did not respond in faith like Abel to God’s revelation (Heb. 11:4). In contrast to God’s revealed will, either he put worship before atonement or he distorted his presentation of the fruits of the soil from a recognition of the Creator’s gifts into an offering of his own.
The notion of substitution is that one person takes the place of another, especially in order to bear his pain and so save him from it. Such an action is universally regarded as noble. It is good to spare people pain; it is doubly good to do so at the cost of bearing it oneself. We admire the altruism of Moses in being willing for his name to be blotted out of Yahweh’s book if only thereby Israel might be forgiven (Exod. 32:32). We also respect an almost identical wish expressed by Paul (Rom. 9:1–4), and his promise to pay Philemon’s debts (Philm. 18–19). Similarly in the twentieth century we cannot fail to be moved by the heroism of Father Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan, in the Auschwitz concentration camp. When a number of prisoners were selected for execution, and one of them shouted that he was a married man with children, ‘Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked if he could take the condemned man’s place. His offer was accepted by the authorities, and he was placed in an underground cell, where he was left to die of starvation.’5
So it is not surprising that this commonly understood principle of substitution should have been applied by God himself to the sacrifices. Abraham ‘sacrificed...as a burnt offering instead of his son’ the ram which God had provided (Gen. 22:13). Moses enacted that, in the case of an unsolved murder, the town’s elders should first declare their own innocence and then sacrifice a heifer in place of the unknown murderer (Deut. 21:1–9). Micah evidently understood the substitutionary principle well, for he soliloquized about how he should come before Yahweh, and wondered if he should bring burnt offerings, animals, rivers of oil or even ‘my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul’. The fact that he gave himself a moral instead of a ritual answer, and especially that he rejected the horrific thought of sacrificing his own child in place of himself, does not mean that he rejected the substitutionary principle which was built into the Old Testament sacrificial system (Mic. 6:6–8).
This elaborate system provided for daily, weekly, monthly, annual and occasional offerings. It also included five main types of offering, which are detailed in the early chapters of Leviticus, namely the burnt, cereal, peace, sin and guilt offerings. Because the cereal offering consisted of grain and oil, rather than flesh and blood, it was atypical and was therefore made in association with one of the others. The remaining four were blood sacrifices and, although there were some differences between them (relating to their proper occasion, and the precise use to which the flesh and blood were put), they all shared the same basic ritual involving worshipper and priest. It was very vivid. The worshipper brought the offering, laid his hand or hands on it and killed it. The priest then applied the blood, burnt some of the flesh, and arranged for the consumption of what was left of it. This was significant symbolism, not meaningless magic. By laying his hand(s) on the animal, the offerer was certainly identifying himself with it and ‘solemnly’ designating ‘the victim as standing for him’.6 Some scholars go further and see the laying-on of hands as ‘a symbolic transferral of the sins of the worshipper to the animal’,7 as was explicitly so in the case of the scapegoat, to be considered later. In either case, having taken his place, the substitute animal was killed in recognition that the penalty for sin was death, its blood (symbolizing that the death had been accomplished) was sprinkled, and the offerer’s life was spared.
The clearest statement that the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament ritual had a substitutionary significance, however, and that this was why the shedding and sprinkling of blood was indispensable to atonement, is to be found in this statement by God explaining why the eating of blood was prohibited:
For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life (Lev. 17:11).
Three important affirmations about blood are made in this text. First, blood is the symbol of life. This understanding that ‘blood is life’ seems to be very ancient. It goes back at least to Noah, whom God forbade to eat meat which had its ‘lifeblood’ still in it (Gen. 9:4), and was later repeated in the formula ‘the blood is the life’ (Deut. 12:23). The emphasis, however, was not on blood flowing in the veins, the symbol of life being lived, but on blood shed, the symbol of life ended, usually by violent means.
Secondly, blood makes atonement, and the reason for its atoning significance is given in the repetition of the word ‘life’. It is only because ‘the life of a creature is in the blood’ that ‘it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life’. One life is forfeit; another life is sacrificed instead. What makes atonement ‘on the altar’ is the shedding of substitutionary lifeblood. T. J. Crawford expressed it well: ‘The text, then, according to its plain and obvious import, teaches the vicarious nature of the rite of sacrifice. Life was given for life, the life of the victim for the life of the offerer’, indeed ‘the life of the innocent victim for the life of the sinful offerer’.8
Thirdly, blood was given by God for this atoning purpose. ‘I have given it to you’, he says, ‘to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.’ So we are to think of the sacrificial system as God-given, not man-made, and of the individual sacrifices not as a human device to placate God but as a means of atonement provided by God himself.
This Old Testament background helps us to understand two crucial texts in the letter to the Hebrews. The first is that ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness’ (9:22), and the second that ‘it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’ (10:4). No forgiveness without blood meant no atonement without substitution. There had to be life for life or blood for blood. But the Old Testament blood sacrifices were only shadows; the substance was Christ. For a substitute to be effective, it must be an appropriate equivalent. Animal sacrifices could not atone for human beings, because a human being is ‘much more valuable...than a sheep’, as Jesus himself said (Matt. 12:12). Only ‘the precious blood of Christ’ was valuable enough (1 Pet. 1:19).
We turn now from the principle of substitution, as it is seen in what the Old Testament says about blood sacrifices in general, to two particular examples of it, namely the Passover and the concept of ‘sin-bearing’.
It is right for two reasons to start with the Passover. The first is that the original Passover marked the beginning of Israel’s national life. ‘This month is to be for you the first month,’ God had said to them, ‘the first month of your year’ (Exod. 12:2). It was to inaugurate their annual calendar because in it God redeemed them from their long and oppressive Egyptian bondage, and because the exodus led to the renewal of God’s covenant with them at Mount Sinai. But before the exodus and the covenant came the Passover. That day they were to ‘commemorate for the generations to come’; they were to ‘celebrate it as a festival to the LORD – a lasting ordinance’ (12:14, 17).
The second reason for beginning here is that the New Testament clearly identifies the death of Christ as the fulfilment of the Passover, and the emergence of his new and redeemed community as the new exodus. It is not only that John the Baptist hailed Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29, 36),9 nor only that according to John’s chronology of the end Jesus was hanging on the cross at the precise time when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered,10 nor even that in the book of Revelation he is worshipped as the slain Lamb who by his blood has purchased men for God.11 It is specially that Paul categorically declares: ‘Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival...’ (1 Cor. 5:7–8).
What then happened at the first Passover? And what does this tell us about Christ, our Passover lamb?
The Passover story (Exod. 11 – 13) is a self-disclosure of the God of Israel in three roles. First, Yahweh revealed himself as the Judge. The background was the threat of the final plague. Moses was to warn Pharaoh in the most solemn terms that at midnight Yahweh himself was going to pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn. There would be no discrimination either between human beings and animals, or between different social classes. Every firstborn male would die. There would be only one way of escape, by God’s own devising and provision.
Secondly, Yahweh revealed himself as the Redeemer. On the tenth day of the month each Israelite household was to choose a lamb (a year-old male without defect), and on the fourteenth evening to kill it. They were then to take some of the lamb’s blood, dip a branch of hyssop in it and sprinkle it on the lintel and side-posts of their front door. They were not to go out of their house at all that night. Having shed and sprinkled the blood, they must shelter under it. For Yahweh, who had already announced his intention to ‘pass through’ Egypt in judgment, now added his promise to ‘pass over’ every blood-marked house in order to shield it from his threatened destruction.
Thirdly, Yahweh revealed himself as Israel’s covenant God. He had redeemed them to make them his own people. So when he had saved them from his own judgment, they were to commemorate and celebrate his goodness. On Passover night itself they were to feast on the roasted lamb, with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, and they were to do so with their cloak tucked into their belt, their sandals on their feet and their staff in their hand, ready at any moment for their rescue. Some features of the meal spoke to them of their former oppression (e.g. the bitter herbs), and others of their future liberation (e.g. their dress). Then on each anniversary the festival was to last seven days, and they were to explain to their children what the whole ceremony meant: ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’ In addition to the celebration in which the whole family would share, there was to be a special ritual for the firstborn males. It was they who had been personally rescued from death by the death of the Passover lambs. Thus redeemed, they belonged in a special way to Yahweh who had purchased them by blood, and they were therefore to be consecrated to his service.
The message must have been absolutely clear to the Israelites; it is equally clear to us who see the fulfilment of the Passover in the sacrifice of Christ. First, the Judge and the Saviour are the same person. It was the God who ‘passed through’ Egypt to judge the firstborn, who ‘passed over’ Israelite homes to protect them. We must never characterize the Father as Judge and the Son as Saviour. It is one and the same God who through Christ saves us from himself. Secondly, salvation was (and is) by substitution. The only firstborn males who were spared were those in whose families a firstborn lamb had died instead. Thirdly, the lamb’s blood had to be sprinkled after it had been shed. There had to be an individual appropriation of the divine provision. God had to ‘see the blood’ before he would save the family. Fourthly, each family rescued by God was thereby purchased for God. Their whole life now belonged to him. So does ours. And consecration leads to celebration. The life of the redeemed is a feast, ritually expressed in the Eucharist, the Christian festival of thanksgiving, as we shall consider more fully in chapter 10.
The second major illustration of the principle of substitution is the notion of ‘sin-bearing’. In the New Testament we read of Christ that ‘he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’ (1 Pet. 2:24) and similarly that he ‘was once offered to bear the sins of many’ (Heb. 9:28, AV). But what does it mean to ‘bear sin’? Must it be understood in terms of the bearing of sin’s penalty, or can it be interpreted in other ways? And is ‘substitution’ necessarily involved in ‘sin-bearing’? If so, what kind of substitution is in mind? Can it refer only to the innocent, God-provided substitute taking the place of the guilty party and enduring the penalty instead of him? Or are there alternative kinds of substitution?
During the last one hundred years or so a number of ingenious attempts have been made to retain the vocabulary of ‘substitution’, while rejecting ‘penal substitution’ (‘penal’ being derived from poena, a penalty or punishment). Their origin can be traced back to Abelard’s protest against Anselm in the twelfth century, and even more to Socinus’ scornful rejection of the Reformers’ doctrine in the sixteenth. In his book De Jesu Christo Servatore (1578) Faustus Socinus denied not only the deity of Jesus but any idea of ‘satisfaction’ in his death. The notion that guilt can be transferred from one person to another,12 he declaimed, was incompatible with both reason and justice. It was not only impossible, but unnecessary. For God is perfectly capable of forgiving sinners without it. He leads them to repentance, and so makes them forgivable.
John McLeod Campbell’s The Nature of the Atonement (1856) stands in the same general tradition. Christ came to do God’s will, he wrote, and in particular to bear men’s sins. Not in the traditional sense, however, but in two others. First, in dealing with men on behalf of God, Christ’s sufferings were not ‘penal sufferings endured in meeting a demand of divine justice’, but ‘the sufferings of divine love suffering from our sins according to its own nature’ (pp.115–116). Secondly, in dealing with God on behalf of men, the ‘satisfaction’ due to divine justice took the form of ‘a perfect confession of our sins’. In this way Christ acknowledged the justice of God’s wrath against sin, ‘and in that perfect response he absorbs it’ (pp.117–118). He was so much one with God as to be ‘filled with the sense of the Father’s righteous condemnation of our sin’, and so much one with us as to ‘respond with a perfect Amen to that condemnation’ (p.127). In this way ‘sin-bearing’ has dissolved into sympathy, ‘satisfaction’ into sorrow for sin, and ‘substitution’ into vicarious penitence, instead of vicarious punishment.
Ten years later The Vicarious Sacrifice was published, by Horace Bushnell, the American Congregationalist.13 Like McLeod Campbell he rejected ‘penal’ substitution. Yet the death of Jesus was ‘vicarious’ or ‘substitutionary’ in the sense that he bore our pain rather than our penalty. For ‘love is itself an essentially vicarious principle’ (p.11). Consequently, God’s love entered through the incarnation and public ministry of Jesus (not only his death) into our sorrows and sufferings, and ‘bore’ them in the sense of identifying with them and feeling burdened by them. ‘There is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary’ (p.35). This loving sacrifice of God in Christ – expressed in his birth, life and death – is ‘the power of God unto salvation’ because of its inspiring influence upon us. Christ is now able ‘to bring us out of our sins...and so out of their penalties’ (p.7). It is thus that the Lamb of God takes away our sins. ‘Atonement...is a change wrought in us, a change by which we are reconciled to God’ (p.450). But the ‘subjective atoning’ (i.e. the change in us) comes first, and only then ‘God is objectively propitiated’ (p.448).
R. C. Moberly developed similar ideas in his Atonement and Personality (1901). He rejected all forensic categories in relation to the cross, and in particular any idea of retributive punishment. He taught that penitence (worked in us by the Spirit of the Crucified One) makes us first ‘forgivable’ and then holy. Christ may be said to take our place only in terms of vicarious penitence, not of vicarious penalty.
The attempt by these theologians to retain the language of substitution and sin-bearing, while changing its meaning, must be pronounced a failure. It creates more confusion than clarity. It conceals from the unwary that there is a fundamental difference between ‘penitent substitution’ (in which the substitute offers what we could not offer) and ‘penal substitution’ (in which he bears what we could not bear). Here is Dr J. I. Packer’s definition of the latter. It is the notion
that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.14
The essential question, however, concerns how the biblical authors themselves employ ‘sin-bearing’ language.
It is clear from Old Testament usage that to ‘bear sin’ means neither to sympathize with sinners, nor to identify with their pain, nor to express their penitence, nor to be persecuted on account of human sinfulness (as others have argued), nor even to suffer the consequences of sin in personal or social terms, but specifically to endure its penal consequences, to undergo its penalty. The expression comes most frequently in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. It is written of those who sin by breaking God’s laws that they ‘will bear their iniquity (or sin)’ (AV and RSV). That is, they ‘will be held responsible’ or ‘will suffer for their sins’ (NIV). Sometimes the matter is put beyond question by the fact that the penalty is specified: the offender is to be ‘cut off from his people’ (i.e. excommunicated) and even, for example in the case of blasphemy, put to death.15
It is in this context of sin-bearing that the possibility is envisaged of somebody else bearing the penalty of the sinner’s wrongdoing. For example, Moses told the Israelites that their children would have to wander in the desert, ‘suffering for your unfaithfulness’ (Num. 14:34); if a married man failed to nullify a foolish vow or pledge made by his wife, then (it was written) ‘he is responsible for her guilt’ (Num. 30:15, NIV) or more simply ‘he shall bear her iniquity’ (RSV); again, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC the remnant who stayed in the otherwise deserted ruins said: ‘Our fathers sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment’ (Lam. 5:7).
These are examples of involuntary vicarious sin-bearing. In each case innocent people found themselves suffering the consequences of others’ guilt. The same phraseology was used, however, when the vicarious sin-bearing was intended. Then the notion of deliberate substitution was introduced, and God himself was said to provide the substitute, as when he instructed Ezekiel to lie down, and in dramatic symbolism to ‘bear the sin of the house of Israel’ (Ezek. 4:4–5). The sin offering was also referred to in terms of sin-bearing. Moses said of it to the sons of Aaron: ‘it was given to you to take away the guilt of the community by making atonement for them before the LORD’ (Lev. 10:17). Clearer still was the ritual of the annual Day of Atonement. The high priest was to ‘take two male goats for a sin offering’ in order to atone for the sins of the Israelite community as a whole (Lev. 16:5). One goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled in the usual way, while on the living goat’s head the high priest was to lay both his hands, ‘and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head’ (v. 21). He was then to drive the goat away into the desert, and it would ‘carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place’ (v. 22). Some commentators make the mistake of driving a wedge between the two goats, the sacrificed goat and the scapegoat, overlooking the fact that the two together are described as ‘a sin offering’ in the singular (v. 5). Perhaps T. J. Crawford was right to suggest that each embodied a different aspect of the same sacrifice, ‘the one exhibiting the means, and the other the results, of the atonement’.16 In this case the public proclamation of the Day of Atonement was plain, namely that reconciliation was possible only through substitutionary sin-bearing. The author of the letter to the Hebrews has no inhibitions about seeing Jesus both as ‘a merciful and faithful high priest’ (2:17) and as the two victims, the sacrificed goat whose blood was taken into the inner sanctuary (9:7, 12) and the scapegoat which carried away the people’s sins (9:28).
Although the sin offering and the scapegoat both in their different ways had a sin-bearing role, at least the more spiritually minded Israelites must have realized that an animal cannot be a satisfactory substitute for a human being. So, in the famous ‘servant songs’ in the second part of Isaiah, the prophet began to delineate one whose mission would embrace the nations, and who, in order to fulfil it, would need to suffer, to bear sin and to die. Matthew applies to Jesus the first song about the quietness and gentleness of the servant in his ministry,17 and Peter in his early speeches is recorded four times as calling Jesus God’s ‘servant’ or ‘holy servant’.18
But it is particularly the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, describing the servant’s suffering and death, which is applied consistently to Jesus Christ. ‘No other passage from the Old Testament’, Joachim Jeremias has written, ‘was as important to the Church as Isaiah 53.’19 The New Testament writers quote eight specific verses as having been fulfilled in Jesus. Verse 1 (‘who has believed our message?’) is applied to Jesus by John (12:38). Matthew sees the statement of verse 4 (‘he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases’) as fulfilled in Jesus’ healing ministry (8:17). That we have gone astray like sheep (v. 6), but that by his wounds we have been healed (v. 5) are both echoed by Peter (1 Pet. 2:22–25), and so in the same passage are verse 9 (‘nor was any deceit in his mouth’) and verse 11 (‘he will bear their iniquities’). Then verses 7 and 8, about Jesus being led like a sheep to the slaughter and being deprived of justice and of life, were the verses the Ethiopian eunuch was reading in his chariot, which prompted Philip to share with him ‘the good news about Jesus’ (Acts 8:30–35). Thus verses 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 – eight verses out of the chapter’s twelve – are all quite specifically referred to Jesus.
Careful students of the Gospels have detected numerous references by Jesus himself, sometimes only in a single word, to Isaiah 53. For example, he said he would be ‘rejected’,20 ‘taken away’21 and ‘numbered with the transgressors’.22 He would also be ‘buried’ like a criminal without any preparatory anointing, so that (he explained) Mary of Bethany gave him an advance anointing, ‘to prepare for my burial’.23 Other allusions may well be his description of the stronger man who ‘divides up the spoils’,24 his deliberate silence before his judges,25 his intercession for the transgressors26 and his laying down his life for others.27 If these be accepted, then every verse of the chapter except verse 2 (‘he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him’) is applied to Jesus in the New Testament, some verses several times. Indeed, there is good evidence that his whole public career, from his baptism through his ministry, sufferings and death to his resurrection and ascension, is seen as a fulfilment of the pattern foretold in Isaiah 53. Oscar Cullmann has argued that at his baptism he deliberately made himself one with those whose sins he had come to bear, that his resolve to ‘fulfil all righteousness’ (Matt. 3:15) was a determination to be God’s ‘righteous servant’, who by his sin-bearing death would ‘justify many’ (Isa. 53:11), and that the Father’s voice from heaven, declaring himself ‘well pleased’ with his Son, also identified him as the servant (Isa. 42:1).28 Similarly, Vincent Taylor pointed out that already in the very first apostolic sermon in Acts 2 ‘the dominating conception is that of the Servant, humiliated in death and exalted...’.29 More recently, Professor Martin Hengel of Tübingen has reached the same conclusion, arguing that this use of Isaiah 53 must go back to the mind of Jesus himself.30
So far my purpose in relation to Isaiah 53 has been to show how foundational the chapter is to the New Testament’s understanding of Jesus. I have left to the last his two most important sayings, which focus on the sin-bearing nature of his death. The first is the ‘ransom saying’: ‘for even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). Here Jesus unites the divergent ‘Son of man’ and ‘Servant’ prophecies. The Son of Man would ‘come with the clouds of heaven’ and all peoples would ‘serve him’ (Dan. 7:13–14), whereas the Servant would not be served but serve, and complete his service by suffering, specially by laying down his life as a ransom instead of many. It was only by serving that he would be served, only by suffering that he would enter into his glory. The second text belongs to the institution of the Lord’s Supper, when Jesus declared that his blood would be ‘poured out for many’,31 an echo of Isaiah 53:12, ‘he poured out his life unto death’.32 Moreover both texts say that he would either give his life or pour out his blood ‘for many’, which again echoes Isaiah 53:12, ‘he bore the sin of many’. Some have been embarrassed by the apparently restrictive nature of this expression. But Jeremias has argued that, according to the pre-Christian Jewish interpretation of it, ‘the many’ were ‘the godless among both the Jews and the Gentiles’. The expression therefore is ‘not exclusive (“many, but not all”) but, in the Semitic manner of speech, inclusive (“the totality, consisting of many”)’, which was ‘a (Messianic) concept unheard of in contemporary rabbinical thought’.33
It seems to be definite beyond doubt, then, that Jesus applied Isaiah 53 to himself and that he understood his death in the light of it as a sin-bearing death. As God’s ‘righteous servant’ he would be able to ‘justify many’, because he was going to ‘bear the sin of many’. This is the thrust of the whole chapter, not just that he would be despised and rejected, oppressed and afflicted, led like a lamb to the slaughter and cut off from the land of the living, but in particular that he would be pierced for our transgressions, that the Lord would lay on him the iniquity of us all, that he would thus be numbered with the transgressors, and that he would himself bear their iniquities. ‘The song makes twelve distinct and explicit statements’, wrote J. S. Whale, ‘that the servant suffers the penalty of other men’s sins: not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth, fifth and sixth verses.’34
In the light of this evidence about the sin-bearing nature of Jesus’ death, we now know how to interpret the simple assertion that ‘he died for us’. The preposition ‘for’ can translate either hyper (‘on behalf of’) or anti (‘instead of’). Most of the references have hyper. For example, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8), and again ‘one died for all’ (2 Cor. 5:14). Anti comes only in the ransom verses, namely in Mark 10:45 (literally ‘to give his life as a ransom instead of many’) and in 1 Timothy 2:6 (‘who gave himself as a ransom for all men’, where ‘for’ is again hyper, but the preposition anti is in the noun, antilytron).
The two prepositions do not always adhere to their dictionary definitions, however. Even the broader word hyper (‘on behalf of’) is many times shown by its context to be used in the sense of anti (‘instead of’), as, for example, when we are said to be ‘ambassadors for Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:20), or when Paul wanted to keep Onesimus in Rome to serve him ‘on behalf of’ his master Philemon, that is, in his place (Philm. 13). The same is clear in the two most outspoken statements of the meaning of Christ’s death in Paul’s letters. One is that ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us’ (2 Cor. 5:21), and the other that Christ has ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13). Some commentators have found these assertions difficult to accept. Karl Barth called the first ‘almost unbearably severe’35 and A. W. F. Blunt described the language of the second as ‘almost shocking’.36 It will be observed that in both cases what happened to Christ on the cross (‘made sin’, ‘becoming a curse’) is said by Paul to have been intended ‘for us’, on our behalf or for our benefit. But what exactly did happen? The sinless one was ‘made sin for us’, which must mean that he bore the penalty of our sin instead of us, and he redeemed us from the law’s curse by ‘becoming a curse for us’, which must mean that the curse of the law lying upon us for our disobedience was transferred to him, so that he bore it instead of us.
Both verses go beyond these negative truths (that he bore our sin and curse to redeem us from them) to a positive counterpart. On the one hand he bore the curse in order that we might inherit the blessing promised to Abraham (Gal. 3:14), and on the other, God made the sinless Christ to be sin for us, in order that ‘in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). Both verses thus indicate that when we are united to Christ a mysterious exchange takes place: he took our curse, so that we may receive his blessing; he became sin with our sin, so that we may become righteous with his righteousness. Elsewhere Paul writes of this transfer in terms of ‘imputation’. On the one hand, God declined to ‘impute’ our sins to us, or ‘count’ them against us (2 Cor. 5:19), with the implication that he imputed them to Christ instead. On the other, God has imputed Christ’s righteousness to us.37 Many are offended by this concept, considering it both artificial and unjust on God’s part to arrange such a transfer. Yet the objection is due to a misunderstanding, which Thomas Crawford clears up for us. Imputation, he writes, ‘does not at all imply the transference of one person’s moral qualities to another’. Such a thing would be impossible, and he goes on to quote John Owen to the effect that ‘we ourselves have done nothing of what is imputed to us, nor Christ anything of what is imputed to him’. It would be absurd and unbelievable to imagine, Crawford continues, ‘that the moral turpitude of our sins was transferred to Christ, so as to make him personally sinful and ill-deserving; and that the moral excellence of his righteousness is transferred to us, so as to make us personally upright and commendable’. No, what was transferred to Christ was not moral qualities but legal consequences: he voluntarily accepted liability for our sins. That is what the expressions ‘made sin’ and ‘made a curse’ mean. Similarly, ‘the righteousness of God’ which we become when we are ‘in Christ’ is not here righteousness of character and conduct (although that grows within us by the working of the Holy Spirit), but rather a righteous standing before God.38
When we review all this Old Testament material (the shedding and sprinkling of blood, the sin offering, the Passover, the meaning of ‘sin-bearing’, the scapegoat and Isaiah 53), and consider its New Testament application to the death of Christ, we are obliged to conclude that the cross was a substitutionary sacrifice. Christ died for us. Christ died instead of us. Indeed, as Jeremias put it, this use of sacrificial imagery ‘has the intention of expressing the fact that Jesus died without sin in substitution for our sins’.39
The key question we now have to address is this: exactly who was our substitute? Who took our place, bore our sin, became our curse, endured our penalty, died our death? To be sure, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). That would be the simple, surface answer. But who was this Christ? How are we to think of him?
Was he just a man? If so, how could one human being possibly – or justly – stand in for other human beings? Was he then simply God, seeming to be a man, but not actually being the man he seemed? If so, how could he represent humankind? Besides this, how could he have died? In that case, are we to think of Christ neither as man alone, nor as God alone, but rather as the one and only God-man who because of his uniquely constituted person was uniquely qualified to mediate between God and man? Whether the concept of substitutionary atonement is rational, moral, plausible, acceptable, and above all biblical, depends on our answers to these questions. The possibility of substitution rests on the identity of the substitute. We need therefore to examine in greater depth the three explanations which I have sketched above.
The first proposal is that the substitute was the man Christ Jesus, viewed as a human being, and conceived as an individual separate from both God and us, an independent third party. Those who begin with this a priori lay themselves open to gravely distorted understandings of the atonement and so bring the truth of substitution into disrepute. They tend to present the cross in one or other of two ways, according to whether the initiative was Christ’s or God’s. In the one case Christ is pictured as intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation. In the other, the intervention is ascribed to God, who proceeds to punish the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment. In both cases God and Christ are sundered from one another: either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. What is characteristic of both presentations is that they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed upon by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.
Such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping-boy who is punished instead of the real culprit, or as the lightning conductor to which the lethal electric charge is deflected. Even some of our time-honoured hymns express this view:
Jehovah lifted up his rod;
O Christ, it fell on thee!
Thou wast sore stricken of thy God;
There’s not one stroke for me.
There is, of course, some justification in Scripture for both kinds of formulation, or they would never have been developed by Christians whose desire and claim are to be biblical.
Thus, Jesus Christ is said to be the ‘propitiation’ for our sins and our ‘advocate’ with the Father (1 John 2:2, AV), which at first sight suggests that he died to placate God’s anger and is now pleading with him in order to persuade him to forgive us. But other parts of Scripture forbid us to interpret the language of propitiation and advocacy in that way, as we shall see in the next chapter. The whole notion of a compassionate Christ inducing a reluctant God to take action on our behalf founders on the fact of God’s love. There was no Umstimmung in God, no change of mind or heart secured by Christ. On the contrary, the saving initiative originated in him. It was ‘because of the tender mercy of our God’ (Luke 1:78) that Christ came, ‘because of his great love for us’,40 because of ‘the grace of God that brings salvation’ (Titus 2:11).
As for the other formulation (that God punished Jesus for our sins), it is true that the sins of Israel were transferred to the scapegoat, that ‘the Lord laid on him’, his suffering servant, all our iniquity (Isa. 53:6), that ‘it was the Lord’s will to crush him’ (Isa. 53:10), and that Jesus applied to himself Zechariah’s prophecy that God would ‘strike the shepherd’.41 It is also true that in the New Testament God is said to have ‘sent’ his Son to atone for our sins (1 John 4:9–10), ‘delivered him up’ for us,42 ‘presented him as a sacrifice of atonement’ (Rom. 3:25), ‘condemned sin’ in his flesh (Rom. 8:3), and ‘made him...to be sin for us’ (2 Cor. 5:21). These are striking statements. But we have no liberty to interpret them in such a way as to imply either that God compelled Jesus to do what he was unwilling to do himself, or that Jesus was an unwilling victim of God’s harsh justice. Jesus Christ did indeed bear the penalty of our sins, but God was active in and through Christ doing it, and Christ was freely playing his part (e.g. Heb. 10:5–10).
We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of each other or were even in conflict with each other. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment or God the object of Christ’s persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taking the initiative together to save sinners. Whatever happened on the cross in terms of ‘God-forsakenness’ was voluntarily accepted by both in the same holy love which made atonement necessary. It was ‘God in our nature forsaken of God’.43 If the Father ‘gave the Son’, the Son ‘gave himself’. If the Gethsemane ‘cup’ symbolized the wrath of God, it was nevertheless ‘given’ by the Father (John 18:11) and voluntarily ‘taken’ by the Son. If the Father ‘sent’ the Son, the Son ‘came’ himself. The Father did not lay on the Son an ordeal he was reluctant to bear, nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow. There is no suspicion anywhere in the New Testament of discord between the Father and the Son, ‘whether by the Son wresting forgiveness from an unwilling Father or by the Father demanding a sacrifice from an unwilling Son’.44 There was no unwillingness in either. On the contrary, their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrifice of love.
If then our substitute was not Christ alone as a third party independent of God, is the truth that God alone took our place, bore our sin and died our death? If we may not so exalt the initiative of Christ as virtually to eliminate the contribution of the Father, may we reverse their roles, ascribing the whole initiative and achievement to the Father, thus virtually eliminating Christ? For if God has himself done everything necessary for our salvation, does that not make Christ redundant?
This proposed solution to the problem is at first sight attractive theologically, for it avoids all the distortions which arise when Jesus is conceived as a third party. As we saw in the last chapter, it is God who must satisfy himself as holy love. He was unwilling to act in love at the expense of his holiness or in holiness at the expense of his love. So we may say that he satisfied his holy love by himself dying the death and so bearing the judgment which sinners deserved. He both exacted and accepted the penalty of human sin. And he did it ‘so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’ (Rom. 3:26). There is no question now either of the Father inflicting punishment on the Son or of the Son intervening on our behalf with the Father, for it is the Father himself who takes the initiative in his love, bears the penalty of sin himself, and so dies. Thus the priority is neither ‘man’s demand on God’ nor ‘God’s demand on men’, but supremely ‘God’s demand on God, God’s meeting his own demand’.45
Many theologians ancient and modern, representing different traditions, have seen the necessity of emphasizing that God himself was there on the cross, and have therefore expressed their understanding of the atonement in these terms. In the Old English poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’, which may date from as early as the seventh or eighth century, the author tells how in ‘the most treasured of dreams’ he saw ‘the strangest of trees’:
Lifted aloft in the air, with light all around it,
Of all beams the brightest. It stood as a beacon,
Drenched in gold; gleaming gems were set
Fair around its foot....
Then in the dream the cross spoke, telling its own story. Having been cut from the forest, it was carried up the hill. Then it saw what its destiny was to be:
The King of all mankind coming in great haste,
With courage keen, eager to climb me.
Then the young hero – it was God Almighty –
Strong and stedfast, stripped himself for battle;
He climbed up on the high gallows, constant in his purpose,
Mounted it in sight of many, mankind to ransom.
At the end of the poem, having seen God dying for him, the dreamer prays to ‘that blessed beam’ and, putting his trust in it, declares: ‘My refuge is the Rood.’46
‘God dying for man’, wrote P. T. Forsyth. ‘I am not afraid of that phrase; I cannot do without it. God dying for men; and for such men – hostile, malignantly hostile men.’47 Again, because ‘the holiness of God...is meaningless without judgment’, the one thing God could not do in the face of human rebellion was nothing. ‘He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And he chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took his own judgment.’48
It was ‘God himself’ giving himself for us. Karl Barth did not shrink from using those words. ‘God’s own heart suffered on the cross’, he added. ‘Noone else but God’s own Son, and hence the eternal God himself....’49 Similarly, Bishop Stephen Neill wrote: ‘If the crucifixion of Jesus...is in some way, as Christians have believed, the dying of God himself, then...we can understand what God is like.’50 And hymns of popular devotion have echoed it, like this phrase from Charles Wesley’s ‘And can it be’:
Amazing love! How can it be
That thou, my God, should’st die for me?
The reason why both scholarly and simple Christians have felt able to use this kind of language is of course that Scripture permits it. When the apostles wrote of the cross, they often indicated by a tell-tale expression who it was who died there and gave it its efficacy. Thus, he who humbled himself even to death on a cross was none other than he who ‘being in very nature God’ made himself nothing in order to become human and to die (Phil. 2:6–8). It was ‘the Lord of glory’ whom the rulers of this age crucified (1 Cor. 2:8). And the blood by which the robes of the redeemed have been washed clean is that of the Lamb who shares the centre of God’s throne (Rev. 5:6, 9; 7:9). Moreover, the logic of the letter to the Hebrews requires us to say that it is God who died. It plays on the similarity between a ‘covenant’ and a ‘will’. The terms of a will come into force only after the death of the testator. So he who makes promises in his will has to die before the legacies can be received. Since, then, the promises in question are God’s promises, the death must be God’s death (Heb. 9:15–17).
There is one other verse which we must not overlook. It occurs in Paul’s farewell speech at Miletus to the elders of the Ephesian church. The flock over which the Holy Spirit has made them overseers and shepherds, he says, is nothing less than ‘the church of God, which he bought with his own blood’ (Acts 20:28). It is true that the text is uncertain (some manuscripts read ‘the church of the Lord’, referring to Christ, instead of ‘the church of God’), and so is the translation (it might mean ‘the church of God which he bought with the blood of his own’, referring again to Christ). Nevertheless, the context seems to demand the readings ‘the church of God’ and ‘his own blood’. For Paul’s purpose is to remind the elders of the precious value of the church they have been called to serve. It is God’s church. God’s Spirit has appointed them elders over it, and the price paid for its purchase is actually ‘God’s blood’ – an almost shocking phrase which was used by some of the church Fathers such as Ignatius and Tertullian,51 and which medieval churchmen continued to use, albeit often as an oath.
In spite of this biblical justification, however, no verse specifically declares that ‘God himself’ died on the cross. Scripture bears witness to the deity of the person who gave himself for us, but it stops short of the unequivocal affirmation that ‘God died’. The reasons for this are not far to seek. First, immortality belongs to God’s essential being (‘God...alone is immortal’, 1 Tim. 6:16), and therefore he cannot die. So he became man, in order to be able to do so: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil’ (Heb. 2:14). Similarly, he became man in order to be the ‘one mediator between God and men’ (1 Tim. 2:5).
The second reason why it is misleading to say that ‘God died’ is that ‘God’ in the New Testament frequently means ‘the Father’ (e.g. ‘God sent his Son’), and the person who died on the cross was not the Father but the Son. At the beginning of the third century AD some denied this. They had difficulties with the doctrine of the Trinity and could not see how to believe in the Father, the Son and the Spirit without thereby becoming tritheists. So they began by emphasizing the unity of God, and then spoke of Father, Son and Spirit not as three eternally distinct ‘persons’ within the Godhead, but rather as three temporal ‘modes’ in which God successively revealed himself. Hence their name ‘Modalists’. The Father became the Son, they taught, and then the Son became the Spirit. They were also referred to as ‘Sabellians’ because Sabellius was one of their leaders. Another was Praxeas, whose teaching is known to us through Tertullian’s powerful refutation of it. Praxeas taught (or, according to Tertullian, the devil taught through him) ‘that the Father himself came down into the virgin, was himself born of her, himself suffered, indeed was himself Jesus Christ’. Because Praxeas also opposed the Montanists, who have been loosely described as the charismatics of that era, Tertullian continued, ‘Praxeas did a twofold service for the devil at Rome; he drove away prophecy and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father’.52 The droll notion that the Father was crucified led the critics of Praxeas’ followers to give them the nickname ‘Patripassians’ (those who taught that the Father suffered). Over against this Tertullian urged: ‘Let us be content with saying that Christ died, the Son of the Father; and let this suffice, because the Scriptures have told us so much.’53
A somewhat similar deviation arose in the sixth century in Constantinople, which came to be known as ‘theopaschitism’ (the belief that God suffered). Its adherents rejected the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) that Jesus, though one person, had two natures, being both truly God and truly man. Instead, they were ‘Monophysites’, teaching that Christ had only one composite nature (physis, ‘nature’), which was essentially divine. Thus underplaying the humanity of Jesus, they naturally emphasized that God suffered in and through him.
Although these controversies seem very remote to us in the twenty-first century, we need to take warning from them. An over-emphasis on the sufferings of God on the cross may mislead us either into confusing the persons of the Trinity and denying the eternal distinctness of the Son, like the Modalists or Patripassians, or into confusing the natures of Christ, and denying that he was one person in two natures, like the Monophysites or Theopaschites. It is true that, since Jesus was both God and man, the Council of Ephesus (AD 431) declared it correct to refer to the virgin Mary as theotokos (‘mother of God’, literally ‘God-bearer’). Similarly, and for the same reason, it seems permissible to refer to God suffering on the cross. For if God could be born, why could he not also die? The value of these expressions is that they eliminate the possibility of thinking of Jesus as an independent third party. Nevertheless, the words theotokos and Theopaschite are misleading, even if technically legitimate, because they emphasize the deity of the person who was born and died, without making any comparable reference to his humanity. It would be wiser instead to say what the New Testament authors said, faithfully echoed by the Apostles’ Creed, namely that he who ‘was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried’ was not ‘God’, still less the Father, but ‘Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord’. The apostles further clarify this by stressing the Son’s willing obedience to the Father.54
Our substitute, then, who took our place and died our death on the cross, was neither Christ alone (since that would make him a third party thrust in between God and us), nor God alone (since that would undermine the historical incarnation), but God in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man, and who on that account was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them. If we speak only of Christ suffering and dying, we overlook the initiative of the Father. If we speak only of God suffering and dying, we overlook the mediation of the Son. The New Testament authors never attribute the atonement either to Christ in such a way as to disassociate him from the Father, or to God in such a way as to dispense with Christ, but rather to God and Christ, or to God acting in and through Christ with his whole-hearted concurrence.
The New Testament evidence for this is plain. In surveying it, it seems logical to begin with the announcement of the Messiah’s birth. The names he was given were Jesus (‘divine Saviour’ or ‘God saves’) and Emmanuel (‘God with us’). For in and through his birth God himself had come to the rescue of his people, to save them from their sins (Matt. 1:21–23). Similarly, according to Luke, the Saviour who had been born was not just, in the familiar expression, the Christ of the Lord, the Lord’s anointed, but actually ‘Christ the Lord’, himself both Messiah and Lord (Luke 2:11).
When Jesus’ public ministry began, his personal self-consciousness confirmed that God was at work in and through him. For though he did speak of ‘pleasing’ the Father (John 8:29) and ‘obeying’ him (John 15:10), of doing his will and finishing his work,55 yet this surrender was entirely voluntary, so that his will and the Father’s were always in perfect harmony.56 More than that, according to John he spoke of a mutual ‘indwelling’, he in the Father and the Father in him, even of a ‘union’ between them.57
This conviction that Father and Son cannot be separated, especially when we are thinking about the atonement, since the Father was taking action through the Son, comes to its fullest expression in some of Paul’s great statements about reconciliation. For example, ‘all this is from God’ (referring to the work of the new creation, 2 Cor. 5:17–18), who ‘reconciled us to himself through Christ’ and ‘was reconciling the world to himself in Christ’ (vv. 18–19). It does not seem to matter much where, in translating the Greek, we place the expressions ‘through Christ’ and ‘in Christ’. What matters is that God and Christ were together active in the work of reconciliation, indeed that it was in and through Christ that God was effecting the reconciliation.
Two other important Pauline verses forge an indissoluble link between Christ’s person and work, and so indicate that he was able to do what he did only because he was who he was. Both speak of God’s ‘fullness’ dwelling in him and working through him (Col. 1:19–20 and 2:9). This work is variously portrayed, but it is all attributed to the fullness of God residing in Christ – reconciling all things to himself, making peace by the blood of the cross, resurrecting us with Christ, forgiving all our sins, cancelling the written code that was against us, taking it away, nailing it to the cross, and disarming the principalities and powers, triumphing over them either ‘by it’ (the cross) or ‘in him’ (Christ).
Anselm was right that only man should make reparation for his sins, since it is he who has defaulted. And he was equally right that only God could make the necessary reparation, since it is he who has demanded it. Jesus Christ is therefore the only Saviour, since he is the only person in whom the ‘should’ and the ‘could’ are united, being himself both God and man. The weakness of Anselm’s formulation, due probably to his cultural background in medieval feudalism, is that he overemphasized the humanity of Christ, since man the sinner must pay the debt he has incurred and repair the damage he has done. But the New Testament emphasis is more on the initiative of God, who ‘sent’ or ‘gave’ or ‘delivered up’ his Son for us,58 and who therefore suffered in his Son’s sufferings.
George Buttrick wrote of a picture which hangs in an Italian church, although he did not identify it. At first glance it is like any other painting of the crucifixion. As you look more closely, however, you perceive the difference, because ‘there’s a vast and shadowy Figure behind the figure of Jesus. The nail that pierces the hand of Jesus goes through to the hand of God. The spear thrust into the side of Jesus goes through into God’s’.59
We began by showing that God must ‘satisfy himself’, responding to the realities of human rebellion in a way that is perfectly consonant with his character. This internal necessity is our fixed starting-point. In consequence, it would be impossible for us sinners to remain eternally the sole objects of his holy love, since he cannot both punish and pardon us at the same time. Hence the second necessity, namely substitution. The only way for God’s holy love to be satisfied is for his holiness to be directed in judgment upon his appointed substitute, in order that his love may be directed towards us in forgiveness. The substitute bears the penalty, that we sinners may receive the pardon. Who, then, is the substitute? Certainly not Christ, if he is seen as a third party. Any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role – the guilty party, the punitive judge and the innocent victim – is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence. It would not only be unjust in itself but would also reflect a defective Christology. For Christ is not an independent third person, but the eternal Son of the Father, who is one with the Father in his essential being.
What we see, then, in the drama of the cross is not three actors but two, ourselves on the one hand and God on the other. Not God as he is in himself (the Father), but God nevertheless, God-made-man-in-Christ (the Son). Hence the importance of those New Testament passages which speak of the death of Christ as the death of God’s Son: for example, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son’, ‘he...did not spare his own Son’, and ‘we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son’.60 For in giving his Son he was giving himself. This being so, it is the Judge himself who in holy love assumed the role of the innocent victim, for in and through the person of his Son he himself bore the penalty which he himself inflicted. As Dale put it, ‘the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering’.61 There is neither harsh injustice nor unprincipled love nor Christological heresy in that; there is only unfathomable mercy. For in order to save us in such a way as to satisfy himself, God through Christ substituted himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice. The cross was an act simultaneously of punishment and amnesty, severity and grace, justice and mercy.
Seen thus, the objections to a substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here, since the substitute for the law-breakers is none other than the divine Lawmaker himself. There is no mechanical transaction either, since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions. And what is achieved through the cross is no merely external change of legal status, since those who see God’s love there, and are united to Christ by his Spirit, become radically transformed in outlook and character.
We strongly reject, therefore, every explanation of the death of Christ which does not have at its centre the principle of ‘satisfaction through substitution’, indeed divine self-satisfaction through divine self-substitution. The cross was not a commercial bargain with the devil, let alone one which tricked and trapped him; nor an exact equivalent, a quid pro quo to satisfy a code of honour or technical point of law; nor a compulsory submission by God to some moral authority above him from which he could not otherwise escape; nor a punishment of a meek Christ by a harsh and punitive Father; nor a procurement of salvation by a loving Christ from a mean and reluctant Father; nor an action of the Father which bypassed Christ as Mediator. Instead, the righteous, loving Father humbled himself to become in and through his only Son flesh, sin and a curse for us, in order to redeem us without compromising his own character. The theological words ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’ need to be carefully defined and safeguarded, but they cannot in any circumstances be given up. The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us.
The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.
If the essence of the atonement is substitution, at least two important inferences follow, the first theological and the second personal. The theological inference is that it is impossible to hold the historic doctrine of the cross without holding the historic doctrine of Jesus Christ as the one and only God-man and Mediator. As we have seen, neither Christ alone as man nor the Father alone as God could be our substitute. Only God in Christ, God the Father’s own and only Son made man, could take our place. At the root of every caricature of the cross there lies a distorted Christology. The person and work of Christ belong together. If he was not who the apostles say he was, then he could not have done what they say he did. The incarnation is indispensable to the atonement. In particular, it is essential to affirm that the love, the holiness and the will of the Father are identical with the love, the holiness and the will of the Son. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.
Perhaps no twentieth-century theologian has seen this more clearly, or expressed it more vigorously, than Karl Barth.62 Christology, he insisted, is the key to the doctrine of reconciliation. And Christology means confessing Jesus Christ the Mediator, he repeated several times, as ‘very God, very man, and very God-man’. There are thus ‘three Christological aspects’ or ‘three perspectives’ for understanding the atonement. The first is that ‘in Jesus Christ we have to do with very God. The reconciliation of man with God takes place as God himself actively intervenes’ (p.128). The second is that ‘in Jesus Christ we have to do with a true man....He is altogether man, just as he is altogether God... That is how he is the reconciler between God and man’ (p.130). The third is that, although very God and very man, ‘Jesus Christ himself is one. He is the God-man’ (p.135). Only when this biblical account of Jesus Christ is affirmed can the uniqueness of his atoning sacrifice be understood. The initiative lay with ‘the eternal God himself, who has given himself in his Son to be man, and as man to take upon himself this human passion... It is the Judge who in this passion takes the place of those who ought to be judged, who in this passion allows himself to be judged in their place’ (p.246). ‘The passion of Jesus Christ is the judgment of God, in which the Judge himself was the judged’ (p.254).
The second inference is personal. The doctrine of substitution affirms not only a fact (God in Christ substituted himself for us) but its necessity (there was no other way by which God’s holy love could be satisfied and rebellious human beings could be saved). Therefore, as we stand before the cross, we begin to gain a clear view both of God and of ourselves, especially in relation to each other. Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place. Hell is the only alternative. This is the ‘scandal’, the stumbling-block, of the cross. For our proud hearts rebel against it. We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the cross. Surely, we say, there must be something we can do, or at least contribute, in order to make amends? If not, we often give the impression that we would rather suffer our own punishment than the humiliation of seeing God through Christ bear it in our place.
George Bernard Shaw, who had considerable insight into the subtleties of human pride, dramatized this in his comedy about the Salvation Army entitled Major Barbara (1905). Bill Walker, ‘a rough customer of about 25’, arrives at the Army’s West Ham shelter one cold January morning drunk and infuriated because his girl-friend Mog has not only been converted but ‘got another bloke’. Bill’s rival is Todger Fairmile, a champion music hall wrestler in Canning Town, who has also been converted. Accusing Jenny Hill, a young Salvation Army lass, of having set his girlfriend against him, Bill first seizes her by the hair until she screams and then strikes her with his fist in the face, cutting her lip. The bystanders mock him for his cowardice. He attacks a girl, they say, but he would not have the courage to hit Todger Fairmile. Gradually Bill’s conscience and pride nag him, until he can no longer bear the insult. He determines to do something to redeem his reputation and expiate his guilt. He says in broad Cockney:
‘Aw’m gowin to Kennintahn, to spit in Todger Fairmawl’s eye. Aw beshed Jenny Ill’s fice; an nar Aw’ll git me aown fice beshed...Ee’ll itt me ardern Aw itt er. Thatll mike us square....’
But Todger refuses to co-operate, so Bill returns shamefaced:
‘Aw did wot Aw said Aw’d do. Aw spit in is eye. E looks ap at the skoy and sez, “Ow that Aw should be fahnd worthy to be spit upon for the gospel’s sike!”... an Mog sez “Glaory Allelloolier!”.’
Jenny Hill says she is sorry and that he did not really hurt her, which makes him angrier still:
‘Aw downt want to be forgive be you, or be ennybody. Wot Aw did Aw’ll py for. Aw trawd to gat me aown jawr browk to settisfaw you – ’ Because that way has failed, however, he tries another ruse. He offers to pay a fine which one of his mates has just incurred, and produces a sovereign.
‘Eahs the manney. Tike it; and lets ev no more o your forgivin an pryin an your Mijor jawrin me. Let wot Aw dan be dan an pide for; and let there be a end of it....This bloomin forgivin an neggin an jawrin...mikes a menn thet sore that iz lawf’s a burdn to im. Aw wownt ev it, Aw tell yer....Awve offered to py. Aw can do no more. Tike it or leave it. There it is’,—and he throws the sovereign down.
The proud human heart is there revealed. We insist on paying for what we have done. We cannot stand the humiliation of acknowledging our bankruptcy and allowing somebody else to pay for us. The notion that this somebody else should be God himself is just too much to take. We would rather perish than repent, rather lose ourselves than humble ourselves.
Moreover, only the gospel demands such an abject self-humbling on our part, for it alone teaches divine substitution as the only way of salvation. Other religions teach different forms of self-salvation. Hinduism, for example, makes a virtue of refusing to admit to sinfulness. In a lecture before the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda said: ‘The Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the children of God; the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth, sinners? It is a sin to call a man a sinner. It is a standing libel on human nature.’ Besides, if it has to be conceded that human beings do sin, then Hinduism insists that they can save themselves.63
As Brunner put it, ‘all other forms of religion – not to mention philosophy – deal with the problem of guilt apart from the intervention of God, and therefore they come to a “cheap” conclusion. In them man is spared the final humiliation of knowing that the Mediator must bear the punishment instead of him. To this yoke he need not submit. He is not stripped absolutely naked.’64
But we cannot escape the embarrassment of standing stark naked before God. It is no use our trying to cover up like Adam and Eve in the garden. Our attempts at self-justification are as ineffectual as their fig-leaves. We have to acknowledge our nakedness, see the divine substitute wearing our filthy rags instead of us, and allow him to clothe us with his own righteousness.65 Nobody has ever put it better than Augustus Toplady in his immortal hymn ‘Rock of Ages’:
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to your Cross I cling;
Naked, come to you for dress;
Helpless, look to you for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Saviour, or I die.