I count it an enormous privilege to have been invited by Inter-Varsity Press to write a book on that greatest and most glorious of all subjects, the cross of Christ. I have emerged from the several years of work involved spiritually enriched, with my convictions clarified and strengthened, and with a firm resolve to spend the restof my days on earth (as I know the whole redeemed company will spend eternity in heaven) in the liberating service of Christ crucified.
It is appropriate that a book on the cross should form part of theGolden Jubilee celebrations of Inter-Varsity Press, to which (under its dedicated leaders Ronald Inchley and Frank Entwistle)the wholeChristian reading public is greatly indebted. For the crossis at thecentre of the evangelical faith. Indeed, as I argue in this book, it liesat the centre of the historic, biblical faith,and thefact that this is not always everywhere acknowledgedis in itselfa sufficient justification for preserving a distinctiveevangelicaltestimony. Evangelical Christians believe that in and through Christ crucifiedGod substituted himself for us andbore our sins, dying in our place the deathwe deserved to die, in orderthatwemight be restored to his favourand adopted intohisfamilyDr J. I. Packer hasrightlywritten that this belief‘isadistinguishingmarkof the world-wide evangelicalfraternity’(eventhough it ‘often gets misunderstood and caricatured by its critics’); it ‘takes us to the veryheart of the Christian gospel’.1
The centrality of the cross has certainly been a vital factor in the history of what is now the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, together with the world body to which it is affiliated, namely the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Two events, which took place earlier in this century, were particularly important.
The first was the disaffiliation in 1910 of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (founded in 1877) from the Student Christian Movement (founded in 1895). CICCU members were conscious of standing in the tradition of Bilney, Tyndale, Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, the great names of the Cambridge Reformation. They also looked back with pride and affection to Charles Simeon, who for fifty-four years (1782–1836) as Vicar of Holy Trinity Church had faithfully expounded the Scriptures and, as his memorial plaque testifies, ‘whether as the ground of his own hopes or as the subject of all his ministrations, determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified’. It is not surprising, therefore, that they were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the liberal tendencies of the SCM, and specially with its weak doctrines of the Bible, the cross and even the deity of Jesus. So when Tissington Tatlow, General Secretary of the SCM, met CICCU members in March 1910, the vote to disaffiliate the Union was taken. The following year Howard Mowll (later to be Archbishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia) became President of CICCU and helped to establish it on firm evangelical foundations from which it has never been moved.2
After the First World War ended in 1918, many ex-servicemen went up to Cambridge as students. CICCU by now was much smaller than the SCM. Yet the SCM leaders (notably Charles Raven, the Dean of Emmanuel) made overtures to the CICCU, hoping that they would re-join and supply the missing devotional warmth and evangelistic thrust. To resolve the issue, Daniel Dick and Norman Grubb (President and Secretary of CICCU) met the SCM committee in the rooms in Trinity Great Court of their secretary, Rollo Pelly. Here is Norman Grubb’s own account of the crucial issue:
After an hour’s talk, I asked Rollo point-blank, ‘Does the SCM put the atoning blood of Jesus Christ central?’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘Well, we acknowledge it, but not necessarily central.’ Dan Dick and I then said that this settled the matter for us in the CICCU. We could never join something that did not maintain the atoning blood of Jesus Christ as its centre; and we parted company.3
This decision not only confirmed the pre-war vote to disaffiliate, but ‘was also the real foundation of the I.V.F., for it was only a few months later that the realization dawned on us that if a C.I.C.C.U. was a necessity in Cambridge, a union of the same kind was also a necessity in every University of the world’.4 The first Inter-Varsity Conference was held in London in December 1919.
During this period Norman Grubb quoted 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 as a key text in their thinking: ‘For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ (rsv). It would be hard to square with this the SCM’s 1919 Aim and Basis, which included the following statement about the cross: ‘it is only as we see on Calvary the price of suffering paid day by day by God himself for all human sin, that we can enter into the experience of true penitence and forgiveness, which sets us free to embark upon a wholly new way of life... This is the meaning of the Atonement.’5 But we have respectfully to respond that the meaning of the atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross he took our place and bore our sin.
This distinction between an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ understanding of the atonement needs to be made clear in every generation. According to Dr Douglas Johnson, the first General Secretary of the IVF, this discovery was the turning-point in the ministry of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who occupied an unrivalled position of evangelical leadership in the decades following the Second World War. He confided in several friends that ‘a fundamental change took place in his outlook and preaching in the year 1929’. He had, of course, emphasized from the beginning of his ministry the indispensable necessity of the new birth. But, after preaching one night in Bridgend, South Wales, the minister challenged him that ‘the cross and the work of Christ’ appeared to have little place in his preaching. He went ‘at once to his favourite secondhand bookshop and asked the proprietor for the two standard books on the Atonement. The bookseller...produced R. W. Dale’s The Atonement (1875) and James Denney’s The Death of Christ (1903). On his return home he gave himself to study, declining both lunch and tea, and causing his wife such anxiety that she telephoned her brother to see whether a doctor should be called. But when he later emerged, he claimed to have found ‘the real heart of the gospel and the key to the inner meaning of the Christian faith’. So the content of his preaching changed, and with this its impact. As he himself put it, the basic question was not Anselm’s ‘why did God become man?’ but ‘why did Christ die?’.6
Because of the vital importance of the atonement, and of an understanding of it which reclaims from misrepresentation the great biblical concepts of ‘substitution’, ‘satisfaction’ and ‘propitiation’, two things have greatly surprised me. The first is how unpopular the doctrine remains. Some theologians evince a strange reluctance to subscribe to it, even when its biblical basis becomes clear to them. I think, for example, of that noted Methodist New Testament scholar, Vincent Taylor. His careful and comprehensive scholarship is exemplified in histhree books on the cross – Jesus and His Sacrifice (1937), The Atonement in New Testament Teaching (1940) and Forgiveness and Reconciliation (1946). He employs many adjectives to describe thedeathof Christ, such as ‘vicarious’, ‘redemptive’, ‘reconciling’, ‘expiatory’, ‘sacrificial’ and especially ‘representative’. But he cannot bring himself to call it ‘substitutionary’. After a close examination of primitive Christian preaching and belief, of Paul, Hebrews and John, he writes of the work of Christ: ‘In none of the passages we have examined is it described as that of a substitute...Nowhere have we found any support for such views.’7 No, Christ’s work was ‘a ministry accomplished on our behalf, but not in our stead’ (p.270). Yet even as Vincent Taylor made these astonishing statements, he was clearly uneasy in making them. Their vehemence leaves us unprepared for the concessions which he later feels obliged to make. ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of New Testament teaching concerning the representative work of Christ’, he writes, ‘is the fact that it comes so near, without actually crossing, the bounds of substitutionary doctrine. Paulinism, in particular, is within a hair’s breadth of substitution’ (p.288). He even confesses of New Testament theologians that ‘too often we are content to deny substitution without replacing it’ (p.289), and that it is a notion ‘we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess’ (p.301). What, however, I shall try to show in this book, is that the biblical doctrine of atonement is substitutionary from beginning to end. What Vincent Taylor shrank from was not the doctrine itself, but the crudities of thought and expression of which the advocates of substitution have not infrequently been guilty.
My second surprise, in view of the centrality of the cross of Christ, is that no book on this topic has been written by an evangelical author for thoughtful readers (until two or three years ago) for nearly half a century. True, there have been several small paperbacks, and there have been some scholarly works. I would like to pay special tribute to the outstanding labours in this field of Dr Leon Morris of Melbourne, Australia. His Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (1955) has put all of us in his debt, and I am glad that he has brought its contents within reach of lay people in The Atonement (1983). He has made himself master of the extensive literature of the ages on this theme, and his The Cross in the New Testament (1965) remains probably the most comprehensive survey available. From it I quote with warm endorsement his statement that ‘the cross dominates the New Testament’ (p.365).
Until the recent publication, however, of Ronald Wallace’s The Atoning Death of Christ (1981) and Michael Green’s The Empty Cross of Jesus (1984), I do not know of an evangelical book for the readership I have in mind since H. E. Guillebaud’s Why the Cross? (1937), which was one of the very first books published by IVF. It was a courageous work, meeting the critics of a substitutionary atonement head on, and asking the three questions: (1) ‘is it Christian?’ (i.e. compatible with the teaching of Jesus and his apostles); (2) ‘is it immoral?’ (i.e. compatible or incompatible with justice); and (3) ‘is it incredible?’(i.e. compatible or incompatible with such problems as time and the transfer of guilt).
My concern is to range more widely, for this is not a book on the atonement only, but on the cross. After the three introductory chapters which form Part One, I come in Part Two to what I have called ‘the heart of the cross’, in which I argue for a truly biblical understanding of the notions of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’. In Part Three, I move on to the three great achievements of the cross, namely saving sinners, revealing God and conquering evil. But Part Four grapples with areas which are often omitted from books on the cross, namely what it means for the Christian community to ‘live under the cross’. I try to show that the cross transforms everything. It gives us a new, worshipping relationship to God, a new and balanced understanding of ourselves, a new incentive to give ourselves in mission, a new love for our enemies, and a new courage to face the perplexities of suffering.
In developing my theme, I have had in mind the triangle of Scripture, tradition and the modern world. My first anxiety has been to be true to the Word of God, allowing it to say what it has to say and not asking it to say what I might want it to say. There is no alternative to careful exegesis of the text. Secondly, I have endeavoured to share some of the fruits of my reading. In seeking to understand the cross, one cannot ignore the great works of the past. To be disrespectful of tradition and of historical theology is to be disrespectful of the Holy Spirit who has been actively enlightening the church in every century. Then, thirdly, I have tried to understand Scripture, not only in its own light and in the light of tradition, but also in relation to the contemporary world. I have asked what the cross of Christ says to us at the end of the twentieth century.
In daring to write (and read) a book about the cross, there is of course a great danger of presumption. This is partly because what actually happened when ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ’ is a mystery whose depths we shall spend eternity plumbing; and partly because it would be most unseemly to feign a cool detachment as we contemplate Christ’s cross. For willy-nilly we are involved. Our sins put him there. So, far from offering us flattery, the cross undermines our self-righteousness. We can stand before it only with a bowed head and a broken spirit. And there we remain until the Lord Jesus speaks to our hearts his word of pardon and acceptance, and we, gripped by his love and brimful of thanksgiving, go out into the world to live our lives in his service.
I am grateful to Roger Beckwith and David Turner for reading portions of the manuscript and for their helpful comments. I thank my four most recent study assistants – Mark Labberton, Steve Ingraham, Bob Wismer and Steve Andrews. Steve Andrews has been characteristically meticulous in reading the MS, compiling the bibliography and indices, checking references and correcting the proofs.
But I reserve until last my heartfelt thanks to Frances Whitehead who in 1986 completes thirty years as my secretary. This book is the umpteenth she has typed. I cannot speak too highly of her efficiency, helpfulness, loyalty, and undiminished enthusiasm for the work of the Lord. With much gratitude I dedicate this book to her.
Christmas 1985 John Stott