Total Atonement: Trinitarian Participation in the Reconciliation of Humanity and Creation 1978702132, 9781978702134

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Praise for Total Atonement: Trinitarian Participation in the Reconciliation of Humanity and Creation

“Swimming against the current of much contemporary theology, Hastings challenges many common reductionisms. Instead, he offers a robust account of atonement, one that refuses to settle for unwarranted ‘either-or’s’ and instead insists upon the fullness of the gospel. The result is a Trinitarian doctrine according to which the atonement is both filial and juridical, functional and ontological. This is a wide-ranging and penetrating study that is both well-informed and pastorally sensitive.” —Thomas H. McCall, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School “As I read this monumental work by my dear friend and brother Hastings, the prayer of the apostle Paul keeps coming to mind—‘that you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.’ That is what this book helps me do, or begin to do! Hastings opens up for us the totality of redemption, helping us bask in the kaleidoscopic wonder of the finished work of the cross. Hastings helps us enter into ‘total redemption’ by showing us how the cross addresses the totality of the human condition and need, by showing us how the one who dies on the cross embraces and becomes the totality of human sin, and by showing us how the totality of the Living God ‘participates’ (a word he loves) in the mystery of the cross. And Hastings does this while engaging in a near total conversation with all who have tried to declare the finished-ness of the finished work of Jesus. I will be soaking in this volume for years to come!” —Darrell Johnson, Regent College

Total Atonement

Total Atonement Trinitarian Participation in the Reconciliation of Humanity and Creation W. Ross Hastings

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number:2019949947 ISBN: 978-1-9787-0213-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-9787-0214-1 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to our grandchildren, Keiden, Mario, Makayla, Jadyn, Rhys, Carlos and Lucia, and Ada Sharon

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Part I: The Christological Foundation of Total Atonement 1 Redemption and Creation 2 The Work of Atonement in the Totality of the Son’s Person 3 The Being and Act of the Persons of the Trinity in Atonement Part II: The Participatory Framework 4 Nomenclature in Atonement Theology 5 The Son’s Participation in Humanity and Human Participation in the Son through the Spirit Part III: The Dialectical Fullness of the Atonement 6 The Wealth of Biblical Metaphors 7 The Historico-Theological Models: Moral Influence 8 Historico-Theological Models: Vicarious Humanity 9 Historico-Theological Models: Ransom and Satisfaction as Recapitulation or Theosis 10 Historico-Theological Models: Christus Victor 11 Historico-Theological Models: The Origins of the Penal Substitution Model 12 Historico-Theological Models: Proponents of the Penal Substitution Model ix

13 23 47

73 87

107 129 143 177 193 209 229

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13 Historico-Theological Models: Prominence of the Penal Substitution Model 14 Historico-Theological Models: Participation and the Penal Substitution Model 15 Total Atonement: Applying the Atonement as Sufficient for All

259 267 275

Bibliography

299

Index

303

About the Author

307

Acknowledgments

There are people I need to thank liberally, without whom this book could not have been written. I am grateful for communities of the people of God in my youth (open Brethren) who devoted themselves in the weekly meeting of the church to deep meditation on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and especially the cross. My love for the doctrine, or shall I say the realities of the atonement, was birthed and formed by the Scriptures shared, the hymnology and the practice of meditating at the foot of the cross. I can remember sensing the presence of the nail-scarred Christ in these meetings and sometimes being overwhelmed to the point of tears. Needless to say, having more than a minute’s silence in contemporary church life is considered “awkward” and counter-cultural, but I recommend it for the recovery of the life of the church! I am grateful for the community in which I work, the faculty with whom I teach, and research at Regent College. As iron sharpens iron, they have sharpened me. James I. Packer has been particularly helpful in providing encouragement and guidance in this work, as has Hans Boersma. I am also grateful for three research assistants who, throughout the course of the writing, have helped find books and articles, edited chapters, and offered helpful perspectives. They are Gillian Chu, Matt Darby, and Jennifer Wotochek. The stimulation and input that I received in the course of teaching an Atonement seminar here at Regent College was significant and I am grateful to each student for their contribution to this lively seminar. Rev. Michael Wimmer, the rector of the Chemainus Anglican Church, which we attend in the summers has, with the whole church, also made a significant contribution to the ethos of this book with his teaching and the dignified and deeply evocative way in which he conducts the Eucharist. A number of times, while writing this book, the service and Michael’s words or xi

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a hymn have provided fresh insights into its subject material and have affected the tone with which I have sought to write it. I am deeply grateful also for the financial and moral support of Jimmy and Janet Chee and their family. Their remarkable generosity flows from the cross of Christ. I am also grateful to the editorial staff at Lexington for their assistance, Gayla Freeman and Neil Elliott. I cannot adequately express the thanks I feel also for the encouragement my wife Tammy has brought through her sunny disposition and life-giving diversions, such as forays to second-hand stores, and road trips to see the beauty of the island, to fly fish for trout, to say nothing of the eating of sumptuous meals that make a person feel human again.

Introduction

TOTAL ATONEMENT: TRINITARIAN PARTICIPATION IN THE RECONCILIATION OF HUMANITY AND CREATION What has awakened my desire to write a book on the atonement? I have been somewhat motivated by apologetic or defensive reasons, answering objections to the theology of atonement and, in particular, penal substitution, that have arisen in contemporary, “postmodern” theology. The problems that have surfaced surrounding this area of theology have provoked an increasing number of Christian theologians to offer answers. These problems can be summarized as being threefold: a. First, there is the modern sensitivity to violence which makes it difficult for moderns to imagine that a violent act, that of the cross, could be permitted and even enacted by a God of love to effect atonement. Indeed, on one account, God the Father did not just permit, but perpetrated violent action on the Son. We will deconstruct this popularly preached idea later and reconstruct a much more nuanced understanding of the sacrificial and substitutionary nature of the atonement grounded in the person of Christ, and in Trinitarian considerations. b. Second, and a specific case of the first, has been the objection raised by feminist theologians, among others, that a Father punishing his Son for the sake of the world sounds like “cosmic child abuse.” At a less vulgar level, for some feminist theologians, atonement imagery raises some questions first about the very nature of God who “is envisaged as the powerful patriarch in the greater household of the human family. This God demands absolute allegiance and punishes any act of disobedience.” 1 The cross of Christ, on this account, “becomes a man1

2

Introduction

ifestation of God’s wrath and a paradigm of parental punishment. God is the patriarch who punishes his son in order to satisfy God’s parental honour and sense of justice.” 2 For Rita Nakashima, for example, the gains of atonement theology as revelation of the grace of God are cancelled by the fact that they come to us at “the expense of the abuse of one perfect child” and of a punitive father lurking behind the atonement. 3 Other feminist theologians speak of Anselm of Canterbury’s doctrine of the atonement as “sadomasochism” where God is the sadist and Jesus the masochist. 4 Also, this school of thought is concerned that “the metaphors concerning the character of God that are accorded privilege in atonement theology lead easily and naturally to the incarnation of those characteristics in human relationships–that is, among those whose vocation is to reflect the divine image.” That is, in the home, where Jesus as victim may play into “idealizing the values of the victim and advising the abused to participate in their own victimization.” 5 Fervent statements from evangelical pulpits to the effect that the Father punished the Son for our guilt, or that suggest that the Father and the Son were separated on the cross, perpetuate these concerns. While hearing clearly the concerns of feminist theologians, a properly biblical and Chalcedonic and Trinitarian approach will serve to allay these objections and vindicate the substitutionary sacrificial aspects of the atonement. c. Third, questions have arisen within an analytic approach to theology related to the justice of one entity being punished in the place of another. How can it be just for one perfect party to actually bear the consequences of another guilty party? We offer the notion of participation as the key dynamic or “mechanism” underlying atonement, as the remedy for this; that is, the participation (or union) of God the Son in humanity for us and for our salvation, from incarnation to ascension, and Spirit-enabled and en-graced participation of humans in Christ. However, in a more constructive, rather than apologetic mode, I have been keenly motivated by the desire to expound the atonement in a positive and sane way and to participate in and perpetuate the ongoing expression of the deep devotion of the church’s response to the atoning work of God on behalf of reconciled humanity. The fact that none of the councils of the church had to do primarily with the atonement is suggestive of the fact that the core understanding of the atonement came from the eucharistic liturgies of the church, that is, from the church at worship. This is echoed by T. F. Torrance when he states that “Undoubtedly it was our Lord’s own interpretation of his passion, perpetuated in the eucharistic liturgy, that constantly nourished the early Church’s understanding of atonement.” 6 Many narratives of conversion

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3

have to do with the deep affections experienced when the soul has been awakened to the fact that Christ died for the sins of the converting person. The Eucharist brings week by week before the church the depth of the sacrifice which Christ offered for us. The idea of the cross as the best theodicy we have depends on the reality that Christ has taken up our sufferings and carried them with us and for us. It is impossible to enter into the longstanding tradition of meditation on the sufferings of Christ for comfort in our own sufferings, or in the remembrance aspect of the Eucharist, if his sufferings were not vicarious, if his participation in our humanity established at the incarnation was not substantive. How best to try to resolve the objections, and present a constructive view of the atonement which answers to the church’s deep affective and intelligent devotion? What is required first is an approach centered on the person of Christ as the personal self-revelation of the triune God, that is a Christological and therefore Trinitarian foundation. Secondly, what is required in light of biblical revelation is to express the framework within which all understanding of atonement, including all the motifs or models, must be considered. That framework, or principal undergirding mechanism (“theory,” if we must) is that of participation. This section will include a brief discussion of nomenclature in atonement theology in a way that hopefully still leaves the mystery extant. And thirdly, we must adopt an attitude of fullness or plenitude rather than seeking to engage in the reductionism that sees only one model as the means for understanding the whole atonement realm. It is a fullness expressed best in participatory terms. Total atonement is reflected in each of these categories. I have often found that theological truth has an “and” dimension to it. Elton Trueblood, the Quaker philosopher and theologian, famously said that the most important word in language is “and.” 7 Applying this to theology, there are corollary truths, or truths in tension, which must be held together for the whole truth to be approached. This is part and parcel of the ectypal nature of the theological enterprise. In brief, this is the acknowledgment that all human theology is “an imperfect, finite statement about God that successfully reflects the divine archetype only by the grace of God’s gift of revelation.” 8 This book will be structured around the importance of taking an “all” account of the atonement if one is to see in it many facets of the glorious diamond of the mystery, and avoid misconceptions and caricatures of particular doctrines and motifs of the atonement. This is not to be construed as dialecticism run amok. Mystery or the “mystery card” must not be easily invoked in theology (or in science, for that matter). However, when it becomes clear that all of the persons of the Trinity are involved in the atonement, and that all of the person of the incarnate Christ—which thus invokes the notion of mystery of the hypostatic union—is involved in accomplishing the work of atonement, then we will not be surprised if the work of

4

Introduction

atonement has ineffable aspects. T. F. Torrance declares early on in his work on this subject that the atoning work of Christ is ultimately an unutterable mystery: “it cannot be spelled out, and it cannot be spied out.” 9 The depth of mystery may also account for the fact that multiple motifs in the Holy Scriptures and in the theological tradition are required to describe it. And when we have finished trying to describe it, we will not be surprised that mystery remains. And we will adore the depth in worship, even if we cannot completely fathom it. The particular “ands” which are relevant in atonement theology are the following, which will comprise the chapter divisions of the book. Atonement entails the totality of creation and redemption; the totality of the person in the work of Christ ; the totality of the persons of the triune God; the totality of the history of Jesus Christ—his incarnation and vicarious life and substitutionary death and resurrection and ascension and high priesthood; the totality of many biblical and theological motifs (models); the totality of participation, as in the Divine participation of the Son in humanity and the human participation of believers in the Son by the Spirit, which frames and undergirds all the models (participation in our account is not just a model among others [as in the accounts of Bayne and Restall, and Strabbing, but the “theory” behind all the models]); the totality of its provision for the reconciliation and redemption of all humanity and all creation. 1. The Christological Foundation The foundation of atonement theology is sometimes thought of in terms of the need which precipitates it, the mechanisms it entails and its effects, or the ends it accomplishes. While all those realities are profitable and worthy of our affective and doxological response, they are not the foundation. That foundation must be the person of Jesus Christ as the self-revelation of the triune God. I am certainly not the first to make this point. Kevin Diller made it eloquently, when, in responding to the eschatological emphasis in theology in the twentieth century, he writes, But, I think we might do well to heed the cautions of Christoph Schwöbel. The twentieth century brought a great amount of interest in the significance and advocates for the priority of eschatology in theology (e.g. Pannenberg, Robert Jenson—even Jüngel’s ontological priority of the possible). Schwöbel recommends that we not lose sight of the Christological determination of Christian theology. It’s not like we can actually look into the future but we look of course to Jesus to understand our future hope. 10 (emphasis mine)

This is an important word for a merely horizontal approach to the atonement. More constructively, Diller affirms that “if we want to have a properly grounded unified framework for a Christian understanding of anything about

Introduction

5

the action of God vis-à-vis creation, we cannot start with problems, mechanisms or even resolutions, we must be tethered to who God is revealed to be in Christ Jesus.” He does not offer a defense of this proposition, but I am in agreement that this is not a hazardous assumption. It is hardly necessary to defend this assumption for theology that is Christian and Trinitarian. It is, as he says, “the only safe ground Christian theology has, because it is the only ground Christian theology has.” A Christological, incarnational, work-ofChrist-within-the-person-of-Christ and Trinitarian approach is what I will keep as the center of this reflection on the atonement. This does not mean, as Diller suggests, “that we can assume that our grasp of that ground or anything we build from it is ‘safe’: but, it would be far more perilous not to attempt to work out from this center.” 11 This was one of the key convictions of J. B. Torrance’s deeply insightful essay on, “The Vicarious Humanity of Christ,” 12 in which we find an expression of many of the components of a unified and coherent propositional account of the atonement. He notes that it was, “Bonhoeffer in his Christology that pled for the priority of the Who over What and How—that we interpret atonement in terms of the Incarnation and not the other way around.” 13 The chapters in this foundational section will therefore be as follows, each being an exposition of an aspect of total atonement: Chapter 1: Redemption and creation, redemption in light of creation. This relates to affirming both the ontological and the juridical aspects of the atonement, that is, both the filial and forensic nature of the atonement. Chapter 2: The work and the person of the Son; or, the work of atonement in the totality of the person of the Son, for the glory of God. This will expound the importance of the history and being of Jesus for the atonement, grounded in his incarnation. Chapter 3: Atonement as the presence and work of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; or, the being and act of all three persons of the Trinity for the glory of God. The full participation of the Father and the Spirit in atonement and the reality that each of the Persons is in the other, by coinherence, will be expounded and shown to overcome the “cosmic child abuse” misunderstanding. We will thus outline an atonement foundation that addresses—to some degree—all of the major questions about the atonement with priority given to consistency with who God reveals Godself to be in the incarnation. Torrance himself might have called this an “incarnational model,” because of the centrality of the notions of Christ’s vicarious humanity and union with Christ within it. I will move further by referring to this as more than a model, or

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motif. I will call it a participation framework for understanding the atonement because, on this view, human beings are reconciled by means first of the divine participation of the Son of God in our humanity in the person and work of Jesus, a participation made real by his incarnation, and leading to the vicarious nature of his life, death, resurrection, ascension, session and second coming. But secondly it is entered into by our human participation in Him, enabled by the Holy Spirit, through faith. This notion comes closest to describing a mechanism by which the atonement works, while preserving an unfathomable depth to the matter of the atonement. Thus, if the foundation for understanding the atonement is Christological, this generates secondly, a deep framework 14 for atonement theology that is participatory. 2. The Participatory Framework The participatory framework includes within its scope every one of the socalled models or motifs of the atonement that appear in the Bible and in the orthodox Christian tradition. After a brief discussion of nomenclature in the theology of atonement, it will be concluded that no model or theory on its own, or even a framework, can stand on its own. The motifs, within the participatory framework form a large and rich complex of ideas that characterize the mystery of atonement. The mystery of the atonement is too great to be described by one model or even “theory.” To attempt to do so is reductionistic, and decidedly modern (that is, modern in a “not good modern” kind of way). 15 I realize this is counter to some of the trends of atonement theology in our time. What can be affirmed in a minimalist spirit, I think, is that the context of every one of the models or motifs is participatory in its mechanism, and therefore involves a ‘great exchange,’ or substitution (either deathbearing or sin-bearing or victory-imparting), and that each is meaningless without that framing mechanism. The theological participation I have in mind is in two directions. It involves first the participation of God the Son in our humanity, by way of the incarnation, and then in our sin and guilt and captivity and alienation and death, leading to life and reconciliation and freedom and justification and purification. And second, it involves human participation in that extant reality of salvation in the Son, by the regeneration and indwelling and empowerment of the Holy Spirit, by grace, through faith. This latter human aspect is our coming into Christ by faith and baptism, our being “in Christ,” and therefore our receiving by virtue of our union with him, the gifts of forgiveness and justification and sanctification and redemption and access and resurrection life. In short, the saving work of God may be expressed in the way Irenaeus did when he said, “[T]he Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself,” 16 and, “For this is

Introduction

7

why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” 17 Athanasius expressed this in a similar language (which he did not intend to have ontological weight) in this marvellous exchange, “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” 18 It need hardly be said that a participation framework and mechanism for all the motifs, and especially the substitution motif necessitates an understanding of God as Trinity as essential. Indeed, it is unintelligible without it. The chapters expressing this heading of participation as framework will thus be: Chapter 4: Total participation (the Son in humanity, redeemed humanity in the Son) as a framework: nomenclature in atonement theology. Chapter 5: The totality of participation, Divine participation of the Son in humanity and the human participation of believers in the Son by the Spirit. Participation is, after all, the crucial soteriological concept of the New Testament and of soteriology in the tradition. Whether it be Orthodox theosis or Western Augustinian theosis in which justification and sanctification are coalesced, or Calvinist or Edwardsean or Barthian union with Christ as the basis for the twin graces (duplex gratia) as distinct yet inseparable, participation is key. As noted already, there are two participations in salvation reality: the first is the participation or union of the Divine Son with humanity in Jesus Christ. The second is the participation of believing humans with the Son enabled by the Holy Spirit. Different traditions and theologians emphasize one of these over the other. The Barthian tradition, including the Torrances (who were also influenced by John McLeod Campbell), emphasize, especially, the saving significance of the Christological union, beginning with the incarnation, and the vicarious humanity of Jesus, though the roots of this go back to the Church Fathers—Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Irenaeus. Jonathan Edwards, setting the tone for the evangelical tradition, emphasized the necessity of human participation by the Spirit in Christ, reflecting theosis in ways that mirror Cappadocian sentiments also. But the crucial thing is that participation is a given ontological reality that undergirds the atonement in all its aspects, including that of Christus Victor and substitutionary atonement. Substitutionary atonement is really an unsurprising concept given this union emphasis. Within this participatory framework, one can pursue a dialectical fullness in one’s approach to the atonement.

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Introduction

3. The Dialectical Fullness of the Atonement Under the framework of participation in Christ by the Spirit, the rich motifs of the biblical text and in the theological tradition will be reflected on in an “and” rather than an either/or manner. Thus, in this section, there will be seven chapters: Chapter 6: All of the biblical metaphors or motifs of atonement—the Old and the New Testaments. Given the scope of this, our focus will be on the major types offered in the Old Testament as these are echoed in the New Testament, and on key texts in the New that deal directly with the atonement. • • • •

The offering of Isaac by Abraham The Levitical offerings: burnt and meal and peace and sin and trespass The Day of Atonement: expiation/propitiation and substitution Key Lukan and Pauline and Petrine and Johannine texts.

Pertinent to the last heading, for example, if it is insisted that the narratives of conversion in Acts do not convey penal substitution, 19 but rather only the Christus Victor motif, what about the explicit teaching of the epistles of John and Paul and Peter? Was penal substitution a given in Acts, therefore? The word “and” seems relevant again. Chapter 7: The historico-theological metaphors and models of the atonement: moral influence. The preference for the terms “metaphors” and “models” over “theories” will be explained here as we begin this consideration of the models. These chapters on the models will have an eye toward a version of penal substitution that is tempered by the other motifs, and toward a view of the other motifs as modified by substitution. This chapter will, in other words, begin to provide insights into each of these motifs within the unifying framework of participation—the participation of God in humanity in the Son (the ordo historia) and our participation in the Son’s humanity by the Spirit (the ordo salutis). It will then deal specifically with the exemplar or moral influence model. Succeeding chapters will cover the other models building toward four chapters on penal substitution. Chapter 8: The historico-theological models of the atonement: vicarious humanity. Chapter 9: The historico-theological models of the atonement: ransom, satisfaction as recapitulation/theosis.

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Chapter 10 The historico-theological models of the atonement: Christus Victor. Chapter 11: The historico-theological models of the atonement: Penal substitution—origins. Chapter 12: The historico-theological models of the atonement: Penal substitution—proponents. Chapter 13: The historico-theological models of the atonement: Penal substitution—prominence. Chapter 14: The historico-theological models of the atonement: Penal substitution—participation. The final chapter will introduce briefly the matter of the scope of the atonement with reference to the two unions, that of the Son with humanity, and that of believing humanity in the Son by the Spirit. Chapter 15: The application of the atonement as sufficient for all. NOTES 1. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts, 2nd Edn. (Downers Grove: IVP Acad., 2011), 116. 2. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 116. 3. Rita Nakashima Brock, “And a Little Child Will Lead Us: Christology and Child Abuse,” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carol R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), 52–53. 4. Beverly W. Harrison and Carter Heyward, “Pain and Pleasure: Avoiding the Confusions of Christian Tradition in Feminist Theory,” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carol R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), 153. 5. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 115–116. 6. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (London: T&T Clark, 1988), 168. 7. “He liked to say that the most important word in the language was ‘and.’ On many matters of controversy he would insist, ‘we have to say both-and-together, not either-or.’” Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 20 (Wednesday, February 1, 1995) (Senate)(Pages S1872-S1874), Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office (www.gpo.gov), https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1995-02-01/html/CREC-1995-02-01pt1-PgS1872.htm 8. Richard A. Muller, “What I Haven’t Learned from Karl Barth.” Reformed Journal 37 (1987): 16–18. 9. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove: IVP Acad., 2009), 2. 10. Kevin Diller, “Participation Views of the Atonement,” a paper presented at the Logos Institute for Analytical and Exegetical Theology, University of St. Andrews, April 5, 2018. 11. Kevin Diller, “Participation Views of the Atonement,” 2018.

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12. James B. Torrance, “The Vicarious Humanity of Christ,” The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed AD 381, ed. T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: Handel, 1981), 127–147. 13. James B. Torrance, “The Vicarious Humanity of Christ,” 134. 14. Diller in his proposal of participation as a framework for atonement theology clarifies that his “idea of a ‘unifying framework’ maps most closely to Crisp’s doctrine. Unlike a doctrine, the ‘unifying framework’ I would propose for the atonement will conspicuously lack confinement to one particular ecclesial community. Like a doctrine, a framework is merely an attempt to get at the important structural elements and their relationships.” Kevin Diller, “Participation Views of the Atonement,” a paper presented at the Logos Institute for Analytical and Exegetical Theology, University of St. Andrews, April 5, 2018, 8. My description of participation as a framework was conceived independently of Diller’s, but is confirmed by his usage of the term. 15. “Theory” infers a rationalism inappropriate to the mystery that is the atonement. Here I am in agreement with Colin Gunton that “metaphor” is more suitable to the subject material and its transcendence of mere reason. This has resonance also with Gustav Aulén and his preference for “motif ” or “idea” expressed in his Christus Victor. As Fleming Rutledge has reflected, “‘theory’ is a poor word to choose when seeking to understand the testimony of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments do not present theories at any time. Instead we find stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs letters, poems. It would be hard to find writing that is less theoretical.” The Crucifixion, 9. She goes on to affirm that our approach should be less positivist and more in keeping with the “faith seeking understanding approach” of Anselm. Critical realism is appropriate for this and indeed all of theology (as well as science). I may sometimes use “theory” instead of “framework” for the undergirding mechanism in all of the models but it should be understood as arising from a critical realist and not positivist approach, as indeed is the case in science properly understood. More will be said of this word theory in subsequent chapters (4 and 6). 16. Irenaeus, 5, preface, Adversus haereses (Against Heresies), http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/0103500.htm. 17. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 3.19.1. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103319.htm. 18. Athanasius, De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation of the Word) 54.3 http://www. newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm. 19. See, for example, the Tweeted rhetoric of Michael Bird on May 24: “Haters: Michael Curry’s sermon did not mention penal substitutionary atonement! A pox on him!!! Me: Dude, have you ever read any of the sermons in the Book of Acts?”

Part I

The Christological Foundation of Total Atonement

Chapter One

Redemption and Creation

This chapter relates to affirming both the ontological and the juridical aspects of the atonement, that is, both the filial and forensic nature of the atonement. Offering a defense of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and its penal component seems very relevant in our times. This in light first of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in which this doctrine was developed, but secondly, in light of its seeming unpopularity, especially in some forms of feminist theology (the cosmic child abuse accusation), but well beyond that, even in mainstream evangelical theology (Greg Boyd, for example, the “slaughterhouse religion” critique, the touted injustice of someone being punished for another, etc.). Indeed, there have been many objections to the atonement seen as inclusive of the concept of penal substitution. These include objections from feminist theology, postmodern philosophy and theology, and within Evangelical and even Reformed Theology. The vexing matter of how violence is to be understood within the atonement (Boersma) 1 is one example. Specifically, postmodern critiques of the atonement have expressed the difficulty of understanding a God who seems to require blood and suffering to avenge his slighted honor to reconcile an estranged humanity, a God who “has the terrible privilege of not being able to forgive out of love but instead always to require payment.” 2 This includes also the above referenced accusation of cosmic “child abuse” levelled at God if the primary theme of the atonement is that of a Father punishing his Son for our sins. For instance, Vincent Brümmer poses the questions “How can we be required to believe doctrines which we cannot understand? Can our eternal salvation be made to depend upon such a sacrificium intellectus?” 3 We can never forget that, as Adam Johnson reminds us, “The cross was the wise act of the Creator God.” 4 His exhortation to those who see the atonement as a mosaic or kaleidoscope of models is to ask the question, 13

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“What funds the diversity?” Johnson confirms our notion that there is an “irreducible complexity” to the atonement and he offers “the diversity proper to the life of the triune God in the fullness of the divine attributes” 5 as that which properly funds this rich diversity. It is in particular the all-encompassing wisdom of the triune God which Johnson employs as his unifying category or motif. 6 I have reached the conclusion after much study of this subject area that crucial to the wisdom of God revealed in the atonement is to locate it specifically within participation: God’s participation in our humanity in Christ, and our participation with God in Christ by the Spirit. I am convinced that this participatory theory of the atonement, properly nuanced by the models or metaphors that comprise it, is a mysterious, deep, but winsome understanding of salvation, which will evoke appropriate responsive worship and profound gratitude to the God of love and wisdom. Thus, the “theory” and the models are all secondary to what must be the primary emphasis of all doctrines, including this one. It must begin with Christ and therefore with and in the triune God of grace and glory. An important recalibration of redemption has occurred in Christian theology from the work of biblical scholars and theologians like E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, Abraham Kuyper, and others. This has been to remind the church of the story we are in, involving four historical realities, that is, creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, which is the redemption of creation, not out of creation. It has been a reminder that we must keep the aspects of the story together, and specifically to keep creation and redemption together. This arose from a reappropriation of the Pauline concept expressed in his description of reconciliation as the reconciliation of “all things”: “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross,” (Col. 1:19–20). This is evident also in Paul’s depictions of creation, in light of the completed work of atonement, anticipating its full redemption in Romans 8:19–21: For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

One key reason why atonement theology has been polarized in an either/or kind of way into ontological and forensic aspects, rather than celebrated in its depth as a both/and fullness, is the failure to keep the doctrines of creation and redemption together. In another chapter, this will come into Christological focus, emphasizing that there is no forensic work of Christ apart from the atonement first in the person of Christ, and especially his incarnation by

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which he has cleansed humanity as an ontological entity. In yet another chapter, there will be a Trinitarian focus to the assertion that ontological matters must precede the forensic and that these must not be separated. Here, however, we first focus on a salvation history question, that is the relation between creation and redemption, and how keeping these together allows for both the ontological (or filial) and the juridical (forensic) aspects of the atonement as centered in the person of Christ. Here we will follow the work of the Church Father, Athanasius. 7 Speaking of the doctrine of creation seems to require some clarification in popular Christianity, as if what follows will be a discussion of the doctrine of origins, and a creation/evolution debate. The Christian doctrine of creation is much more about the given reality of creation, that God created, rather than the how question. The doctrine is not really mostly about how creation might have been in its original state before its disfigurement by sin, as if that can be known apart from the realities of sin and redemption. When Athanasius writes his doctrine of creation as found in Against the Pagans—On the Incarnation, he eschews such dualism. Khaled Anatolios indicates that this Church Father affirms that the intelligibility of Christian faith depends “on its making sense of the only world we can possibly know, either by direct encounter or by historical memory or through the witness of revelation.” And he confirms that it is this world created by God as good, but “disfigured by sin,” which has now become the object of God’s saving work “that has culminated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In other words, the doctrine of creation has the essential role of being “the ontological grammar for the exposition of the drama of salvation, which encompasses the entirety of human history.” 8 The doctrines of creation and redemption are thus “entirely and inseparably correlated,” 9 and it is indeed this correlation that gives to this two-part Athanasian treatise, Against the Pagans—On the Incarnation, its inherent structure. Anatolios highlights the logic of the work as a whole in two parts: first he describes the “necessary mutual correlation of the doctrines of creation and redemption in Christian proclamation,” and second, he analyzes how his ontology of creation “provides the fundamental grammar for his construal of the narrative of Christian salvation.” Crucially for our purposes, Anatolios proposes that Athanasius’s intensive correlation of the doctrines of creation and salvation helps him overcome the dichotomy between “‘ontological’ and ‘juridical’ soteriologies.” 10 Referring to the first part, Anatolios quickly moves to assert that the goal of demonstrating the mutuality of the doctrines of creation and salvation is grounded in Christ, specifically the incarnation of the Word of God and his life, death, and resurrection. This accounts for Athanasius’s rebuttal of idolatry, which takes up half the treatise. The interrelations of creation and salvation in Christ are part and parcel of this rebuttal, given that idolatry is a miscontrual of the nature of creation, and a blurring of the categories of

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Creator and creature. Given that idolatry has been overthrown by Christ, Athanasius is demonstrating that truth concerning creation is only accessible through knowledge of Christ, which is itself the fruit of the saving work of Christ. Creation, given it is disclosed by Christ who is the revelation of God, is thus discovered to be “an epiphany of Trinitarian life.” 11 In fact, the purpose of creation according to Athanasius is the disclosure of the mutual relations of the Father and the Son, and that this has been revealed through the incarnation, the “appearance of the Word and Wisdom of God.” 12 If the thesis of the first half of his treatise is to show the necessity of the incarnation for a proper understanding of creation, then the primary point of the second half is to show that the creation is in fact a “prolegomenon to the exposition of the doctrine of the incarnation.” 13 Thus, in a nutshell, Contra Gentes shows the reliance upon the incarnation for an understanding of the doctrine of creation, and conversely, the De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation) reveals the reliance of the doctrine of the incarnation on the doctrine of creation. There, in his first chapter, Athanasius states, It is proper for us to speak first of the creation of the universe and of its maker, God, so that one may fittingly contemplate that its renewal (ἀνακαίνισιν) was accomplished by the Word who created it in the beginning. For it will appear as in no way contradictory that the Father worked its salvation in the same one by whom he created it. 14

This would at first glance merely seem to assert the common assumption that salvation requires divine agency just as creation did, but Athanasius conveys that “a much more complex logic” 15 is at play in the opening chapters of On the Incarnation. Here Athanasius demonstrates that both the Christian doctrines of creation and salvation contain the same rationale “which consists of certain laws of interaction, as it were, between God and creation.” 16 Central to the whole Christian proclamation is the fact that the doctrine of creation contains an essential structure of this rationale in the concepts of an “ontology of the inter-relation of God and creation,” while the narrative of the saving work of Christ “becomes intelligible and persuasive precisely by manifesting its consistency with that ontology.” 17 This mutual correlation of these doctrines is what saves the Christian gospel from irrationality, or alogon. The whole treatise thus presents the lucidity of the Christian proclamation in accordance with “a twofold movement that has the doctrine of creation as its terminus a quo and the doctrine of redemption as its terminus ad quem.” 18 But how does Athanasius’s doctrine of creation provide the logical grammar for his account of salvation? The answer to this question resolves the dichotomy between the ontological and forensic aspects of salvation. It has been commonly assumed that Athanasius represents the typical “Greek soteriological paradigm” in which

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salvation thought of primarily as deification is accomplished through the incarnation, rather than by means of “Christ’s suffering and death on the cross.” That is, that we are saved from death and corruption rather than from sin. This putative “Greek patristic model” is often portrayed over against “Western” soteriology arising from Anselm, which stresses the juridical rather than the ontological, one which is preoccupied with God’s forgiveness through Christ’s paschal sufferings and death. However, this way of depicting Athanasius, says Anatolios, is problematic. Athanasius clearly says in this text that the death of Christ is the primary means by which Christ effects our salvation, that his death is “the capstone of our faith.” He also speaks of his death as removing the penalty and paying the debt of sin on our behalf and “thereby fulfilling the demands of divine justice.” 19 This early Christian text thus shows support for both an ontological and also what are sometimes called “transactional” or juridical Western approaches to the atonement. Athanasius’s synthesis is thus an important voice for ecumenical dialogue in this area. But just to be clear, this is no mere harmonization of alternative models of salvation. Rather, it is the case that “the ontology of creation” is that which “supplies the grammar” for understanding and proclaiming Christian salvation. 20 In the same vein, another Orthodox scholar, Matthew Baker, has suggested that dismissing a juridical dimension in redemption is problematic and inconsistent with the patristic tradition. He asserts that “a more honest study of the language of substitution, debt-satisfaction, ransom, and law in general within patristic literature is thus in order for Orthodox theology.” 21 Anatolios confirms that for Athanasius it is clear that “the Paschal mystery” is the central content of our salvation, but that this “content has ontological depths.” 22 But what is that grammar that is found in the theology of creation, in the “ontological depths of human existence” that is answered in the nature of salvation? What is it in the theology of creation that provides this ontological basis for the doctrine of salvation without minimizing the transactional and judicial aspects of the God-human covenantal relationship? 23 That grammar, spelled out in the opening chapters of On the Incarnation, relates to the notion of creation as gift. Superceding even the notion of contingency, creation is seen as the fruit of divine generosity. Thus, Athanasius states, “God is good—or rather, he is the source of goodness. Because he does not begrudge being to anything, he made all things from non-being through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.” He goes on to say that a special goodness and mercy was shown to the human race “to which he granted a further gift” which was the gift that he “made them according to his own image, and shared with them the power of his own Word, so that having a kind of reflection of the Word and thus becoming rational, they might be enabled to remain in blessedness and live the true life of the saints in paradise.” 24 Anatolios’s commentary emphasizes that creation, being wholly a

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gift, “is literally nothing apart from its ‘being-gifted.’” As such, what he calls an “ontology of gift” is also “an ontology of participation.” 25 One cannot simply walk away with this gift, however, as the gift of creaturely being “is ineluctably relational; it is a sharing in the very life of the divine Giver.” 26 Crucial to how this works its way into salvation teaching, Athanasius speaks of this ontology in divine creation as one of “the further gift[s]” of human rationality which “includes the capacity to determine one’s own being through moral choices.” 27 Thus, humanity by grace can either “confirm its own being by wilfully participating in the power of the divine image,” or it can freely turn down this participation and so “forfeit its being, sliding into nothingness and preferring the self-grasping power of sheer autonomy to the giftedness of participated being.” 28 Thus, clearly, the Athanasian ontology of creation contains from its beginnings “the co-incidence of moral and ontological realms.” 29 As a consequence of this, sin not only has ontological consequences (non-being or death); it is an ontological event, in which the creature loses the only basis it has for its being, which is “participation in divine life.” 30 But what does this suggest about the response of God to human sin in his salvation as outlined in the biblical account? Athanasius’s approach to this includes both divine justice and divine mercy and forgiveness. The “enduring significance” of his account “resides in his seeing all of these motifs within a synthetic conception in which the moral drama of divine-human interaction is not at all separated from . . . ‘the ontological depth of human existence.’” 31 Over against other interpretations of Athanasius in this regard, Anatolios affirms that his interpretation of the significance of the saving death of Christ is that in part at least, it is a fulfillment of divine justice, addressing not just the ontological problems of human corruptibility and death, but also the matter of the transgression of divine law. In the first instance that law announced to Adam and Eve that they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen.2:17). The work of salvation, in a way that corresponds to this, must answer this issue. Jesus must fulfill that law and he did so by dying for us, to effect forgiveness of sins and our salvation. In answer to the objection that the role of divine justice seems to stand in contradiction to his love and mercy, Athanasius’s answer is that justice is not abstract, as if it were extrinsic to the ontological depths of human existence. His response to the question of how justice might somehow restrain love and mercy, Anatolios suggests he overcomes such a dichotomy in his description of the law as “securing the grace” of humanity’s participation in God. 32 This ontology of creation is expressed in On the Incarnation with respect to the being of the first human beings. They are given free choice in God’s paradise and the gift is secured for them by “a law and a place.” The consequence of obedience is incorruptible life in heaven, of disobedience, the suffering of corruption in death “according to their nature,” outside of paradise. 33

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Read in context, and embedded within his ontology of creation, Anatolios surmises that for Athanasius, the law of God is a means of securing the gift by outlining the terms by which the gift is received. As such, it is not out of touch with the being of creation or the goodness of God. It is rather a “manifestation of the ontology of creation as entirely and comprehensively gift and as an expression of the divine solicitude for the integrity of that gift.” 34 It merely describes the essential “terms of the God-world relation within the ontology of gift” and gives warning that refusal of the gift of participation in the life of God leads to the “forfeiture of creaturely being.” 35 This is underlined by what Athanasius asserts a few paragraphs later concerning salvation . . . that it cannot be accomplished without death, the death of the Son, because, if it could, God would have lied about the consequences of sin as death. The real crux of the matter is that for Athanasius, the form of God’s word as law is true to his creative word, and true to the “radically gracious terms of the relation between God and creation.” 36 This is precisely why “it is absurd for the law to be annulled without being fulfilled,” and why, therefore, Anatolios insists, “it is absurd for divine justice to be simply set aside in the work of redemption.” 37 Once seen within an ontology of creation, the absurdity of annulling the law and divine justice will be seen in light of the fact that it would be a setting aside of the fundamental terms of the God-human relation. It would be the equivalent of saying “that the God-world relation, after being broken by sin, can be restored by setting aside the God-world relation.” 38 Rather, there must be a correspondence between the restoration of creation and “the original terms of the creation, if it is precisely that creation which is being restored.” 39 Anatolios concludes that Since sin not only results in but actually consists of the ontological deprivation of death, salvation cannot simply transcend that ontological deprivation without undergoing it and reversing it from within. This is what Christ’s death does. 40

He goes on to confirm that Athanasius speaks consistently of the death of Christ as his eucharistic self-offering, therefore. He does not hesitate to speak of his death in sacrificial terms, as a self-offering to the Father which “annuls the sinful content of death as self-withdrawal from divine life.” 41 This correspondence of the self-offering of the last Adam as an overcoming of the selfwithdrawal of the first Adam, and every human being since, is an astute insight of Athanasian soteriology! The death of Christ is thus both a “fulfillment and an annihilation of death,” fulfillment “because Christ enters into the place of humanity’s decline into nothingness, which came about through its rejection of the gift of participation in the divine life”; annihilation, because “Christ enters into this place of withdrawal only to reverse it by his

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own Eucharistic self-offering.” 42 It is noticeable, true to our proposal of participation as the theory of atonement that participation, that is, the union of Christ with humanity by the incarnation, is crucial for this Athanasian atonement to be operative, and that in turn, this brings about our human participation in its efficacy. Anatolios asserts that “our inclusion into Christ’s death of self-offering also brings about the renewal of our participation in divine life, which is his resurrection.” 43 In sum, without relegating the moral categories of human sin and divine justice to a secondary status, Athanasius’s creational ontology of creation as gift provides the unbroken thread that extends from creation as “radically gifted” on to sin and death described as the creature’s rejection of its own being, as gift, on to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “as the Eucharistic reversal of the creature’s rejection of the gift of being.” 44 This ontology of creation is thus the grammar for the “comprehensive account of Christian salvation.” 45 This ontology of creation accounts for Athanasius’s ability to transcend the dichotomy of the ontological and the juridical. The divine law bound up in this creational ontology is not “abstract justice” that can be overruled by divine love and mercy. The saving efficacy of Christ’s death must therefore always be “explained in both ontological and juridical terms.” 46 We conclude that atonement is total in the sense that both the ontological and the juridical apply, and that this is feasible because creation and redemption are kept together in Christ by an ontology of creation as Athanasius has described this. NOTES 1. Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2006). 2. These sentiments are those of Adolf von Harnack, as cited in Vincent Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 4, fn. 2. 3. Vincent Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity, 4. 4. Adam J. Johnson, The Reconciling Wisdom of God: Reframing the Doctrine of the Atonement (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016), 18. 5. Adam J. Johnson, The Reconciling Wisdom of God, 102–103. 6. See Adam J. Johnson, The Reconciling Wisdom of God. See also his Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2015) and God’s Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis for the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: T&T Clark, 2012). 7. We will be guided in part by Orthodox theologian, Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria” in Matthew Baker, Seraphim Danckaert and Nicholas Marinides, eds. On the Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2016), 59–72. 8. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 59. 9. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 59. 10. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 60. 11. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 61. Athanasius says, “Creation itself cries out . . . and shows forth God as its Maker and Creator who

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rules over it, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Athanasius, Against the Pagans (Contra Gentes) (hereafter cited as c. gent.), 27, in Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. R. W. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 73. 12. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 62. 13. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 61. Athanasius says, “Creation itself cries out . . . and shows forth God as its Maker and Creator who rules over it, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Athanasius, Against the Pagans (Contra Gentes) (hereafter cited as c. gent.), 27, in Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. R. W. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 73. 14. De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 1.4, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 262. 15. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 62. 16. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 62. 17. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 62. 18. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 62. 19. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 63, citing De Incarnatione Verbi Dei 4.9 and 20; De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 1.4, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 274–279, 294–299, 336–341. 20. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 63–64. 21. Matthew Baker, “In Ligno Crucis: Atonement in the Theology of Fr. Georges Florovsky,” in Matthew Baker, Seraphim Danckaert, and Nicholas Marinides, eds, On The Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2016), 101–128, 125. 22. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 67. 23. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 67. 24. De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 3.3; De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 1.4, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 270–273. 25. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 68. 26. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 68. Protestant scholar Julie Canlis speaks of image-bearing in a similar manner. 27. De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 3.3; De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 1.4, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 270. 28. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 68. 29. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 68. 30. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 69. 31. A phrase used by Georges Florovsky, see Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 69. 32. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 69. 33. De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 3.4, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 272–275. 34. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 70. 35. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 70. A point of interest here is that theologians of the Reformed tradition would probably use the “covenant of works” as opposed to the “law” as Anatolios uses it, and may or may not however, describe it as grounded in an ontology of creation. The idea of a morality embedded in the creation is not unique to the Eastern tradition, but it is more strongly emphasized in the Eastern tradition following Athanasius. 36. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 70. 37. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 70, emphasis added. 38. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 70–71, emphasis added. 39. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71. 40. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71, emphasis added.

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41. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71. 42. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71. Here Athanasius is cited: De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 9, 20, 22, Sources Chretiene (SC), Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1973, ed. Charles Kannengiesser, 199, 294–299, 336–341, 344–349. For further development of this theme, see also Khaled Anatolios and Richard Clifford, “Christian Salvation: Biblical and Theological Perspectives,” in Theological Studies 66 (2005): 756–760. 43. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71. 44. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 71. 45. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 72. 46. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria,” 72.

Chapter Two

The Work of Atonement in the Totality of the Son’s Person

This chapter concerns the importance of the history and being of Jesus for the atonement, grounded in his incarnation. His vicarious humanity, sacrificial death, resurrection, ascension, high priesthood, and second coming are efficacious with respect to atonement because all are grounded in the person of the Son of God become human for us. The Scottish Liturgy of 1982 expresses this beautifully: “In Christ your Son our life and yours are brought together in a wonderful exchange. He made his home among us that we might for ever dwell in you. Through your Holy Spirit you call us to new birth in a creation restored by love.” 1 We begin with a biblical text that expresses the origin of salvation in the person of Jesus Christ. In the third chapter of his first epistle, John repeats a phrase that has the word “appearing” of the Son of God in humanity in it, and a stated purpose for it, in each case: But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. (1 Jn. 3:5–10)

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The first stated purpose in verse 5 is unquestionably forensic or sin-related in its tone: “he appeared so that he might take away our sins.” The previous reference in the antecedent context concerning the topic of the overcoming of sin as habitual practice in the life of the believer (and this cycling is the pattern in John’s writing) references both the advocacy of Jesus Christ on behalf of his people when they sin, and the concept of propitiation. This is in 2:1–2, which states, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (NASB). The variation in translation of the Greek word hilastêrion from “propitiation” (NASB, KJV) to “atoning sacrifice” (NIV, NRSV) reflects a controversy over whether propitiation (of the wrath or judgment of God) or expiation (or forgiveness of sins) is the concept behind it. The most normal or biblicohistorical translation is surely “propitiation,” as this reflects the way in which the term hilastêrion was translated as “mercy seat” in the Old Testament ark of the covenant in the “Holy of Holies” in the inner sanctum of the tabernacle or Temple. On the day of atonement blood was sprinkled on and before this mercy seat in a manner assumed to permit a holy God to live among his sinful people, and to make atonement for their sins and do so justly. Whether the appeasing of God’s wrath or even his judgment is implicit in this process has been discussed at length by biblical scholars. That aside, that there is some kind of juridical meaning is beyond question. John’s meaning in chapter 2:2 and carried over into 3:5 is that this juridical reality which leads to forgiveness (or justification, as Pauline might say) is coupled with the enabling to overcome sin as a root principle in the being of the believer: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin” (2:1) and “And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him” (3:5–6). This latter being dimension suggests a more ontological aspect of Christ’s saving work. If in Christ there “is no sin” and if one is brought into saving participation with Christ, this union must result in real transformation (or sanctification, in Pauline language): “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin” (2:1); “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him” (3:6). This ontological aspect of things, that is that relate to the actual being of the believer as a consequence of their being in Christ, is accentuated in the second purpose statement for the incarnation which John makes in chapter 3: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (3:8). Whatever this means, in context it has the same effect as the first statement. That is, it enables the Christian, the one born of God, the one in whom “God’s seed remains” (9), not to “continue in sin” (9), to “do what is right” and “love their brother and sister” (10). What is implicit here is that the

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destruction of the devil’s work accomplished by Christ is his destruction of death (cf. Heb. 2:14), enabling those who by faith are brought into union with Christ, to be born from above, to be born into divine life. This is very much filial language, and it is salvation seen as an ontological deliverance from death. As a result of the “appearing,” that is, the incarnation of the Son of God, there is an implied link between Christ’s being and human being. The holding together of the filial or ontological with the forensic or juridical by John provides an important paradigm for consideration of these aspects of salvation in the various branches of the Christian tradition. Whatever is accomplished in the atoning person of Christ always involves forensics and it always involves ontology. Crucial to the means by which Christ in his person accomplishes the work of atonement and these outcomes in the being of the church, is the ancient notion of recapitulation. This theme is introduced here, and developed further in a later chapter. RECAPITULATION IN THE PERSON OF CHRIST, THE VICARIOUS HUMAN Hans Urs von Balthasar in his introduction to Irenaeus’s Against the Heresies writes, The prophetic appearances of the Word pointed ahead to the one mystery: the union of God and man. All the threads in God’s saving plan are here entwined. Now the stupendous exchange takes place: God becomes “nothing,” so that the “nothings” might become God. Irenaeus calls this wonderful thing recapitulation (ana-kephalaiosis). What he means is this: the second Adam is the repetition, in divine truth, of the first Adam, the Adam who turned away from God. The second Adam repeats the whole natural development of man at the higher level of divine reality. Sinful, lost, and wandering man is not just back on course by the companionship of love; more profoundly, he is taken into that love. 2

Balthasar then points back to the apostle Paul for the source of the word “recapitulation” to “express the meaning of the incarnation.” The text quoted is Ephesians 1:10: God will “bring everything together under Christ as Head, everything in the heavens and everything on earth” (JB). The Greek word for “Head,” used here for Christ, is kephalē, suggesting ana-kephalaiosis (recapitulation) in him. “In Him everything becomes clear and has meaning,” says Balthasar. Irenaeus puts forward his “boldest ideas” which concern “[t]he self-abasement of Christ, by which he gets down to man and lifts him up to God; the reconciliation of the world and God, of nature and grace, which has its foundation in the one Incarnation.” He goes on to emphasize what Irenaeus himself emphasized, that the incarnation deals the death blow to Gnosticism, a heresy which would “tear Christ into pieces.” He concludes that

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“only when matter, Christ’s very body, is safeguarded in God, is man redeemed: here the fruit of the dark earth itself is transformed into grace.” 3 The ability of Jesus to be the last Adam and recapitulate the human race very much depends on his union or oneness and therefore solidarity with humanity. One of the tenets of soteriology in the patristic tradition is that the incarnation, though vital for the atoning work of the cross, was itself a salvific act, one in which the sinful human nature which Christ assumed at the incarnation, was cleansed by him. This is interpreted in the Reformed tradition in various ways: it happened either at the moment of Christ’s conception in Mary’s womb (Calvin), 4 or more progressively throughout his life, and in the crisis moments of the cross (Owen) 5 (Barth). 6 This involved the human nature as an ontological reality. This is strange to modern Christians, but it was not so in the tradition of the Church Fathers. It is most popularly known in the saying of Gregory of Nazianzus: “If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” 7 One’s comfort level with the idea of the compatibility of the person of God the Son being in union with a sinful human nature is perhaps ameliorated best by the idea of Calvin that the healing takes place immediately as the two natures come together in the one person of the Son. Indeed, one theologian has suggested that the notion that a holy person can contain a sinful nature is not philosophically feasible. 8 One could imagine that the pure and holy nature of God might work slowly rather than immediately to heal the sinful human nature, and this would not be surprising given that the Creator and the sanctifying redeemer does work this way more often than not. Either way, whether immediately at the incarnation, or gradually throughout his saving life and death and resurrection, this is a crucial corollary of the participatory work of God in salvation. If Owen and Barth are correct, then this is in agreement with a dimension of the nature of the cross that Paul refers to in Romans 8:3–4—“For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” This strand of Christian teaching has been recovered for the church by theologians like John Calvin, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and especially T. F. Torrance. At the core of it is the idea that the heart of the Christian gospel lies the reality of the homoousios in two senses: that is, the eternal union of the Son with the Father and the Spirit in the Holy Trinity, and a corresponding reality in the incarnate Son, which is that his divine nature is homoousios with his human nature, and therefore ours. This idea is often coupled with the notion of the vicarious humanity of Christ. What the latter

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means is unfolded best in the theology of Torrance. He speaks of the vicarious assumption of the fallen human nature beginning at the incarnation. In order to understand this, it is important to parse out a distinction Torrance observed between the enhypostatic and anhypostatic aspects of the incarnational union of God the Son with humanity in the hypostatic union. Torrance expresses the necessity of the union of the Son with a fallen human nature in a vicarious way in the following terms: If the incarnate Son through his birth of the Virgin Mary actually assumed our flesh of sin, the fallen, corrupt and enslaved human nature which we have all inherited from Adam, then the redeeming activity of Christ took place within the ontological depths of his humanity in such a way that far from sinning himself, he condemned sin in the flesh and sanctified what he assumed, so that incarnating and redeeming events were one and indivisible, from the very beginning of his earthly existence to its end in his death and resurrection. 9

This expresses eloquently the centering of atonement in the person of the Son. This also expresses in pithy form the ontological nature of salvation. But contained also within it is the preparation of the Son to be a perfect offering up to God on the cross in a forensic sense. But what exactly is Torrance saying regarding the vicarious assumption of human nature in its fallenness and sin? It is clear here and elsewhere that Torrance attributes sin not to the person-hypostasis of Christ, but to the human nature he assumed. Enhypostatically speaking, Christ remains sinless for his person is that of the eternal Son of God. At the incarnation, the person of the Son assumed a human nature, instantiating it as such in his personhood as the divine, now human Son. Christ thus assumed the likeness of sinful flesh (nature) (anhypostasis) in an atoning union, and yet remained sinless as a person (enhypostasis). In Chalcedonian Christology, there is no human person already existing that the Son of God becomes one with at the incarnation. The eternal Logos is a person, and over against the Adoptionist heresy, the Logos does not at the moment of incarnation take on another already existent human person who was adopted into union with the Logos, thus making this a two-personed union. Or as Fred Sanders has expressed this, there was no Jewish man who “got out of the way when the eternal Son of God took over his existence.” 10 In that case, there would be two persons and not one. The assuming of a human nature by the divine person of the Son is the anhypostatic nature of the incarnation. Chalcedonian Christology has as its background and context the theology of the Trinity, such that the hypostatic union will be determined by the preexistence of the person (hypostasis) of the Son who is God. The doctrine of the two natures of Christ in one person is in that sense asymmetric. It is a divine person taking on a human nature, and not the other way around. Christ is therefore one person, that of the Son who has by his union instantiated one person who is both fully divine and fully human. That is

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enhypostasis. But, he can therefore be viewed also as having taken on a sinful nature anhypostatically, and as such he does so vicariously. This anhypostatic/enhypostatic distinction is a difficult one. Sanders has explained it well in the following way: On the one hand, the human nature of Jesus Christ is in fact a nature joined to a person, and therefore enhypostatic, or personalized. But the person who personalizes the human nature of Christ is not a created human person (like all the other persons personalizing the other human natures we encounter); rather it is the eternal second person of the Trinity. So the human nature of Christ is personal, but with a personhood from above. Considered in itself, on the other hand, and abstracted from its personalizing by the eternal person of the Son, the human nature of Jesus Christ is simply human nature, and is not personal. The human nature of Christ, therefore, is both anhypostatic (not personal in itself ) and enhypostatic (personalized by union with the eternal person of the Son). 11

It is especially important to note that Torrance’s view is that the assumption of the human nature as fallen and sinful is permitted within this anhypostatic aspect, and that it is vicarious. The fact that there is no independent human hypostasis leads to the concept of anhypostatic solidarity, of the incarnation as an ontic incarnational union with all humanity. In his act by which the divine Son enters into humanity, the anhypostatic reality allows us to see Jesus assuming humanity as an ontological reality, and enduring its sinfulness and fallenness and death vicariously. At the same time, the unique person of Jesus Christ, the person of the Son of God who took on human nature, is a particular hypostasis, and over against the Apollinarian heresy that he lacked a human mind and will, Jesus is as a fully divine and fully human person, the holy Son of God, “holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens,” as Hebrews tells us (7:26). Torrance achieves a fine balance in articulating his doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ in such a way that his personal holiness is intact, and yet humanity itself is healed and made holy. At one point Torrance states, Although he assumed our fallen and corrupt humanity when he became flesh, in assuming it he sanctified it in himself, and all through his earthly life he overcame our sin through his righteousness, our impurity through his purity, condemning sin in our flesh by the sheer holiness of his life within it. 12

He goes on to speak of the ontological consequences of the death and resurrection of Christ as a consequence of the forensic reality of his having purified human nature, and his having offered it up to God. Death could not hold him because there was no sin in him to make him susceptible to corruption. Conversely, the forensic consequences are that the condemned and lost condition of humanity into which Christ entered has been redeemed in him.

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Torrance sums up the importance of the whole life of Jesus to atonement in this way: “In that life-act of the historical Jesus the Son of God so clothed himself with our humanity and so subdued it in himself that he converted it back from its resentment and rebellion to glad surrender to the holy will of God, and so lifted humanity up in himself to communion with the Father, setting it again within the divine peace, drawing it within the divine holiness and placing it within the direction of the divine love.” 13 MATTERS OF ONTOLOGY IN BARTHIAN REFLECTIONS ON ATONEMENT Thus far, our consideration of recapitulation and vicarious humanity of Jesus has illustrated and emphasized the importance of ontology in the matter of the atonement. Ontology, specifically the being of the person of Christ, cannot be underestimated. The whole burden of this book can be well expressed in sentiments written by Bruce L. McCormack on his reflections on “The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement.” 14 McCormack bemoans the tendency of classical Reformed Orthodoxy to neglect matters of ontology, that is, of being, in its theological approach to the atonement. He broadens this critique to speak to the same tendency within contemporary evangelical theology. Such a non-ontological theology has left inadequate answers to the objections of feminist and liberationist theologians to penal substitution theory, for example. McCormack is on target when he highlights the need for both “an integrated understanding of the person and work of Christ” and “a well-ordered doctrine of the Trinity as well.” 15 This, he suggests, requires a rediscovery of the theological ontology that occupied the Church Fathers in their clarification of Christological matters around and after the Chalcedonian definition, as well as the ontological issues surrounding the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is into precisely these areas that this study of the atonement seeks to move. In this section we will encounter the specific ontological arguments of three theologians in the Barthian tradition that illumine the core essence of the nature and meaning of the atonement, and who thus enable the Reformed and evangelical traditions to offer a robust defense of cherished understandings of the atonement. We will proceed in chronological order: first, Karl Barth himself, then Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and finally we will return to the work of Bruce McCormack, a competent expositor of Barthian thought. Karl Barth If Karl Barth is McCormack’s primary appeal in this regard, it will be appropriate to test Barth’s assertions in this regard. Barth, on the one hand, appears to affirm penal substitution in his opening statement on the mechanism of the

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atonement. In Church Dogmatics, IV/1, in the paragraph, “The Judge Judged in Our Place,” he asserts that “the Son of God fulfilled the righteous judgment on us men by Himself taking our place as man and in our place undergoing the judgment under which we had passed.” 16 There are many quotes to this effect in the pages that follow, along with references to Christ as our “Representative” and “Substitute.” For example, Christ’s appropriation of Psalm 22 while on the cross is given great weight by Barth. He even cites approvingly Luther’s famous statement concerning the imputation of sin on Christ: “be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them.” 17 The way into this discussion must not, however, be neglected. Before Barth has come to these assertions, he has belabored the theme of the personhood and incarnation of the Son who from eternity past, by way of covenant and intention, and then in his birth and life, takes on the sin of the first Adam in order to create a new peace. This is what lies behind what may appear as a surprising turn in the tone of the conversation in this paragraph in the Dogmatics. Barth wishes to nuance the concept of penal substitution over against the classical Reformed expressions of it with their particular interpretation of Anselm. The decisive thing is not that He has suffered what we ought to have suffered so that we do not have to suffer it, the destruction to which we have fallen victim by our guilt, and therefore the punishment which we deserve. This is true, of course. But it is true only as it derives from the decisive thing that in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ it has come to pass that in His own person He has made an end of us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners. In His person He has delivered up us sinners and sin itself to destruction. 18

But even in the earlier parts of the section, this is evident in statements that appear to affirm penal substitution in an unqualified way. For example, the quote we have used above (p. 222) to suggest his espousal of penal substitution, is followed by clarifications that ameliorate some of the objections to penal substitution. In receiving the divine accusation and condemnation that was “embodied in his presence in the flesh,” and as the “fellow-man” to humanity, Christ was both our Judge, with Divine authority, and the one judged for us, with competence and power as Son of God: “Everything happened to us exactly as it had to happen, but because God willed to execute his judgment on us in his Son it all happened in his person, as his accusation and condemnation and destruction. He judged and it was the Judge who was judged, who let himself be judged.” 19 He “was able to be judged like us” because he became one with us. What is clear is the participational grounds of solidarity and representative integrity in the Son’s being and acting for us. His position as Divine Judge among us gave him the authority “in this way—

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by this giving up of himself to judgment in our place—to exercise the divine justice of grace, to pronounce us righteous on the ground of what happened to him, to free us therefore from the accusation and condemnation and punishment (note the unmistakable juridical reference), to save us from the impending loss and destruction.” 20 Furthermore, his being in the “way of obedience” (note the reference to the wider theme of this paragraph in the Church Dogmatics—“The Obedience of the Son of God,” that is, the notion that salvation is ensconced in the whole history of Jesus Christ from incarnation and throughout his vicarious life), “he did not refuse to accept the will of the Father as his will in this self-giving” (note the Trinitarian nuance here). Barth does not dismiss the juridical, but rather indicates clearly that the ontological reality of the atonement accomplished in Christ’s person, results in freedom from our “accusation and punishment,” 21 bringing us into righteousness before the Judge. In reality, throughout this section, what Barth seems to be objecting to is any concept of penal substitution distanced from the person of the Son, and, in particular, any concept distanced from union of the person of the Son of God with humanity which began at the incarnation, continued throughout a vicarious life, and indeed, to which the eternal Son was destined in the eternal, covenantal purpose of God as the Son incarnandus. I offer the following summation of Barth’s view of the atonement which distills out of his section on the atonement: 1. The Judge who is judging is not just the Son who is human, but the Son who is God. In this, Barth consistently shows his commitment to Cyrilline Christology in which the divine nature has a priority over his humanity. Not to the neglect of the full and true humanity of the Son, but in acknowledgment that God the Son took on human flesh, not the other way around. This is critical to the notion that he who died on the cross was, yes, fully human, authentically bearing human sin and guilt, but also fully God, participating with the Father and the Spirit in whatever was transacted there. The Son is not the hapless victim therefore. 2. The Judge who is judging is not just the Son on his own, but the whole triune coinherent God as the One God. Any idea of cosmic child abuse fades away. 3. And the Judge who is judged is the person of the Son and the judgment cannot happen outside of his person as the God-Man. The notion of some kind of judgment external to the Son is problematic. 4. The notion of the participation of God the Son in humanity is absolutely crucial to this account of atonement. He can act representatively for us because he has genuinely and fully become one with us, one of us.

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5. The notion of the death of Christ being disconnected with his incarnation and his vicarious life is avoided by Barth. Reconciliation begins at the incarnation, and continues throughout his vicarious life, and is climaxed in his death. The filial is more prominent than the forensic, for it is the ground of atonement and its ultimate aim. 6. The nature of sin as an active principle embodied in the first Adam and taken on by the last Adam, receives more weight and indeed guides the meaning of penal substitution. Crucial to this concept and its priority is Barth’s belief (a definite strand of this exists in the great tradition) that at the incarnation the Son takes on a sinful human nature with a view to purifying it in his life and death and resurrection. 7. The nature of sin as a principle at work in fallen humanity since the first Adam must be slain if its concomitant judgment is to be assuaged. 8. The reality of death as an ontological reality to be overcome seems to shade the concept of guilt that requires being atoned for, as it is in the Eastern concept of atonement, derived from Irenaeus. 9. The overall metaphor for atonement for Barth seems to be one of victory over sin and death. This seems to suggest a commitment to a recapitulation and Christus Victor model within which penal substitution is enacted and understood. The reality of penal substitution is thus peripheral, not central, for Barth, and it does not include propitiation, understood as wrath-aversion. 10. Since Barth speaks of the atonement in ontological terms, it is not surprising that he understands the atonement to be universal in its intent and efficacy. All of humanity as an entity is justified in Christ’s person and actions (whether this necessarily leads to universalism in Barth is a matter of debate). The God who is for us, is a primary theme in his discussion of who God is as the reconciling God. However, he is conscious in this section, not just of the benevolence of God. One must not assume that Barth neglects the justice and holiness of God in granting atonement to humanity. In a passage in which he speaks especially of the historical reality of the cross and of its finality related to its once-for-all efficacy, Barth speaks precisely of the justice of God as the Judge. “There and then there took place the strange judgment which meant the pardon and redemption of man the wrong-doer, the making possible of that which seemed to be contrary to every possibility.” 22 “Strange judgment” seems to be a quotation of Isaiah who speaks of judgment as God’s strange work (Isaiah 28:21). His “not so strange” work is the benevolent disposition of God, expressed in the giving of forgiveness and salvation. Barth seems to acknowledge here the critique that God does not seem to be free to forgive apart from reparation or proper punishment of that sin, in light of the justice of his nature and dealings. The critique has been that since God can’t forgive

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without demanding payment, then we as humans are morally superior because we can forgive without demanding justice. Barth’s answer lies in the just character of God. This section in Barth culminates in two emphases: the first is on the benevolence of God as the ultimate intention for this act of judgment—“And it was done as God became man in Jesus Christ, in order to do that in our place and for us.” 23 Note the mention of the incarnation as that event which is both a preparation for the cross, in that it produced a God-man who is truly and fully man and able therefore to be judged vicariously for humanity, and also included within the atoning work itself. It is in that person that the forensic transaction could be effected. And its aim is filial also: it is for the making of humans into what they were intended to be as image-bearing human persons. But it does and must involve an act of judgment by God as is consonant with what is affirmed by the apostle Paul in the core section on the atonement in the epistle to the Romans 3:25–26. The second and most emphatic theme in this discourse of Barth’s is that the judgment happened in the person of the Son, and not external to him. In this sense, it is profoundly ontological: “But the significant thing is what happened in Him, in Jesus Christ, in this one man. It is His history as such. It alone is the basis for faith. Its proclamation alone is the summons to faith— faith in this strange judgment, and the invitation and constraint to submit to it. Jesus Christ for us as a supremely objective happening is the word of reconciliation on the basis of which there is a ministry of reconciliation.” 24 Barth’s preferred motif of reconciliation for the atonement is evident here also. Even as he speaks of its judicial element, he couches it in the personal metaphor of reconciliation. The justification of the justice of God in the atonement, an important theme for Barth (and for Paul!) is that Jesus Christ does not die as if he were any man dying for the rest of humanity. He lives and dies as the man, the Man who ontologically in himself defines the true human person. The seeming “injustice” of an agent being punished in the place of another is answered in part by the representative nature of this Man, the eschatos Adam. It would seem to be the case that recapitulation is necessary to the participatory and substitutionary nature of the atonement in Karl Barth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bonhoeffer’s account of atonement is unsurprisingly similar to that of Barth. There is, as in Barth, an emphasis on the benevolence of God which undergirds the presence of the whole Godhead in the atonement. There is also an emphasis on recapitulation and victory that also mirrors Barth. And there is an acknowledgment, despite the priority and primacy of the filial in salvation

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which is seen by Bonhoeffer as theosis, an acknowledgment of the necessity of the forensic and judicial. This is evident especially in the Ethics in which the grand theme of justifying grace, as the grounding of Christian ethics requires a judicial mechanism for its effecting. 25 Just one passage illustrates the nuanced way in which Bonhoeffer refers to the atonement as both ontological and juridical. The notion of the recapitulated man for humanity is evident also in this section. “Ecce homo!” says Bonhoeffer of Jesus: Behold the man who has been taken to Himself by God, sentenced and executed and awakened by God to a new life. Behold the Risen One. The “yes” which God addresses to man has achieved its purpose through and beyond judgement and death. God’s love for man has proved stronger than death. . . . God’s love has become the death of death and the life of man. Humanity has been made new in Jesus Christ, who became man, was crucified and rose again. What befell Christ befell all men, for Christ was man. The new man has been created. 26

Bruce McCormack McCormack’s concern about the general ontological deficit in the teaching of systematic theology in seminaries, Reformed and otherwise, is well taken, and his work furthers our aims well in demonstrating the crucial importance of the specific ontology of the person of Christ and the triune nature of God to an understanding of the atonement. He exposes a proof text approach as one evidence of the ontological deficit in some evangelical thought. One level only slightly above this is the tendency to ground theology in biblical exegesis but never to get to the systematics. 27 Another unfortunate tendency is to lay a greater stress on the attributes of God than on the central reality of who God is as the revealed Trinity. This is the consideration of the work of Christ in soteriology in a way that is disconnected from the being of Christ, his incarnation, by which God the Son became one with humanity that we might become one with him. It is an emphasis on the ordo salutis that makes no reference to its connection to the ordo historia of the Lord Jesus Christ. “Where the person of Christ is abstracted from his work,” says McCormack, “our treatment of the Chalcedonian formula becomes all too ‘metaphysical,’” on the one hand, and, on the other, “where the work of Christ is abstracted from his person, our understanding of that work is severely attenuated,” 28 leaving our traditional evangelical answers wanting. In later chapters, under the themes of atonement in the incarnation and in the vicarious humanity of Christ, we will explore in detail the connection between the person and the work of Christ, and in particular that these are not merely a preparation for the work of the cross, but each is part of the atonement. But here I wish to emphasize how the incarnation and the vicarious obedience of Christ do give context and character to what transpires in the

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climactic hour of the reconciling work of God in Christ, by the Spirit. These realities of the history of the person and work of Christ do in fact help to palliate the critiques of the atoning work accomplished in the death of Christ and especially the penal substitution metaphor and model. Here I wish to return with McCormack to rehearse the manner in which Karl Barth employs a “well-ordered” Christology and so “well-ordered” 29 Trinitarian ontological realities, without defending them in detail here. I will resonate with McCormack’s (Barth’s) apologia for penal substitution, with just one reservation that in order to offer what I think is a more convincing defense, the social and perichoretic nature of the Trinity must be acknowledged, a theme I will develop mainly in the next chapter. What is it that liberal and now even evangelical theologians find so distasteful in the penal substitution account of the atonement developed in the Reformation especially by Calvin and then Charles Hodge in the Old Princeton theology? McCormack speaks, for example, of popular American evangelical theologian Philip Yancey who in 1999 expressed his ambivalence about the doctrine and offered in its place the idea of the death of Christ as a death in solidarity with “victims.” 30 In his book, The Nonviolent Atonement, 31 Denny Weaver has also given a comprehensive account of the turn toward Christus Victor and away from penal substitution within academic scholarship. Greg Boyd is one example cited. He offers the Christus Victor model over against penal substitution, not in concert with penal substitution. Similarly, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Chalke has championed the resurrection within the Christus Victor model, not as a complementary model to penal substitution, or even as a preparation for contextualizing it. Rather, he has argued that “while the New Testament has a number of atonement images, penal substitution is not one of them.” 32 Chalke is one among others who has spoken of the idea of penal substitution in which “a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed” as divine child abuse. 33 One has sympathy with Chalke when penal substitution is construed in those terms, that is, as involving divine persons who seem more like individuals, rather than Trinitarian persons-in-relation. This caricature of penal substitution is sadly what can be heard in some evangelical preaching, and Chalke is right to correct that. But rather than reject penal substitution, it seems better to nuance it with proper description of the incarnational and Christological and Trinitarian realities that undergird it. Chalke further objects, in particular, to the theology proper he discerns behind penal substitution, in that it presumes a God of retribution, “a God who is first and foremost concerned with retribution flowing from wrath against sinners.” Chalke prefers to speak of the character of God as love, and not retribution. He points out that in the parable of the prodigal son, forgiveness is offered without retribution. To this moral critique of God in penal substitution may be added the further accusations that penal substitution apparently has no

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rationale for the resurrection of Christ in atonement, and then, a soteriological one—forgiveness may be had without transformation of the life of the convert. The objection to violence in God undergirds Chalke’s work also, and in the work of others Weaver has considered in his monograph. 34 Apart from inadequate nuancing of the theological realities that offer a reasoned defense of penal substitution, it seems to me that most of these objections are neglectful of the mystery of the cross. The reasoning is far too anthropocentric and restrictive and finite. Listening to the gravitas of Mozart’s Agnus Dei from his Requiem in D Minor makes one freshly aware that the depth of the atoning sufferings of Christ cannot be explained by the other models, not even the Christus Victor model. The metaphor “Lamb of God” and its connotations cannot and should not be trivialized! Too much depth is sounded in the Old Testament sacrificial system and what it anticipates and provides a window for. Too much depth is expounded in the texts of Paul and Peter and John and the anonymous master who authored Hebrews. One cannot fathom this mystery but one can adore the depth. Building on our introduction to Barth’s atonement theology in the previous chapter, let us proceed to see how the ontological realities spoken of in Barth’s theology by McCormack may help abate some of these objections. It is not that Barth is the only source for clarification and defense of penal substitution, but I agree with McCormack that “he is the best.” 35 I invite you to listen along as McCormack speaks in Barth’s voice in a defense that is principally about the ontological nature of the atonement, that is, about the home of the atonement in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore in the union of his person with humanity by the incarnation, and his union with the Father and the Spirit in the triune being of God. It is actually unsurprising to find the objections above to penal substitution in the Western and evangelical tradition given the profound neglect within Western and evangelical theology of the doctrine of the Trinity. A perspective offered here, in this respect over against the opinion of McCormack, is that this is exacerbated by the Western emphasis on the oneness of the Godhead at the expense of personhood, of substantialist metaphsyics at the expense of relational/personal metaphysics. Isolating the oneness of the Trinity from its threeness allows no space for the being and person of the Son to be incarnate, to be the God-Man mediator and sin-bearer, as he most certainly is in the revelation of the economic Trinity. On the other hand, isolating personhood from oneness, that is from coinherence of being and action (the Trinitarian axiom of the indivisibility of the works of the Trinity), could lead to the accusation of cosmic child abuse. Affirming this coinherence, that is the presence of the Father in the Son, and the presence of the Spirit in the Son, and so on, permits a view of the atonement in which all three persons are always present, including all through the hours of the cross. It allows for “God to be in Christ reconciling the world to himself ” (2 Cor.

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5:19). It allows for the possibility that God, the whole triune Godhead, somehow make space mysteriously for the fallen and sinful humanity Christ assumed and brings to the cross, and reconciles and justifies it with justice, so that he is “both just and the justifier of those who believe in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26) A proper view of what is going on in the person of Jesus will also help us to see that he is both God the Judge and the representative Man, in ways that move far beyond any notion of child abuse. It is there that McCormack (Barth) begins his considerations. As McCormack reviews the remarkable Chalcedonian formula concerning the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ, he first and rightly emphasizes that it was constructive, not merely a setting of boundaries of orthodox definition. For example, although the definition sided with Cyril of Alexandria over against Nestorius in asserting that the two natures subsisted in the one person, thus closing the door on adoptionism, it also paid due attention to one of the concerns of Nestorius which had to do with the kind of union that resulted from the coming together of deity and humanity in their completeness. As McCormack stresses, the “formula affirms that each ‘nature’ is preserved in its integrity after being united in a single Person.” 36 The resulting constructive formulation concerns “not God in a human (as One who indwells an already existing human being) but God as a human” 37 in one Person, the only-begotten Son, God the Logos. Despite its great accomplishments, McCormack draws attention to two residual Christological issues that remained unresolved at Chalcedon. They were not live issues at the time, but the open-endedness of the formula has made these “unattended issues” challenging for Christology in both the East and the West ever since. The first issue has to do with the possibility of the communication of attributes between the two natures (communicatio idiomatum) of Christ. By drawing on the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, McCormack suggests that the communication of divine life from the divine to the human nature of Christ was affirmed by the Church Fathers in the era in which the Council of Chalcedon occurred. This is surmised from how he and the Church Fathers as a whole viewed soteriology as first an ontological matter (overcoming the corruption of being resulting in death) before it was a moral or forensic matter (the need for justification or forgiveness). From the moment of the incarnation, the Logos infused life into the human nature so that humanity, represented ontologically in the human nature of Christ, may be divinized (given life by God, and made like God, in terms of character and morally speaking). The role of the incarnation in divinization (theosis), or salvation, viewed from this ontological perspective, will be considered in detail in chapter 9. The immediate point of relevance here is that whereas this communication of life to the human nature by the divine nature of Christ was considered to be legitimate by the Church Fathers, they would not likely have

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entailed in this the communication of other attributes such as omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, for the simple reason that this was not necessary in the strictly soteriological nature of the communication, and in any case, this would have confounded the two natures, making the human nature divine. Divinization did not entail the human becoming divine, in a metaphysical sense, but rather it enabled the human subject to have divine life in order to be and become fully human. The distinctness and the union of the human and divine natures in their unconfused union is precisely the basis on which humans are divinized without becoming God. That is, they participate in the divine nature, as 2 Peter 1:4 indicates, but this means that as sons and daughters of God, they receive his life and then become morally like God. The important point to note here is that, on the one hand, the absence of a statement on communicatio idiomatum at Chalcedon left the door open for someone like Luther to invoke it to account for the ubiquity of the human nature of the ascended Christ and therefore to justify the bodily presence of Jesus at the Eucharist. On the other hand, the tradition, expressed through Cyril of Alexandria, did not justify this move on Luther’s part. As McCormack insists, “the ancient church would not have taken ‘divinization’ quite this far.” 38 McCormack expresses the view, however, that this passing on of the life of God from the Logos to the human nature in theosis not only paved the way for Luther, but was even on its own a means for the confusion of the two natures. In fact, the assumption that the Logos would exercise a direct influence on the human nature of Christ was one which the Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) stood stoutly against, at least in its extreme version as expressed in the Apollinarians who held that Jesus Christ did not have a human soul. The divine nature replaced the human soul in the teaching of Apollinarius. Even though this was an extreme way of accomplishing their aim, what motivated the Apollinarians was that the Logos should be “the ruling principle of Christ’s human nature.” 39 This might have been achieved in a less drastic way by invoking communication of the kind just considered. The result of both moves would have been the same, the human nature being diminished to become a mere “passive instrument in the hands of the Logos . . . the object upon which the Logos acts.” 40 What is crucial to understanding the nature of the atonement in all its aspects—the incarnation, the vicarious humanity, the cross and the resurrection—is that the fullness and identity and completeness of the humanity of Christ must be intact. Only if this is the case can we be sure that “the mind and will that are proper to Christ’s human nature” have cooperated “fully and freely in every work of the God-human.” 41 Removing the human soul and replacing it with the divine nature is bad enough, but the invoking of the communicatio idiomatum risks the same conclusion, at least without careful nuance. It is legitimate to

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say that the human nature communicated to the divine nature, but not the other way around with respect to everything but life. The second issue left unattended at Chalcedon was the exact identity of the Logos. The first option is that the Logos-incarnate was merely a man indwelt by the Spirit. Within the scope of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, however, there are two real options: (i) the subject who brings about “reconciliation and redemption is the Logos simpliciter,” 42 which is to say that the Logos is the primary agent and the humanity the receptive or instrumental agent, in a manner which reflects the Apollinarian tendency in the Chalcedonian formula; and (ii) the subject who effects reconciliation and redemption “is the God-human in his divine-human unity.” 43 This issue might appear to have been resolved at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (681), where the Council confirmed that in the union of the two natures in one person there were two wills and “two natural principles of action” which in the union “undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion.” McCormack raises the concern that the notion of “no partition, no division” is challenging given the inclination of a “majority of theologians” in the tradition, from the Fathers through to the Reformation, to divide up the work of Christ to each of the natures such that “some actions were assigned to the divine nature and some to the human nature alone.” 44 The natures were thus spoken of as “‘subjects’ in their own right.” 45 The work of Christ as a “single unitary subject” is shaded by two sets of distinct works which complement each other only in the sense that they are “empirically distinguishable” as to their source and unified only “in the sense of conducing to a single end.” 46 McCormack is convinced that the reason so many theologians have this tendency has to do with the concept of divine immutability widely held by these theologians. The pay-off was that this division of labor facilitated protection against the idea that God could suffer and die. McCormack wryly adds that “[c]onfronted with theopaschitism, even the most Cyrilline theologian often turns into a Nestorian.” 47 In the end, both the Apollinarian tendency to have the Logos as the operative agent in achieving the work of salvation through the instrumental agency of the human nature, and the tendency toward Nestorianism in the “flight from a mutable God,” have the same origin. This, according to McCormack, is a move in which the Logos is abstracted from his human nature with the consequence either of making the human nature an entity which is “acted upon by the Logos” or of making the human nature “a subject in its own right in order to seal the Logos off hermetically from all that befalls that human nature from without.” 48 He argues further that the Logos is abstracted from the human nature Christ assumed and thus the Chalcedonian formula is interpreted as the Logos simpliciter option mentioned above (second option). The solution requires some elaboration on the somewhat abstract doctrine of the Logos in the Chalcedonian formula. This is expressed in such a way that the subject of the incarnate Logos who accomplishes reconciliation and

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redemption on behalf of humanity is the God-human in his divine-human unity, and not the Logos alone. The nature of this union for McCormack is one in which the human nature engages in real “communication,” to the Logos, including both “acts and experiences,” but that there is not a “corresponding ‘communication’” in the reverse direction. 49 This means that the human remains human in divinization, while saying that God “can take on human nature, and in it suffer and die—without ceasing to be God.” 50 The challenge that remains is to answer the question of divine immutability. This account of the incarnation (indeed, any orthodox account of it) requires an explanation of how the eternal Logos can come into union with humanity and still be identical to who he has been throughout eternity prior to the incarnation. This is how McCormack sets us up for Karl Barth’s “historicized” Chalcedonianism. Barth’s “historicized” Chalcedonianism One particular understanding of immutability is grounded in the substantialist ontology of the ancient Greeks. For the Greek, the essence of a person is defined by the substance of that person, and is as substance, complete in itself “apart from, and prior to the decisions, acts and relations by means of which the life of the person in question is constituted.” 51 The essence of God on this account is complete apart from, and prior to, all his decisions and acts. What God does, “manifests, or gives expression” to what he is, but what he does, on this account, is not in any sense “constitutive of what God is.” 52 As McCormack shows, however, this substantialist understanding of God’s being works for all of God’s activities except for one important reality in God, the incarnation. On such an account, the human nature of Jesus Christ cannot be understood to be “the human nature of the eternal Logos.” This is because the attributing of any human qualities or actions to the Logos would contravene the “immutability” of the Logos. McCormack rightly concludes that the unity of Logos and the human nature is no longer viable on this account and can only be sustained by the “abandonment of substantialist thinking and the ‘abstract’ epistemology that makes it possible.” 53 This, it seems to me, is a classic test case with respect to how knowledge is gained in theology. A logically positivist and philosophically a priori way of epistemology is contrasted with what may be called a critical realist approach, one that looks to empirical data, to real history and asks in an a posteriori fashion, what can I learn regarding who God is and who Christ is from the reality of the incarnation. What does the reality of the union of the Logos with the human nature reflect of the reality of who God-in-Christ is? Enter Barth. Barth’s theological method is indeed the reverse of the substantialist approach that has just been described, and is indeed a posteriori and in accordance with critical realism. Barth wishes to “learn from the incarnation itself

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what it means to be God, and what it means to be human.” 54 What the “divine” and the “human” means cannot be determined in advance of the “data,” that is, the incarnation as described in Holy Scripture and the creeds. This epistemological point is made well by McCormack. 55 With regard to what “human” means, McCormack offers a theological anthropology in the same vein. Anthropology is not first gleaned from philosophy or the social sciences. Likewise, what it means to be “human” is not to be learned in advance from philosophy, the social sciences, and so forth. These must be assimilated to an understanding of the human as learned from the history of the Man Christ Jesus “in whom human nature is restored, exalted and made to be what God intended it to be.” 56 Given this approach, that is, beginning with historical revelation, the right question to ask is how the being of God must be constituted in eternity “if he can do what we have seen him to do in time?” 57 To answer the question as to what conditions in God allow for the possibility of the sending of the Son in the incarnation, and the giving of the Spirit, in time, Barth appeals to the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of election. With respect to the Trinity, Barth appeals to the view of the correspondence of the immanent Trinity to what has been revealed in the economic Trinity (they are not identical as in LaCugna or Rahner, but they do correspond). That is, there is a correspondence between the processions of the immanent Trinity and the missions of the economic Trinity. In this vein, McCormack affirms that the act of the incarnation of the Son is contained within the eternal generation of the Son, and similarly with respect to the Spirit’s outpouring. 58 The movements of the Son and the Spirit in “lived history” 59 correspond to the reality of their particular and personal movements or “processions” in eternity. So how does Barth’s doctrine of election feature in his exposition of the incarnation governed by the historical and the nature of the immanent Trinity as revealed by the economic? It answers the why question, that is the question, “Why God is not changed by the incarnation and the giving of the Spirit?” Here McCormack offers his interpretation of how election, as Barth understood it, determines his divine being from all eternity. It is acknowledged that not all Barthian scholars see eye to eye on this, to say the least. McCormack’s viewpoint is that the doctrine of election in Barth refers not to a choice God made to select some humans for salvation, and others for damnation, in the classical Calvinist understanding of this. Before election had anything to do with humans, whether some or all, it had to do with God’s decision with respect to himself. God is, as Barth would say, the benevolent God, the God for us. He chooses eternally not to live without humanity. “God chooses to be God only in the covenant of grace,” and McCormack opines (reflecting Barth, he believes), that inherent within this decision was/is the determination of God for incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit. McCormack stresses that this is a decision of an eternal nature, in that

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there could never be a time when this decision had already been enacted. 60 Thus we may consider the being of God in eternity as a “being-in-act; a being that is realized in the act of self-determination for incarnation.” 61 In so doing, McCormack eliminates the idea of any existence or mode of being of God prior to his eternal act of self-determination. 62 One can anticipate where McCormack is going with this, which is the relevance of this to the incarnation debates about immutability. It is to state that since God is an eternal being-in-act, then when God does that which is in accordance with what he determined in eternity for himself, “no change is brought about in him on an ontological level.” 63 There is a correspondence between God’s being-in-act in eternity and his being-in-act in time. They are identical as to their content, even if distinct with respect to setting. What, in a nutshell, does this do for immutability? It is preserved but “newly defined” 64 by this historical mode of thinking in which the divine essence is constituted by God’s “sovereign and free act of Self-determination in eternity.” This replaces the substantialist thinking. In fact, on this account, immutability now means, “that in all that God does, he is fully himself.” 65 On this account the second person of the Trinity when he assumed a human nature in the virgin’s womb, did not become something new, something he had not been before. For Barth, Christ was incarnandus, of the incarnation, before he was incarnate. He never was the Logos simpliciter. McCormack concludes that the language “eternal Son” when abstracted from “his human nature to be assumed,” is “to engage in illegitimate metaphysical speculation.” 66 His name is Jesus Christ for all eternity, on this account. 67 What may be inferred regarding the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus? On the basis of this historicized ontology, which does not depart from but reinterprets the Chalcedonian formula, substantialist thinking, which tends to abstract the Logos from his human nature and vice versa, is displaced by an understanding of the God-human Jesus as a divine-human unity. As a result, for the Logos as human, “whatever happens to the God-human in and through his human nature happens to the God-human in his divinehuman unity.” 68 For example, death happens to the Logos as human. The experience of human death as a human experience is taken up “into the divine life and does not remain sealed from it.” 69 Does God suffer death in the death of Jesus Christ? McCormack answers with a cautious “yes.” The caution arises in the concern that there is a right and a wrong way to say this. To say that the Logos simpliciter dies, or that the eternal Son of God dies, is the wrong way. “Death in God” (Hegel), that is in the being of God would as McCormack affirms, rupture the eternal relations within the Godhead causing a “rift in the very being of God.” 70 The idea that the Father and the Son could have their relation severed would mean, as McCormack confirms, that “the Son would not be God in the one event in which we most need him to be God.” The idea of “death in God” is indeed as Barth asserts, “supreme

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blasphemy.” 71 As Barth himself states, “God gives Himself, but he does not give Himself away. He does not give up being God in becoming a creature, in becoming man. He does not cease to be God . . . And when he dies in unity with this man, death does not gain any power over Him.” 72 Yet it seems to me the Hegelian idea of death in God, a rupture of divine relations, is precisely what Steve Chalke and others seem to assume when they speak of cosmic child abuse. No such abuse is possible. First, because what the Son as human, the Logos as human, undergoes on the cross, he experiences not just as human, but as divine. The subject who dies is not the Logos simpliciter, but the God-human, in his divine-human unity. In the event of the suffering and death of the cross, “the Logos as human is taking a human experience into the unity of his person.” 73 But as person, he is a divine-human person, and therefore in at least a mediated sense, the whole Godhead experiences this suffering and death. The God-human who dies is just that, God the Son, in union with his humanity. But further, as the Godhuman he is God with the Father and the Spirit, and those relations may not be broken. The objection to penal substitution that it involves the punishment by the Father of an isolated, forsaken Son, or even a person who is human simpliciter, is not found anywhere in Scripture, nor on historically orthodox theological grounds. It is simply a straw man. In conclusion, atonement is accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ, in union with the Father and Holy Spirit, and in union with humanity. Participation is thus the framework for atonement. All of this finds its expression in the fact that salvation inheres in the priesthood of Christ, before and after his ascension. He is the priest who becomes one with humanity, offers himself without spot to God on their behalf, and now lives in the power of an indissoluble life to make intercession for them, a sequence expressed eloquently in the epistle to the Hebrews. Space does not permit a weighty treatment here of his high priestly ministry. 74 The assertion by John Calvin that Christ’s substitutionary death and his intercession at the right hand of the Father are inseparable parts of his one priestly work will suffice to illustrate this point. 75 This is evident especially in his commentary on 1 Tim. 2: 6, where he writes, “there is a necessary connection between the two things, the sacrifice of the death of Christ, and his continual intercession. (Romans 8:34.) These are the two parts of his priesthood.” 76 Calvin thus speaks of Christ’s death on the cross, as an intercession 77 and Christ’s heavenly intercession is thus seen not as a repetition of the atonement but as a reflection and representation of his death. Thus, as Richard Muller has said, in Calvin’s view “the work of satisfaction and the act of intercession belong to the same official function of Christ, the priestly.” 78

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NOTES 1. Eucharistic Prayer 1, Scottish Liturgy with Alternative Eucharistic Prayers, published by the General Synod Office of the Scottish Episcopal Church, 21 Grosvenor Crescent, Edinburgh, EH12 5EE, 9. 2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus against the Heresies, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1981), (commentary on III 16 3.), 53. 3. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation, 53. 4. John Calvin, Institutes, 2.8.4. 5. John Owen, The Holy Spirit, His Gifts and Power: Exposition of the Spirit’s Name, Nature, Personality, Dispensation, Operations and Effects, abridged by George Burder (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1960), 93–96. See also Alan Spence, “Christ’s Humanity and Ours: John Owen” in C. Schwöbel and C. E. Gunton (eds.), Persons Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 74–97. 6. Karl Barth, CD I/2, 147–159; II/1, 397–398; III/2, 209–216. 7. Gregory of Nazianzus, “To Cledonius the Priest against Apollinarius” Epistle 101, trans. Edwin Hamilton Gifford. http://biblehub.com/library/cyril/select_letters_of_saint_gregory_ nazianzen/to_cledonius_the_priest_against.htm or http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a. htm. 8. Oliver Crisp, “Did Christ Have a Fallen Human Nature?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, No.3 (2004), 270–288. 9. T. F. Torrance, “Incarnation and Atonement: Theosis and Henosis in the Light of Modern Scientific Rejection of Dualism,” Society of Ordained Scientists, Bulletin No. 7 (Edgeware, Middlesex, Spring 1992), 12. 10. Fred Sanders, “Introduction to Christology: Chalcedonian Categories for the Gospel Narratives,” in Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler, eds., Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Intermediate Christology (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2007), 32. 11. Fred Sanders, “Introduction to Christology,” 31. Emphasis added. 12. T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark; Revised edition, 2000), 53. 13. T. F. Torrance, “The Atoning Obedience of Christ,” Moravian Theological Seminary Bulletin (1959), 66. See also Bruce L. McCormack, “For Us and Our Salvation: Incarnation and Atonement in the Reformed Tradition,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 43 (1998), 314. 14. Bruce L. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement” in The Glory of the Atonement, eds. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James, III (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 346–366. 15. Bruce L. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 348. 16. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 222. 17. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 238. 18. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 253, emphases added. 19. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 222–223, emphases added. 20. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 222–223, emphases added. 21. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 222–223, emphases added. 22. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 223. 23. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 223. 24. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 271. 25. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 78–124. 26. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 79–80. 27. B. B. Warflield’s exhortation to New Testament scholars to is apposite. “The task of Biblical Theology, in a word, is the task of coördinating the scattered results of continuous exegesis into a concatenated whole, whether with reference to a single book of Scripture or to a body of related books or to the whole Scriptural fabric. . . . Systematic Theology is not founded on the direct and primary results of the exegetical process; it is founded on the final and complete results of exegesis as exhibited in Biblical Theology. Not exegesis itself, then, but

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Biblical Theology, provides the material for Systematics. Biblical Theology is not, then, a rival of Systematics; it is not even a parallel product of the same body of facts, provided by exegesis; it is the basis and source of Systematics.” See “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” in The Necessity of Systematic Theology, ed. John Jefferson Davis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980), 65 (49–87). 28. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 347–348. 29. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 348. 30. Philip Yancey, “Why I Can Feel Your Pain,” Christianity Today 43 (1999), 136, cited in McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 348. 31. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 32. This is Weaver’s summation of Chalke’s position. See J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 305. 33. Steve Chalke and Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 182; Steve Chalke, “Redeeming Cross from Death to Life” in Consuming Passion: Why the Killing of Jesus Really Matters, Simon Barrow and Jonathan Bartley, eds. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005), (19–26) 22. 34. See J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 279–320. These include Darby Kathleen Ray, Brian McLaren, Thomas N. Finger, Gregory Boyd, Stephen Finlan, Leanne Van Dyk, Anthony Bartlett and S. Mark Heim, Alan Mann and Steve Chalke. Defenses of the traditional atonement are also discussed (254–278). These include those in the work of Peter Schmeichen, Daniel Bell, Richard Mouw, Hans Boersma, Robert Sherman and “Tradition.” 35. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 349. 36. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 350. 37. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 350. This succinct phrase McCormack acknowledges to T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 150. He notes also that the favoring of Cyril by the Council is also evident from its affirmation that Mary the Virgin is the God-bearer (theotokos), the issue which in fact had precipitated the Council. 38. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 351. 39. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 352. 40. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 352. 41. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 353. 42. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 353. 43. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 353. 44. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 354. 45. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 354. 46. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 354–355. 47. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 355. 48. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 355. 49. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 356. 50. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 356. 51. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 357. 52. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 357. Emphases original. 53. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 357. 54. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 358. 55. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 358. McCormack insists that we do not deduce the being and acts of God by “speculation” or the “three classical ways (i.e. the via negativa, the via eminentiae and the via causalitatis)” but rather “through an attentive following-after of the movement of God into history in all its concreteness.” 56. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 358. This weighting of things learned from the sciences as valid (theology), yet under the ultimate domain of revealed, conciliar theology (theology) finds consonance with my own assessment as expressed in Echoes of Coinherence: Trinitarian Theology and Science (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017). 57. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 358. 58. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 358–359. Obviously McCormack here represents the Western filioque understanding, but the Eastern view would not change his essential point here.

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59. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. 60. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. Italics original. 61. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. 62. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. This idea has been challenged by George Hunsinger who proposes that there is a life in the eternal triune God prior to this decree, and that God at some point in eternity covenanted to be for humanity and to become human in the Son. See, for example, George Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,” Modern Theology 24/2 (2008), 179–198. This is a difficult issue, and I deeply respect both theologians and their work, but if I have to choose a side, it will be that of McCormack on this issue. 63. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. 64. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359. 65. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 359–360. 66. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 360. 67. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 360. 68. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 360. 69. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 360. 70. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 361. 71. CD, III/1, 185, cited in McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 361. 72. CD, III/1, 185, cited in McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 361. 73. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 361. 74. See, for example, Paul Molnar, “Resurrection and the Atonement in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance.” In Adam J. Johnson, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (Bloomsbury Companions) (London: Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2017), 52–76; and Robert Sherman, King, Priest and Prophet: A Trinitarian Theology of Atonement (New York/London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 169–218. 75. See John Calvin, Institutes 2.16.2, Institutes 2.15.6. I am indebted to Jacob Raju for drawing my attention to this in a term paper in Theology II, 2018. 76. Jean Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), Vol. 21, 60. 77. John Calvin, Institutes 2.16.2. 78. Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 102. Muller points to the limitation of the priestly intercession to the elect in order to show that the scope of the sacrifice was also limited.

Chapter Three

The Being and Act of the Persons of the Trinity in Atonement

In this chapter, total atonement as the full participation of all three of the Persons of the Trinity in atonement will be considered. Important Trinitarian axioms, including the reality that each of the Persons is in the other, by coinherence, will be expounded and shown to overcome, to a large measure, the “cosmic child abuse” misunderstanding of penal substitution. A remarkable aspect of Christian faith is that its two greatest realities transcend human reason, and that these two great mysteries are actually compounded in that they intertwine and interpenetrate each other in the mysterious moments of the life and death of Jesus. I am referring to the Trinity, the incarnation, and the atonement. Caricatures of the atonement abound when the atonement is described in a way that is isolated from Trinitarian concerns. Well intended preachers who say things like “Jesus was separated from his Father as he endured the wrath of the Father for our sins,” actually play into the criticism that penal substitution is cosmic child abuse. Most importantly, they misquote Scripture, failing to notice the careful wording of the cry of dereliction which Jesus uttered on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” It is notably not “My Father, My Father” that Jesus says. In other sayings of Jesus on the cross around this saying, Jesus does use “Father,” and he opts not to use that title in this saying, not only because he is careful to reflect the Psalm (22) he is quoting faithfully, but because the theological reality he is reflecting in this saying is not one of an isolated individual Son making atonement with an angry individual Father. It is of a Trinitarian Son who has come into union with humanity, and is representing humanity and its sin, in the presence of the Father and the Spirit with whom he is in eternal union, a union that cannot be broken, ever! And as Karl Barth has said, that Son himself, in his own person, in the depths of his 47

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own being, is both the Judge and the Judged. As God he is judge, the one who in communion with his Father and the Spirit can choose to become the judged, and justly accomplished justification of sinners. As the judged, within his own being he endures the judgment and wrath of the Divine Judge, which includes himself. In fact, Jesus spoke of himself as the one person within the Trinity to whom all judgment has been committed (John 5:22–23). This text actually states that “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” Of course, even though the primary work of judgment is given to the Son, a Trinitarian axiom is that the works of the Trinity are coinherent, that is, they are undivided. The Son is judging and the Father is judging in the Son. Thus the Father is present in this act of judgment. The Son is also being judged, and in a mediated way, the Father enters into that agony. It is often assumed that John 5 refers to the final judgment at which the Son will be the touchstone of humanity, the one who metes out divine judgment. However, since the cross is spoken of as the event in which the condemnation and wrath of God upon humans and human sin is administered (Romans 3:25–26), we must assume that the primary locus of that judgment is in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ, the Son, at the cross. Thus, this event in which the Son offers himself up, is not to be construed as if he were a helpless son being abused. It is of a Divine Person who of his own volition lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13) and even his enemies (Rom. 5:6–11). He is both willing victim and judge in his own person, and is with the whole Godhead in this experience as the previous chapter has shown. The telling way in which the atonement is actually described in the New Testament is that God comes to the cross. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself ” Paul states in 2 Cor. 5:19. That means the totality of what God is, as the one God, in all three persons. Paul expresses this again in that core passage on the atonement in Romans, 3:22–28. The heart of it is that a righteousness has been given through faith in (of ) Jesus “[w]hom God has set forth to be a propitiation” (3:24, NKJV). God gives the gift of Jesus as our propitiation, the means by which his own wrath is addressed and exhausted. Furthermore, the Spirit of God is spoken of explicitly as being present at the cross. The writer of Hebrews states that Jesus accomplishes the purifying work of atonement as an act in which he “through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God” (Heb. 9:14). The intertwining of atonement and the Trinity leads us first and foremost to a posture of humility in considering these matters. Before even entering this discussion, the limits of human reason must be acknowledged even as we seek to use reason to plumb the depths that we can plumb. If Christ crucified is “foolishness to the Greeks” (1 Cor. 1:23), explicating some of its mysteries employing yet another great mystery seems to compound this foolishness. Yet this is the reality of a faith which is discernible only by the Spirit. And

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Scripture leaves us no option other than this, for it unapologetically speaks of the cross in Trinitarian terms. In a “buffered” society (Charles Taylor) it is our task to proclaim or witness to the cross and the triune God of the cross, rather than to offer rationalistic apologetics. What is clear enough from the biblical accounts and exposition of the atonement is that apart from the Trinity, the atonement does indeed look like cosmic child abuse. As already stated, a Trinitarian axiom involves the principle of indivisibility of the persons and their acts, to be sure, so that it is understood that all three persons are present at every moment of the cross event. But it is also understood that apart from the irreducible differentiated identity and integrity and responsiveness of the divine persons, the atonement is a nonsense, for though it is clearly not an interaction between two separate individuals, it does involve persons conveyed as such in the economy and the gospel record, and it does involve one person, in particular, who, unlike the other two divine persons, has taken on human flesh to stand in the place of humanity before his God. It thus involves three persons-in-relation who though one in essence and communion, are irreducibly distinct. So, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. Our approach will of necessity be humble, it will seek understanding grounded in faith and enabled by the Spirit. There will be limits to the reach of our finite reason. We will not be able to plumb the mysteries fully, but we will at least be able to adore the depths. In proceeding toward a discussion of the reflexive nature of the doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement, the model of penal substitution will be the primary model under discussion. All of the models as they unfold in later chapters must invoke Trinitarian consideration. The term “Trinitarian” can include incarnational realities or pneumatological realities. That is, we could say, the atonement involves the Trinity extensively or descriptively. For example, the models of recapitulation and the vicarious humanity of Christ obviously involve the work of the Son whose life is offered up to his God on behalf of humanity. However, when it comes to satisfaction and especially penal substitution, what is transpiring may be considered to be more intensively Trinitarian. It is those dynamics that will occupy our attention in this chapter. It is in consideration of this substitution model that a de-trinitized view of the work of sacrifice leads to caricatures of substitutionary atonement. It is in this arena where most mistakes are made by zealous preachers of the cross. Our focus in the following chapter will be to alert us to be wary of an extrinsic view of the transactional reality of the cross that treats Christ’s work in a manner that neglects his personhood. The forensics are never dissociated from participation and the filial. The Act and Being of God are kept together. The ontological union of God with humanity in Christ, his becoming one with us, is prerequisite to what he accomplishes on our behalf. And our union with Christ is also logically prior to our enjoying the benefits

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of that atonement—justification and sanctification—our topics in chapter 15. This notion of atonement within the person of Christ must of course be part of our Trinitarian discussion, as has already and will be emphasized further. Gathering up what we have said already by way of introduction, and in preparation for developing this theme of the Trinity in the atonement, we may say that there are two Trinitarian axioms which it is essential to observe in order to have some grasp of the biblical statements about the atonement and the Trinity. Without these and without holding them in tension we cannot have a credible atonement. Again, the first is that of the differentiation of persons, which involves the doctrine of appropriations of particular works to each person, and the second is the indivisible nature of these persons and their acts. Historically the church has been in agreement regarding some basic tenets of the doctrine of the Trinity, with some differences with regard to the nature of divine persons, and how the threeness relates to the oneness, and also on the filioque clause. Thus, a discussion of the atonement and the Trinity must be conducted with a focus on those aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity on which the tradition is united, with some awareness also of the contested aspects. I wish to postulate what might be called a reflexive relationship between the Trinity and the atonement. THE TRINITY-ATONEMENT REFLEXIVE TRAJECTORY Penal substitution (and all legitimate models) have validity, if and only if, the nature of God as Trinity and the nature of the Son as both fully God and fully human is brought to bear on what happens in the atonement. If we are intended to discover the nature of the triune God by how he effects salvation and redeems humanity, and most Trinitarian scholars agree at least on this point, then it seems good to pursue and probe the depths of the mystery of the inner mechanism of the atonement for elucidation of the mystery of the being of the triune God, and then also to probe the nature and mystery of the triune God for some elucidation of the mysteries of the atonement. The Trinity is crucial to a proper understanding of the atonement in all its dynamics, including its “dereliction” dimension. Bearing in mind how the said two axioms of Trinitarian life must be held together, we may say that on the basis of the appropriation of works, it is the Son who becomes incarnate and who dies on the cross, and on the basis of indivisibility, the Father is always in the Son and the Son in the Father, and the Son works as the Father works (John 10:38; 5:19–20), even as the Son bears our sin. The Father suffers along with the Son, albeit mediately rather than immediately, and the Son offers himself to God by the eternal Spirit. The cross is a Trinitarian “moment.” Space is opened up by the hospitable God for fallen humanity represented by Christ.

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Furthermore, the Son is committed to this moment from before the creation of the world (Rev.13:8, NIV) and goes to the cross with full volition as a divine person, not as a hapless victim. All of this counters the “cosmic child abuse” charge. This does not remove all of the mystery of the cross, just as one cannot plumb the depths of the mystery of the Trinity. If God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19), we might expect some mystery in the cross! Jonathan Edwards once offered the opinion that the atonement was the reason that the doctrine of the Trinity was revealed to us. Yet, in an environment in which the doctrine of the Trinity was under siege, Jonathan Edwards stated that he wished to offer a defense of the Trinity beyond that of merely requiring it for the atonement. Thus Edwards used the psychological constitution of humanity as the ground for his articulation of the human mind, and thus, the mind and being of God. He had an aversion to using the atonement or sanctification to “prove” the Trinity by needing the Son to be divine for the first, and the Spirit for the second. Edwards takes issue with Calvin on this point. 1 By this Edwards meant that he wished to prove the Trinity philosophically. Our approach has the diametrically opposite trajectory. Edwards’s first assertion is the right one. The Trinity is indeed revealed from below in an a posteriori manner through the cross. It may be arrived at from first principles in an a priori fashion, but this only confirms the biblical and personal revelation given in history through the incarnation, cross, and ascent of Jesus—the Christ event and especially the cross, as that which was received by the apostles and then the church. Our approach seeks some clarity as to what transpired within the triune Godhead precisely in the atonement, recognizing that it must ultimately remain somewhat shrouded in mystery, given that biblical revelation is suggestive for the most part, rather than comprehensive. As indicated, the aims of the chapter orient therefore around a reflexive atonement-Trinity theme, in both directions: to further probe what the atonement meant, given the Trinitarian essence of God, and conversely, to gain insight into the triune being of God given what the atonement reveals of this. The latter trajectory (atonement to Trinity) of knowledge makes sense in light of a commitment to the sensible hermeneutical principle proposed by Karl Barth that the pathway toward understanding of the immanent Trinity is through what has been revealed to us in the economic Trinity. It is hoped that the atonement will indeed illumine who God is in se. Given that the atonement was designed in the freedom of the immanent Trinity in eternity past and carried out in time, this seems like a reasonable assumption. It seems to me that this principle of beginning with the revealed economic Trinity, including the atonement, is much neglected in recent debates on personhood and the unity of the Godhead. Barth stated in volume 1 of the Dogmatics, that “If the tropos apokalupseos is really a different one from the tropos hupar-

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cheos and if the huparchis is the real being of God, then this means that God in His revelation is not really God.” 2 Barth, in his approach to the doctrine of God, intentionally starts with the economic Trinity, and then at each point moves to the essential Trinity. His concern is to demonstrate that “God is what He reveals Himself to be.” 3 Thus, the activities of Father, Son, and Spirit in creation, reconciliation, and redemption do not only reveal a single God playing three different roles. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit eternally and antecedently in Himself, and therefore, is revealed as such in his dealings with us. Geoffrey Bromiley summarizes Barth’s methodology in this manner: “Noetically, the economic Trinity forms the starting point, but the eternal Trinity has ontic priority.” 4 The former trajectory (Trinity to atonement) anticipates that what we do discover by way of the workings of the incarnate Son by the Spirit within the Trinity, will serve to illumine the dynamics of the atonement also. Our overall pursuit in both directions of seeking light as to what transpired in the atonement within the incarnate Christ and within the Trinity is aimed also at taking little steps toward constructively gaining an understanding of the atonement and proposed models in light of recent research. In seeking to speak into some of these issues, the limited scope of a book of this nature dictates that great selectivity is required. I wish to focus discussion, therefore, primarily on the two trajectories outlined above. That is, the primary window into these matters will be incarnational and Trinitarian. Our development of the doctrine of the atonement will then, in succeeding chapters, seek to be consistent with this theme. Which Trinity? It is difficult not to be drawn into discussion of recent books and papers on the Trinity in which the social Trinity is compared (sometimes not very favorably), with the so-called “classical” Trinity, but the relevance of this to what transpires in the atonement makes it unavoidable. Adherents of the “classical” view wish supposedly to emphasize the oneness of God, and in certain instances prefer the term “relations” to persons (Ratzinger Benedict XVI), 5 in light of the proposal that the only differentiation of said relations is their eternal origin in the processions. Adherents of the social Trinity of a moderate kind wish to emphasize that the divine persons, hypostases, are indeed persons defined in the Cappadocian way as persons-in-relation, though not at the expense of the shared perichoretic essence or ousia and the shared perichoretic communion or koinonia. Perichoresis establishes both the oneness of essence and irreducible personhood. A recent proposal has been to offer an alternative name to the social Trinity view to distinguish it from sociopolitically reductionistic views of it. That name is the “relational Trinity.” 6 This seems passing strange to me since both views of the Trinity are in

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fact relational. Relations-as-persons, are nevertheless relational, and personsin-relation are relational. The greatest challenge for the classical view, which I prefer to call the Western Augustinian view, is that “relations” or “pure relation” as a term is a description of that which is between persons, and therefore runs the risk of modalism. Of course, the counter will be that persons-in-relation runs the risk of tritheism. The counter to that counter is that persons-in-relation are each completely in the other by coinherence, that the three subjects are therefore one subject, the three wills are also one will, by coinherence, and therefore we have one God and not three. In analyzing this controversy, care must be taken in one respect: it has been common to contrast Augustine and the Cappadocians and suggest the former is the psychological model of the Trinity emphasizing oneness, and the latter is the social model of the Trinity, emphasizing threeness. Along with this basic assumption came an understanding that the danger to avoid in the Augustinian model was modalism, and the danger of the Cappadocian approach, tritheism. It seems that current scholarship will not allow these simplistic distinctions anymore. For example, Lewis Ayres, 7 insists that Augustine inherited the Cappadocian discoveries and believed them. As an inheritor of the Cappadocian Trinity, Augustine’s use of analogies seems to have been for pastoral education purposes, not for the advancement of a new model. Ayres challenges the assumption that the Eastern view “starts from” the persons, whereas the West “starts from” the essence. Ayres states that “starting from the essence (as the West is alleged to do) supposedly entails that the divine essence is an object that is somehow prior to—even independent of—the divine persons, and that this belief distinguished it from the Eastern view.” 8 This is patently false, he assures us. Richard Cross has also sought for clarity on what exactly the differences are between the Eastern and Western views. 9 He states, “It is easy enough to establish that both views accept a sense in which the divine essence is somehow ‘shared’ by the three persons.” 10 Thus he makes the point that we must be careful if we assert that the Trinity is simply reducible to the persons and the relations that obtain between them. In a footnote, he writes: “I believe in any case that a claim that the divine essence is somehow shared by the three persons entails that there is any philosophically significant sense in which the essence is prior to the persons, let alone independent of them.” 11 However, Cross does indicate where the difference(s) between the traditions does in fact exist: “The Eastern view does, and the Western view does not, generally accept a sense in which the divine essence is a shared universal.” 12 He shows this divergence clearly in the originators and developers of the traditions. Gregory of Nyssa (and John of Damascus) asserts that the divine essence is a universal, and Augustine (and Aquinas) unequivocally denies this. What is the consequence of denying that the divine essence is a universal? “What model,” Cross asks, “is available to us to give an account of how the

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divine essence could be ‘shared.’” 13 This is a metaphysical question, and Cross undertakes it, not for the whole Trinitarian debate throughout history, but he does seek to unravel the metaphysical assumptions of the primary originators of Trinitarian thought even if the assumptions of these traditions may often be intuitions rather than clearly articulated metaphysical systems. Even if the intuitions are that, however, they are metaphysical in nature and so require exposing, he thinks. He offers the controversial thesis that “once we take account of the divergent metaphysical presuppositions of the various writers” we have indicated, “we discover that there is after all no significant difference between Eastern and Western views on the specific question . . . despite the apparent divergence on the question of the divine essence as a universal.” 14 Having taken account of all this, I am prepared to stick my neck out just a little and say that Augustine’s particular psychological analogy of the Mind as self, intellect, and will/love, which someone like Jonathan Edwards, for example, was fond of, came to influence the Western tradition more than Augustine intended, leading to an under-emphasis on the Trinity in Western theology, and an overemphasis on the oneness of the Godhead. Coupled with this has been a Western emphasis on simplicity. As Sang Lee has stated, the primary issue which defeated Arius at Nicea was the co-divinity (homoousios) and equality of the Son with the Father, not the issue of unity. 15 Yet, under the influence of the Greek philosophical concepts of perfection, the concepts of unity and then simplicity became emphatic concerns in the West, culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 which asserted that “each of the persons is that reality, namely the divine substance, essence or nature.” 16 That is, there is acknowledgment of a perichoresis of essence, but not one of persons. As a result of all this, the Trinity had much less influence on theology in the West until the advent of Karl Barth. The East, by contrast, favored a more generic understanding of unity, which consists in three divine persons being three particular instances of the one common divine nature, in a perichoresis of essence and persons. Let us briefly explore how one prominent Reformed theologian, Jonathan Edwards, interacted with these tensions. On the one hand, Edwards does make reference to simplicity even if it is not a major theme in his Trinitarian writings, and he most definitely emphasizes the unity of the Godhead by way of his primarily psychological approach to the Trinity. However, Edwards does employ what looks like an Eastern perichoretic approach, which Sang Lee finds to be “profoundly different from the Western church’s traditional tendency to see God’s unity in the singularity of divine substance.” “For Edwards,” Lee writes, “to see God’s unity consists in ‘wonderful union’ between the persons of the Trinity and a ‘communion in one another.’” 17 In fact, a controversy has arisen in the renaissance of the study of the Trinity in Edwards as to which model Edwards actually followed. There has

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been the proposal that Edwards’s model of the Trinity is a cobbled mix of psychological and social Trinities, of Western and Eastern Trinities (even though it is clear Augustine was Cappadocian!). Amy Plantinga Pauw, following Lee, proposed precisely that Edwards’s view of the Trinity was a cobbled mix of psychological and social in her work The Supreme Harmony of All. 18 Reacting to her cobbled view, Steve Studebaker took her on, insisting that Edwards’s Trinity was well within the mutual love of the Father and the Son psychological model. Their controversy spilled over into articles in SJT 19 that make for entertaining reading. Edwards does use the language of the social Trinity, and indeed even sounds tritheistic at times. For example, the Trinity is spoken of as “the society and family of the three” in his “Essay on the Trinity.” 20 So I am sympathetic with Amy, and also with Patricia Wilson-Kastener 21 who does see the Cappadocian social Trinity in Edwards. On the other hand, however, Studebaker insisted that all the social aspects of the life of the Trinity are understood within the particular Augustinian model he proposed. The trouble here is that if Augustine did indeed inherit the Cappadocian Trinity, then this discussion is somewhat moot. Despite the occasional social allusions in Edwards, I believe William Danaher to be correct when he says that actually Edwards’s Trinity is so much psychological that his is not merely a psychological analogy but a psychological account of the Trinity, built on the Idealism of Locke and Malebranche. As Danaher points out, this model may account for mutuality of the persons of the Trinity, but not agency. 22 More of Danaher shortly. Kyle Strobel has suggested that perichoresis must be assumed in Edwards’s account and that this resolves the issue and accounts for the agency. This may be so, but a question arises as to the version Edwards uses of perichoresis. Irrespective, there is something very rich about the particular way in which Strobel employs Edwards’s psychological model to speak of it as the “Personal beatific delight model.” This is what he means: the Father gazes upon the Son with beatific delight, and the Son gazes back at the Father with beatific delight, and the Spirit is that delight. As Strobel states—“the Trinity is religious affection in pure act.” Further, he affirms that “[p]ersonal beatific-delight is simply a way to highlight the key features of religious affection as the very life of God,” 23 which is a beautifully integrative way of expressing Edwards’s whole theology, which includes God, Christ, humanity, and creation. 24 It certainly pulls together Edwards’s theology and his ethics in an elegant manner. Danaher also rightly, in my opinion, concedes that the psychological analogy has limitations, even with Malebrancheian adaptation, precisely at the point of vindicating the personhood of the Spirit. Edwards’s conception of the persons, including that of the Spirit, does not yet reveal how the Three function as persons. They are still intra-personal, and capable of becoming

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persons, one might say, but they are not yet inter-personal in such a schema. The psychological analogy also does not do justice to the “account of the order and manifestations of God’s triune creation and redemption of the world through the missions of the Son and Spirit.” 25 Danaher, therefore, like Plantinga Pauw, sees a prominent social analogy in Edwards’s Trinitarian theology, one that is also crucial to the theme of personhood, which Danaher perceives to be so foundational for Edwards. Again, the psychological analogy can by speaking of understanding and will/love provide the basis for the concept of the mutuality and self-donation in community but not for the agency of persons that the social dimension of Trinitarian persons reflect in the biblical account, and that humans in his image reflect. Thus he sees in Edwards the use of a social analogy which “provides an essential aspect of personhood.” 26 Danaher’s summation is that when describing the immanent Trinity (God in se), Edwards consistently uses the psychological analogy, but when describing the economic Trinity (God ad extra or pro nobis), he speaks of it as a society of persons. “Where the psychological analogy conceives of the Trinity in terms of self-consciousness,” says Danaher, “the social analogy conceives of the love of God in terms of self-donation, mutuality, and inclusion. Love is transposed from a governing ‘disposition’ within the mind of the Deity into an interpersonal relation that is diffusive and overflowing—a love that seeks the welfare of, and communion with, others.” 27 Danaher attributes this social analogy in Edwards to the influences of Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and Aquinas, that is, the West. This is the model by which Edwards describes the premundane counsels of God and the action of the Son. This is the model by which Edwards refers to God as the “society of the three persons,” a society into which all believers are welcomed at conversion as a result of the work of the cross which leads to the goal of the indwelling of the saints by the Spirit. How Edwards’s invokes this social analogy remains somewhat mysterious. What does it all matter for the atonement? After all, if Richard Cross is right when he says, “It is easy enough to establish that both views accept a sense in which the divine essence is somehow ‘shared’ by the three persons,” 28 then we are better to proceed without continuing the controversy, and so we shall. However, suffice it to say that it matters a great deal if we fail to grant to the persons of the divine Trinity as revealed in the act of atonement their irreducible identity and agency, and it matters a great deal if we fail to acknowledge the oneness of the God who comes as the one God to make reconciliation. It is because of the clarity with which theologians of the social Trinity articulate a doctrine of the persons that I tip my hat in that direction, for if the Son is not the Son who offers himself up freely to his God, and if the Father is not there with the Son, as Abraham was with Isaac in the Akedah, and if the Spirit does not strengthen and enable the Son to offer himself to God, then the atonement is a myth.

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The social Trinitarian analogy (reality) has received criticism especially for theologians “who are concerned that what is propounded as a traditional defense of Christian faith is really a projection of worldly social agendas into the Trinity.” 29 These critics, says Peter Casarella, “generally believe that the social analogy involves the erroneous projection of an idealized form of the body politic onto the divine.” 30 He cites Rowan Williams who has questioned the Christological underpinnings of the “‘social’ doctrine of the Trinity.” 31 However, as Casarella indicates, “a proper analogical account of the social Trinity will restrain the attempt by some current social trinitarians to project metaphors of idealized social existence or interpersonal relations onto the divinity” 32 At the same time the social Trinity is validated in its legitimate use of analogy, not univocity, analogies that are not the product of human imagination but based in revelation. Analogy, unlike metaphor, is grounded “in the relationship between the triune Creator and what the Creator has wrought in the finite order” as derived from “the order of things,” and analogy unlike equivocity “points to an ontological relationship between God and the world, albeit an asymmetrical one.” This “more strictly analogical account of the relationship between God and the world,” says Casarella, “will highlight that the prime analogate, namely, God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is a revealed datum of faith.” On this basis, the author believes “the renewal of social trinitarianism will be placed back in the stream of the tradition that spawned it.” 33 This conclusion is not by any means unanimous as Sarah Coakley exemplifies. 34 She suggests that Nyssa’s concern was much more with “the fulfilment of human eros in the wholly transcendent goodness of the divine being than in trinitarian politics” and his “apophatic erotics of creaturely participation in the triune God serves as an instructive counterweight to any modern attempts to read trinitarian social analogies in an overly innerworldy fashion.” These arguments have their place, and one is grateful for support for the social Trinity rightly conceived. The most convincing argument is not sufficiently emphasized, however. Social trinitarianism is not a projection from society below. It most obviously draws its legitimacy from how the Son and the Father and the Spirit interact within the economy of redemption as revealed in the Gospels. 35 There it is clear that the Father and the Son are equal in essence, and that they are in perfect communion, but they are at the same time irreducibly distinct, irreducibly the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, irreducible personal agents . . . for the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father or the Spirit. Though Barth did not affirm a social Trinity, his epistemological rule for the Trinity was, as we have seen, that we move from the economy to the immanent. There is no God back of the triune God, and there is no God other than the God who in the Father, Son, and Spirit, is the threepersoned God of the economy. Had Barth been consistent he would have allowed for a fuller expression of perichoretic personhood, 36 for that is what

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is observed in the economic Trinity. Crucially for the events of the cross, for the “classical” Trinitarians to suggest that the only differentiation within the Trinity is their eternal relations, that is their processions, is to obfuscate what happens there, indeed even in the incarnation. All three persons are present and in relation at the cross, even in the dereliction, but only one, the Son, is the person in union with humanity and bearing its sin. APPROPRIATIONS AND INDIVISIBILITY Irrespective of the model of the Trinity we may choose, and I have nodded toward the possibility that it is easier to account for the economy with the historic social model, it is vital to stress that both the indivisibility of works and appropriation of roles must be held together in considering the atonement. Locating atonement within a broader theological framework, Adonis Vidu has recently explored the integration between the work of Christ at the cross and the classic doctrine of inseparable Trinitarian operations, the Trinitarian axiom known in full in Latin as opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. 37 It certainly goes as far back as the Cappadocians. One of the challenges to the doctrine of the atonement, as already mentioned, has been that the notion of the Father punishing the Son seems like cosmic child abuse. The notion that every act of the divine being involves all three persons of the Trinity does, in part, remove that charge. The Trinitarian axiom of “inseparable operations” says precisely this. That is, the Father and the Son, and the Spirit are all together at the cross, albeit in different ways. Vidu gives traction and width to this concept in various ways. With respect to the logic of inseparable operations, he begins as follows: “While I am convinced that theology is still searching for an adequate conceptual model of Trinitarian economic agency, the patristic grammar of the concept rules out certain misconceptions of what this inseparability entails.” 38 He then engages the work of Kathryn Tanner and Bruce McCormack in their use of this concept, both of which he adjudges to be inadequate in various ways, and he thus appeals to Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan for further elucidation. Let us first explore his explanation of “The Logic of Inseparability.” It is invoked widely in the Reformed tradition especially to defend penal substitution. It is often poorly used, he suggests, when it is described merely as a unity of intention and purpose. The Cappadocians and Augustine both expressed clearly that “the actions of Father, Son, and Spirit must be mutually involved in each other, such that the common action cannot be broken into simpler constituent actions.” 39 They do the same actions and they share the same power. Vidu offers some examples and also some direct quotes from the Cappadocians. The cleansing of the believer from sin, for example, is

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attributed to both the Spirit in Romans 8:2, 13, and to the Son in 1 John 1:9. As Vidu says, “Clearly, this is not simply the Spirit cleansing some and Christ others, but both being active in the very same action.” 40 Basil the Great affirms this principle in relation to the work of the Spirit: “The Holy Spirit is inseparable and wholly incapable of being parted from the Father and the Son . . . in every operation.” 41 Gregory of Nyssa is equally emphatic that this is not just a sharing of intention, but of actual action and therefore of power. Thus he states in Not Three Gods, since among men the action of each in the same pursuits is discriminated, they are properly called many since each of them is separated from the others within his own environment, according to the special character of his operation. But in the case of the divine nature we do not similarly learn that the Father does anything by Himself in which the Son does not work conjointly, or again that the Son has any special operation apart from the Holy Spirit; but every operation which extends from God to creation, and is named according to our variable conceptions of it, has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit. . . . For this reason the name derived from the operation is not divided with regards to the number of those who fulfil it, because the action of each concerning anything is not separate and peculiar, but whatever comes to pass, in reference either to the acts of His providence for us, or to the government or constitution of the universe, comes to pass by the action of the Three, yet what comes to pass is not three things. 42

In sum, the actions of God bear a common agency of the three persons together. Gregory is defending against the accusation that Trinity means tritheism. The basis, of this, of course is the simplicity of the Godhead, and the avoidance of the error of tritheism. Three human persons may contribute to a project and produce the same thing contributing different aspects of it, but they are not simple as in the Godhead, which is undivided. These considerations in Vidu’s work are very helpful. One concern, however, might be that “the ascriptions of agency” to various persons of the Trinity, as Vidu calls these, is better described by another axiom in the tradition, that of the “doctrine of appropriations.” Yes, one does wish to say categorically that the Father and the Spirit are engaged at the cross with the Son, but to fail to distinguish between the ways in which each are engaged is a mistake. The doctrine of appropriations acknowledges the differentiation of the persons that makes sense of an emphasis on particular persons for particular agencies. It is decidedly not the Father who died on the cross, but the Son. How the humanity of the incarnate Son plays into this makes this point obvious, for clearly the taking on of humanity is a role “appropriated” only by the Son, even though it is effected by the Spirit and commanded by the Father.

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In sum, failure of differentiation with respect to the persons has perhaps unintended yet nevertheless profound consequences for the dynamics of the atonement of the cross. The relevance of this for the church is that it may preach with freedom the gospel, a gospel that must include the message that Christ died for us and in our place, with nuance and with confidence, and that the very nature of God as the triune God of love is indeed revealed there. The Will of the Trinity and the Will of the Son What of the question of the wills of the persons of the Trinity, and of the wills (divine and human) or will of the Son as God and Man? One of the motivators for the psychological Western view of the Trinity has been the ability to show that the three persons have one will or one love. That one will has typically been personified in the person of the Holy Spirit, spoken of as the mutual love of the Father for the Son, or the mutual will of the Father and the Son. Edwards, for example, espoused the idea of a perichoresis of natural attributes such that the Father (the memory) and the Son (the intellect) had will because although it resided primarily in the Spirit, it was present also in the Father and the Son, since each was in the other by perichoresis. As mentioned above, divine simplicity has been a strong emphasis in the Western tradition. The Eastern approach has been to ascribe will (as well as intellect and affection) to each person, allowing there to be three wills, which are one will because each is completely in the other by perichoresis. In the end, the result seems the same, in that God has one will, as expressed even by Eastern father, Gregory Nazianzen. 43 However, what the Eastern fathers express is that, true to Divine personhood, the Godhead has three wills yet one will by the coinherence of the three persons. Thomas Aquinas 44 in the West expressed his agreement with John of Damascus 45 that “operation is consequent upon the nature.” If operation were consequent upon the person, then the Trinity would have three wills, as they are three persons. To have more than one will, is to say there is more than one divine nature, which is to propose polytheism. By contrast, Gregory of Nyssa definitely indicates that this oneness of will in God does not mean that each of the persons is devoid of a will. In fact, what he indicates is that there is a oneness of will based on the symphonia of the three wills of the three persons. Gregory of Nyssa arrives at this through consideration of the incarnate person of the Logos. He states, If, then, the Logos, as being life, lives, it certainly has the faculty of will, for no one of living creatures is without such a faculty. Moreover that such a will has also capacity to act must be the conclusion of a devout mind. For if you admit not this potency, you prove the reverse to exist. But no; impotence is quite removed from our conception of Deity. 46

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Given that in Cyrilline and Chalcedonic manner, the person of the Logos assumed the human nature so that the one eternal person of the Son now has two natures, Nyssa means that in that divine person there is a distinct will which is in perfect symphony with the will of the Father as is expressed verbally by Jesus again and again. Therefore, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa are not in disagreement about the end result: God does have one will, yet each person has a will, and God has one will presumably through the unperturbable perichoretic communion of the persons. Where this begins to influence Gethsemane and Golgotha is that for Gregory of Nyssa, the Logos, as a divine Person, must have its own faculty of a divine will and a human will. In sum, certainly the traditions are agreed that no matter how this is pictured (by the Spirit, by perichoresis, or both), the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have the numerically same will. Maximus in the Eastern tradition not only affirmed this, but invoked this to express support of the dyotheletist 47 interpretation of the agonized prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. 48 That is, he argued that in Gethsemane, Christ wants in his human nature to avoid death, while at the same time he is willing for the crucifixion in his divine nature. The divine will of the Son, in perfect harmony with the Father is in keeping with the way in which the Father and Son converse throughout his life on earth, and then before and even on the cross (“Father forgive them . . . Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”). The expressed devotion of the Son to the Father in Gethsemane is not authentic if the Son is not possessed of a will. At the same time, even as a person possessed of a will, the Son will will what the Father wills! But the expression of the human will of the Son to do the will of the Father and go to the Tree is vital for our atonement. It is the reversal of the first Adam’s disobedience with respect to another tree. It is this obedience, this submission even in the face of the awful death that awaited him, along with and in harmony with the Son’s own divine will, that is crucial to atonement as vicarious obedience and as satisfaction and in preparation for penal substitution as the sacrifice made for the glory of God and for our salvation. THE ETERNAL INNER BEING OF GOD AND THE GOD OF INCARNATION AND ATONEMENT It is unsurprising that the Son as God willingly goes to the cross for us, and that the divine and human wills are in symphony on this in his one person. The reason that it is unsurprising is that it was simply a fulfillment and extension of, even participation in a divine decision made in eternity past within the Godhead. A significant theological problem has been to reconcile the unchanging nature of God with the fact that the Son became, that is,

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became human, and that he died. Aspects of the inner being of God in his immanent Trinity serve to illumine the Trinitarian nature of the atonement and vice versa. Part of this discussion must be consideration of the actus purus tradition and also the act and being of God. We have spoken of God in his triune being as a “being in relation”; we must now also speak of the triune God as “being in act.” Here we may reference Karl Barth, who made much of God’s premundane, pre-cosmic act of election, that is, his election to create the cosmos, through the agency of the Son; his election to have the Son enter creation and become human. This electing act of God is, for Barth, the very best news of the gospel. God has in his freedom, in the very eternal act of the eternal generation of the Son that defines the immanent Trinity (McCormack, as we have noted), and at least in the eternal covenant of God (for other scholars of Barth), chosen the Son to become human, 49 to become Jesus, the one Man who defines humanity in its freedom, the one Man in whom God has chosen to be for humanity. This primal decision in God from all eternity thus made Jesus of Nazareth the prototypical human, after whose image we have been created. In both creating 50 and in becoming incarnate, God became what he had not previously been, from our temporal perspective. With T. F. Torrance we must surely be guided in our theology proper by Christology, the factum that the agent in the creation of God the Father was God the Son, and the factum that God, in the Son, became human for us. The fact that God always possessed the power to create, that creation was in the mind of God before it came into being, and that God the Son was incarnandus, that is, oriented toward becoming human in eternity past prior to the incarnation . . . invoke areas of philosophical and theological (the triune God as “being in act”) debate. Theologically speaking, the issue is not just that Barth is saying that this one human being is present at the beginning and foundation of all things. Since election is how God determines his own identity, Barth is insistent that we know nothing of who God is apart from his choice to be our covenant partner in Jesus Christ. On Bruce McCormack’s account, as noted, the Divine act of electing this incarnate human being in which the Son participates as electing God, actualizes the immanent Trinity. This for McCormack accounts for how God is both being and becoming, that is, specifically how as the Son he became human in Jesus Christ, and died for our sins. This admittedly radical understanding accounts well for the uniting of act and being in God, and for how the incarnation does not change God. However, this account is simply termed “Barth-revisionism” by George Hunsinger. As Phillip Cary says, reflecting Hunsinger’s position, McCormack’s position has a severe weakness: Barth never said any such thing. He never said the Trinity results from divine election. This is what Barth should have said, McCormack contends, but never did. To be consistent, he

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should have applied his actualistic ontology to the doctrine of the Trinity, deriving the triune being of God from his act of election. Yet even after he worked out his mature doctrine of election, Barth kept talking as if the Trinity could be conceived independently of Jesus Christ. At this point McCormack can only say that Barth failed to carry out consistently his own deepest insight about the being of God. 51

In countering McCormack’s take on what Barth should have said, Hunsinger “asks us to read Barth ‘with charity,’ seeking to discern the fundamental coherence of his thinking,” and his conscious debt to the tradition, not modernity. Hunsinger appeals to “the ‘doctrine of antecedence,’ according to which all that God does in the world finds its ground in what God is antecedently in himself, prior to the work of creation and redemption. God’s grace toward the world in Christ corresponds to, but is not identical with, what he is in himself as the triune God. In this context, there is a place for the notion of a Logos asarkos or unincarnate Word, not as a principle of rationality to which we have access apart from Christ, but as a necessary concept in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity.” 52 Cary’s critique of McCormack is that he “reads” Barth as offering an approach that has “reconstructed the whole of ‘orthodox’ teaching from the ground up,” 53 and that he thereby neglects the great tradition of church scholarship. He thinks therefore that McCormack has made Barth to be something other than a voice among other great theologians in the tradition in order to rescue Protestantism, and also that he has given too much credence to modernity in a manner that Barth does not. It is my personal impression that McCormack is correct in his understanding of Barth and of what Barth may have thought but not articulated. In other words, McCormack has simply extended a Barthian idea without violating his overall theology, and in so doing illustrates what it means to apply Scripture and creative reasoning to a vexing theological and philosophical problem in a manner that does not violate the creeds. Barth did offer the distinction that the Word of God is our final authority, norma normans, the norming norm, and that the creeds are norma normata, normed by Scripture as properly interpreted (which of course does involve the church). McCormack is not challenging the creed, but his deliberations go beyond what has been said in the tradition on the matter of the relation between the electing act of God and his essence. This is surely what a theologian does. Are we saying that a theologian can never have a new insight into old creedal truth? I for one, while deeply respectful of both theologians would urge respectful listening to both. But at the end of the day, knowing what Barth thought or may have thought does, as Cary says, needs to be weighed by the biblical scholars and all the theologians of the tradition. Something about how McCormack has brought into union the electing act of God and his being honors the God of the Scriptures as the one

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who loves in freedom, and who is for humanity, and who has in Christ Jesus brought about in time what is an eternal reality for him. The effect of McCormack’s view is also laudable in another sense—it removes the notion of the Deus absconditus with respect to the secret election of some individual human beings and not others, and conveys God as the God who has eternally been for humanity and for his creation in the Logos incarnandus. Turning now to a philosophical issue, the debate as to whether God is timeless or everlastingly temporal is evoked here, for one. The relation of God and time is certainly a complex one. The traditional view, which goes back to Augustine, is that God is timeless, that is he is outside of its realm and does not experience temporal succession. This is the Divine timelessness view (Eleanore Stump, Norman Kretzmann, Brian Leftow). 54 The current trend among Christian philosophers is toward the view that although God is everlasting, that he never began and will never end, he is nevertheless temporal. He exists at each moment in time. This is the Divine temporality view. Among those who have taken a via media position are Alan Padgett and Garrett DeWeese, who represent the “God as Relatively Timeless” position, and William Lane Craig who preferred a “God as Timeless without Creation and Temporal with Creation.” 55 This latter view fits well with the incarnation narrative. T. F. Torrance took the temporalist position, though, as Ryan Mullins indicates, he “posits a distinction between the created time of the universe and the uncreated time of God.” 56 The notion of uncreated time as God knows it, and time as we know it, is appealing, and it may give credence to McCormack’s view of the act and being of God. How does this affect the atonement? A few passages in the New Testament create awareness that not only that God sovereignly planned the atonement within divine time—“This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross” (Acts 2:23)—“the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world ” (Rev. 13:8)—but that its effects are eternal, and even that this somber and yet God-glorifying event is forever fresh in the mind of God. This latter notion is conveyed in Revelation 5, where John sees the risen, ascended Lamb, at “the centre of the throne of God, looking as if it had been slain,” and the sense of the Greek is “as if it had been freshly slaughtered.” The enormity of what it meant in the life of God to give up his Son for us, and in his triune being express and consume his wrath justly, is reflected in the notion that the perpetual memorial is always a fresh one in the heart of God, and that will always have its efficacy . . . for he entered the “most holy place” and there accomplished “an eternal redemption,” according to the writer of Hebrews (9:12). The incarnation is also clearly spoken of as the subject of divine decision, in Hebrews 10:1–7 which speaks of a body prepared (10:5) for the Son before he actually became human in human time. Furthermore, the perpetua-

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tion of that body, in its continuity with the body in which he lived and died on earth, as well as its discontinuity after the resurrection, related to the new creation, and its spiritual orientation and imperishable quality (1 Cor. 15:42–44), is that which grounds his priesthood at the right hand of the Father. He represents and intercedes as the Human for humanity, and guarantees our eternal life in his presence—he is “one who has become a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life. For it is declared: ‘You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’ Because of this oath, Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant. Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore he is able to save completely (right on to the end) those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Heb. 7:15–25). A further outcome of the relation between the electing act of God and the atonement is that it gives us insight into what transpires in the atonement. In the freedom of God’s act of election, the Son is both the electing God, a free agent in his nature as a person within the Trinity, and also the elect man, receiving freedom vicariously for humanity. As Robert Osborn has stated, this ensures both that Jesus, as the electing God is the “beginning of all God’s ways,” and that as the elected man he is “the goal and fulfillment of God’s eternal will . . . the event in which God’s eternal will is actualized. The creation comes from Christ, and it is fulfilled in him.” 57 Osborn clarifies by saying that as “Jesus is at the beginning and in the middle, he is also at the end. . . . Whatever comes to man in the freedom of God and in the fulfillment of his eternal will comes first of all to Jesus as the elected man.” 58 This expression in Barth of Christ as both the one electing as God, and as the one who is elected as the Man who is God, anticipates how he will place atonement, and penal substitution, in particular, in the one person of Jesus Christ, who is both the Judge of all humanity as God, and the Judged, on its behalf as man. But this is the very heart of the gospel for Barth. He is, in his christological expression of election, defending it against “all non-Christological interpretations of divine and human freedom in orthodox Calvinism and Lutheranism, and in philosophical versions of the same in modern Protestantism . . . he is endeavouring to correct deterministic construction of God’s freedom on the one hand and existentialistic, indeterminate constructions of human freedom on the other hand.” 59 And what does this communicate about our human identity? What we are elected for in Christ, through the atonement is freedom. I venture to say that this is the most crucial descriptor of identity in Barth’s anthropology. It is derivative, a freedom received, received from the freedom of God to be God, his freedom to love, his freedom to create through Christ, and his freedom to elect Jesus and all humanity in him. Yet it is real, for the end goal of that

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election is the creature living in freedom. This is not freedom of a modern kind that says, “I can do or be whatever I want.” The free creatures live into their identity-in-freedom, paradoxically, by being bound to the freedom of God in Christ, and are never more themselves than by being in union with him. In fact, matter itself, that is all created being, has its identity-in-freedom in a similar, qualified way. The freedom of God in creating is essential to understanding the freedom for what has been created, to be what it has been created to be, which is in some sense analogous to the freedom of God to be who he is. SPECIFIC APPLICATION TO THE PENAL SUBSTITUTION MODEL In thinking about how the triune being of God informs our understanding specifically of the penal substitution model, it is clear that the Son suffers and dies for us, not as an “individual” but as a person in communion with his Father. Involvement of the Father is suggested in the picture of the atonement given in Genesis 22 (“They went both of them together”), but also from the prayers of Jesus on the cross. There can be no doubt about the immediate agency of the incarnate person of the Godhead, or of his sin-bearing priestly function. But it is much more complete to speak of atonement being accomplished within the triune Godhead and therefore of the mediate involvement of the Father and the Spirit, than to say that Christ was forsaken by his Father. He may as a human have felt forsaken by his God, but the Trinity did not fall apart on the cross. Furthermore, as is abundantly clear from the Chalcedonian formula that the Logos, God the Word, is not God in a human (adoptionism), but God as a human. As such, reconciliation and redemption are accomplished not in a mere human, nor in the Logos-simpliciter, but as the sixth ecumenical council affirmed, in the God-human in his divine-human unity. 60 Miroslav Volf in Free of Charge asks whether by putting forward the Son as our substitute the Father is abusing the Son. 61 The answer is no, because the Father could only be abusing the Son if the Son were a third party to the offense. 62 But as the Father and Son are one then Jesus is not a third party, a go-between between us and God, but instead, the Son “stands firmly on the side of the forgiving God.” 63 He then quotes Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:19 and comments, “Not: Christ was reconciling an angry God to a sinful world. Not: Christ was reconciling a sinful world to a loving God. Rather: God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself.” 64 In an earlier book, Exclusion and Embrace, Volf gives the most graphic and intriguing picture of what may have transpired on the cross.

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When the Trinity turns toward the world, the Son and Spirit become, in Irenaeus’s beautiful image, the two arms of God by which humanity was made and taken into God’s embrace (see Against Heresies 5,6,1). That same love that sustains nonself-enclosed identities in the Trinity seeks to make space “in God” for humanity. Humanity is, however, not just the other of God, but the beloved other who has become an enemy. When God sets out to embrace the enemy, the result is the cross. On the cross the dancing circle of self-giving and mutually indwelling divine persons opens up for the enemy; in the agony of the passion the movement stops for a brief moment and a fissure appears so that sinful humanity can join in (see John 17:21). We, the others—we, the enemies—are embraced by the divine persons who love us with the same love with which they love each other and therefore make space for us within their own eternal embrace. 65

The issue of what precisely transpires with respect to dealing with sin and its consequences is not neglected by Volf. In Free of Charge, he asks precisely what happened when God made Christ to be sin, or a sin offering. “The answer is simple,” says Volf; “God placed human sin upon God!” “One God placed human sin upon another God?” he asks. “No, there are not two Gods. The God who is One beyond numbering and yet mysteriously Three reconciled us by shouldering our sin in the person of Christ who is one of the Three.” And he concludes by saying that this is “the mystery of human redemption made possible by the mystery of God’s Trinity: The One who was offended bears the burden of the offense.” 66 Volf also expresses his disapproval of the liberal neglect of the wrath of God or even the view that wrath is expressed merely in the consequences of human sin. The terror of oppression of the powers cannot be broken apart from their violent overthrow, and sin cannot be atoned for without the satisfaction of the justice of a holy God who consumes it within his own being. Obviously the fullness of what may have transpired is impenetrable mystery, and judgment is endured by the Son as Judge and Judged is implied if not explicit, but nevertheless, Volf has sought to portray with imagination the substitutionary suffering of Jesus in a truly Trinitarian way. The fissure is not, I take it, a fissure in the Godhead, but space opened up within his being to include humanity by what Jesus endures for us. NOTES 1. Jonathan Edwards, Works [Carter], 4:130, 154. 2. CD I/1, 353. 3. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1979), 21. 4. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, 21. 5. https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/concerning-the-notion-of-person-in-theology.

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6. Jason S. Sexton, general ed., and Stanley N. Gundry, series ed., Two Views of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), (Paul S. Fiddes, Stephen R. Holmes, Thomas H. McCall and Paul D. Molnar, contributors). 7. Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3–4 and ‘“Remember That You Are Catholic’ (serm. 52.2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God,’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000), 39–82, at 39–40. 8. “‘Remember That You Are Catholic’ (serm. 52.2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000), 39–82, at 39–40. 9. See Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” in Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, vol. 1, Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, ed. Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107–126. 10. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 107. 11. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 108, fn.3. 12. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 88. 13. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 98. 14. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 108. 15. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale Edition, Volume 21 (YE 21); Sang Hyun Lee, ed., Writings on the Trinity, Grace and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 22. 16. Jesuit Fathers of St. Mary’s College, The Church Teachers: Documents of the Church in English Translation, trans. John F. Clarkson, trans. John H. Edwards, trans. William J. Kelly and trans. John J. Welch (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1955), 133, cited in YE 21, 22. 17. YE 21, 27 18. Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 19. See Steve Studebaker, “Jonathan Edwards’s Social Augustinian Trinitarianism: An Alternative to a Recent Trend,” Scottish Journal of Theology 56, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 268–285. See also Steve Studebaker, “Supreme Harmony or Supreme Disharmony? An Analysis of Amy Plantinga Pauw’s ‘The Supreme Harmony of All’: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards.” Scottish Journal of Theology 57, no. 4 (January 1, 2004): 479–485. 20. Jonathan Edwards, “Essay on the Trinity,” in Treatise on Grace, and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971), 122 (the YE 21 edition is called “The Discourse on the Trinity”). 21. Patricia Wilson-Kastner, “God’s Infinity and His Relation to Creation,” Foundations 21 (Oct. 1, 1978), 317. 22. William Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 63–65. 23. Kyle Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (London: Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark, 2013), 90–91. 24. Kyle Strobel, Jonathan Edwards’s Theology, 70. 124. Strobel is convinced that personal perichoresis is the dominant idea in Edwards’s Trinity, but this beatific delight seems more in harmony with the psychological model. 25. Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, 67. 26. Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, 7. 27. Danaher, The Trinitarian Ethics of Jonathan Edwards, 68. Emphases added. 28. Richard Cross, “Two Models of the Trinity,” 107. 29. Peter J. Casarella, “Thinking Out Loud about the Triune God: Problems and Prospects for a Trinitarian Social Ethic in a Procedural Republic,” in William F. Storrar, Peter J. Casarella, Paul Louis Metzger, eds., A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 122–159 (156). 30. Peter J. Casarella, “Thinking Out Loud About the Triune God,” 156. 31. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 225–238 (226). 32. Peter J. Casarella, “Thinking Out Loud about the Triune God,” 156. 33. Peter J. Casarella, “Thinking Out Loud about the Triune God,” 157. 34. Sarah Coakley, “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126.

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35. For a reasoned defense of certain historic and carefully nuanced forms of Social Trinitarianism, see William Hasker, “Objections to Social Trinitarianism,” in Religious Studies 46, No. 4 (2010), 421–439. He overcomes objections that Social Trinitarianism is not monotheistic by showing that these objections apply only to some versions of ST but not all, and he shows convincingly to my mind that objections to Social Trinitarianism as such are not in fact successful. 36. This point is acknowledged in Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation with Special Reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 245. 37. Adonis Vidu, “The Place of the Cross among the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity,” in Locating Atonement: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, edited by Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015. 38. Adonis Vidu, “The Place of the Cross among the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity.” 39. Adonis Vidu, “The Place of the Cross among the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity.” 40. Adonis Vidu, “The Place of the Cross among the Inseparable Operations of the Trinity,” 22. 41. Basil the Great, “On The Holy Spirit,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8, eds. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA.: Hendriksen, 1999), ch. 16, sect. 37, see also ch. 6, sect. 15. 42. Gregory of Nyssa, On “Not Three Gods” in Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises, vol. 5, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 8, eds. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), 334, emphasis is that of Vidu. 43. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30.12, “for as we have one Godhead, so we have one will.” 44. Summae III, qu. 19, Article 2. Whether in Christ there are several human operations? Obj. 3. 45. John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith) iii, 15. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33043.htm. 46. Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises, NPNF2-05, 473, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/npnf205.xi.ii.iii.html 47. This has reference to the dyotheletism/monotheletism debate. The orthodox position is the dyotheletist Chalcedonian view that Jesus had two wills that correspond to his two natures. Monotheletism is the view that Jesus Christ has two natures but only one will. Monothelitism, formulated in 638AD developed from the Neo-Chalcedonian position in the Christological debates but was rejected and denounced as heretical in 681AD, at the Third Council of Constantinople. 48. See Jordan Wessling, “Christology and Conciliar Authority: On the Viability of Monotheletism for Protestant Theology,” in Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders, eds. Christology Ancient and Modern: Exploration in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 151–170 (153–154). This chapter is an excellent introduction to not only the monotheletist/dyotheletist controversy but to the relative authority of the Creeds and Councils of the Church and interpretation of Holy Scripture. 49. What exactly this means for the essence of the triune God is a hotly debated topic among Barth scholars, and principally, Bruce McCormack and George Hunsinger. For an able summation of the controversy, see Phillip Cary, “Barth Wars: A Review of Reading Barth with Charity.” First Things, April 2015. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/barth-wars. 50. T. F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 65–66. In The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001) (88–89). Torrance confirms that in his ex nihilo creation, God acted in an altogether new way, bringing into being entirely new events, for the creation of the world, ex nihilo is something new even for God. 51. Phillip Cary, “Barth Wars: A Review of Reading Barth with Charity.” First Things, April 2015. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/barth-wars. 52. Cited in Phillip Cary, “Barth Wars: A Review of Reading Barth with Charity.” First Things, April 2015. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/barth-wars.

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53. Cited in Phillip Cary, “Barth Wars: A Review of Reading Barth with Charity,” First Things, April 2015. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/barth-wars. 54. See Ryan Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13, 57, 65. 55. See Ryan Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 16–18, 24, 32, 33, 35–40. 56. Ryan Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 31. See T. F. Torrance, Theological and Natural Science (Eugene, OR.: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 50–51. 57. Robert T. Osborn, Freedom in Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), 118. 58. Robert T. Osborn, Freedom in Modern Theology, 118. 59. Robert T. Osborn, Freedom in Modern Theology, 118. 60. Over against the Lutheran view, McCormack follows Calvin’s view that there is a real communication of all that belongs to the human nature to the divine nature, but not vice versa, apart from life. See Bruce L. McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions,” 354–357. 61. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 144. 62. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 145. 63. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 145. 64. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 145. 65. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 128. 66. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 145.

Part II

The Participatory Framework

Chapter Four

Nomenclature in Atonement Theology

There have been many theories of the atonement but we are not saved by any theory. God saves us according to His infinite grasp of the Atonement. We can all say He did this for me. ––John Rae, of Prestwick, Scotland; unpublished notebook

Before embarking on discussion of the proposed unifying framework for theology of the atonement, our methodological approach needs to be declared. First, the legitimacy of the concept of a “framework” (or unifying “theory”) needs to be validated and clarified within atonement theology nomenclature. Secondly, having asserted already that metaphor or model are our terms of choice rather than the so-called “theories” that describe the dynamics of the atonement, we will offer explanation for this choice (prior to detailed discussion of the specific historico-theological models in chapter 7). This will serve to clarify and locate the theological ambition in our approach to the theology of the atonement. In sum, even prior to discussing the framework terminology and the choice of the term “model” for all the models contained within the framework, the big picture question of the status quo of nomenclature in the study of the theology of the atonement must be considered. DOGMA OR DOCTRINE? Oliver Crisp has served this area of theology well in his attempt to bring methodological clarity to these key terms and concepts. 1 But can we move beyond that? He believes that methodological clarification is helpful in this, first to clarify the theological ambition of different doctrines of atonement, and sec73

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ond, because it “raises important questions about the scope of atonement theology—What can such reflection actually achieve, theologically speaking?” 2 This is especially important since “there is no universally agreed upon doctrinal core to the reconciling work of Christ” 3 expressed at the councils and in the creeds of the Church. Crisp confirms that atonement theology does not constitute “dogma” for this reason. It is commonly accepted that a dogma is a doctrine that has been ratified by a council of the ecumenical church and written in a creed. It thus has canonical shape. An example of this might be the deity of Christ or the Trinity. A dogma is therefore a clear measure of orthodoxy. There is no canonical definition of the atonement, and no official church doctrine on the matter that is shared across different churches and denominations, though there are views expressed by particular church bodies and denominations. Atonement as doctrine might be expressed “at face value” as “at-one-ment,” “the act of reconciliation between God and fallen human beings brought about by Christ.” 4 But this is not technically a dogma. Thus it is clear that no metaphor or model or theory of the atonement can claim dogma status, including ours. Atonement theology may, however, involve certain doctrines rather than dogma. Crisp defines a doctrine as “a comprehensive account of a particular teaching about a given theological topic held by some community of Christians, or some particular denomination.” 5 And atonement theology fits that. There are two further methodological issues before us. The first of these is the question as to whether a single framework is even legitimate for describing the mystery of the atonement. Having already signaled in the introduction our opinion that the modern and rationalistic word “theory” is inappropriate, to now propose that there might be a framework or even a common dynamic within all the “metaphors” or motifs, may seem inconsistent. The second but related issue is one of nomenclature, that is, how one should describe what have typically been called theories or models in the history of atonement theology. MOSAIC/KALEIDOSCOPE AS THEORY OR SINGLE THEORY? On the first matter, there has been in recent atonement theology a differentiating between a mosaic approach which is called a “theory” and a singletheory approach not based on multiple models. We need first to explore what “theory” means in this context. Theories of atonement are “more comprehensive than either doctrines or models.” 6 Crisp suggests that the kaleidoscopic view of Mark Baker and Joel Green may provide an example of this. 7 This is because a theory provides a way to think about “different models of the atonement relative to one an-

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other and to the doctrine of atonement.” Crisp stresses that Baker and Green do not necessarily classify their kaleidoscopic viewpoint in that way, but he insists that it can be on the basis of his classification, since they “claim to be offering a way of understanding all the existing models of atonement as partial metaphorical ‘windows’ onto some larger whole.” This, Crisp thinks is more like a “meta-model, or a theory” than a model since it speaks to how other models should be regarded. It also “takes into consideration other relevant factors like social location and epistemic purview.” 8 There is at first glance a similarity between what Green and Baker have proposed and our intention. In our case, we might be seen to be proposing a participatory metamodel or theory of the atonement that involves multiple metaphors which are integrated by a participatory Christological and communal dynamic or framework. We retain a reticence toward these modern terms, preferring metaphors and framework or doctrine, yet finding ourselves at times slipping into these terms. Perhaps the reason Green and Baker resist this classification is something akin to what we shall see in Colin Gunton’s reticence to become too definitive, a tendency to which we are sensitive also. Green and Baker are comfortable offering what is present in Scripture, that is, multiple metaphors or motifs, but resist pressing further for a definitive “theory,” a move they find to be modern and positivist. The word “theory” whether it is used for either a single metaphor or model (say penal substitution) or for an integrated or summary view of all the metaphors, infers a rationalism inappropriate to the mystery that is the atonement. At the same time it must be countered that the word “theory” is not itself in science thought of as “positivist,” and is in fact the product of an empirical and more humble falsification and critical realist approach. Crisp and Green 9 have in fact differed over whether a mosaic or kaleidoscopic approach to understanding the atonement is correct (Green, Gunton), or whether a singular theory, such as union or participation (Crisp, Bayne and Restall) might be more appropriate. Offered here is a via media position. That is, a mosaic position in which all the metaphors are acknowledged but with a view toward seeking to find integration and a common dynamic which is termed a “framework” rather than a “theory” (though it may be used with the qualifications indicated above). Integration of various metaphors to seek a common theme or mechanistic framework is still not to advance a positivist “theory” and is still to be within the bounds of a humble way of knowing that may be termed “critical realism” or “faith seeking understanding,” or critically realist “theory.” To anticipate one outcome of this approach, widespread concern is evident in contemporary evangelical scholarship over the moral and aesthetic legitimacy of the penal substitution metaphor. Presenting this metaphor within the framework of participation will serve to preserve this valued biblical concept.

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METAPHORS OR MODELS AND THEORIES? The second question relates to whether one should name the various ways of speaking of the atonement in church history as “theories,” or “models,” “metaphors” or “motifs,” and how these relate to “doctrines.” Crisp’s classification is summarized as follows: Motifs and metaphors are partial pictures or windows onto the doctrine; doctrines are more complex wholes that have motifs and metaphors as constituent elements; models are more narrow, but conceptually richer attempts to provide a particular way of understanding the reconciling work of Christ; and theories about atonement models offer a way of thinking about these different doctrines relative to particular cultural and contextual hermeneutical concerns that shape the particular accounts of the work of Christ. 10

Crisp expresses the sentiment that it is difficult to see how Christian doctrines can be purely metaphorical “all the way down, so to speak.” 11 Metaphors are powerful and they do their own work, but Crisp argues that there must be some non-metaphorical work being done in order for us to have a clear conceptual content to particular doctrines. For one of the things that is true of metaphors, and is not true of doctrines as such, is that metaphors have a surplus of meaning. But a doctrine of atonement, such as the satisfaction view, is more than just a metaphor, though metaphor plays an important role. It is a particular conception of the nature of Christ’s saving work that provides an account of the mechanism by means of which his work reconciles us to Godself: Christ’s death satisfies divine honor. In a similar manner, in contemporary scientific optics, a model of light as a wave is more than a metaphor, though metaphor plays a crucial role in helping to convey something of the behavior of the packets of photons that make up visible light under certain conditions. So doctrines of atonement are particular conceptions of the nature of Christ’s saving work that provide an account of the mechanism by means of which his work reconciles us to Godself. These include metaphors, but are not reducible to metaphors. They may also reflect certain motifs found in Scripture, of ransom, or sacrifice, or whatever, though they are not reducible to these motifs. Crisp, though he recognizes all aspects of the atonement are metaphorical, is doubtful that metaphors can elucidate the reality of what they convey all the way down to the core of the truth they represent. He describes the legitimacy and limits of “model” as a more satisfactory way to describe the various facets of the atonement. First, models of atonement “thicken up” the “dogmatic minimalism of atonement doctrines,” so that the nature of the atonement can be more fully explained and especially the operative mechanism(s). 12 Yet paradoxically,

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they are neither complete nor comprehensive in their description of the atonement and in fact offer “a simplified description of the complex reality that is the work of Christ.” 13 The conceptual goals (more narrowly focused for a model than for a doctrine) and dogmatic function (minimalist for a doctrine, thicker for a model) are thus what differentiate between doctrines and models of atonement. 14 Having distinguished a model from a doctrine, drawing on the work of Ian Barbour, Crisp then offers elucidation of the concept of a model in atonement theology guided by the concept of model in the philosophy of science. In science a model “offers a coherent simplified description of a more complex reality. It attempts to ‘save the phenomena’ but it does not attempt to give a complete description.” 15 They are viewed with seriousness but are not to be taken literally; they are “limited and inadequate ways of imagining what is not observable.” They “make tentative ontological claims that there are entities in the world something like those postulated in the models.” 16 The Niels Bohr diagram of an atom provides an example of a model of this kind. By way of analogy, when applied to the atonement, Crisp indicates that models are “pictures” of Christ’s work that are to be taken seriously but do not claim and are not to be considered to be “a complete account of this aspect of Christ’s work.” The use of the term “model” already implies awareness of a “certain fallibilism” and a partiality. They do not purport to reflect “the whole truth of the matter.” 17 That is the model is “epistemically fragile and dubitable.” Crisp goes on to confirm that this is consistent with the view that the pursuit of knowledge by means of the postulation of models is consistent with theological realism though it is a chastened realism, a realism that recognizes its fallibility. Models thus “only approximate the truth of the matter,” yet atonement models are nevertheless truth-apt and aimed at truth. That is, they are aimed at the explanation or partial explanation of some truth of the matter regarding the atonement—a truth that is mind-independent. This is the point at which Crisp expresses that in light of the assumption that in theological models of the atonement “there is some truth to be had about the reconciling work of Christ,” that “[a]ccounts of the atonement are not just metaphor all the way down, so to speak, though they may contain metaphorical elements.” 18 A few evaluative comments are appropriate here. First, it is interesting that Crisp cannot use the word “models” without expressing the reality that they are “pictures.” Secondly, Crisp points out that “some modern theological treatments of models as applied to theology have argued that they are, in fact, no more than metaphors.” 19 Sally McFague is instanced. She writes that “a model is, in essence, a sustained and systematic metaphor.” 20 Crisp expresses doubt “that models are just metaphors writ large,” pointing out the inconsistency in McFague’s proposal when she describes features of meta-

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phors like “hypotheses of structure,” or “sets of relations” that are possible only for models. 21 How can “apparently non-metaphorical notions feature as parts of models that are supposed to be essentially metaphorical in nature,” wonders Crisp. 22 So what are we proposing is the most appropriate way to describe the deep mystery of the atonement? We are considering biblical metaphors and motifs of the atonement which led to the development of different theological metaphors/models in order to discover a common thread in the mechanism of each that may be called a “framework” which Crisp would likely call a unifying theory. One could acknowledge that the term “model” is valid given that models are proposed in the way of knowing that is common to both theology and science, critical realism. However, the nature of the subject requires a slightly different approach in theology of this depth. We wish to maintain that models are based on metaphors and that models can hardly be distinguished from metaphors. Thus we still wish to emphasize the metaphor in the case of theology. In the case of models in atonement theology there are good reasons to believe that there are multiple models or theological metaphors as there are multiple biblical metaphors in a way that transcends scientific descriptions. Models, if indeed acknowledged to be fallible, as suggested above, are by their nature one among others in atonement theology. It is in particular the contention that all of the models relate to one another somehow and are dependent on one another, that merits our investigation into a framework, in the case of a mystery as complex as atonement theology. Are we justified in seeking an integrative framework? The work of Colin Gunton prepares the way for this discussion. His decision to use the term metaphor is interesting, as is his reticence about moving further toward an integrative doctrine or theory. We first consider the distinction between a model and a theory. MODEL VERSUS THEORY Crisp is guided by how the term “theory” is used in science to explain how it may be used in theology. He suggests that like models, theories “may offer generalized accounts of a great deal of complex information, which may be simplified using concepts independent of the data (e.g. concepts like ‘incarnation’ or ‘Trinity,’ neither of which are to be found in the New Testament).” They are unlike models, however, in that “theories do not necessarily correlate to facts. Theories can be used to provide an explanation of counterfactual states of affairs.” 23 However, in theology, theories of atonement are not typically counterfactual in this sense, 24 and he also notes that a theory can in fact be complex and need not simplify the data. In fact, a theory “may be used to offer a complete account of a given data set.” Theories are in this

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sense “more metaphysically ambitious in scope than models” as in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. 25 Moving specifically to atonement theories, Crisp expresses the opinion that the now frequent use of the word theory for the atonement is a trend which does not “reflect patristic, medieval, or early modern usage any more than language about ‘models’ of atonement do.” In fact, he maintains that most modern theologians who use the term “theory” are actually advancing a “model” of the atonement, and frequently, as if the model is the only one “among several possible models.” 26 There are some examples of authors who “do go beyond this to delineate something more like theories of atonement.” These are theologians who “hazard a theory that explains why there is a plethora of different, and apparently mutually exclusive, models of the atonement.” This is how Crisp understands Green and Baker’s “kaleidoscopic account of the atonement,” 27 as mentioned above. In light of this, our attempt to search for integrative commonalities may be legitimately called a “theory.” Yet theory, if not qualified by the critical realism that undergirds it, seems too modern and too positivist for such a mystery. The word “framework” is our term of choice as it is less ambitious and more cognizant of the depth of the subject, even though we lapse into use of theory on occasion. GUNTON AND BEYOND The work of Colin Gunton in the twentieth century is influential in our methodological decisions, though our pressing for a united framework moves slightly beyond his intentions. In a nutshell, for Gunton, the term “metaphor” is more suitable to the subject material of the atonement, to the primacy of raw divine revelation concerning the atonement, and to the expectation that the theology of the atonement will transcend mere reason, without violating it. This has some resonance also, as already noted, with Aulén’s preference for “motif ” or “idea” expressed in his Christus Victor. The incongruency of the word “theory” with the multiple and rich descriptions of atonement in the multiple genres of the Bible—“stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs, letters, poems,” has been noted also by Rutledge. 28 A word less pregnant with logical positivism and more in keeping with the “faith seeking understanding” approach of Anselm, or with critical realism, is appropriate for this especially deep area of theology. The conviction that theology takes its cue in a mutually interdependent way from biblical studies also points toward the use of metaphor, given the range of genres in the Bible that inform the theology of the atonement. The reality that biblical studies also operate on the basis of critical realism, and not in accordance with logical positivism, provides further support for this nomenclature. The limits of

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theological language and the appropriate place of mystery is also best acknowledged by the use of the term “metaphor.” Some background on the nature and limits of Gunton’s use of the term “metaphor” is relevant to both of the interpretive questions before us. It is important to note the context of Gunton’s theology of the atonement, that of the rationalism of modernity. Gunton took the form of revelation concerning the significance of the atoning life and death of Jesus seriously, and not just its content. He argued therefore that biblical teaching regarding sacrifice, victory, and justice was best expressed in metaphors rather than theories. As Justyn Terry indicates, Gunton sought to address the great polarization in British atonement theology in his era and also to provide fresh stimulus for its study in light of the great discredit the acrimonious controversies brought upon it. 29 On the one hand there were modern rationalists like Hastings Rashdall, 30 R. S. Franks 31 and V. F. Storr 32 who fashioned Christian doctrine “in ways that were sympathetic to Hegelian Idealism, scientific reductionism and literary criticism of the Bible.” 33 This anti-revelatory rationalism led them to eschew anything deemed to be objectionable to a modern mind-set—objective or vicarious or forensic aspects of the atonement, concepts of original sin or the wrath of God, and ransom theory—and to embrace the moral exemplarist position of Abelard. These rationalists thus embraced only a subjective understanding of the atonement. The effect of the obedience of Jesus in going to the cross upon the human person, leading them to repentance was the way, and only way, in which reconciliation could be imagined. On the other hand, other theologians of the twentieth century resisted this modern rationalism and defended penal substitution theory, with emphasis on the objective taking away of the penalty and the wrath of God for human sin and guilt by the death of Christ. These theologians included R. W. Dale, 34 James Denney 35 and J. K. Mozley. 36 The arguments of these theologians at times seemed to lack nuance and were characterized by a reductionism of their own. Gunton’s answer was to speak of the various “theories” as metaphors, and thereby to nuance the arguments of the more conservative theologians, as well as to perturb the confident rationalism of the liberal theologians. Gunton’s Actuality of the Atonement, as Terry suggests, thus offers a “sustained critique of the rationalisms of morality, experience and concept stemming from Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel” as “preparation for reinterpreting traditional atonement imagery in terms of metaphor, and thereby to transcend the narrow confines of rationalism.” He thus “refuses to choose between an account made from within modernist assumptions, or from broad-brush rejections of rationalism.” 37 As an alternative to the various forms of rationalism and the dichotomies they created, Gunton developed a case for a metaphorical reading of the biblical accounts of the atonement. He is in fact borrowing from the use of metaphor in Rashdall, Storr, and

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Whale, 38 but, by contrast with these authors, not in order to discount the objective reality of “the ontological change” that the atonement imagery has secured. Gunton is anxious to “show that metaphor is both a pervasive feature of our language and it is a way of telling things as they are.” 39 He employed categories from philosophy of science and contra Hobbes and Locke who considered metaphor to be “an abuse of language,” he proposed that metaphor “is a major clue as to what language is and does.” 40 By contrast with how language in general mirrors reality in the rationalist way of thinking, Gunton states that “simply in virtue of the greater modesty of the claims for comprehension, metaphor is a primary vehicle of human rationality and superior to the pure concept (if such exists, as must be doubtful).” 41 The “importance of metaphor,” as Terry affirms, is that “it enables us to speak of things without which we could only remain silent.” 42 Gunton says it this way: “[A] metaphor or family of metaphors takes its shape from the divine and human story it seeks to narrate, and so enables aspects of the meaning of an unfathomable mystery to be expressed in language.” 43 This assertion from Gunton is the point to be applied in our treatment of the “models” of atonement as metaphors. Acknowledging and preferring the category of metaphor does not imply, however, that all of Gunton’s assumptions around its use need to be affirmed, and in particular in his application of it to the atonement in the categories of victory, justice, and sacrifice. On the one hand, one can agree in general with Gunton in his assessment of the Christus Victor motif, for example. He aptly points out that viewing the victory of Christ over Satan at the cross metaphorically avoids the historic problems of dualism and the attributing of rights to Satan, without taking away the claim that a great victory was accomplished by Christ’s death. Pressing it too far, as Aulén did, according to Gunton, leads to a view of the victory dynamic as merely myth, isolated in a realm “outside the course of concrete human relations.” 44 In general, Gunton observes that when a metaphor is taken too literally it becomes a myth. 45 Used properly, these biblical metaphors “are ways of describing realistically what can be described only in the indirect manner of this kind of language. But an indirect description is still a description of what is really there.” 46 So far, so good. The problem is, however, that this assessment of Christus Victor reflects Gunton’s prior assumption that biblical references to the devil and demons are always to be understood as references to earthly political, social, and religious powers. The existence of Satan and his emissaries are in fact myth in Gunton’s thought. Similarly, when Gunton discusses the sacrifice category, and the penal substitution metaphor in particular, he believes that this notion is a result of treating the metaphor too literally. Gunton critiques the penal substitution “theory” for the reasons that it treats the metaphor too literally, that it isolates the legal metaphor from other metaphors, and it involves a dualism between God and his Son, Jesus. In agreement with the sentiments of Justyn Terry, it can be acknowledged that this may

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be the case in some crass formulations of the penal substitution metaphor. However, crucially, as Terry also points out, Karl Barth has demonstrated that it is “possible to affirm both penalty and substitution in Christ’s work by setting it in the wider context of judgment without committing any of these sins.” 47 Karl Barth’s treatment of Christ as both Judge and the Judged will receive more attention in a later chapter. Suffice it to say for now that as Ruler–Judge, “Jesus is the representative of his people, and since his death is the means by which sinners are judged and find forgiveness, it is also a substitution: ‘he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves,’ to use Gunton’s phrase.” 48 Barth is thus able to “interpret judicial accounts of the work of Christ metaphorically and in a way that can readily be related to sacrifice and victory, and does so without driving a wedge between the Father and the Son, breathing new life into the concept of penal substitution.” 49 Gunton’s treatment of metaphor, though it served to “lift it from the ruts into which it [the doctrine of the atonement] had fallen,” and to reveal “the glory of the work of Christ” in the atonement, is thus not uncritically adopted here, especially when it comes to some aspects of its outworking with respect to the metaphors which undergird the models of the atonement. It had another limitation, which we seek to overcome also. This is his failure to develop an integrative view of all the metaphors together. Gunton did not like to over-schematicize theology, and this may have hindered his carrying of his project forward. It is true that Gunton does set the three main metaphors of justice, victory, and sacrifice in a wider context—that of the triune relationality of God and his mutual relations with humanity—and within the creation to a new creation narrative. However, Gunton does not give attention to the relation between the metaphors of victory, justice, and sacrifice themselves. Thus we hope to offer a framework which was in fact implicit throughout Gunton’s theology, that of participation, the dynamics of which may serve to unify and demonstrate mutual relations between the metaphors. One can understand why Gunton might resist such an integrative step. It might seem to invite a step which transcends metaphor, thus removing the mystery. This would be the case if one were to call this framework an unqualified “theory” of the atonement, that which Gunton was seeking to avoid. He seems to have preferred to keep to a rich kaleidoscopic view without seeking a single thread. If by “theory” is meant a positivist notion, this is understandable. But if by “framework,” or “unifying theory,” is intended a conception of the reality of what atonement in its totality involves, then so be it. Another way to say this is that if we can assume that our epistemology in pursuit of the truth of atonement approximates to the ontology or reality of what really went on in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and what now goes on in his session as our Great High Priest, and what will occur when he returns, and we believe we

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can, then it is not presumptuous to express something by way of a framework. Divine revelation suggests we can. The metaphorical nature of the language, and the variety of the metaphors used to convey the reality of atonement, is stressed also by J. I. Packer, in a way that reflects what I might say is an epistemology of critical realism which is pertinent in both Christian theology and in science. Packer affirms that Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational “picture-language.” This consists of parables, analogies, metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other, as in the Bible itself (from which this language is first learned), and all pointing to the reality of God’s presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it. 50

Then referring to the debate in theological circles in the 1960s and 1970s regarding the nature of theological language, 51 Packer speaks of “the recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are ‘models,’ comparable to the thought-models of modern physics.” 52 In particular, he gleans the significance of this from John Maclntyre’s assessment “that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic . . . and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa.” 53 Packer confirms that the “doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account, going back to Aquinas, of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite creatures).” 54 Packer then makes the interesting comparison between epistemology in theology and that in science: “All theological models, like the nondescriptive models of the physical sciences, have an analogical character; they are, we might say, analogies with a purpose.” 55 The general statement that models and epistemology function in roughly the same way in the sciences as in theology, does not preclude the particularities in knowing that pertain in each of the disciplines and their content (kata physin). Packer thus speaks of the “characteristic theological method,” which “whether practised clumsily or skillfully, consistently or inconsistently, has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point, to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say, and to let these models operate as ‘controls,’ both suggesting and delimiting what further, secondary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary.” 56 Packer goes on to affirm the empirical nature of both science and theology. On this basis, Packer then outlines a “three-tier hierarchy of models” in theology which are pertinent to the use of the term “model” in atonement theology:

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Chapter 4 first, the “control” models given in Scripture (God, Son of God, kingdom of God, word of God, love of God, glory of God, body of Christ, justification, adoption, redemption, new birth and so forth . . .) next, dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion, Trinity, nature, hypostatic union, double procession, sacrament, supernatural, etc.—in short, all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks); finally, interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution, verbal inspiration, divinization, Barth’s “Nihil”— das Nichtige—and many more). 57

The use of the term “model” in our treatment corresponds therefore with the interpretive model in Packer’s schema, and is based on Scriptural metaphors, models, or motifs. The interpretive models, like penal substitution, are humbly expressed for they lie between “Scripture and defined dogma.” And implicitly, there are more than one. An alternative to the term “model,” which emphasizes the humility in the use of the term model, as well as maintaining the empirical and critical realism implicit is the term “metaphor.” Thus, on occasion, “model” and “metaphor,” while hearing Crisp’s concerns, may be used interchangeably. Metaphor best represents knowledge humbly held through critical realism, and because it allows for mystery. It prevents us from ever saying we have arrived when it comes to the atonement, its dynamics, and especially what transpires in the Godhead concerning its dynamics. “Model” assumes more than one, and therefore allows for the mosaic understanding, but it can seem too much like theory and logical positivism. “Motif ” tends to describe the biblical themes of the atonement and this category will sometimes be used as synonymous with “metaphor.” NOTES 1. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” in Adam J. Johnson, ed. T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (Bloomsbury Companions) (London: Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2017), 315–334. 2. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 332–333. 3. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 333. 4. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 317. 5. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 330. 6. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 332. 7. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 332. 8. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 332. 9. Joel B. Green, “Kaleidoscopic View” in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, ed. James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 171. See also Mark Baker and Joel B. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts. Second Edition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011 [2000]). 10. Oliver D. Crisp, “The Union Account of the Atonement,” in The Word Enfleshed: Exploring the Person and Work of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2016), 26. 11. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 327.

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12. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 324. 13. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 324. 14. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 324. 15. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 325. 16. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 326. Crisp here reflects the work of Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 115. 17. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 326. 18. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 327. 19. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 328. 20. Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology, Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 67. 21. Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 76. 22. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 328–329. 23. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 329. 24. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 329. 25. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 329. 26. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 329–330. Crisp cites Adam J. Johnson as having made the same point recently in Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 28. He also indicates that “nineteenth century theologians like Schleiermacher, Charles Hodge, and John Miley write of ‘theories’ of atonement, not models.” (See, e.g., Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Macintosh and J. S. Stewart [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999 (1830)], 460; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology Vol. 2 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1940 (1845)], Part 3, ch. 9; and John Miley, Systematic Theology Vol. 2 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1989 (1893)], ch. 4.) But Crisp comments that “it seems that they mean by theories of atonement what I am calling models of atonement. The classification offered here more closely follows current language of models and theories in the current scientific literature than it does nineteenth century theological usage” (fn. 23, 329–330). 27. Oliver D. Crisp, “Methodological Issues in Approaching the Atonement,” 330. Here he refers to Baker and Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross. 28. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 9. 29. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement: Transcending Rationalism by Metaphor,” in The Theology of Colin Gunton, Lincoln Harvey, ed. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), (130–145), 130, fn.1 references Colin Grant’s reference to a certain “abandonment of atonement” as a result of these interminable controversies. Colin Grant, “The Abandonment of Atonement,” in King’s Theological Review, vol. 9, 1986. 30. Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (London: Macmillan, 1919). 31. R. S. Franks, The Work of Christ (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1918/1962). 32. V. F. Storr, The Problem of the Cross, 2nd ed. (London: SCM, 1924). 33. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 131. 34. R. W. Dale, The Atonement (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1888). 35. James Denney, The Atonement and the Modern Mind (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903). 36. J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of Atonement (London: Duckworth, 1915). 37. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 131. 38. See references in Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” 142–143. 39. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 25. 40. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 134. 41. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 39. 42. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement, 135. 43. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 113.

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44. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 63–65. 45. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 64. 46. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 65. 47. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 140. 48. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 140. The phrase from Gunton is from The Actuality of the Atonement, 165. 49. Justyn Terry, “Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement,” 140. 50. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin, Issue 25 (1974), (3–45) 10–11. 51. See Frederick Ferré’s Language, Logic and God (New York: Harper, 1961); Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (London: SCM, 1974); John Macquarrie, God-Talk (London: SCM, 1967). 52. Packer notes that “The pioneer in stating this was Ian T. Ramsey: see his Religious Language (London: SCM, 1957); Models and Mystery (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), Christian Discourse (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). He makes reference also to further discussion of models in theology. Cf. John Maclntyre, The Shape of Christology (London: SCM, 1966), especially 54–81, Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion (London: SCM, 1970), 69–94, and Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (London: SCM, 1974). 53. John MacIntyre, The Shape of Christology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Person of Christ (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 1998), 63. 54. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 11. Packer refers to formulation of the idea of analogy by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v., as follows: “A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects.” He states also that “Aquinas” account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I, xiii, and can be read in Words about God, ed. Ian T. Ramsey (London: SCM, London 1971), 36ff. He also references “a technical Thomist discussion, concentrating on analogy in natural theology,” in E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy (London: Longmans, 1949) 92–121. Packer explains that “For Thomists, the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology). Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” n.11, 11. T. F. Torrance’s modified version of Natural Theology is a helpful Protestant affirmation of it. See T. F. Torrance, Theological Science (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), Reality and Scientific Theology. Margaret Harris Lectures, Dundee, 1970. Theology and Science at the Frontiers of Knowledge 1 (Edinburgh: Scottish University Press, 1985). See my discussion of this in Echoes of Coinherence: Trinitarian Theology and Science Together (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017). 55. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 10–11. 56. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 12. 57. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 12. Emphases added.

Chapter Five

The Son’s Participation in Humanity and Human Participation in the Son through the Spirit

The suggested framework within which all models of the atonement belong is participation. Some might say this is a theory of redemption, and for reasons already stated I have resisted this nomenclature somewhat, while finding it is hard to avoid if one wants to communicate in this area of theological pursuit. One reason for retaining the word “theory” is that participation has to do with the explicatory mechanism of the atonement. I am, in fact, arguing that none of the atonement models work apart from the incarnation, that is, God’s participation in humanity in the person of his Son, or the hypostatic union (unio hypostatica), and nor do they work apart from the union or participation of human persons with Christ, enabled by the Holy Spirit (unio cum Christo when considered of a person, unio mystica when considered collectively of the church). How this is true for each model will not be considered in detail here, but will become apparent in the chapter on the biblical metaphors and then the sequential chapters on the models. Our aim in this chapter is merely to explain what these two aspects of participation mean. We begin with a consideration of the union of the divine and human natures of the Son of God, which is the grounding or framework or explanatory mechanism for all models of the atonement, and indeed also as the grounding or framework or mechanism for the subjective reality that human persons are brought into union with Christ, and as those in Christ, to receive the benefits of the atonement, which may be summed up as justification and sanctification and the vocation to be fully human. 87

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THE INCARNATIONAL UNION (UNIO HYPOSTATICA) Given that Jesus Christ is the one mediator between God and humanity, it will not be surprising that atonement theology must begin in Christology. The filial objective of the atonement is the bringing of many sons and daughters to glory (Heb. 2:10). That cannot happen in the context of Hebrews 2 apart from the incarnation: “the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters” (Heb. 2:11). . . . The act of incarnation is, in the same context, the basis for the conquest of death in the Christus Victor objective of the atonement: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:14–15). Furthermore, the forensic transaction that enables both the filial and the victory objectives of the atonement is also grounded in the incarnation, in this same context: “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.” (2:17). What enables Jesus to act on behalf of, as representative, and as substitute for humanity is, according to Scripture, his having become one with humanity, his having assumed humanity. Theologians of theosis in both the East and the West understood that the incarnation was the crucial starting point and primary means in the process by which humans would be deified or divinized, that is, made sons and daughters of God. For example, Irenaeus (c. 130–200) stated that God had “become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” 1 He argued that atonement was very much contingent on the incarnation. Donald McKim notes that for Irenaeus “if [Jesus’s] flesh differed from humanity’s in any way (except in sinlessness), the parallel is incomplete, the sin of the first Adam cannot be overcome, and reconciliation cannot occur.” 2 Irenaeus thus represents a strong focus on the human nature of Christ as an absolute necessity. Considered to be the intellectual heir of Justin Martyr, he assumes his mediatorial language, although Norris suggests Irenaeus develops this further through asserting that, “it is in the incarnation itself which is the mediation.” 3 Likewise, Athanasius, the great theologian of Alexandria (c. 296–373), expressed his theology of deification in this way: “The Word was made flesh in order that we might be made gods. . . . Just as the Lord, putting on the body, became a man, so also we men are both deified through his flesh, and henceforth inherit everlasting life,” 4 and “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” 5 Augustine of Hippo (354–430) also said: “But

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he himself that justifies also deifies, for by justifying he makes sons of God. ‘For he has given them power to become the sons of God’ [referring to John 1:12]. If then we have been made sons of god, we have also been made gods.” 6 Augustine does clarify that they are gods by grace and not nature, but they are still called “gods.” But the key for Augustine is the incarnation: “To make human beings gods . . . he was made man who was God.” 7 Whatever forensic dynamics of the atonement occurred en route to deification, whether they occurred in the act of the incarnation, through his vicarious life, through a sacrifice offered as satisfaction, or even as a substitute, the church understood that the participation of Christ in humanity was crucial to whatever mechanisms were in operation in the divine mystery of the atonement. But no theologian in the great tradition has grasped the importance of the incarnation and explicated its crucial importance for salvation better than Karl Barth. Speaking of the volume in the Church Dogmatics (IV/2, para. 64.2) which contains the outworking of salvation for the church as justification and sanctification, Adam Neder says, “Simply put, the Christology is the key to the whole volume, and covenant-historical thinking is the key to the Christology.” 8 The effects of salvation are indissolubly linked to the history of Jesus Christ and specifically the “mutual participation” 9 of the human essence in the divine and the divine essence in the human, which “is the event of his (Christ’s) person—unio hypostatica—and the accomplishment of the exaltation of humanity.” 10 He goes on to say that “The participation of humanity in Jesus Christ occurs objectively within this history of mutual participation and subjectively in a way that corresponds to this history.” In other words, the ordo salutis of the Christian is governed by the ordo historia of Jesus Christ. Neder is careful to pay attention to the particular Cyrilline understanding of Barth’s Christology. Union of the believer and the church with Christ is closely modelled on the unconfused and asymmetric nature of Barth’s understanding of the relationship between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Christ. 11 Barth spends time expressing these nuances as he portrays the relationship between the “Exaltation of the Son of Man” and the consequences for humans in union with Christ. Urging his readers back to John 1:14, the “central saying” of the incarnation in Scripture, Barth explains that the two natures do not really exist or are “actual as such” apart from the person of the Son of God. It is the eternal Logos “who adds human essence to His divine essence, thus giving it existence and uniting both in Himself. In Him, and Him alone, they were and are united.” 12 Over against Lutheran Christology and its emphasis on the communion of properties (communicatio idiomatum) of the two natures, Barth insists that he has laid emphasis on “the divine Subject of the incarnation,” thereby “giving priority and precedence to the doctrine of the unio hypostatica over that of the communio naturarum” in a manner that is true to the “Christology of the Reformed tradition.” 13 That is, Barth believed that we must consider first the

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union of the person of the Logos with the human nature, as that came to exist historically when the Son of God took on human nature and became the man Jesus of Nazareth, and only secondarily as a result, the communio naturarum, or the interplay between the divine and human natures, as if they were equal. The Word became flesh, not the divine nature, in other words. Life is communicated from the Divine person to the human nature, but none of his other attributes. This actualistic ontology in which Jesus Christ is the actualization of the divine and human natures was not preconceived in Barth’s thinking but was rather a response to the actual and unique revelation of God in Jesus Christ. “Since Jesus Christ is himself the event of this history,” Neder says, “historical thinking is the fitting mode of description” 14 for Barth in Christology. This ensures that we must consider the relationship between the person of the Logos and his assumed human nature to be in a mutual participation, but not on an entirely equal basis. Barth states of the two natures, that “even in their common working they are not interchangeable. The divine is still above and the human below. Their relationship is one of genuine divine action.” 15 But why does Barth enter in to such Christological depth at the start of his volume on human salvation? It is because this Christology and these particular Christological, incarnational categories will shape the nature of human salvation as expounded in it. Barth urges his readers not to skip the opening Christological section in order to get quickly to sanctification, for Christology is actually the interpretive grid for all that is true of the Christian in union with Christ. Speaking of the Christology, Barth states, “For it is there—and this is true of every aspect—that the decisions are made. There is no legitimate way to the understanding of the Christian life than that which we enter there.” 16 In sum, for Barth, “The problem of reconciled humanity, like that of the reconciling God, has to be based in Christology, and can be legitimately posed and developed and answered only on this basis.” 17 Neder goes on to show how in the following four paragraphs in IV/2 “the actualism of Barth’s Christology makes itself felt in a thoroughly actualistic construal of the believer’s participation in Christ.” 18 The essential features of Barth’s understanding of participation in Christ shaped by his Christology, may be summarized as follows: first, participation in Christ is divinely enabled, it is not synergistic or Pelagian, just as the divine person assumed a human nature, and not the other way around; yet, participation in Christ, despite its asymmetric nature in which God takes the initiative, does include human agency, though it is always human agency in his agency; participation in Christ is unconfused, just as participation of the Logos in humanity was and is unconfused, it is a fellowship as indeed the divine and human natures of Christ are in fellowship in an unconfused, unmixed way. That is, humans in union with Christ stay human, and they don’t become divine in essence. They do become divine in character and are

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restored into the divine image, but this makes them more fully human, not less human. Neder has captured Barth’s view of participation in Christ, reflecting the hypostatic union, with the appropriate term, “An Orderly Fellowship.” 19 He encapsulates Barth’s whole intent in his sentence near the beginning of IV/2 with this quote: “As God condescends and humbles Himself to man and becomes man, man himself is exalted, not as God or like God, but to God, being placed at His side, not in identity, but in true fellowship with Him, and becoming a new man in his exaltation and fellowship.” 20 The way in which Barth’s view of the incarnational participation, and how this translates into union with Christ, affects how he sees the atonement will unfold in chapters 11 and 12. How the hypostatic union and the union of the Christian with Christ informs all of the models which will be considered in the chapters which follow, will give evidence that it is indeed the theory or framework for atonement. One other theologian is worthy of mention with respect to his work on the importance of the incarnation and to the atonement. This is John Williamson Nevin (1803–1886), an American theologian who lived before Barth and T. F. Torrance and presaged many of the themes of their theology. He argued that the atonement stands upon the incarnation rather than the incarnation merely enabling the atonement. Thus, reflecting Irenaeus, Nevin states that “the race starts in Adam” and “is recapitulated . . . or gathered into a new centre and head in Christ.” 21 As we transition to considering the role of the union of the believer with the incarnate, atoning Christ in salvation, it will be appropriate to anticipate the graces (both pardon and holiness) that flow from union with Christ as these are expressed in Nevin. His language sounds oddly like that of T. F. Torrance: It makes us to be in fact, what it accounts us to be, in Christ. The ground of our justification is a righteousness that was foreign to us before but is now made to lodge itself in the inmost constitution of our being. A real life-union with Christ, powerfully wrought in our souls by the Holy Ghost, is the only basis . . . [for] any true imputation to us of what he has done and suffered on our behalf. 22

Consideration of a conflict between Nevin and his mentor Charles Hodge will serve to illuminate the recovery of the importance of the incarnation for Reformed theology which Nevin offers. 23 It was in fact Nevin who defended John Calvin’s sacramental understanding of the Lord’s Supper in this altercation. Hodge actually contended essentially for the Zwinglian memorialist position. 24 As might be expected, the full range of their theology was drawn into the contention, 25 and what emerged was a difference of opinion as to the center of Christian faith: in the case of Hodge it was the satisfaction theory of the atonement, and for Nevin, the incarnation. 26 Nevin characterized the conflict in this manner: “What [Hodge] is offended with is the conception of

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sacramental religion, as distinguished from a religion of mere individual spirituality. . . . Justification by faith and sacramental grace are, in his view, incompatible conceptions.” 27 Nevin’s theology of the atonement, and indeed his whole corpus, naturally received strong criticism, despite being orthodox, and broadly Reformed. However, as Glover has indicated, Nevin’s theology of the atonement must be considered within his overarching incarnational theology. His critique of the American Protestantism of his day was essentially a critique of its insufficient doctrine of the incarnation and the believer’s union with Christ, which resulted in unbalanced atonement theology, and erroneous views of the church and sacraments. 28

What Nevin in fact does is to “restore the atonement to its proper place in the economy of redemption and the life of the church by grounding it upon the enduring incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, and the church’s union with him,” 29 expressed and appropriated afresh by the Eucharist. His theology of the atonement, though it did not neglect satisfaction and substitution, simply recast the doctrine in light of the incarnation of Christ, the center and ground of his entire theology. The incarnation was for Nevin, “the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s revelations.” 30 As such, the incarnation was “the principle” and “true measure and test” of Christianity, the “fact of all facts” and the “centre and hinge of all history.” 31 Indeed, for Nevin, “all Christian theology is a subset of Christology; every aspect of theology must be related to the hypostatic union of the eternal Logos and humanity in the person of Christ.” 32 It was in fact the “absolute unity of the divine and the human in his person” which is the “last ground of Christianity” and to which it owes “its distinctive character.” 33 Recognizing in American Protestantism a “failure to afford the incarnation its proper place as the nexus for . . . all genuine Christian theology,” 34 Nevin recognized “Christ’s embodiment” as having “massive mediatorial and redemptive implications.” 35 Against these, Nevin proposed a robust incarnation-centered and ecclesial theology in which “the invisible Word became flesh, and through that flesh brings God to us and us to God.” 36 For Nevin, the incarnation is the central fact in all reality. Specifically, Nevin contended that “a depreciation of the full and abiding significance of the incarnation leads inexorably to a depreciation of the inner logic of the atonement.” 37 Christ is thus reduced to being an Intermediary, rather than the Mediator of salvation between God and humanity. Marcus Johnson comments that the incarnation demonstrates that Christ is far more than an intermediator . . . who brokers an “outward and mechanical” contract or covenant between two others . . . [Christ] mediates God to humanity as truly and fully God, and he mediates humanity to God as fully and truly human—he is as fully the one side of the mediation as he is the other. . . . The at-one-ing mediation that Christ secures between God and men

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is an ontological reality defined by his person—he is the saving union between God and humanity—and so all depends on who Christ is . . . Christ constitutes, rather than merely performs, the atonement . . . the embodied Christ himself is, rather than merely secures, the covenant of grace. 38

Christ’s saving work is inseparable from his person. Forensic or legal imputation of Christ’s righteousness cannot be spoken of without speaking first of prior union with Christ’s person. Nevin thus affirms that “righteousness, like guilt, is an attribute which supposes a subject in which it inheres, and from which it cannot be abstracted without ceasing to exist.” 39 He concludes therefore that “The union between divinity and humanity accomplished in Christ cannot be merely a contractual mediation . . . but must be a true life-union.” 40 Nevin thus proposes at-onement over against atonement in Hodge. 41 THE UNION OF THE BELIEVERS WITH CHRIST (UNIO CUM CHRISTI, UNIO MYSTICA) The Biblical and Theological Basis for Participation in Christ The link between incarnation and atonement is explicit in a number of New Testament passages, and implicit in light of the whole narrative of the gospel as it unfolds in Scripture. Paul makes the connection in Galatians 4:4–5, “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” The forensic and the filial are brought together here. Incarnation, atonement, adoption is the sequence chronologically speaking. 1 John 4:9–10, which is part of a pericope which begins with the incarnation as the differentiating diagnostic of true belief, brings together the incarnation, propitiatory/expiatory atonement and the ontological reality of life in God: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” This echoes John’s Gospel, where he has already unfolded in the same chapter, the identity of Jesus as both the Word made flesh (1:14), and the Lamb of God “who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29). Most significantly, in John 6, thought to be John’s version of the Eucharist, and certainly the most profound exposition of its meaning, John, who has said the “Word became flesh,” now records the words of Jesus saying, “This bread is my flesh, which I will give for you” (6:51). It is the flesh that came down from heaven which is then given, that is offered up on the cross in death, one may assume, that is then appropriated by faith, and reappropriated afresh, again and again in the remembrance of his death. It is not surprising that John, who is linked with Polycarp, who is linked with Irenaeus, is the source of this participatory

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theology. This is the theology that begins with the incarnational participation of the Son in humanity as both atoning in itself and as preparative of atonement, and which issues in the participation of believing humans in Christ, in the life of the triune God, without confusion. These texts may not all directly implicate participation as the mechanism for understanding the atonement in its representative and substitutionary dynamics, but together they build the case convincingly. The most direct statement in the New Testament is the Pauline one which will be discussed in more detail in considering the vicarious humanity model of the atonement. This text is Romans 8:3–4: “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Ruling out the faulty interpretation that Paul means by “likeness,” an appearance that is just an appearance but not the real thing, we are to surmise that the Son actually assumed humanity in its fullness at the incarnation, including its sinfulness, and that he cleansed it (either at conception, by the Spirit, or in his life and especially his sufferings, or in his death), and that this act of cleansing human nature, was salvific in itself or that it enabled the Son to offer a sacrifice for our sins that provided pardon and also the power to obey the law. All of the rich facets of this passage and its various exegetical and theological possibilities will be discussed later, but suffice it to say that Paul thought of the incarnation and workings of the atonement and its effects, justification, adoption, sanctification . . . together. Participation in our human flesh is crucial to Christ’s ability to be one with, identify with, be a substitute for, suffer for, atone for, rise for, ascend for sinful and lost humanity. Paul’s employment of a primitive apostolic “creed” expression in 1 Timothy 3:16 presents this relation in a cryptic way in the first two lines: “Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.” The Old Testament types of the atonement also resonate with this theme that the incarnation, the taking on of human flesh was necessary for the credibility of an act of one Man to be vicarious or representative or substitutionary. These images prepared humanity for the concepts that underly the atonement. Would we ever have understood the efficacy of the offering of Christ for us if we had not seen this pictured for centuries in the Old Testament sacrificial system? This was a system which would, yes, pass away with the advent of Christ. But it did not ever lose its illustrative value. It would still provide key insights and illumination into all that he accomplished as our Great High Priest, as Hebrews suggests. Take just the example of the liturgy of the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16, which has

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participative elements in spades. The high priest, truly and fully a man, represents the whole covenantal people of God in all his actions as he makes atonement that is propitiatory, as he offers the blood of a bull for himself and of a goat for the people seven times before and once on the mercy seat, the hilastêrion, or propitiatory cover, through which God observed the tablets of his holy law. His actions are also clearly depicted as something more than merely representative, but something in fact that is substitutionary, for he confesses the sins of all the people onto a goat which is sent off into a desert place, an uninhabited place of abandonment. It is true that the contrasts are glaring—Jesus does not need to offer a sacrifice for he is sinless. But the comparisons are equally evident—that participative priest and the participative sacrifices of the Old Testament prefigures the participative Priest, and the sacrifices offered prefigure all that Jesus, who is both priest and sacrifice, rendered to God and accomplished for us. Hebrews is at great pains to establish the humanity of Christ in chapter 2 as the grounding for his participative work of atonement in the rest of the book. And chapter 10, the most eminent chapter of the atonement in the New Testament begins with the foundation, Christ’s incarnation, in 10:5–7. The body prepared for the Son (10:5) prior to the incarnation once given becomes that body in which Christ is obedient for us (10:8–9), and then in death, we are “made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10), for “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (10:13). Justification and sanctification become ours for he became one with us that we might become one with him. This Priest “sat down at the right hand of God” having completed the work of atonement, but this same epistle, which is the pinnacle of revelation concerning the High Priesthood of Christ, tells us that he continues to represent his people in heaven and to intercede for them, and that he can do so, not merely because he is the divine Son but because he became human for us. His ongoing ministry at the right hand of the Father is effective because he has carried our humanity into the fellowship of the triune Godhead and there he stands for us, representing us to the Father in light of his atonement, and there he prays for us (7:23–25) until we are saved completely. He is our priest as seated and as standing, but he is so in both cases because of the unio hypostatica! His union with humanity. And we are present in him there at the right hand of the Father because of the union cum Christo, our union with Christ which justifies and sanctifies us. The epistle of Hebrews on its own is sufficient to establish the proposition that participation is the framework or theory on which atonement is accomplished and applied. But beyond any particular text or book of the Bible, this is the essence of the Christian story. The Gospels either begin with or assume the story of the incarnation, and the Gospels, though they deeply value the story of his virtuous life, are always anticipating his death, with a sometimes explicit (Mark 10:45 “to give his life as a ransom for many”) and mainly implicit assump-

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tion that he was not dying for sins of his own, but for the sins of the world, and that he therefore was the Man for or in the place of humanity. The Gospels all end with the story of the cross where, as Man, he dies pronouncing the forgiveness of others, and the promise of paradise for penitent sinners. Then comes the resurrection of a body, and the ascension of that body to the Father’s right hand where he still represents humanity (Luke 24). The Gospels simply narrate this, and the epistles interpret it theologically in ways we have illustrated above. The very core of the gospel or the kerygma regarding the atonement is that Jesus Christ is Lord, and though it does not mention the incarnation, in all three aspects Paul mentions, it is assumed: he “died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). If the incarnational union is everywhere implied in statements concerning the atonement in the New Testament, the union with Christ which this engenders in those who believe is equally prominent in the New Testament, where the phrase “in Christ” is the most dominant concept. The filial always comes before the forensic in the sense that it is because of union with Christ that justification is granted and sanctification is engrafted within the believer. This is the pattern for the epistle of Romans, for instance. Justification, expounded in 3:21–5:21, is given to those who through faith in Jesus Christ find themselves to be “in Christ” and “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1). Participation in the last Adam is the means by which all may participate in the justification made in the one man who participated in humanity for all (5:18). Sanctification similarly is the outworking of union with Christ in death and resurrection, leading to mortification of sin and vivification of virtues in Christ. Justification and sanctification are a mirage apart from our union with the person of Christ enabled by his union with us. The promise of life in the Spirit in chapter 8 is for those who are “in Christ Jesus” (8:1) and who therefore know not only that freedom from condemnation, but freedom for righteousness by the Spirit’s empowering. The promise of bodily resurrection is also realized only for those “in Christ,” which is to say those of whom it may be said by the indwelling of the Spirit, that Christ is in them (8:11). However, perhaps Paul’s clearest and most pithy statement about union with Christ and all that flows from it, is in 1 Corinthians 1:30: “It is because of him (God) that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” The connection between the incarnation, that is, the union of Christ with humanity, and the union of believers with Christ, is explicit in the tradition. In A. M. Allchin’s book Participation in God, Allchin states that for the Welsh Anglican hymn-writer William Williams (1719–1791), as well as for other teachers of theosis, “the doctrines of Trinity, incarnation and deification belong together in an indissoluble knot.” 42 These three doctrines form an indissoluble helix in the participation theology of the Eastern tradition, as

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well as frequently in the Western traditions. Even in the Reformed tradition, Jonathan Edwards reflects these intertwined realities, with the Holy Spirit being especially prominent in each union. 43 Edwards does, however, underplay the incarnation in this soteriological knot and even presents a somewhat ahistorical version of it. By contrast, another Reformed theologian who has given full weight to the doctrine of the incarnation in the atonement and salvation and to its connectedness to union of the believer with Christ, is John Williamson Nevin. We return to his work with an emphasis on this linkage, once again in conversation with Charles Hodge. Nevin, as already noted, had much to say to correct a focus on Christ’s saving work and benefits that neglected his person. He proposed his robust ecclesial theology of union with Christ over against prevailing individualist and “nonchurchly” views of “relationship with Christ in external and contractual terms.” 44 Union with Christ for Nevin was not merely moral or legal. Rather, it was the “reception of [Christ’s] life,” as this was expressed in and mediated through the church in its ministry of the Word and sacraments. Nevin did not deny the need for personal appropriation of Christ by faith in conversion. This new life was “a real communion with the person of Christ . . . effected by the Holy Spirit through faith.” 45 Yet he understood the mediated nature of saving faith. He recognized that “the life of Christ [is] located in his people, the church.” 46 He therefore understood living union with Christ to be sustained, through faith, by receiving Christ’s own “life-giving flesh.” That is, this union was to be ever more deeply actualized in believers through the Eucharist. Thus he reflected the real spiritual presence view of John Calvin faithfully with respect to the Eucharist. Thus, for Nevin, “there is” in the Eucharist, “an ‘efflux’ from Christ that lodges itself in the inmost core of our personality and becomes the ‘seed’ of our sanctification.” 47 The connectedness of the incarnation and union with Christ becomes apparent when Nevin expresses over against Hodge’s view that the incarnation is a necessary condition for accomplishing atonement and justification, that the incarnation is in fact the true basis of humanity’s relationship with God, and that the atoning death of Christ was necessary because the divine Logos had become incarnate into a fallen world and a sinful humanity. 48 Nevin reflects an awareness of the Church Fathers and Aquinas and relies on their work in this regard more so than on scholastic Reformed theologians. Nevin was persuaded that “Jesus’ incarnation is not simply a compulsory mechanism of the atonement” but “the fundamental need and longing of creation itself . . . to be raised into a higher order of existence . . . the moral and ontological ascension of humanity into the life of God.” 49 In particular, “Christ communicates his own life substantially to the soul on which he acts, causing it to grow into his very nature. This is the mystical union; the basis of our whole salvation.” 50

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For Nevin, the forensics of atonement and justification are not denied. However, they are a consequence of the filial. They stand on the incarnation, and, as in Calvin, they are the graces (duplex gratia) that are grounded in union with Christ (unio Christi). Justification and sanctification are the consequence of real, organic union with Christ, and a resulting principle of growth in inherent righteousness. Some commentators on Nevin on this matter have suggested that Nevin denies forensic, imputed righteousness, and others that he fails to integrate the real organic union and the forensics. That is, these latter, such as Evans and Letham, believe that Nevin separates imputation and impartation, 51 subordinating the forensic to the realistic. 52 For them, Nevin’s theology of union fails to “integrate these two elements.” 53 However, it seems better to say with Glover, that Nevin merely grounded legal righteousness logically on organic union with, and therefore actual righteousness through, Christ. 54 As Evans affirms, “Nevin does not deny or belittle the legal declaration, but rather bases the forensic/external righteousness on the real/internal, 55 as with Adam’s guilt.” 56 Glover points out aptly that scholastic Reformed theology separated these elements even more sharply whereas Nevin “held these in tension, as part of the mystery of Christ’s incarnate person and work, believing both to be taught in Scripture and affirmed by the tradition.” 57 The connection between the real or organic and the forensic in Nevin is consistent with the organic and forensic relationship between the first and last Adams. Adam’s guilt was, in Nevin’s mind, being reckoned to the human race forensically because we participate in it organically. Likewise, Nevin viewed Christ, the second Adam, to be our remedy “as both our federal and real head, both our representative and organic source (as root to branches).” 58 Nevin also viewed the church’s union with Christ in realistic terms as a matter of logical priority. He believed that the exclusively legal view, the “imagination that the merits of Christ’s life may be sundered from his life itself, and conveyed over to his people in abstract form, on the ground of a merely outward legal constitution,” was contrary to both Scripture and reason. 59 As Oliver Crisp has stated, Nevin could not see how “any who hold to the Augustinian view of Adam’s organic union with his posterity, as the only basis that can properly support the doctrine of original sin, should not feel the necessity of a like organic union with Christ, as the indispensable condition of an interest in his salvation.” 60 The contribution made by Nevin is significant though not new to the Reformed tradition, since his work reflects that of Calvin closely. It establishes the close intertwining and even coinherence of the union of the Son with humanity and the union of believing humanity with the Son. It is by faith in Christ, a faith which is mediated by the church, that the converting human receives the incarnate life of Christ, and that union and that life of

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Christ is freshly encountered again and again as that is mediated by the Spirit through the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In sum, we may say that no atonement is accomplished apart from the incarnational union of God with man in Christ, and that there is no atonement applied outside of the union of the believers with Christ. How this concept of participation works its way into each aspect of atonement and all of its biblical motifs and theological models will be our primary theme from this point on. However, before proceeding, there is a need in a contemporary theological milieu in which the work “participation” is frequently bandied about, to clarify what we mean in the second sense of the participation of humans in the life of God. The Nature of Participation While a doctrine of participation is increasingly being embraced by Protestants, following Calvin and Edwards and Barth, it is on the basis of the more biblical and theological concept of koinonia that such a framework must be based. The methexis concept of participation (and the obsession with Plato) has been heavily critiqued by Alan Torrance 61 and also by Julie Canlis, 62 in favor of a notion of participation that is restricted to the relations between Divine and human persons in Christ (koinõnia). As Torrance indicates, “participation that are derived closely from New Testament references to koinõnia, commits us to an irreducibly relational conceptuality denoting a radically interpersonal overlapping or interpenetration of being, where this is conceived in such a way that personal hypostases are fully realized in this and not in any way subsumed by it.” 63 Canlis, for the benefit of the squeamish Reformed, argues that even Calvin portrays a doctrine of participation consonant with the transcendence of God, and along with Irenaeus, “refashioned Platonic participation on the anvil of their perception of the Trinitarian relations.” Canlis cites Paul Lebeau, who suggested that Irenaeus’s theology can be condensed into the work koinõnia: The coherence of the Gnostic universe was founded in the principle of incommunicability and dissociation. Irenaeus’s universe, as it is often noted, is a universe of unity, or more precisely, of communion, of communication and of mutual exchange where each being keeps its ontological uniqueness even as they open themselves up to others. 64

Irenaeus’s influence on Calvin is also demonstrated by Canlis at length. Citing one example, commenting on Irenaeus’s letter to Martyr, and specifically on the assertion in 1 Corinthians 1:9 that the faithful are called into the communion of the Son, and after indicating the inadequacy of words like “Fellowship” (Consortium) and “Society” (Societas), Calvin states, “in my judgement, he designates that sacred unity by which the Son of God engrafts

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us into His body, so that He communicates to us all that is His. We so draw life from His flesh and His blood, that they are not improperly called our food.” Canlis points out that this participation for Calvin is grounded in a pneumatic anthropology and ontology. I have shown elsewhere that Jonathan Edwards’s concept, similarly crafted within the Western model of the Trinity, leaves itself open to the charge of monism, and I have suggested that a perichoretic Eastern model would have served to facilitate a model of participation that leaves human and Divine persons distinct and intact. 65 This may apply to Calvin also, I suggest. Karl Barth too was of the opinion that the way Paul uses koinõnia “factored personal relationship into what was formerly a philosophical and cosmological conceptual tool.” 66 This is confirmed in IV/2 as noted above. In CD IV/3, Barth wrote, “In the language of the NT, koinõnia or communicatio is a relationship between two persons in which they are brought into perfect mutual coordination within the framework of a definitive order, yet with no destruction of their two-sided identity and particularity but rather in its confirmation and expression.” 67 A few comments seem necessary on how participation may be viewed with respect to God’s relationship to his creation, including humans who even if unregenerate are still, on most accounts, image bearers of God. Some Eastern theologians, Maximus, for example, embrace both the philosophical concept of methexis and the theological concept of koinõnia. Consubstantial participation of the methexis kind seems to be tantamount to monism and confounds the personal nature of the persons of the triune Godhead. It seems better to stay with the concept of koinonia and to see the relationship between the divine person of the Logos and his human nature as a very appropriate way of envisioning how he is in asymmetric and sovereign fellowship with his creation in which he works all things out “in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:10). 68 With regard to the status or condition of humans who are “not-yet-Christians,” Calvin (on Canlis’s account at least) and the neo-Calvinists (Kuyper and Dooyewoord, for example) have affirmed a strong theology of creation and the imago Dei as extant despite the Fall and a participation of a nonmethexis kind by which the providence of God operates in all aspects of the pursuit of human knowledge and government. The work of the person of the Spirit is invoked in particular. Barth’s recasting of the theology of election (considered later) brings the added incentive for mission in the broadest sense, including engagement in the public square, on the basis of the fact that all humans are as such, “designated Christians.”

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NOTES 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies (Adversus haereses), book 5, preface, http:// www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103100.htm Emphasis added. 2. Donald K. McKim, Theological Turning Points: Major Issues in Christian Thought (Atlanta: J. Knox Press, 1988), 28. 3. Richard A. Norris, The Christological Controversy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 9. 4. Athanasius, Against the Arians, 1.39 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/28161.htm), 3.34 (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/28163.htm). 5. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word (de incarnatione Verbi Dei) 54.3 (http:// www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm). Athanasius meant this in a relational and moral sense, not because he was a monist or pantheist. Humans do not become God in an ontological sense. 6. Augustine, On the Psalms, 50.2. https://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/otesources/19-psalms/text/books/augustine-psalms/augustine-psalms.pdf, 315–316. 7. Augustine, Sermon 192.1.1. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons (184–229), Vol. 3/6. trans. Edmund Hill (New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1993), 47. Emphasis added. 8. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 61. 9. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 13 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975), IV/2, 66. 10. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 61. 11. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 6. 12. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 66. 13. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 66. 14. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 61. 15. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 116. 16. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, x. 17. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 19. 18. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 62. 19. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 62. 20. Karl Barth, CD IV/2, 6. 21. William B. Evans, ed. The Incarnate Word: Selected Writings on Christology, John Williamson Nevin, Philip Schaff and Daniel Gans. Vol. 4 of The Mercersburg Theology Study Series (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 64. 22. William B. Evans, ed. The Incarnate Word, 159–60, emphasis added. 23. In this section I am indebted to the work of Daniel Glover on John Nevin in his paper, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union: John Williamson Nevin’s Incarnational Participatory Theology of the Atonement,” presented in the Atonement Seminar, APPL/THEO 725, Fall 2018. 24. W. Bradford Littlejohn, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 40–55. See John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence and The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper, Linden J. DeBie, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 40–91, for historical evidence of Reformed position. 25. W. Bradford Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 56–87. 26. B. A. Gerrish, Thinking with the Church: Essays in Historical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 183 and 201 respectively. 27. Linden J. DeBie, Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion: Mercersburg and the Conservative Roots of American Religion (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2008), 88. 28. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist,” 3–4. 29. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist,” 4–5. 30. Quoted in Marcus Peter Johnson, One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 82. 31. Quoted in Richard J. Mouw and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Toward a More Compassionate Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic,

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2013), 21. See also William DiPuccio, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin (Macon: Mercer, 1998), 25–26. 32. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist,” 5. 33. John Williamson Nevin, Mystical Presence, 27. Emphasis added. 34. Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh: John Williamson Nevin, Charles Hodge, and The Antichrist,” vol. 2 of E vangelical Calvinism: Dogmatics and Devotion, ed. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 60. 35. Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh,” 61–62. Emphasis added. 36. Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh,” 66. 37. Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh,” 67. 38. Marcus P. Johnson, “The Word Became Flesh,” 61–62. 39. William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock/Paternoster, 2008), 171. 40. W. Bradford Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 59. 41. W. Bradford Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 59. 42. A. M. Allchin, Participation in God (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988), 45. 43. See for example, W.Ross Hastings, The Life of God in Jonathan Edwards: Towards an Evangelical Theology of Participation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). 44. Robert Letham, Union with Christ: In Scripture, History, and Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2011), 121. 45. Robert Letham, Union with Christ, 121. 46. Robert Letham, Union with Christ, 121–122. 47. B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock), 4. 48. John Williamson Nevin, Mystical Presence, 147–148. 49. Adam S. Borneman, Church, Sacrament, and American Democracy: The Social and Political Dimensions of John Williamson Nevin’s Theology of Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 94. See also James Hastings Nicols, Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 159: “[Nevin] had made himself at home with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil, and the two Gregories.” 50. James Hastings Nicols, Romanticism in American Theology, 159, citing Nevin’s Mystical Presence. 51. Robert Letham. Union with Christ, 122. 52. William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation, 169–172; Letham, Union, 122. 53. William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation, 171–172, 183. 54. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 9. 55. B. A. Gerrish, Thinking with the Church, 219, 56. John Williamson Nevin, Mystical Presence, 146. 57. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 9, reflecting here Gerrish, Thinking, 219–220; Letham, Union, 122. See also J. W. Nevin, History & Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, PA: Publication Office of the German Reformed Church, 1847), 137, regarding holding aspects of biblical/confessional truth in tension through faith. 58. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 7, reflecting here, Nevin, Mystical Presence, 183–185. See also Oliver Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity, 2010), 168–173. 59. Daniel Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 7–8, reflecting here William B. Evans, Imputation and Impartation: Union with Christ in American Reformed Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock/Paternoster, 2008), 171, quoting Nevin. 60. Oliver Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine, 170, quoting Nevin. The mystical elements of Nevin’s thought are thought to have been influenced by romanticism and German Idealism. Letham blames this for Nevin’s “mystical elements of union with Christ” supposedly “at the expense of the atonement, justification, and election.” Letham, Union with Christ, 122. Letham notes Evans’s agreement with this conclusion. This assessment, however, ignores Nevin’s actual theological discussion, and as Glover states, “proves Nevin’s own point that American Reformed theology had (and largely still has) departed not only from the Fathers but from the

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sixteenth-century Reformers themselves.” Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 10. Hodge attributed Nevin’s theology of mystical union to an uncritical reception of Schleiermacher’s views and his eucharistic doctrine to Romanism. See Gerrish, Thinking, 211; Littlejohn, Mercersburg Theology, 40. Glover notes that this critique “is at least partially guilty of the genetic fallacy, for Nevin did not borrow Schleiermacher’s views uncritically. Although appreciative of Schleiermacher’s Christocentrism through the lens of German mediating theologians, Nevin critiqued him precisely for his atonement theology, believing Schleiermacher did not take sin seriously enough.” Glover, “The Eucharist as Actualization of Union,” 10. 61. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 256 ff. 62. Julie Canlis, Calvin's Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010. 63. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion, 256. 64. Paul Lebeau, “koinõnia: la signification du salut selon saint Irénée” in Epektasis (Beauchesne, 1972), translation by Julie Canlis. 65. W. Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Towards an evangelical theology of participation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015) and “Honouring the Spirit”: analysis and evaluation of Jonathan Edwards’ pneumatological doctrine of the incarnation. International Journal of Systematic Theology, 7 (No.3) July 2005, 279–299. 66. Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 9. 67. Karl Barth, CD, IV/3, 535. 68. I have addressed this issue in more length in Echoes of Coinherence: Trinitarian Theology and Science Together (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017).

Part III

The Dialectical Fullness of the Atonement Metaphors, Motifs, and Models

Chapter Six

The Wealth of Biblical Metaphors

Given the possible width of this topic of the biblical metaphors of atonement, our focus will be on the major types offered in the Old Testament as these are echoed in the New Testament, and on key texts in the New that deal directly with the atonement. Our aim is to gather a sense of the multiple metaphors for atonement in the biblical narrative and account, thus creating a sense of the legitimacy of the multiple models that have arisen in theological history, as well as of the consistency of participation as the operative mechanism. This communicates the mystery of the atonement in its dialectical fullness. THE OFFERING OF ISAAC BY ABRAHAM John’s Gospel, in contrast with the three Synoptic writers, does not describe the role Simon played in carrying the cross for Jesus when he could do so no longer. The absence of this “Simon-tradition” in John, and his emphasis that Jesus bore his own cross (John 19:17), seems both to indicate that John is showing awareness of the tradition, and that, by his amendment, he wishes to make a theological point. Joel Green, in describing possibilities that have been suggested for what this theological point might be, speaks first of the allusion to Akedah, the offering up of Isaac by Abraham described in Genesis 22, and verse 6 in particular, which refers to the fact that the wood for the burnt offering was laid on Isaac by his father. This event, described as the “binding of Isaac,” was, says Green, “prominent in current Jewish literature and Christian thought,” 1 and he goes on to illustrate also the presence in the early typology of the church of expositions of the significance of this event. Chrysostom and Tertullian both saw the Isaac-Christ typology in this regard. The latter wrote, 107

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Chapter 6 And so Isaac, to begin with, when delivered up by his father for a sacrifice, himself carried the wood for himself, and did at that early date set forth the death of Christ, who when surrendered as a victim by his Father carried the wood of his own passion. (Adv. Marc. 3.18.2) 2

Having said this, Green, as well as Schnackenburg, are hesitant to read too much into this Johannine emphasis and its Isaac-ian background, suggesting that John might have drawn out the parallel more clearly if he intended this. Respectful as I am of New Testament scholarship, I cannot resist the comment that in a number of other examples of this metaphorical approach in John, he is equally suggestive rather than directive. Take the case of John 6, which seems pointedly to speak of the Eucharist, for example, and the case of the suggestive metaphor of “church” in John 20:19–23. Having discounted the view that John might have been correcting an errant Docetic viewpoint that was supposedly permitted by the Synoptic accounts (i.e. that Simon actually died on the cross, and not Jesus), or the view of C. H. Dodd that John was aware of and responding to the Lukan statement of Jesus that “each must carry his or her own cross” (Luke 14:27), Green offers what he believes to be a less speculative and more straightforward account of why John emphasizes that Jesus carried his own cross. It is this—that Jesus bore his own cross dovetails with a pervasive theme of John’s account of the passion that he was “the master of his own fate” through it all. Much as this emphasis sounds reasonable, it does not necessarily negate the evidence for a typological fulfillment of Genesis 22, which seems to suit the general approach of John. Schnackenburg references the Jewish tradition that the “Lamb of God” reference in John 1 does indeed reflect the Isaac story of Genesis 22 interpreted in light of Isaiah 53 and the concept of the suffering Servant, thus “giving the Passover victim the Aqedat Jishaq for its strength.” 3 He does not think that John engages in such theological combinations, but this is interesting nevertheless. THE PASSOVER Gerry Wheaton, in his work on the role of the Jewish feasts in John’s Gospel, on the one hand makes the rather surprising statement that it “seems best to concede that the Passover tradition does not contribute to the question of the atoning value of Jesus’ death.” 4 This is surprising in light of the fact that the Pauline interpretation expressed in 1 Corinthians 5 (“For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed ”) is not brought to bear upon the Johannine perspective. This is an example of the value of the analogy of faith Protestant principle of interpretation—that the context of any text is the whole of Scriptural revelation—and also how theological interpretation must interact with biblical studies. On the other hand, Wheaton acknowledges that this does not undermine “the contention that the Fourth Gospel interprets the death of Jesus in expiatory terms.” 5 He speaks approvingly of the work of John Den-

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nis, for example, “who documents the sea change in scholarly (particularly German) treatment of the subject in recent decades.” 6 D. Moody Smith 7 has also argued that “John presupposes the idea of vicarious sacrifice found in Mark, Paul, Hebrews, 1 John, and Revelation, but that John nevertheless gives greater attention to the revelatory significance of Jesus’ death.” 8 Paul’s interpretation of the Passover in the Old Testament as he expresses this in 1 Corinthians 5 calls for an insistence upon its typological significance for the atonement, and the redemption metaphor in particular: Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

The descriptions given of the Passover event in Exodus 12 and how this takes its place within the Feast of Unleavened Bread are clearly uppermost in Paul’s mind as he writes this exhortation to the Corinthians. Leaven was almost universally a picture of moral evil and hypocrisy in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles. It is the sacrifice of our Passover Lamb which motivates and empowers our sanctification, grounded as it is in the justification which the redeeming sacrifice of the Lamb accomplished. But this Pauline clarity simply reinforces what is already in the Gospels where there is an obvious sense of fulfillment expressed in Jesus’s passion ministry, including his institution of the Lord’s Supper. This context frames all that Jesus does as he moves toward the cross and dies there. He has a clear sense that he is the paschal Lamb, the redeemer of the world from its enslavement to sin and Satan, by the payment of the price of his own life’s blood. This provides the grounding for both the ransom model and the Christus Victor model. It also provides one clue as to how the substitutionary nature of the atonement works: righteousness is gifted by grace to believing people “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). That, with an added explanation that the work of Christ was also propitiatory is how Paul describes the means by which God accounts his people righteous, and how God himself is faithful to his covenant and his own righteousness (3:25). The metaphorical title of Jesus as the Lamb has its background in the Passover context, and it finds its development most fully in works of St. John. His Gospel begins with the acclamation of Jesus as the “Lamb of God which bears away the sin of the world.” John’s theology of the Lamb culminates in his Apocalypse, with heavenly visions of worshipping saints (Rev. 5) and angels and all creation (Rev. 4) adoringly singing, “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain.” (Rev. 5:12). But why is he worthy? The response of the choir is “because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for

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God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9). The cosmic song climaxes with the stunning acknowledgment of the Father and the Lamb as the corecipients of worship: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (5:13). That “throne of God and of the Lamb” then takes prime and central place as the book of Revelation climaxes in the new creation, the new city of God: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him” (Rev. 22:1–3). Clearly, the sacrificial nature of the atonement is undeniable, given the prominence of the Lamb metaphor throughout divine revelation. A Lamb is promised in Abraham’s words in Genesis 22:8 at the Akedah (“God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering”). It is pictured by the Passover narratives in Exodus 12. It is also prophesied in Isaiah’s messianic oracle in chapter 53 in ways that certainly evoke the metaphors of sacrifice and substitution: But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

The Lamb is then personified in the person of Jesus in the Gospels, in a Passover and salvific context, and universally praised in the book of Revelation as already seen. There are elements of both sacrificial and victory motifs in these references to the Lamb, and the participatory nature of the acts of the Lamb are evident. THE LEVITICAL OFFERINGS: BURNT AND MEAL AND PEACE AND SIN AND TRESPASS OFFERINGS The “fragrant offering” referred to by Paul in Ephesians 5:2 evokes the first three offerings, called “sweet savour” offerings (Lev. 1:9, 2:2, 3:5 KJV) the burnt offering, the cereal offering and the peace offering. These were not offered by the worshippers specifically for sins they had committed, but rather as offerings of worship. They were atoning in the sense that the offerings, so offered in gratitude and worship, brought positive delight to God, not the purging or payment for sin. These offerings thus prefigured the offering

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up of the life of the incarnate Son to God, as the representative Human, in obedience and love, as a sweet savor to God, by means of which his positive righteousness and merit is granted to us, or by means of which satisfaction rather than penal substitution is enacted. The burnt offering is unique in that all of it is offered on the altar and none of it is eaten by the priests. As such it is a vivid expression of the devotion of the Son to his Father and his primary orientation to the Father in approaching the cross. Fallen humanity crucified him, yet the higher level of reality is that he voluntarily lays down his life for humanity, in obedience to his Father, and as an act of worship and communion which overcame the breach of humanity with God in Eden. The opening phrase of the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17 expresses this deep mutual act between the Father and the Son in his self-giving to the Father: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.” The offering of the Son on the cross is simply reflective of the eternally self-giving nature of the persons of the Trinity, only on this occasion, humanity is present in the self-giving act in the person of the Son. In John 12, in anticipation of the “hour” in which the Son of Man was to be “lifted up,” this act of mutual self-giving is expressed in the dialogue between the Father and the Son. Here we gain insight into this burnt offering aspect of the cross: “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again” (12:27). The grain or cereal offering (Lev. 2) is particularly congenial to typological interpretation regarding the atoning significance of the life of Christ, in that it was a bloodless offering, made up of fine flour ground from grains, oil, and incense. It was then baked in an oven, or cooked in a pan, without yeast. Part of the grain offering was then burnt on the altar and part was given for the priests to eat. It was seasoned with salt. Jesus in his life here on earth is spoken of as always doing those things that were pleasing to the Father (John 5:30). In John 5, Jesus expresses the reason that he is confident in the fact that the Father delights in his life. That reason is that the Father is living his life in the Son so that the works of the Son are the works of the Father: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed” (5:18–20). This idea of the coinherence of the Father and Son in their works as triune persons (known by the Latin term circumincessio), and not just in their triune being (circuminsessio), has been expressed in the tradition, which is to say that the works of the persons of the Trinity are always undivided. As already noted, this Trinitarian axiom comes

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into play in what transpires between the persons of the Trinity on the cross. It makes nonsense of the notion that the Father and the Son are naked individuals (they are persons defined as persons-in-communion) and that what transpires is cosmic child abuse (the Father and the Son and the Spirit are together on the cross at every moment, for the Trinity cannot “break up”). The point here is that whether in life or in death, the acts of the Son may be distinguished from those of the Father by the Trinitarian axiom of “appropriation” of roles, but that the axiom of the “indivisibility of the works” of the persons ensures they are inseparable. With respect again to his life on earth, Jesus expresses this clearly when in John 8 he says, “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him” (8:29). This might be described as the fragrance of his life before the Father, a fragrance that is vicarious, for his active obedience in life, as well as his passive obedience when he allows himself to be crucified for us, was a vicarious obedience on our behalf. It was the life and obedient acts of the first covenant partner of God in human history who could actually live out the covenant faithfully for us. The fragrance of incense associated with that life offered up to God in all its moral beauty and balance which answers to the incense of the grain offering is possibly depicted in Mary’s act of devotion to Jesus, as this is recorded in John 12:3—“Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” The fragrant reality of his perfect humanity may be said also to be expressed in his presence before the Father after his ascension by which he carried humanity into the life of the triune Godhead, and which is lived in the power of an endless life as our Great High Priest. The peace or fellowship offering described in Leviticus 3 does involve the sacrifice of an animal, one specified as being “without defect,” and the priests both sprinkled its blood against the altar, and fed on the meat of that offering on the day it was offered. However, the primary feature of this offering is that all the fat from the sacrificed animal was to be burned completely on the altar, on top of the burnt offering, as an aroma pleasing to the Lord. It is a voluntary expression of thankfulness or of a freewill offering, in particular (Lev. 6:12). It was not required by the worshipper, but was simply an unnecessary and gratuitous act. Again, it is not an offering for sins committed. The fat was considered to be the best part of the animal, very much unlike our day, when fat is to be avoided at all costs for reasons associated with cholesterol and so on. It was not for eating in the Levitical order either (Lev. 7:22–27). So what does this fellowship offering signify? For the offerer, it was an expression of being in fellowship with God, and of thankfulness, an expression of generous giving to God in response to his gifts. A primary, perhaps the primary metaphor for salvation in the New Testament is reconcil-

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iation. And how is it accomplished? Second Corinthians 5 stresses that God was present in Christ, “reconciling the world to himself.” The work of reconciliation was initiated by God on our behalf. It was not required of God to do so. Just as his act of creation was magnanimous and contingent and unnecessary, so also was his act of reconciliation. Second Corinthians 5 expresses that God, in a gratuitous and unnecessary way, provides the peace offering. That peace offering is Christ, the best of humanity, the one who offers himself up as God to God. It is true that the context of 2 Corinthians 5 sounds more like the sin offering, and verse 21 states that this is precisely how Paul describes the offering of Jesus. However, the emphasis in verses 18 and 19 is on the presence of God in the act of reconciliation of the cross where Jesus died: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” We as God’s priests today feast on the meat of the realities accomplished by his offering of his person as God to God. The word “sacrifice” in Ephesians 5:2 possibly signifies the sin offering category in Leviticus, consisting of the sin and the guilt offering. By contrast with the first three offerings that are suggestive of atonement accomplished by the offering up of a life that is aesthetically pleasing to God, and that find their final fulfillment in the offering up of the life of the Son to his God, the last two sacrifices deal directly with sin and its guilt. Other New Testament passages reflect these sacrifices as being fulfilled in the juridical offering up of the life of Jesus for our sin. For example, that Christ’s death was a sin offering is expressed with clarity in Romans 8:3–4—“For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” As expressed elsewhere this sacrifice made by Christ addresses sin as a principle, something within the human nature that Christ cleanses. If there is a distinction to be made between the sin offering and the guilt offering, it would be that, as the names suggest, one deals with sin as a principle, that is, it has to do with the taking away of the ontological reality of sin, whereas the other has to do with the guilt that sin incurs. Second Corinthians 5:21, in a context that describes the reconciling work of God, the God who is in Christ reconciling the world to himself, expresses flatly that “God made him who had no sin to be sin (a sin offering) for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This expression seems to suggest again the ontological reality, but one cannot help but see signs of a penal substitutionary transaction made feasible by the participation of the Son in our humanity. The epistle to the Hebrews is the locus of the related doctrines

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of the superior new covenant, the superior Great High Priesthood of Christ which both fulfills and transcends the Old Testament priesthood, the superior atoning sacrifice by means of which atonement was completed, as well as his ongoing intercession by which he actually maintains the righteous standing of the people of God and sustains their faith and witness. Focusing for a minute on the efficacy of his sacrifice leads quickly to an understanding that the offering up of Christ dealt with both sin and sins, the principle within the human being, and the guilt which sins incur before a holy God. A few passages will serve to highlight these concepts. Hebrews 9:26–28 references the sacrifice of Christ as removing both sin and sins, and in so doing they reflect the sin and guilt offerings of Leviticus: Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

It is hard to imagine that the words in the phrase “bear sin” in verse 28, which describes what Jesus has done in his first advent, could be understood in any way other than that he became that which all the sin offerings of the Old Testament anticipated—a sin offering of a once for all and final kind. That it has penal substitutionary connotations seems implicit also. THE DAY OF ATONEMENT: PROPITIATION AND SUBSTITUTION/EXPIATION The passage from Hebrews 9 already considered above has indubitable allusions to the liturgy of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. This passage assumes that the Old Testament tabernacle and Temple were actually constructed to reflect what was an extant reality in heaven. The writer thus argues that if the copies needed cleansing, and part of the liturgy of the Day of Atonement was precisely the cleansing of the articles in the tabernacle by sprinkled blood, so on the great Day of Atonement when Jesus died, among the many things his death accomplished was the sprinkling and cleansing of those items in the heavenly tabernacle that correspond to our inadequate priestly expressions of worship, prayer, and illumination through the teaching of the Word. Hebrews 9:23 expresses this point: “It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” The writer of Hebrews then in verses 24–28 speaks of the three appearances of the Christ. These are his incarnation and death in the presence of God, spoken of

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in a sacrificial manner; his appearing at the right hand of the Father in the holy of holies where he intercedes for the redeemed; and his appearing at the Parousia, the second coming, to consummate the salvation of his people. These no doubt reflect the appearances made by the high priest in Leviticus 16—his appearing in the outer court at the beginning of the ritual, where he dons the linen garments and sacrifices a bull for himself and one of two goats for the people, his appearance in the Holy of Holies by virtue of that shed blood sprinkled before and on the mercy seat, and his appearing to the gathered covenantal community at the end of the proceedings. The people would be waiting anxiously outside of the tabernacle area to see if the high priest had survived and had accomplished “atonement” for one more year. This text is indeed a very rich one with respect to atonement theology: For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

The doing away with sin in the first appearance, chronologically speaking (v. 26), is the appearance of the Priest-Son Jesus, in his humanity and specifically at the cross, to atone for and abolish the principle and penalty of sin. This answers to the appearance of the high priest in the Old Testament liturgy as he enters the courtyard to sacrifice a sin offering, first for himself and then for the people. In an intricate way, the sin and guilt offerings offered on the Day of Atonement find their correspondence in a depth understanding of what transpires in the sacrifice of Christ seen as sin offering. One indication of the depth perspective of what is being pictured is the fact that it takes two goats to describe the atonement being made. The first goat is slain and its blood sprinkled seven times in front of the mercy seat which was on the ark of the covenant. The nature of this act prefigures propitiation. The Hebrew name for the “mercy seat” on the ark is literally translated into the Septuagint as hilastêrion, a word which finds its way into the New Testament on more than one occasion (1 John 2:2; Rom. 3:25, though the NIV translates it as “sacrifice of atonement” in order to allow for either of the expiation/propitiation possibilities). The atonement depicted by this Day of Atonement liturgy, though it was never an atonement actually accomplished in the old order, but only retrospectively by the cross (Romans 3:25) is this propitiatory aspect of the atonement. What is communicated is the possibility of the presence of a

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holy God in the midst of his unholy people on the sole basis that the sprinkled blood averted his holy wrath and satisfied his holy justice. It was focused on the being of the priest and therefore his people being rendered propitious in the divine presence. The act by which the high priest offered the first goat on behalf of the people definitely communicates an undergirding mechanism that is participatory. What he does and the sacrifices he offers have efficacy for the whole community. This is true of the second goat also, and even more graphically so. The participation of the people in the priestly sacrifice actually paves the way for what can only be seen as an unmistakable type of penal substitution: “When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness” (Lev. 16:20–22). The itemization of sins of the covenantal community is noteable, not to justify crass depictions of penal substitutions, as one-to-one sins, but to note nevertheless that the sins as well as the sin of the community are atoned for. The carrying of that guilt into a “remote place” (NIV), or a “land not inhabited” (KJV), is a graphic anticipation of that dereliction which Messiah would endure, which though we must understand in a Trinitarian way, and within the frame of God reconciling the world to himself, was a reality the gravity of which we may never fully grasp. The fact that the Day of Atonement also involved the presentation of a burnt offering creates further rich and deep complexity to the picture of the atonement of Christ whose offering up to his God is one that surpasses the atonement of all sin and guilt and is an indication of the positive virtue that accrues to the people of God in Christ who are represented by the offering up of this sweet savor kind. Leviticus 16:23–25 described this offering in this way: Then Aaron is to go into the tent of meeting and take off the linen garments he put on before he entered the Most Holy Place, and he is to leave them there. He shall bathe himself with water in the sanctuary area and put on his regular garments. Then he shall come out and sacrifice the burnt offering for himself and the burnt offering for the people, to make atonement for himself and for the people. He shall also burn the fat of the sin offering on the altar. (Lev. 16:23–25)

Though it might perhaps stretch the hermeneutical limits, I wish to suggest that the priest offering this burnt offering in his own regular garments, having removed the linen garments, may possibly prefigure the offering up

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of the life of Jesus to the Father as God to God. This makes the offering up of the Son in obedience to the Father at the cross simply a correspondence to and continuance of the eternal intra-trinitarian act of mutual devotion and deep affection. THE PASSION NARRATIVES OF THE SYNOPTICS To a very large extent, scholars of the synoptic Gospels see the relationship between the passion of Christ and atonement as implicit and suggestive rather than explicit. What is emphasized instead is Jesus’s death as the eschatological turning point in salvation history. Salvation is understood to be inaugurated by this turning point. One evidence of this is the way in which Zechariah 13 is used when the disciples fled in fear. As Joel Green comments, “in identifying Jesus with the shepherd, the passion story also brought into view the idea that the shepherd’s demise gives way to triumph and the reconstitution of his ‘flock.’” 9 The climactic and eschatologically decisive nature of Jesus’s death is glaringly evident also from the “temple-material” in the passion narrative, that is, the rending of the veil of the Temple at the moment of Jesus’s death, which as Green suggests, was “symbolizing at once the destruction of the temple and its replacement in the person of the crucified Christ.” But it is especially the “Supper-words” that “present Jesus’ death as the turning point of salvation-history, making use of the ‘new covenant’ idea,” Green insists. 10 In fact, Green goes so far as to say that the “atoning significance of Jesus’ death is explicit in the passion story only in the Supper words.” 11 Everything else in the passion narrative is implicit. In the early part of the passion narrative, there are images and concepts that anticipate the cross, such as mention of the new covenant and “covenant in my blood,” as well as “the Servant of Yahweh, martyrdom and the forgiveness of sins.” In the Barabbas story, Jesus dies in the place and stead of the sinner, and in the words of mockery at the crucifixion (“He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” Luke 23:35), Jesus’s death is “ironically presented as having soteriological effect.” 12 There are however, two allusions to the death of Jesus as the bearing of divine judgment: the first is the fall of the shepherd in the Zechariah passage referred to above in which Jesus is portrayed as the smitten shepherd bearing the divine judgment in place of the flock; and the cup-metaphor employed by Jesus in his Gethsemane prayer, the cup in light of Old Testament usage indicative of the bearing of divine judgment. Despite this, Green insists that it is quite evident that the early passion narrative, “has very little to say about the significance of Jesus’s death in salvation-historical terms.” It focuses on the primacy of the death of Christ in

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the eschatological outworking of God’s plans for humanity in history, and is suggestive even of the reality that it was “central to God’s salvific purpose.” 13 But the passion account emphasizes “much more the that of this connection than the why or how behind it.” 14 Green does establish that there was in earliest Christianity a narrative of Jesus’s suffering and death, and an understanding that the passion was central to God’s redemptive plan. Even if there wasn’t much emphasis on the soteriological implications in the early narrative, Green does propose that his death “was from the beginning theologically interpreted historical narrative.” 15 So why does the primitive passion narrative say so little about atonement theology? As asserted above, one answer is that the primitive passion narrative, as Green notes, had the Lord’s Supper and the eucharistic words of Jesus as its very setting (Ger. Sitz im Leben). In sum, Green’s work presents a compelling body of evidence “that the testimony of the eucharistic words, with their straightforward emphasis on Jesus’ redemptive death, so pervaded the Christian celebration of the Lord’s Supper, that no additional, explicit testimony to its soteriological significance was required in the passion narrative. . . . Simply put, the passion narrative assumes the eucharistic emphasis on the soteriological effects of the death of Jesus.” 16 It has been asserted that the reason the church did not have an ecumenical council concerning soteriology in its detail, is that these were implicit in the eucharistic liturgies of the church. But perhaps, even more fundamentally, they seem to have been implicit in the eucharistic words of Jesus themselves. Reliable as it is, the passion narrative was only one guide for understanding early Christian thought. The Old Testament precepts and pictures and history are another. A further consideration in this discussion is that of genre. If atonement theology is left largely implicit in the primitive narratives and even in the developed Gospels, so are other doctrines for that matter. This matter also relates to process. The events of the history of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels provided rich material for meditation and mental and spiritual and affective processing, which led ultimately toward fully developed doctrines, as expressed in the epistles and in the tradition, in more didactic genres. We must consider the primitive passion narrative and the suggestive texts concerning the mechanism of the atonement in the fully developed Gospels, and some development of the doctrine in Acts and then the fuller picture that the epistles provide. One final observation with regard to the Gospels is that the absence of emphasis on atonement dynamics in the passion narrative surrounding the death of Jesus may serve as some justification for proposals of the aspects of atonement that are related to other stages or events in the history of Jesus: the incarnation, the baptism and vicarious life of Jesus, and indeed, his resurrection.

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THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES In a way that is somewhat analogous to the muted nature of atonement teaching in the passion narrative in the Gospels is the somewhat sparse theology of atonement in the Acts. The inferences of many of the references to the atoning work of Jesus seem to be in the direction of the Christus Victor motif. James Kimbell has described the state of the art of atonement theology in Luke-Acts scholarship. 17 He reports that it is “commonplace to affirm Luke attaches no direct soteriological value to the death of Jesus” and that “a broad contingent of critical scholarship has concluded that nowhere in LukeActs is Christ’s death presented as an atonement for sin.” 18 Even a scholar as conservative as I. Howard Marshall asks, “How does Jesus save?” in Acts, and he answers. . . . “The clear view expressed in Acts is that Jesus saves men by virtue of his exaltation.” 19 However, Kimbell’s very careful thematic work on atonement theology in Luke's double-work demonstrates beyond doubt that the value Luke attributes to the death of Christ has been underestimated, that the death of Christ is given much greater direct soteriological significance in the Lukan writings than scholarship has generally acknowledged, and indeed, that the death of Jesus is portrayed by Luke as an atoning one that brings about the forgiveness of sins. He does not deny the presence of other soteriological emphases, such as the resurrection and exaltation of Christ as Lord. Nevertheless, he has demonstrated that atonement theology plays a crucial role in Luke's soteriology, such that when this aspect is underplayed, Luke’s presentation of the cross and salvation is significantly skewed. One caveat in this consideration within the New Testament studies guild and discourse, is that “atonement” is restricted in a technical way to the concept of the death of Jesus that facilitates the forgiveness of sins. The possibility that atonement and the forgiveness of sins may be a result of the death and the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus seems not to be considered. A broader “total” view of atonement accomplished in the totality of the incarnation and vicarious life and death and resurrection and session and intercession and Parousia of the Great High Priest yields the understanding that not all biblical authors need stress the same aspect of the ordo historia of Jesus Christ. But, if it is insisted that the narratives of conversion in Acts do not convey penal substitution specifically, 20 but rather only the Christus Victor motif, what about the explicit teaching of the epistles of John and Paul and Peter? Can penal substitution possibly be an assumed given in Luke-Acts, therefore? The word “and” seems relevant again.

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KEY NEW TESTAMENT TEXTS As we come to assess key atonement texts in their context, we may begin by noticing that there is clearly a ransom motif in the New Testament associated closely with the words “ransom” in Mark 10:45, and then expanded in consideration of the word “redemption” and its cognates in key texts in the epistles. In Romans 3:24, for example, Paul speaks of the redemption involving the payment of Christ’s blood as the instrumental means of the justification of sinners: “and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption (apolutrôseôs) that came by Christ Jesus.” The metaphor of redemption is accompanied in Paul’s typically rich manner of describing the atonement by the metaphor of propitiation. These two aspects together account for the dynamics by which God has atoned and justified sinful people who are both bound by the power of sin and under the just judgment of God: “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement (hilastêrion, propitiation/expiation), through the shedding of his blood” (3:25). This text emphasizes the work of Christ accomplished in his self-giving person, but at the same time Paul stresses unmistakably that God is the agent in this atoning movement (“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement”), as he does in 2 Corinthians 5:19, which affirms that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” The initiative of God in salvation and the differentiated and yet perichoretic involvement of the persons of the Holy Trinity is stressed also in Paul’s opening description of salvation in the letter to the Ephesians (1:3–14). In this context, Paul stresses in the Christological centerpiece of that lyrical exposition that redemption is found in the person of Christ: “In him we have redemption (apolutrôsin) through his blood, the forgiveness of sins.” Baker and Green give an excellent description of the objections to the atonement and a thorough exposition of the New Testament passages that relate to the theme of atonement. However, one gets the sense that, at times, these authors are so much on the defensive with respect to feminist theology, in particular that the “farm” of even a properly clarified and nuanced atonement theology, gets sold. For example, in the midst of explaining the contextual and “occasional” character of the writings of the New Testament authors, they make the statement that they “were not concerned to set forth the content of the faith for all time,” and that they reflect no “systems of theology.” 21 This would seem to contradict a number of New Testament passages in which the authors imply or express that establishing the faith for all time in all places was indeed their remit. Paul speaks on one occasion of the content of the faith acknowledged in all the churches (1 Cor. 11:16). He also speaks of a kerygmatic core of Christian teaching (1 Cor. 15:3–4) and he certainly seems to reflect an incipient creed in Ephesians 4:4–6 that was to be a ground for unity of all the churches. Jude similarly speaks of a faith universalized,

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“once for all entrusted to all God’s holy people” (Jude 1:6). It is acknowledged that there is no explicit mention of any model of the atonement. Yet to suggest that all reflections of the atonement were merely contextualized for a particular church or its surrounding culture, seems a bridge too far. THE USE OF MULTIPLE “METAPHORS” IN THE SCRIPTURES I am appreciative of the affirmations of Baker and Green, as well as Colin Gunton, to the effect that “metaphor” is the best category for describing the different facets of the atonement, and that this accounts for why there are more than one “model.” This relates both to the richness of what metaphors do communicate and also the limits of what they communicate. “Metaphors,” say Baker and Green, “are two edged: they reveal and they conceal, highlight and hide.” Therefore, they argue, “no one metaphor will capture the reality of the atonement.” This also means that “not all properties are necessarily embraced or legitimated in a given use of a metaphor.” 22 Baker and Green speak of five constellations of images or metaphors concerning the saving significance of the death of Jesus Christ. These come from “significant spheres of public life in ancient Palestine and the larger Greco-Roman world.” 23 They are the court of law (e.g., Justification), commercial dealings (e.g., redemption), personal relationships (e.g., reconciliation), worship (e.g., sacrifice) and the battleground (e.g., a triumph over evil). In answer to the question, why so many images, these authors account for this by pointing out that the “language for the atonement is metaphorical.” These authors clarify that metaphorical language does not detract in any way from the concreteness of language. Rather, it enables us to think of the saving significance of the death of Jesus in “multiple ways through implicit comparison.” Given “the nature of metaphor,” they suggest, “it is unthinkable that one soteriological model could express all the truth.” 24 Another reason for the plurality of metaphors used in the New Testament is the variety of human need that the saving work of Christ addresses. The lost condition of humanity is spoken of in a variety of ways. For example, Bayne and Restall speak of a taxonomy of the atonement guided by three main aspects of the sinful condition of fallen humanity: sin as ontological (sin as pathology), sin as deontic (sin as moral debt), and sin as relational (sin as alienation). 25 These authors, who present a strong case for a participatory model (but not theory, or framework, for all the models) of the atonement, critique certain models of the atonement on the basis that their focus is solely on one aspect of the fallen human condition: In this paper we develop a participatory model of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, according to which the atonement involves participating in the

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Chapter 6 death and resurrection of Christ. In part one we argue that current models of the atonement—exemplary, penal, substitutionary and merit models—are unsatisfactory. The central problem with these models is that they assume a purely deontic conception of sin and, as a result, they fail to address sin as a relational and ontological problem. 26

The approach I take does not so much negate the models mentioned so much as indicate that without participation they are not viable. One must also speak not merely of the death and resurrection of Jesus but also his incarnation. The point at hand, however, is that there is a need for more than one metaphor or “model” in light of the complex nature of the fallen human condition. To state this in a more positive way, the sheer wonder of what human persons as made in the image of God are intended to be is actually mirrored by all that sin has done to humanity, and this anticipates, therefore, all that is required for the atonement and restoration of these remarkable beings. The neglect of the ontological reality of sin which Bayne and Restall speak of, and its restoration, has, as already noted, been a particular blindspot of Western theology. There is a tendency within evangelicalism, for example, to speak of the atonement as if it were only an external transaction between Christ and the Father which is then applied to the believer. It is not wrong per se. It is just grossly insufficient to describe the whole doctrine of salvation, for it neglects the person of Christ who is doing the work. T. F. Torrance states that if “exclusively juridical categories” are used of the atonement and salvation, they “become something less than evangelical.” 27 In fact, they invoke the title of “Latin heresy.” The “Latin heresy” refers to western-Latin christology, wherein a dualism is created between the person and work of Christ. This view is characteristic of both Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism. In the Latin view of the atonement, the “work” of Christ is “external” to the “person” or “being” of Christ; that is, Jesus simply offers his body as an instrument in the payment of a forensic debt. In this view, the atonement is merely the fulfillment of a “transaction” between the Father and the Son, wherein the Son pays humanity’s debt of sin. Hence, in the Latin view, the atonement produces no ontological change in fallen humanity; that is, the atonement discharges a debt but it does not change us in the depths of our fallen being. Words used to describe this view include “external,” “instrumental,” and “transactional.” 28

By way of an example of the importance of acknowledging the limits of metaphors, Baker and Green speak of the word “ransom” in the well known Markan passage—“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). They indicate that the word “ransom” does not necessarily encourage speculation on the nature of the transaction being enacted, as in seeking to specify who pays the ransom, or to whom it is paid, for example. They warn against reading this

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text with Greco-Roman or even modern lenses rather than through the eyes of the original hearers which were attuned much more to the Old Testament background of this word and its specific context of the exodus of Israel from Egyptian bondage. For these readers, the authors suggest the meaning of ransom would be “release” and not “payment.” Helpful as this encouragement is to give priority to the meaning of texts to their original audience in interpretation, is it possible that the authors too quickly capitulate to their present charged context by failing to notice that payment is in fact very much part of the original context. The whole metaphor must include the “payment” of a lamb slain in each home, a payment made in the stead of their firstborn sons. The whole redemption metaphor must include all its dynamics. In the same vein, the point has been made strongly by a number of contemporary biblical scholars that Romans 3:21–25, that core atonement passage of the epistle, should not be read as if it were in a setting of a Western law court. Rather it should be interpreted by “a world portrayed by Israel’s Scriptures” and by how these Scriptures set up the terms and concepts Paul reflects. Thus, in place of the “guilty vs. innocent” issue, that is, “the frame of penal justice,” one should see this passage primarily through the frame of “the faithful adherence to the covenant relationship initiated and maintained by Yahweh.” 29 To read into this text the notion of justification as a declaring of sinners “not guilty” would apparently be “an alien intrusion into Romans 3.” Paul is apparently working within “a different legal frame— not the frame of Western penal justice but the frame of covenant relations as this is portrayed in Israel’s Scriptures.” This text is apparently not about an abstract code of law that demands its subjects be punished for failure to measure up. It is “God’s faithfulness” as that is “revealed in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ,” and it concerns his faith only, not the faith of the responding human. Justification seen in this light is the “embracing” by God of believers, both Jew and Gentile, “as members of God’s own people.” 30 This filial dimension shades the forensic with an almost total eclipse. Those who believe do have their sins forgiven, it is conceded, but logically the incorporation of these believers into the covenant community, from all nations into the one covenant community of Christ, comes first. That there may be an alternative way to read this text, one that sees the filial as preparing the way for the forensic, and that both are evident in the text, seems not to be permissible. There is indeed a lot to parse here. Not just whether the presence of a forensic aspect exists at all, but the much debated matter of what the “faith of/in Jesus Christ” really means, and whether the faithfulness of Christ option leaves any room for human agency. On the former, I am happy to concede and indeed agree vigorously that the filial always come first. The only question is this: Does this remove completely the idea of justification as a declaring righteousness of the people of God in Christ? Is this a binary all or nothing issue? And with respect to the agency of Christ and then believers

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in the Christ, Why must that also be an “all or nothing” matter? Again, I am pleased to concede that the faith and faithfulness of Christ comes first and is the crucial reality in both incorporation and salvation. John McLeod Campbell and T. F. Torrance have made this point in telling ways. But along with Barth, they would not therefore conclude that there is no room for the human response, even if it is also grace-enabled. The human response in faith may be a distant echo of the response of Christ, but it is of importance in the life of the believer, even if not a condition. Respect must be given where due to New Testament scholars in this regard, including how Tom Wright and Richard Hays treat this text, for example. Hays, in his article on “Justification,” expresses the sentiments above in the following way: “Righteousness” refers to God’s covenant-faithfulness which declares persons full participants in the community of God’s people. This declaration has a quasi-legal dimension, but there is no question here of a legal fiction whereby God juggles his heavenly account books and pretends not to notice human sin. The legal language points rather to the formal inclusion of those who were once “not my people” in a concrete historical community of the “sons of the living God” (Rom. 9:25–26). . . . On the other hand, though the gift of incorporation into this community neither presupposes a prerequisite moral uprightness on the part of the recipients (Rom. 5:6–11) nor offers a magical transformation of moral character, participation in the covenant community carries with it a very definite normative demand for radical obedience to God (Rom. 6:1–19; 12:1–2), because the very purpose of the covenant community is to manifest God’s righteous design for his human creatures. 31

These sentiments resonate with the New Perspective of Tom Wright. Frankly, however, I worry about the matter of the perspicuity of Scripture, another important concept recovered for the church in the Reformation. The plain sense of Scripture for people of any culture, including those in the GrecoRoman culture (!) to which Paul addressed this epistle, would seem to say pretty eloquently even here in Romans 3 that humanity incorporated by the electing purposes of God into Christ by His faith and by their own asymmetrically compatible, non-meritorious faith, are both declared righteous and then made righteous. Justification and sanctification, the duplex gratia, as in Calvin, given by grace as a logical consequence of their union with Christ (unio Christi). I worry a little that if this passage and others like it do not include any concept of personal justification by faith, and if it speaks only of sanctification, and not justification, as Hays seems to infer, something crucial is lost to biblical soteriology. Even if it is freely admitted that the emphasis is on the covenantal and the communal, if justification is not offered to the believing person, the jewel of the Reformation, justification by faith alone, is pro-

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foundly compromised. More importantly, the plain sense of the text here is, yes, that God himself is justified in justifying sinners and in fulfilling his covenant promises through his faithful covenant partner Jesus Christ, but there is a human participation also envisioned here, the human person who exercises faith enabled by the Spirit. This passage in fact contains at least three references to the faith of the non-Christ human: “to all who believe,” (22), which is in tandem with the statement concerning the “faith of Christ”; “to be received by faith” (25); and “those who have faith in Jesus” (26). Total atonement involves both the sufficiency of the propitiating/expiating death of Christ and appropriation by participation in that work by faith, the only manner in which the human can respond without adding merit to it. Total atonement involves both the faithfulness of the covenant-initiating and covenant-keeping God of the Old Testament, and his righteousness in enacting the justification of sinful humanity through the redeeming, propitiating work in and by Christ. Total atonement involves the faithfulness of Jesus Christ as our substitute and representative covenant partner, and the gift by grace of response, a participating in this by our faith. Total atonement is the inclusion of both Jew and Gentile in a covenant community that mediates faith to the individual, or better, the person in ekstasis, and the faith of each person in ekstasis. There can be no question that in all these “both and” statements, the first half of the statement has priority. This passage is first and foremost about God. The passage begins with the reality that “the righteousness of God has been made known” (21) which could even be titular: it is thus first about the covenant initiative and faithfulness of God. At the heart of this passage is the dramatic expression that God is the initiator in the atoning event of the cross, and present in it in the fullness of his divine being, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (25–26). Divine action in Christ in a way that justifies his faithfulness and righteousness must be the dominant theme, and human response a distant echo of Christ’s response and a participation in it. There is an asymmetry to divine and human participation, but the latter must not be negated. Humanity and human response is not an epiphenomenon. And secondly, if justification, achieved by Christ for us, “pronounced over our heads” in sheer grace, is not a foundational soteriological reality, sanctification becomes an inwardly focused, performance-based, meritoriously motivated matter, rather than a grace-filled pursuit in union and communion with Christ, with awareness of acceptance already given. It seems to me that the anxiety to rescue atonement from its caricatures and defend it against its assailants leads easily to a denuding of the very core of the doc-

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trine of salvation. A proper Trinitarian understanding of what transpires on the cross and before, which is indeed the only proper interpretation, will, I believe, dismiss these objections and allay these fears. NOTES 1. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus: Tradition and Interpretation in the Passion Narrative (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 295. 2. Translation in Adversus Marcionem, 1:255, cited in Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus: Tradition and Interpretation in the Passion Narrative (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 296. The legitimacy of this type is strengthened by other Isaac typological references in John (1:29, 36, and possibly 3:16) on which there is some consensus among Johannine scholars. See Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St. John, 3 vols., (New York: Seabury Press, 1980–1982), vol. 3, 455–456. 3. Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St. John, 3 vols., (New York: Seabury Press, 1980–1982), vol. 3, fn. 8, 455–456. 4. Gerry Wheaton, The Role of Jewish Feasts in John’s Gospel (Society for NT Studies Monograph Series 162) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 5. Gerry Wheaton, The Role of Jewish Feasts in John’s Gospel (Society for NT Studies Monograph Series 162) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), fn 33, 92. 6. John Dennis, “Jesus’ Death in John’s Gospel: A Survey of Research from Bultmann to the Present with Special Reference to the Johannine Hyper-Texts,” Currents in Biblical Research 4 (2006): 331–363. 7. D. Moody Smith, The Theology of the Gospel of John (New Testament Theology) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115–121. 8. Gerry Wheaton, The Role of Jewish Feasts in John’s Gospel (Society for NT Studies Monograph Series 162) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), fn. 33, 92. 9. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 319. 10. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 319. 11. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 319. 12. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 319. 13. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 320. 14. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 320. 15. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 321. 16. Joel B. Green, The Death of Jesus, 322. 17. James Kimbell, The Atonement in Lukan Theology (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). 18. James Kimbell, The Atonement in Lukan Theology, 3. 19. I. Howard Marshall, Luke: Historian and Theologian, 3rd edn. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988), 169. 20. See, for example, the Tweeted rhetoric of Michael Bird on May 24: “Haters: Michael Curry’s sermon did not mention penal substitutionary atonement! A pox on him!!! Me: Dude, have you ever read any of the sermons in the Book of Acts?” 21. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts, 2nd edn. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Acad., 2011), 118. 22. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 118. 23. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 123. 24. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 124. 25. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” in Yujin Nagasawa and Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 150. 26. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 1.

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27. T. F. Torrance, “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 39 (1986), 461–482. 28. Martin Davis blog on T. F. Torrance: “The Atonement,” pt. 3, The Latin Heresy March 9, 2011. 29. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 120. 30. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 120. 31. Richard Hays, “Justification,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 3:1129–1133 (1131–1132). Emphases added.

Chapter Seven

The Historico-Theological Models Moral Influence

The next three chapters will attempt to show that the metaphor or model of penal substitution has a context, which is all the other metaphors that have been expressed in the history of atonement theology. It must thus be tempered by these other motifs. Conversely, I will argue that none of the other motifs work unless they are undergirded by some form of participatory and even substitutionary atonement. These chapters will, in other words, provide insights into each of the models—moral influence, vicarious humanity, recapitulation/theosis, Christus Victor, satisfaction, substitution, governmental, scapegoat—within the unifying framework of participation—the participation of God in humanity in the Son (the ordo historia) and our participation in the Son’s humanity by the Spirit (the ordo salutis). THE EXEMPLAR OR MORAL INFLUENCE MOTIF Let us begin with the exemplar model, initially proposed by Abelard and made popular by Kant and Tillich during and after the Enlightenment. I have no doubt that the incarnation, life, and death of Jesus are each and together an example inspiring humble and holy character and behavior for the people of God in Christ. The example of Jesus is to be imitated, in the imitatio Christi way of being that is core to Christian character or virtue development. The person of Jesus is to be contemplated, as in the Stabat Mater tradition of sitting at the foot of the cross in adorative posture. Acknowledging this positive role, Wayne Grudem has said, for example, that “Whereas the moral influence theory says that Christ’s death teaches us how much God loves us, 129

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the example theory says that Christ’s death teaches us how we should live.” 1 Selected passages may be drawn upon to speak of this inspirational nature of the incarnation, life, and death of Jesus. For the imitation of his incarnation and life (and the giving of it up in a cross death), Philippians 2 is an obvious passage in which the exhortation toward the cultivation of the mind of Christ is motivated by the magnificent Christological poem or hymn that Paul either composes or employs from the liturgy of the early church. But who could deny that there is a participatory and substitutionary dynamic at work in this passage? In the context of Philippians 2, our salvation is accomplished by this V-shaped history of Jesus Christ, first because it was enacted by One who became human and servant for us, that is, by incarnational Christological participation; and second because our union as believing humans with Christ enacted by the Spirit in our regeneration allows us to enter into this reality. The way the chapter begins makes this human aspect of participation clear in its reference to the “encouragement” believers have “from being united with Christ” and their “common sharing in the Spirit” (Phil. 2:1), or literally simply being ἐν Χριστῷ, . . . participating in κοινωνία πνεύματος (being in Christ, in the communion of the Spirit)! No imitation is possible apart from our being in Christ and in the Spirit’s communion. But this, the possibility of having our being in the triune God, is, in turn, not possible apart first from the union of God the Son with our humanity and so for our humanity in both ontological and forensic ways. This is suggested by what immediately follows the Christological hymn (we are exhorted to work out what has already been worked in us): “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Phil. 1:12–13). “God” is in the emphatic position in this sentence. This is truly our “own” salvation, but it is clearly God’s first. This text not only supplies an example of the compatibility of divine and human action, but of the asymmetric nature of it, in a way that mirrors the asymmetric nature of the incarnation as understood at Chalcedon, by which God, in the person of the Son, took on human nature, not an already extant human person. Barth expressed the relationship between divine and human action in this way, according to Jüngel: “For Barth, where God acts, there we are seen to act—precisely in receiving.” 2 We are ensconced in God and therefore we are working out what he is working in us. This requires, it seems to me, a very contemplative approach to life. But this text also conveys emphatically the idea that there is a salvation already complete (de jure) as a result of the saving history of Jesus Christ expressed in the antecedent Christological hymn. What transpires in the incarnation by which the Son of God became human, is the birthing of a new humanity in Christ (this is the ontological aspect of salvation). In this new

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humanity, humanity is free. This was in one sense, true of all humanity. Justification in Christ was a consequence first of the participation of the Son in humanity, that is, the prior participation of God in humanity, in Christ, the Son of God. This, for Karl Barth, inferred the de jure participation and justification of all humans, though he distinguishes this from the de facto participation of believing people in Christ by the Spirit. 3 The intent and design of God for humanity in the one new human, Jesus, is justification, pronounced over our heads. We had nothing to do with it. But, having our being in union with Christ also means the working out of salvation in sanctification. It is only in light of these realities of the gospel, that of God becoming one with us, and that of us becoming one with God, and that precisely of the One assuming our sinful humanity, healing it, and suffering in our place, that we can hope to adherents of the Moral Influence model! As indicated in the previous chapter, the life of Christ is depicted in the Old Testament in the type of the cereal or grain offering. The eating of that offering by the priests expresses their appropriation of what it represented. The aroma of that offering signified the pleasure of God in receiving this offering. This picture is captured well in the New Testament reality that every aspect of the life of Jesus was indeed vicarious for humanity, but that it also inspired imitation of that life in union with Christ. The death of Jesus is also spoken of in an inspirational way in a number of passages, and we will restrict ourselves to a few. Ephesians 5:1–2 is an obvious candidate: “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” The point is simply made that what is being presented for our inspiration to love is an act of Christ which is by its very essence sacrificial, and certainly participatory, and substitutionary in the sense that the “fragrant offering and sacrifice” are offered for us. This phrase as a whole and in its parts evokes the depth of the atoning work of Christ and our humble and deep gratitude in response. I will not expand the point already made above that imitation is not possible apart from participation of the believer in Christ as this is glaringly obvious in the letter to the Ephesians from start to finish. I will simply restrict myself to the point that what is being portrayed for imitation is an act of atonement which itself assumed a substitutionary element. The grace of forgiveness is not easily inculcated in us, and the infinite example of it in Christ is required to motivate us, even if we can never measure up to it in full. It is so typical of Paul in this rich letter to unfold in such a pithy way the depth of meaning of the sacrificial act of Christ by which we have gained forgiveness, in order to grant it to others. He “gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” These two words echo the two main classes of the Levitical offerings of the Old Testa-

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ment which were provided as types of the atoning work of Christ, the sweet savor offerings and the sin offerings. Another important passage that influences the imitatio tradition is Hebrews 12:1–3—“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” The inspiration of those who lived the life of faith through adversity in the Old Testament, as described in Hebrews 11, is a real and fortifying one (v.1). It would simplify and purify the people of God, for sure, to imitate the faithful. However, the climactic imitation and the truly empowering source of exhortation for a persecution-fatigued people of God in Hebrews is the persevering, God-oriented life of Jesus. Throughout this great epistle the author has offered an unparalleled description of the high priesthood of Christ, its superiority to Old Testament Aaronic priesthood, its superior and eternally efficacious sacrifice, which ratifies the new and lasting and transformative covenant. Here the author exhorts these people in the climactic exhortation passage toward concentrated contemplation of Jesus. Fixing their eyes on him and his race to the finish would enable their perseverance in life and on into whatever death awaited them. The realism that this life of Jesus involved a pathway shadowed by an impending cross would inspire these believers in the midst of their experience of the realism that Christian life is hard. They were a people who had endured the hardships of property loss, being shamed for being Christian, and in some cases Jewish also, and with the shadow of possible martyrdom hanging over them. Jesus’s orientation toward the future, the “joy set before him,” the Father’s pleasure and the bringing of many sons and daughters to glory, would be an incentive for the people of God. And what linked these people to Christ? What made their imitation of him possible and not the impossible dream? Chapter 2 is foundational to all these exhortations to be inspired to imitate Christ. He became one with them that they might become one with him. The seeing of Jesus is first in 2:9, “But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” He is “bringing many sons to glory” by his becoming fully human, suffering included. The author affirms that “both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters” (2:10–11). The union of the Son of God with humanity, Christological incarnational union, is crucial to the notion of imitation if it is not to be a fruitless search. Though the emphasis of the epistle of Hebrews is

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that Christ is for us, all the warnings against unbelief in this epistle speak to the necessity of the union with Christ of the believer which enables her to enter that union receptively. This inspirational nature of the atonement of Jesus in his incarnation, life and death is also apparent in the general epistles. For example, the laying down of the life of Jesus is used by John as his motivating rationale for promoting sacrificial living for the believer who professes to know what true love is: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16). The key to the possibility of such an audacious goal for Christian life is for John wrapped up in the union of the believer with God, such that the “love of God” is “in that person” (3:17). The core of the New Testament way of transformation is always imitation in union with Christ. Still in the context of this command to love as Jesus loved, John writes, “The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us” (1 John 3:24). A crucial text in this same vein is 1 Peter 3:17–22, which offers insight into the meaning of the death and resurrection in clearly sacrificial and substitutionary language. However, it offers some of the deepest insights into the atonement in the New Testament (as is typical of Peter in this epistle) in the service of exhortation and specifically, imitation, of Christ in the Christian life. Peter begins with exhortation to imitation of Christ: “For it is better, if it is God’s will, . . . to suffer for doing good than for doing evil (3:17).” Verse 18 begins with the connecting particle “For” and plunges into a rich and at times mysterious exposition of the meaning of the death of Christ in verse 18a: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” It then moves into resurrection reality in a way that mirrors the baptismal catechetical flavor of this epistle in 18b–22: He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also— not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.

Our point here is simply to say that this passage serves to show that the atonement as inspiration or example or “moral influence” is actually a participatory and substitutionary atonement or no atonement at all! The moral influence theory simply has no basis apart from a participatory and substitu-

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tionary view of the atonement. What is being exhorted has no basis apart from the righteous-for-the-unrighteous reconciling work of God in Christ. In sum, in both of these passages it must be noted that the example that Christ sets is expressed in the language of sacrifice and even explicitly of penal, transactional substitution. His example is not persuasive apart from the remarkable reality that he “laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16) and that he “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). A number of the facets of Baker and Green’s critique of Charles Hodge’s view of penal substitution has weight. 4 It lacked Trinitarian nuance, to be sure, giving credence to the “cosmic child abuse” accusation, and it is limited by a purely legal/moral dimension of sin, neglecting the ontological, to be sure. However, not all of this critique is to be affirmed, and I am referring especially to the comment that “ethically this model has little to offer; it can do little more than serve as an example to point to when calling individuals to imitate Christ.” 5 This is surprising in light of the fact that the substitutionary death of Christ is precisely what Peter in this passage thinks will motivate the imitation of Christ, and that it is a participatory understanding that makes the imitation possible. The forensic and the ontological, if held together, will allow both penal substitution and our presence in the representative and substitutionary Christ as he lives, as he dies, and as he rises again. Divine law must indeed be addressed and this is not merely Anselmian feudalism, it is the witness of the Old and New Testaments. Freedom from the curse of the law accomplished by the One who fulfilled the law and bore its curse on the Tree, is surely to be celebrated. Gratitude for it surely motivates imitation. Yet it does not work without participation, and participation guarantees that what Christ did he did for us, and at the same time it changes us for we have died and risen in that Christ. The Great Exchange is ontological and it is therefore legal and life-transforming. Furthermore, imitation with all its practices can only be carried out in union with the Christ who now indwells us by the Holy Spirit. And that required first that the Son of God entered into union with our humanity at the incarnation. Imitation without participation in the person and work of Christ is futility. It becomes a new legalism. Incarnation as Atonement . . . As Inspirational Example Clarity about what is being asserted here is necessary. The incarnation, life, and death of Jesus are indeed our primary example for Christian virtue and life. However, the example actually almost always relates to Christ in his atoning, participatory, or substitutionary work, and that the following of the example is not possible apart from gratitude and participation, both the participation of God in humanity in Jesus, and our participation by faith in his life. In this section, the particular emphasis is on the fact that the incarnation

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and the life of Jesus are also atoning in their own way. To invite people to follow Jesus’s example and to neglect or reject the reality that his participation in the act of incarnation and in his life are atoning makes the exemplar model meaningless. The exemplar or moral influence motif as I am using it is thus not the model of Abelard or Kant. I am comfortable to affirm that example-following is a valid way to think about the atonement on the ground of clear biblical exhortations, as noted above. I operate on the assumption however, that the incarnation is not just preparatory for atonement, but a crucial part of the atonement, as is Christ’s vicarious life on earth. We do not need to parse Christ’s life and death so exactly to determine the precise moment of humanity’s reconciliation to God. We operate on the assumption that our atonement is in Christ, his person, inseparable from his work. Let us investigate this concept more before reiterating that in the tradition the death of Christ understood as vicarious and that substitutionary was not neglected at the expense of incarnational atonement or the vicarious life of Jesus, and that it must also be included in salvation and in any imitation motif of the atonement. Reference was made above to the great Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5–7 as an illustration of the exemplar motif. This magisterial Christological passage reveals the mind-set of Christ reflected firstly in the incarnation. It exhorts us toward that same humility. “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature (morphē) God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature (morphē) of a servant, being made in human likeness.” In the salvation history of the Son of God, Christ Jesus, there is a downward vector. The Son moves from being God in his inner essence in the outward manifestation of that glory, to being God still but with an outward manifestation of humanity, in obscurity and servanthood. The same person who is God the Son becomes God the Son incognito. Through all of the difficult exegetical issues that characterize this Christological hymn that Paul uses or adapts for his exemplification purpose here in this text, one thing at least is fairly clear. The repetition of morphē in verse 5 and 6 indicates that the nature of God-ness and the nature of servanthood are compatible. His self-emptying to accomplish our salvation does not compromise his deity. Rather, it shows what deity is. Servanthood is what God is about. Becoming human is what God is about. Rather than compromise his deity, reverently speaking, it enhances it . . . not that God’s essence can be enhanced, but his revelation of himself in this new way certainly enhanced how he was seen by the angels and by redeemed humanity. He was glorified by it. But how do we understand this aspect of the atoning history of Jesus? It is resolved in Trinitarian terms. For the incarnation not to reflect a change in the essence of God, it is necessary to understand that the will of God was eternally oriented in the

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direction of becoming human in the Son. The Son of God was always in his eternal existence oriented toward becoming human. He was incarnandus before he was incarnate. As indicated previously, McCormack’s interpretation is that the mission of the Son is somehow profoundly ensconced within the eternal procession of the Son. Or, more specifically, the incarnation is a mirror of the eternal generation of the Son, indeed, more than a mirror; it is a corresponding reality. This helps to frame the importance of the incarnation. Humanity will, as a result of the mission of Jesus, be taken into the inner life of God. When Jesus ascends in a human body now glorified, having accomplished our salvation, he sits at the right hand of God, fully God and fully human. He is God-for-us at the right hand of God. A Man in the glory, a God-Man in the Trinity. But if this is true, and the epistle to the Hebrews suggests, no insists, this is so, then how can God have changed? Is the triune God of the pre-incarnate Son, different to the triune God of the now eternally incarnate ascended Son? The answer is no, but the way to make sense of this is to invoke the assertion that in pre-incarnate time (“eternal time”), the Son is, by means of the will of God, already human before he becomes human in earthly time. 6 Act and being in God are inseparable. Thus if God the Father generates the Son (act), the Son exists eternally (being) as the eternally begotten Son. Thus if God the Son becomes incarnate, this must somehow be included in the act of eternal generation. God’s eternal decision to enter into union with humanity in the incarnation of the Son is crucial to our salvation. Note that it is in the being of the Son that humanity has been incorporated into the life of God. This signals the first great dimension of God’s saving atonement. It has to do with who we are, not what we have done or are guilty of. That is, it is filial, before it is forensic or juridical, that is having to do with the propitiation of God’s righteous wrath or the expiation of guilt or even redemption from the power of sin or the devil. He has become one with us that we might become one relationally with God. The participation of God in humanity is the primary filial or ontological event of the atonement. It will be the means by which our union with God, in Christ, by the Spirit becomes possible, by faith. Of course, there is an undeniable forensic dimension even to this incarnational atonement and again, we find ourselves in the context of Trinitarian considerations as we engage this issue. John Calvin has argued that the coming into relationship of God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, with humanity in the incarnation must involve a cleansing of humanity instantaneously. The English Puritan John Owen, and German Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, think this is more gradual. That is, they believed that the human nature Christ received from Mary was sinful, but that it was purified in the life and death of Jesus. 7 I prefer Calvin’s account of this. The mechanism by which God the Holy Spirit purified the sinful human nature which Jesus received at conception is

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not revealed to us, but it is not hard to imagine a purgation such as that which the lips of Isaiah received in his commissioning (Isa.6). Divine holiness is not compatible with human sin and thus when the two natures came together, the human nature was cleansed. Some theologians in the tradition have thought of this union of the natures as a coinherent or perichoretic union in which Each is in the Other, that is Each is mutually internal to the Other, being equal and sharing a common essence, yet Each is not the Other, having irreducible personal identity. Others have preferred to articulate it as a union held together mysteriously by the Spirit. Irrespective, the coming into union of these two natures required a cleansing of the human nature. Athanasius famously used the term homo-ousios for two great unions in Christian theology: first, to describe the union of the three persons (hypostases) of the Trinity in one essence (ousia), and second, to describe the union of the divine nature of the Son of God with the human nature. That is the union of two natures in one divine-human person, without confusion or mixing. Establishing the premise that the incarnation is in itself a part of the atonement and not just preparatory to the atonement of the cross seems necessary. There is an opposite extreme to which one may go by asserting that the incarnation is the sum total of the atonement. It is important to note that those Church Fathers most often associated with recapitulation and the incarnation as endemic to atonement also affirm decisively that the incarnation is not alone, and that the cross, understood as sacrifice, as ransom, and even as propitiation, is vital and central and instrumentally necessary to atonement. Take Irenaeus, for example. He speaks of the Christ as the last Adam who recapitulates the distorted image of God in the first Adam, but in affirming that he took on the substance of humanity, he asserts that in doing so he also took on Adam’s curse. 8 That involved the concept of the satisfaction which Christ accomplished by way of the cross in a vicarious manner. He speaks of Christ “propitiating indeed for us the Father, against whom we had sinned” 9 and “redeeming us by His own blood.” 10 The great exchange is then completed as signalled and accomplished by the resurrection of the last Adam. In Christ’s risen body, humanity is no longer guilty and damned and dead, but glorified and all redeemed humanity in Christ with it, and all creation, is also reaffirmed and restored. Similarly, Athanasius, the fourth century bishop of Alexandria, so pivotal for the defining and defending of orthodoxy, though unequivocal in his witness to the importance of the incarnation for theosis, does not neglect the cross, as we have already noted. At one point he calls it “the very centre of our faith.” 11 The substitutionary nature of that death is plainly evident also, albeit Athanasius’s primary concern is in connection with death as an effect of sin, rather than the guilt of sin:

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Chapter 7 Thus it happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished. Death there had to be, and death for all, so that the due of all might be paid. Wherefore, the Word, as I said, being Himself incapable of death, assumed a mortal body, that He might offer it as His own in place of all, and suffering for the sake of all through His union with it, “might bring to nought Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might deliver them who all their lifetime were enslaved by the fear of death.” 12

The ontological or death component in the atonement is nevertheless accompanied by a forensic component also, in the form of the reversal of the curse (“you will surely die,” Gen. 2:17) that causes death, as well as in the sacrificial motif and that of ransom. The necessity of the incarnation, which is Athanasius’s larger theme in this work, is seen as being crucial to the removal of the curse and death, for only in taking on a human body capable of death could death be abolished. Athanasius expresses the necessity of the incarnation in these words: “so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished.” 13 The death of the incarnate one is never far away in Athanasius’s mind, however, for, in light of the inevitability of death in all humanity, he speaks of how Christ “assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection.” 14 Indeed, that death, is clearly spoken of as a sacrifice, a body offered for other “like bodies.” Quoting Hebrews 2:14, Athanasius affirms that the giving of Christ’s body “did two things”: First, he “put an end to the law of death which barred our way”; and second, “He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.” He states that “By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew.” 15 The offering up of the Son is articulated by Athanasius specifically as an offering without blemish, “an offering and sacrifice free from every stain, that He forthwith abolished death for His human brethren by the offering of the equivalent. For naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered His own temple and bodily instrument as a substitute for the life of all, He fulfilled in death all that was required.” 16 As such the sacrifice is spoken of also as a ransom, 17 freeing us from Adam’s “primal transgression.” It is a death by which Christ as the Son of God in union with a human body is placed under God’s curse and by “the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death, displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection.” 18

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We have so far established that the exemplar model requires the participation mechanism and substitutionary atonement if it is to fulfill biblical criteria for such a motif. But what, we may ask, does the exemplar motif do for an understanding of a sacrificial and substitutionary understanding of the atonement? First of all, the participatory perspectives we have shared that enable a viable “imitation of Christ” motif equally make viable the notion of the Great Exchange that transpires at the incarnation, and the notion of the Son of God suffering vicariously for us in his death to complete the Great Exchange that is our salvation. However, in addition, the exemplar motif when it is exhorted concerning the death of Christ always includes the notion of the vicarious nature of what is perpetrated at the cross. These exhortations thus help to clarify and exalt the notions of self-sacrifice and servanthood, which find their epitome in the self-giving of the Son on the cross. His supremely virtuous self-giving is vicarious for fallen humanity. It is not just that sin is addressed in its legal sense by the Savior, but rather that virtue and beauty are positively granted to us in union with him. In addition, seeing the cross in light of the ontological, that is, in light of the fact that salvation is worked out in the being of Christ from incarnation on to the ascension, which is an important part of at least the theosis aspect of atonement and moral influence, helps to make sense of the justice issue sometimes expressed as an objection to the idea of substitution. This objection is to the effect that in a juridical situation in our particular modern Western culture, no person can legally or even justly take the place of another in say a murder conviction. This might be true in this particular culture, but in the divine reckoning, which transcends culture, the Son Of God became one with us by the incarnation, and his identification with us by participation, our being one with and in him as he lives and dies, makes sense of vicarious and substitutionary atonement. The ordo historia of Jesus is the ordo salutis of you and me. Furthermore, the exemplar motif’s need of the satisfaction or sacrificial or substitutionary understanding of the atonement simply magnifies its richness and grace. How could any one of us even attempt to pursue likeness to Christ, avoidance of vices and cultivation of virtues, if it were not for the reality that Christ has already stood in our place in life and in death. Ours would be a vain and guilt-ridden pursuit were it not for Christ’s vicarious life and death for us by which we have already received the balm of forgiveness and the sentence of justification over our heads. And our sanctification pursuits are nothing if not a living out of participation in his life and death and resurrection in gratitude for amazing grace. Thus, the exemplar model simply magnifies the atoning efficacy of the cross of Christ, and heightens our sense of its wonder and grace. The summation of a properly conceived understanding of moral theories of atonement by Hans Boersma serves well to sum up our own findings. He

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argues that they do not “encourage us to accept the status quo (after all, we should passively accept the lot that God gives us)” and nor do they justify “a masochistic glorification of suffering.” Rather, they invite us to “imitate Christ in his obedience and faithfulness.” This may involve suffering, given that cross bearing is a “central new Testament concept,” though such suffering “is always the result of faithfulness to the obedient call of the gospel, never a timeless concept that we are asked to pursue for its own sake.” If the moral theory of the atonement requires the human or subjective pole for its completion, this is merely God’s way of taking the human response seriously. Boersma asserts that we learn through Irenaeus that “without the moral theory we lose sight of the freedom of the human response, of the significance of human action, and ultimately all the love of God itself. It is the indispensable anchor for the hospitality of God.” 19 NOTES 1. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 539. The differentiation between moral influence and example theory suggested here is acknowledged. For brevity’s sake, they will be taken as one. 2. Eberhard Jüngel, “Gospel and Law: The Relationship of Dogmatics to Ethics” in Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (G. E. Paul, trans.; Philadelphia: Westminster Press), 105–126. 3. These nuances of Barth’s doctrine of participation are referenced by Adam Neder in his book Participation in Christ: An Entry Into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 82ff. 4. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 173–193. 5. Mark D. Baker and Joel D. Green, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 175. 6. The issue of divine temporality, that is the belief that there is time in God, is a challenging one philosophically. That there seems to be some kind of time in God’s life is signalled by the events of the creation and the incarnation. God exists before he creates and before the Son becomes incarnate. As indicated by Ryan Mullins, divine temporality comes in a “variety of forms but all true temporalists agree that God is eternal in that He exists without beginning and without end, but God is temporal in that He has succession or moments in His life.” “Divine Temporality, the Trinity, and the Charge of Arianism,” Journal of Analytic Theology, journalofanalytictheology.com/jat/index.php/jat/article/download/jat.2016–4.../298. See also Ryan Mullins, “In Search of a Timeless God,” PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 2013 and The End of the Timeless God (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). He has argued extensively against the “anachronistic” tendency of theologians to read four-dimensionalism onto the classical and medieval theologians. He contends that while the classical and medieval theologians believed that all times are eternally present to God, they were making an epistemic rather than an ontological claim (The End, 79–84). Barth similarly is of the opinion that time in the eternal God exists, but that time in the divine life is different to time on earth (though Mullins contends that Barth “denies succession in God's eternal life. [Barth 1975, III, 2, 438–439].” “Divine Temporality,” 268). The opposing view, divine atemporality, is expressed well by Alan Torrance in “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Spatio-Temporal Dimensions, with Special Reference to Jürgen Moltmann and D. C. Williams,” in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). He argues for the unreality of temporal becoming and the facticity of a fourdimensional spatio-temporal view. See also Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004), who states “Clearly, the consensus that emerged during the Middle Ages was that eternity, the temporal mode of God’s being, was

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timeless” (111). A doctrine of God’s ontological atemporality likely necessitates a spatiotemporal view. Prominent contemporary theologians supporting Torrance in a spatio-temporal view include Paul Helm (“Divine Timeless Eternity,” in God and Time: Four Views, ed. Gregory Ganssle [Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001]) and Timothy Sansbury (Beyond Time: Defending God’s Transcendence [Landam, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2009]). 7. For a discussion of Gregory Nazianzen, Calvin, Owen, Barth, Edwards on the sinful nature Jesus assumed and cleansed see W. Ross Hastings, “‘Honouring the Spirit’: Analysis and Evaluation of Jonathan Edwards’ Pneumatological Doctrine of the Incarnation,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 7 (No. 3) July 2005, 279–299. 8. Irenaeus, Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses), III.21.10. http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/0103321.htm. 9. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.17.1. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103517.htm. 10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.14.3. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103514.htm. 11. “Thus, then, God the Word revealed Himself to men through His works. We must next consider the end of His earthly life and the nature of His bodily death. This is, indeed, the very center of our faith, and everywhere you hear men speak of it; by it, too, no less than by His other acts, Christ is revealed as God and Son of God.” On the Incarnation of the Word (De incarnatione Verbi Dei), Ch. 4, para. 19. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.txt. 12. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8. 13. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 8. 14. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9. 15. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9, 10, 20. 16. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9. 17. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 9, 25 18. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 25. 19. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2006), 132.

Chapter Eight

Historico-Theological Models Vicarious Humanity

THE VICARIOUS HUMANITY MOTIF The primary corrective that the vicarious humanity of Christ brings to caricatures of the motif of penal substitution is that it corrects a merely extrinsic view of the transactional reality of the cross, a view that treats Christ’s work in a manner that neglects his personhood. The forensics, as we have repeatedly noted, are never dissociated from participation and the filial. The act and being of God must be kept together. The ontological union of God with humanity in Christ, his becoming one with us, is prerequisite to what he accomplishes on our behalf. And our union with Christ is also logically (not chronologically) prior to our enjoying the benefits of that atonement—justification and sanctification—our topics in a later chapter. The doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ contains within it both atonement itself, in its own right, but it also brings to the fore the ontological realities that give meaning to the atonement as a whole in all its vicarious and substitutionary efficacy. The most prominent advocate of the vicarious humanity of Christ was T. F. Torrance, though he owed a debt to John McLeod Campbell 1 and Karl Barth 2 in this regard. Karl Barth places greater emphasis on the objective nature of the atonement than Torrance, that is, there is still, for Barth, a forensic dimension beyond what transpires within the humanity of Christ. More on this later. The essence of the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ is related to its emphasis on the incarnation by which God, who is spirit, took on flesh in all its physicality and fallenness and purified it, within the person of Christ. He took on humanity as an ontological entity (anhypostatic), and in 143

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doing so also the person of the Son became a distinct divine-human person (enhypostatic). This he did on behalf of, as a representative of, and as a substitute for, fallen humanity. The vicarious humanity of Christ created a theological correlation and correspondence between who God is in himself, and who he is for us. The God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is thus the God of the eternal Trinity. There is no God back of that. As our substitute and representative he was perfectly able to incorporate humanity into himself so that we might know God, and he was perfectly suited to bring us reliable revelation through the knowledge of the true God. Revelation, is after all, a communion category, not just a cognitive one. The doctrine has been summarized helpfully by Christian Kettler by employing four categories for salvation in light of the vicarious humanity of Christ: it is unitary (yet differentiated), ontological, contingent, and human. The reality of salvation is unitary in the sense that the vicarious humanity of Christ “teaches us not to divorce form from being in our cosmology, nor the empirical from the theoretical in our epistemology.” 3 He adds the caution not to neglect the differentiation made between God and the created world in Torrance’s theology, since he was “not an epistemological or cosmological monist.” 4 He affirms secondly that salvation in light of the vicarious humanity of Christ is ontological in the sense that it “derives from salvation as the communication of God himself in Christ.” It is a “concrete reality . . . since it integrates the Act and Being of God” and is thus “rooted in what is most real, the divine Being.” 5 As Torrance himself wrote, “Since the Act and Word of God we meet in Jesus Christ are eternally inherent in the Being of God, and since none other than the very Being of God himself is mediated to us through the Incarnation of his love in Act and Word in Jesus Christ, God’s Being is revealed to be his Being in Act and Word—Being that is intrinsically dynamic and eloquent, the Being of the ever living, acting and loving God.” 6 We may thus be sure that “the life of God communicated in the vicarious humanity of Christ” is indeed the “very being of God.” 7 In sum, the divine Logos in human flesh, as the vicarious humanity of Christ, communicates the very life of God in humanity (Campbell). Salvation is based on the communication of this life (Irenaeus, Athanasius). In this way, Christology is dynamically related to soteriology. In effect, Christ becomes the “very matter and substance of salvation.” 8 This ontological foundation is crucial to the atonement. The reality of salvation is, thirdly, contingent. Just as the creation is created ex nihilo and has no subsistence of its own apart from God, and yet is “endowed with an authentic reality and integrity of its own,” so salvation may also be spoken of as ex nihilo, with no existence or subsistence of its own apart from a gracious act of God, and yet is also “endowed with an authentic reality and integrity of its own.” 9 And, like creation as discovered in science, we cannot “determine beforehand the boundaries, limits, and

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criteria for salvific reality.” 10 The ecclesial and sacramental aspects of the reality of salvation are discovered within the structure of reality given it by the vicarious humanity of Christ, but they “must always be understood as contingent upon the gracious act of God.” 11 Fourthly, the reality of salvation in light of the vicarious humanity of Christ is that it is truly human. Kettler provides here a corrective to Christology that is obsessed with defending only the deity and sinlessness of Jesus and comments that it “is within space and time that creation and redemption are united in the reconciling humanity of Jesus Christ.” “To speak of salvation as less than human,” he continues, “is to fall into idealism and far from the reality of the incarnation.” With Karl Barth, Torrance viewed the humanity of Christ as based in the eternal being of God as the ground for our humanity, in a manner facilitated by “the twin doctrines of substitution and incorporation.” 12 This refers to the fact that Christ takes our place, becoming our representative, and so creates a new humanity (substitution/representation), but he also incorporates us into this new humanity (incorporation), making his life our life. Christology is kept close to soteriology in this doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ. Over against the notion of a “divinized” human Jesus or any Christology that “tears asunder the relationship between Christ’s humanity and ours,” Kettler suggests that there “is a certain humility to the atonement which the vicarious humanity of Christ brings. Weak, frail human nature becomes the arena of salvation.” 13 The importance of the incarnation in the theology of vicarious humanity cannot be overemphasized. With the assumption that the act of incarnation was in the eternal decree and covenant of God, on one account, or even subsumed within the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, on another account, the Son was incarnandus (oriented toward the incarnation) before he became incarnate. Thus it is not surprising that the incarnation was the first saving act of Christ and that his life as the representative of humanity, stands in our place. A Sinful Humanity Assumed A controversial aspect of the saving nature of the humanity of Christ has been the belief that Christ at the incarnation assumed a sinful human nature and healed it, either instantaneously or progressively in his life and climactically in his death. McLeod Campbell, for example, speaks of the sufferings of Christ as the perfecting of the atonement. 14 In other words, the atonement has already begun in the incarnation and life of Christ. Torrance specified that Christ assumed fallen humanity as an ontological entity in an anhypostatic way, vicariously. He insisted that the person of the Son who assumed human nature to form the one divine-human person of Jesus Christ (enhypostatically) was sinless as a person. The timing of the purification of the sinful

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nature may differ in the tradition, but the orthodox consensus is that his impeccability was not threatened by the assumptive act. This idea of Christ’s assumption and purification of a sinful human nature is, in fact, not new in the tradition though it may be new, and not a little threatening, for many evangelicals. In fact it is the prevalent view of the Church Fathers, though it is often attributed solely to Cappadocian Gregory Nazianzen, who famously said, “that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.” 15 The notion of theosis is tied in with this assumption and healing, in the Church Fathers and for Torrance. God can deify our humanity by grace because God has first deified human nature in the hypostatic union of flesh with the Word. 16 In fact, the Church Fathers typically made much of the saving efficacy of the incarnation itself, as we have seen, and they also typically also believed that the Logos assumed a sinful humanity which was by the union purified, thus leading to the healing of humanity as a whole. David Congdon highlights the fact that even scholars who confirm that the majority of the Church Fathers do speak of the Logos assuming a sinful human nature, do not seem to notice the soteriological significance of the union which destroys the corruption of the flesh in order to make it life-giving in the death of Jesus. 17 Cyril of Alexandria is another good illustrative case. David Congdon has pointed out that it is essential, on the one hand, for his soteriological aims, that the human nature of Christ be unfallen, and capable therefore of giving divine life to his humanity by nature, so that the rest of humans may receive divine life in our humanity, by grace. 18 Cyril rejected the unfallenness view. As Congdon states, “if we focus on the humanity originally assumed by the Logos in the event of the incarnation, Cyril makes it clear that this humanity is indeed fallen and corrupt. He says that this nature is ‘subject to corruption,’ ‘under the tyranny of sin,’ and ‘sick with its desires.’ Yet the moment this nature is joined to the Logos it becomes ‘a holy and life giving thing, full of divine energy.’” Congdon concludes that “Cyril thus remains faithful to the axiom of Gregory Nazianzen.” 19 Deification is thus located in the hypostatic union for both Nazianzen and Cyril. Congdon thus highlights an important distinction in incarnational Christology: Whereas the later scholastic tradition requires that human nature be “deiform” prior to hypostatic union, Cyril makes “deiformity” a product of the union. . . . The event of the incarnation conforms human nature to the grace and glory of divinity, redeeming human fallenness in Christ for the sake of redeeming human fallenness universally. In other words, Cyril’s proto-Chalcedonism subverts any recourse to Nestorianism, and consequently he fits neither within the modern “fallenness” camp nor within the camp arguing for a strictly unfallen (i.e., deiform) human nature. 20

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Certainly, Reformed theologian Jonathan Edwards falls within the scholastic tradition in this regard. The human nature in Edwards’s depictions of the incarnation is made deiform (possibly by ex nihilo creation) prior to hypostatic union, and there is no rooting of human deification in the hypostatic union. 21 Rather, deification in believing humanity will be grounded upon the death of Christ, and will be contingent upon the faith of responsive humans, and it will be modelled on the example of Jesus who depended upon the Spirit for the maintaining of holiness throughout life (the Spirit of the Son, in particular). In this regard Edwards is also, broadly speaking, in the Augustinian tradition. Congdon suggests that Osiander in the sixteenth century adopts this Cyrilline Christology and so comes into conflict with Calvin in this regard. Osiander insisted that the humanity Christ assumes must first, at the incarnation, become the medium for God’s redemptive presence by the action of divinity upon it, so that at his death Jesus could function efficaciously. Calvin critiqued Osiander on this account, assuming (incorrectly) that Osiander “bypassed the role of the Mediator.” Congdon suggests that “Cyril (and therefore Osiander) would answer this objection by arguing that the life and righteousness of the Godhead can only save by virtue of the flesh becoming the medium for God’s redemptive presence.” The Reformed tradition is in this aspect of its Christology, out of touch with its patristic roots. Cyril, who is typical of the Church Fathers in this regard, emphasized the incarnation as the focal point of Christology and soteriology. It is true that Calvin’s view of the incarnation does entail the assuming by the Logos of a sinful humanity purified in the act of incarnation, 22 and that Edwards’s view is similar on one account, but this is the result in Edwards’s case of the mediating work of the Spirit, rather than the action of the Logos or divine nature of the one hypostasis of the incarnate Son. 23 Cyril’s proto-Chalcedonian incarnation, as Congdon indicates, involves “an early version of ‘nature-perichoresis,’ or what later came to be known as the communicatio idiomatum.” This “natureperichoresis” is distinct from “person-perichoresis” by which the persons of the Trinity mutually indwell one another. The incarnation entails “the mutual indwelling of each nature in the other, such that the flesh participates in the Logos (so that we can attribute suffering and death to the divine Word) and the Logos participates in the flesh (so that we can attribute the life-giving glory of God to the flesh).” Congdon notes that “while Cyril does not use the term ‘perichoresis’ in his writings, he employs the basic concept, taken from Gregory Nazianzen: ‘the names (or properties of the natures) being mingled like the natures, and flowing into one another, according to the law of their intimate union.’” 24 The extent to which the communicato idiomatum is believed to operate differs widely—from Luther, in which it is total, to Calvin and Barth in which it is restricted to being only from the divine to the human, and is restricted to life and holiness.

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Vicarious Baptism and Repentance The close integration of Christology with soteriology in the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ is reflected in the fact that Torrance, for example, focuses his understanding of the “process of reconciliation, incorporation, atonement, and redemption” 25 upon the whole life of Christ in its totality, as well as in its particular “moments.” With respect to the whole, Torrance expresses that throughout the life of Christ, “the immediate focus is undoubtedly centered on the human agency of the incarnate Son within the essential conditions of actual historical human existence, and therefore on the undiminished actuality of the whole historical Jesus Christ who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified and buried, And rose again from the dead.” 26 In short, Torrance sees the whole life of Christ as redemptive, as a “continuous vicarious sacrifice and oblation which, as such, is indivisible, for everything he assumed from us is organically united in the one Person and work as Saviour and Mediator.” 27 There are, however, particularly significant moments in the life of Christ that Torrance highlights “to structure the correlation he draws between incarnation and reconciliation.” 28 Christ’s baptism is one of those moments. 29 This stress on the vicarious humanity of Christ and ontological atonement, is framed by Torrance’s version of theosis with its roots in that of Athanasius, the theologian in the tradition which Torrance relies on most. This involves two movements: from God to humanity, or “identification,” by which God participates in humanity in Jesus Christ; and the second, from humanity to God, that is, the response of the man Jesus Christ to God, and human responses in Christ by participation. Torrance articulates clearly that Christ is the only human response to God that is acceptable. It is the participation of humanity in the humanity of Christ. This explains Torrance’s emphasis on the responses of Christ to God in his life as those in which our response participates. Whereas a theologian like Jonathan Edwards might stress the role of the Holy Spirit in human participation in Christ, for Torrance and Karl Barth it is first a participation in the humanity of Christ. This serves to explain why the baptism and vicarious repentance of Jesus Christ in that baptismal event is focused upon and theologically expounded by John McLeod Campbell and T. F. Torrance. Torrance, while resisting Barth’s move away from infant baptism (IV/4), nevertheless has in common with Barth the belief that our baptism has its grounding in the baptism of Jesus. By our baptism into Christ’s baptism, we are included in the vicarious obedience of Christ and are adopted as God’s children. It is indeed a participation in Christ’s vicarious baptism for us. Torrance finds support for his understanding of the vicarious nature of baptism in Calvin who wrote: “For all the gifts of God proffered in baptism are

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found in Christ alone. Our baptisms unite us to the Baptized One, Christ himself in whom all blessings are found.” 30 In short, for Torrance, the vicarious nature of Christ’s baptism is justified by an emphasis on participation in the vicarious humanity of Christ. 31 The relationship of participation in the baptism of Christ has a bearing on the activity of the Spirit and the human response of faith. In an essay entitled “The One Baptism Common to Christ and His Church,” Torrance speaks of the work of the Spirit and the response of faith as being in “mutual relation.” Faith arises as a gift of the Spirit to “subjects of his saving activity,” and consequently and concurrently faith facilitates the receiving of the Spirit, who in turn unites them to Christ “so that his atoning reconciliation bears fruit in us, and lifting us up to share in the very life and love of God, in the communion of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” 32 Torrance thus speaks of baptism not as “a sacrament of what we do but of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ,” such that “he has bound himself to us and bound us to himself, before ever we could respond to him.” Yet it is also a sacrament of what God does in us by the Spirit bringing us into union with Christ “in his faithfulness and obedience to the Father and making that the ground of our faith.” Baptism is, in summary, both “an act done to us,” which does not depend on our faith or faithfulness, “but upon Christ alone and his vicarious faithfulness” and an act done in us by the Spirit who binds us creatively to Christ in a way that enables our own spontaneous response to the grace of God in Christ. But Torrance insists that even what is done in us “is undergirded and supported by Christ and enclosed with his own faithfulness, and thus grounded in the mutual relation between the incarnate Son and the heavenly Father.” 33 Two evaluative questions are precipitated by these considerations. Positively, McLeod Campbell and Torrance have served to stress the great reality that atonement is made in the person of Jesus Christ and in participation with him, through all of his life. But what biblical evidence is there for these assertions, and, secondly, what role does the death of Christ have in atonement and does penal substitution have any part to play in the atonement? The concepts of identification, substitution, representation, and the vicarious reality of the life and history of Jesus in its totality are justified, and it is the notion of participation as the mechanism by which the atonement works. But how does this play out in the death of Jesus?

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The Death of Christ and Penal Substitution in the Vicarious Humanity Doctrine John McLeod Campbell (1800–1872) John McLeod Campbell (hereafter Campbell), being found guilty of teaching universal atonement and universal pardon was deposed from the church of Scotland in 1831. Twenty-five years after this, he published The Nature of the Atonement which arguably became “Scotland’s greatest contribution to theology,” 34 and is considered to be as significant in the history of atonement theology as Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. 35 The crucial idea in his atonement theology is his invoking of the vicarious humanity of Christ, and specifically, in his death, Christ’s spiritual expression of vicarious repentance on behalf of humanity, as the means of atonement. In place of penal punishment, within a legal context, involving the physical sufferings and shedding of blood, the cross was the occasion of Jesus offering up perfect vicarious repentance of an emotive and spiritual kind that absorbed the wrath of God. Campbell actually attributes the idea of a perfect repentance in Jesus which becomes vicarious for humanity to Jonathan Edwards, who suggested that a repentance for sin “proportionate to the greatness of the majesty despised” 36 might be accepted by God as satisfaction for sin. Whereas Edwards did not pursue the idea, Campbell made it the kingpin of his atonement theology of vicarious repentance. Campbell’s atonement theology was in the first instance a reaction to limited atonement, popularly espoused by his Calvinist peers in the Church of Scotland and especially as articulated by John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and Thomas Chalmers. For Campbell it had insurmountable challenges for preaching the gospel with integrity, for pastoral care, and for the struggle of parishioners for assurance based on an inward focus and self-examination, such that the proof of one’s election was in one’s sanctified state. But above all for what it implied about the doctrine of God. The biblical assertion “God is love” was contradicted by it; it “set forth justice as a necessary attribute of divine nature.” 37 That is, God had to punish sin, “by necessity of his nature, whereas the love and mercy of God were arbitrary, revealed at his own discretion.” 38 He argued that since “an arbitrary act cannot reveal character,” the cross cannot reveal that God is love if limited atonement is true. God as Judge therefore, obscures who God is as Father. 39 By exalting God’s justice above his mercy they are placed in conflict. The arbitrary nature of the love of God made lack of assurance inevitable. This conception of God implicit in the limited atonement viewpoint led also to problems in how the nature of the atonement was conceived. The atonement was seen as a merely legal transaction, 40 involving a “quantitative” and “arithmetic” view of the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. What

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may seem to be a caricature of penal substitution was nevertheless the natural outcome of limited atonement—“a certain amount of suffering as the punishment for a certain amount of sin.” 41 The language of imputation on behalf of the elect only, seemed to Campbell to be a merely external arrangement, isolated from Christ’s person. As such he considered it to have an “air of legal fiction.” 42 It was this that led Campbell to think of the atonement less in legal terms and more in the filial language of bringing sons and daughters into adoption. That is not to say he neglected the justice of God, nor his wrath. But he thought of atonement in moral and spiritual terms rather than the physical. Crucially for Campbell, the justice and wrath of God were not ameliorated by a substitution of Christ that was in any way penal. 43 His argument was that since God had already provided the atonement this meant that sin had already been forgiven. But in what sense then could the spiritual and moral suffering of Christ effect atonement, and what is the filial emphasis? These will be addressed in turn. The spiritual aspect of Christ’s atoning sufferings is seen in the fact that Christ’s death is envisaged by Campbell as “witness-bearing for God.” 44 That is, Christ death was a demonstration of “His love and His trust towards His father.” 45 One might say the offering of his soul devotion to the Father on our behalf. It was also a manifestation of “His love and His long-suffering towards His brethren,” which he shared with the Father. His death revealed the Father’s love in the Son’s love, a Trinitarian dynamic worthy of note here. With respect to our sins, the death of Jesus was “an expression of the divine mind regarding our sins, and a manifestation by the Son of what our sins are to the Father’s heart.” 46 The Father’s grief over sin, in addition to his love, is revealed in Christ death. It is this goodness of God that leads us to repentance and faith, and therefore into the life of sonship with Christ. The moral dimension of the atonement is explained in Campbell’s concept of the vicarious repentance of the Son. The starting point of this is, of course, the incarnation by which Christ in his great love became fully identified with (participated in) humanity, including its sin. Campbell thus clearly speaks of Christ in his going to the cross “bearing us and our sins on his heart before the Father.” 47 In his approach to God on behalf of humanity, Christ encountered “the divine mind in its aspect towards sin and sinners.” 48 The wrath of God against sin is not denied in Campbell’s scheme, nor the absence of substitution. Christ, on encountering the wrath of God, put himself “between sinners and the consequences of that righteous wrath.” 49 However, crucially, there was no penal infliction of divine wrath in that moment. In place of this is Campbell’s understanding that Christ offered up a perfect repentance that pleased the Father and absorbed and removed the wrath of God, and expiated the guilt of humanity. Having agreed with the Father’s condemnation of the sin of humanity, he offered a perfect amen from within

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the depths of his own humanity to the “divine condemnation” of God on the sin of humanity. 50 This amen took “the form of a perfect confession of our sin,” 51 which made satisfaction for it. Campbell expresses that satisfaction is made by saying of Christ’s response to the wrath of God that “in that perfect response he absorbs it.” This because “that response has all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man—a perfect sorrow—a perfect contrition.” 52 Christ’s confession was a perfect repentance in that it entailed perfect sorrow and perfect contrition. 53 Christ’s perfect knowledge of the anger of the Father based on his unity of mind with the Father, led to great suffering of soul in the Son before the righteous condemnation of the Father. It was this intense sorrow which was the deepest and truest element of Christ’s suffering, and was what gave atoning virtue to his suffering. It was because Christ felt the appropriate way in infinite depth about God’s wrath and humanity’s sin that Christ’s “amen” appeased the wrath of God. Thirdly, the priority of sonship or the filial in Campbell is expressed not only in terms of God’s ontic purpose in salvation, but also in how the account of the cross itself reflected that priority. The evidence of this is in the final saying of the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” which “are given to help us understand the life of sonship which we are seeing passing out of our sight, and to reveal to us in this its final triumph the secret of its victory all along.” 54 This was in fact just a fresh manifestation and perfecting of the faith and trust of the Son in the Father. The faith which was “this last utterance of the voice of sonship” was simply that which had pervaded his whole life. “He ever through the Eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God,” says Campbell. He held and used his “life in the flesh in sonship” and then yielded it up to the Father in the same way. Not my will but thine be done was his disposition always. 55 This related to the contention that the atoning work of Christ on the cross was moral and spiritual, not physical, and it was filial rather than penal in its orientation. Campbell quotes the words of Jesus in John 10:17–18 to reinforce the primary dynamic of the cross as this filial dynamic: “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” Even with regard to death as the consequence of sin, Campbell did not see Christ as a substitute in bearing it, in his defeat of it for humanity. He argued that death had no sting for Christ. He was in control of death as John 10:17–18 affirms, and was not its victim. Rather Christ “tasted it in the strength of eternal life, not as punishment, but, on behalf of men in righteous Amen to the judgment on sin, of which as the wages of sin death is the expression.” 56 That is, our participation in him leads to life, to the Great Exchange, but not in a forensic way. Campbell sees the fitting solemnity of

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the cross event and the significance of the hours of darkness not in punishment of the Son by the Father, but in the intense sorrow of the Son (and therefore the Father) for the sin of humanity and in his righteous expression of Amen against sin and in agreement with its wages in death. 57 Participation of the believer in sonship in the Son, also played a crucial part in how human repentance (the many) is related to Christ’s repentance (the one). Christ’s confession of sin when confronted with the wrath of God, would, “when offered to God on our behalf, have contemplated prospectively our own participation in that confession as an element in our actual redemption from sin.” 58 Evaluation In his atonement theology, it is clear that Campbell wished to stress atonement in light of the incarnation, and as accomplished in the person and in the whole history of Jesus Christ. His desire to exonerate love as an essential and even governing attribute of God in his Reformed tradition is to be lauded. Attempts have been made within Reformed theology to express the possibility that one can still convey that God is love within a limited atonement perspective, but this is a stretch and contradicts the overall tenor of Scripture and the gospel. His correction of a purely legal view of the atonement is also very timely. His emphasis on atonement in the person of Christ, correcting the isolation of his work from his person, is also commendable. His prioritizing of filial realities is also commendable. His inclusion of the raw realities of the judgment and wrath of God is also refreshing in a day when these are avoided and mercy is valued to the exclusion of justice. But is the alternative of vicarious repentance actually credible as a means of atonement? And does Campbell go too far in his disparaging of the forensic and the penal? These two evaluative questions will be taken in order. Concerning the credibility of the vicarious repentance or perfect confession dynamic as a valid mechanism in atonement, there are three questions. The first is, Can the holy Son of God, who Campbell himself speaks of as having no consciousness of sin, repent? Stated this way, this question seems to emphatically rule it out. In fact, it would be to offer the retort to Campbell that if penal substitution is a “legal fiction,” this is a “repentance fiction.” This would be, however, to neglect the important single undergirding reality in all atoning motifs of participation. Jesus can confess with integrity because he has become one with humanity and has anhypostatically taken on a sinful human nature, even while still remaining sinless. He confesses from the depth of his human nature the sin of the world. To say he cannot repent is to say he cannot enter the waters of the baptism of repentance which, in fact, he did! The second question is a biblical historical one: Is Jesus recorded as having repented, or express repentance on the cross? Donald McLeod, for example, states that there simply isn’t

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“any hint of a word of confession or repentance uttered by Christ on the cross,” 59 and that Jesus cries out “Why?” not “Amen” to God’s estimate of sin. There are certainly hints of vicarious confession in the words, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing,” and the cry of dereliction. There are also a number of sayings in the messianic psalms which strongly hint at it. For example, Psalm 69:4 in which the Messiah says, “I am forced to restore what I did not steal,” and Psalm 22:6, where the Messianic Redeemer expresses, “But I am a worm and not a man.” Campbell had an answer for the lack of consciousness of sin in Jesus. Participation is crucial to this and it works in a retrospective way. The individual sinner trusting in Christ would add the consciousness of sin. We actually participate in his substitute repentance so that we have “our own participation in Christ’s expiatory confession of our sin” 60 in accordance with 1 John 1:9. This is facilitated by the intercession of Christ on our behalf. 61 On this basis some have accused Campbell of representing simply a form of moral influence theory, but I think it is more robust than that. The third and most crucial question is whether or not a perfect confession or repentance can actually bring about atonement in God, a question adjudged on the basis of biblical precedent. Campbell points to Phinehas for an example of the presence of this dynamic on one occasion in the Old Testament. He is fond of quoting the texts that suggest that the Old Testament sacrifices never in fact actually atoned for sin. Yet this is to neglect that as the epistle of the Hebrews affirms, all these sacrifices were types of the one great offering of Christ once for all and that their expression in faith had retrospective value (Rom. 3:25–26). They therefore mean something as a type. And their fulfillment in the antetype Christ, and his offering for us, has deep, deep meaning that I must believe transcends merely the vicarious repentance meaning, and includes the penal substitution dynamic. What is regrettable is that Campbell seems to stake his all on one dynamic when it seems from the variety of pictures in the Old Testament and the variety of salvation terms and metaphors in the New, that there are many dynamics at work in this mystery of the atonement of a transcendent God. And penal substitution is one, in fact it is only one because of the ontological and filial foundations Campbell has reminded us of. Secondly, concerning the penal, did Campbell completely deny penal substitution theory? Did he use vicarious humanity and the vicarious repentance of Jesus as an alternative view to penal substitution theory, as in zerosum game? It seems clear in The Nature of the Atonement that he proposed that rather than bearing humanity’s sin in a penal sense, Christ confessed its sin in an act of vicarious repentance. The actual mechanism of the vicarious confession/repentance aspect atonement would, if accompanied by other aspects, perhaps have some credibility if it were just one aspect of Christ’s deep vicarious mediatorial work. There seems to be a lack of acknowledg-

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ment of depth in the event of the cross. Penal substitution doctrine entails a penal and transactional depth in what transpires, if it is accompanied by a depth of understanding of the personhood of the Son and his relations with the Father. Vicarious humanity doctrine envisages a depth arising from Christ’s vicarious confession in life and death which might easily complement penal substitution, but it seems that Campbell is in such reaction to what really is a caricature of penal substitution, that he throws penal and juridical matters out altogether. Interestingly, in both the ontologically nuanced penal substitutionary motif and in the vicarious humanity motif, it is to be noticed that there is no denial of the righteous judgment of God upon human sin. It is just averted by different mechanisms. On reflection, it seems most accurate to say that Campbell accepted a substitutionary form of atonement, and that his emphasis on the incarnation and vicarious humanity/confession of Christ filled up what was lacking in portrayals of penal substitution theory that are not participatory or undergirded by ontological priority. Referring back to the previous chapter, the vicarious humanity motif brings broader perspective to atonement in the person and life of Christ as anticipated, for example, in the bloodless cereal offering of the Levitical order. However, it needs to also have in it what answers to the sin offerings which do involve substitution and blood and suffering for sin and death. There are shades of the burnt offering in Campbell’s depictions of Christ in his offering up of his devotion to the Father, and the accomplishment of the pleasure of God on behalf of and instead of his people. But the sin offering just isn’t there. The blood before and on the altar in the most holy on the day of atonement to propitiate the wrath of God and avert his judgment based on his holy law within the ark, just isn’t there. John McLeod Campbell’s primary concern expressed in his dialogue with Calvinists of both the “Elder” (including Jonathan Edwards) and “modified” variety, is that they made legal and governmental justice the primary motivation for atonement, rather than the question of the being of humanity. One of the subtle shifts made by the more modified Calvinists Campbell is referring to is from Christ “being punished for our sins” to Christ “enduring the punishment for sin.” 62 Moderate Calvinists sought to correct the strident emphasis on Christ bearing the wrath of God as the forsaken one, suffering the hatred and contempt of God for sin, as expressed, for example, by Rambach: “to suffer all the floods of divine wrath to pass over him which would have overwhelmed our Saviour’s human nature had not the divinity supported it in this terrible trial.” 63 The modified view on what Christ endured was expressed as “the loss for a time of all sense of God’s friendship, all enjoyment of his communion,” or the loss of “the consciousness of sinlessness remaining, and there being no misconception assumed as to the Father’s true estimate of Him as the holy One of God.” 64 Yet Campbell insists that even these modifications did not serve to alter the reality of atonement as first and

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foremost a purely legal reality. As already noted, in his dialogue with Calvinists in his tradition he also contested the notion of atonement as limited to the elect, and its relation to justification by faith. It was problematic for him that what Christ endured merely laid a foundation for those who would believe, and that it was somehow insufficient for the totality of humanity, indeed the whole cosmos. He also aims his guns at “modified Calvinism,” which advocated for a fait accompli atonement for all that is merely a legal justification for all, that is, he critiqued, “atonements, the whole character of which is determined by man’s relation to the divine law.” 65 Commenting on a writer who gloried in the atonement as a “grand moral display, illustrative of God’s condemnation of sin and delight in holiness,” Campbell, true to the contention that the forensic still had some place in his theology of the atonement, states, “And such a display it undoubtedly is.” But then he adds, “it is much more than this—neither is it even this healthfully and truly, apart from those specialties in man’s condition, and from that divine purpose concerning man, by which its nature and character have been determined.” 66 Campbell seems to give some validity to the legal, but crucially, he speaks of it as a base and immature concept apart from the workings of divine grace within the believer. He comments on how different from this “abstract atonement for sin” the sentiments of Romans 8:3–4 sound: “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” 67 Matters of law are inferior, is Campbell’s reading of this text. Thus, transformation of persons embodying the law is emphatically the superior part of the atonement. Once again, this seems to become an either/or conversation in Campbell, however. The aversion to limited atonement removes all vestiges of the juridical for Campbell in a reactionary way. Sanctification in the regenerate, because Christ has died to sin, shades the possibility that he has also died for sin, and brought them also into justification from transgression of the law and its penalty (Romans 3 and 5). He thus clouds the reality that both of the twin graces are logically a consequence of the filial, of being in Christ. Over against even the reforms of the moderate Calvinists of his day, Campbell argued for the priority of the filial over the forensic, the latter being neither first in God’s plan of redemption, nor without aim apart from the filial: “In the light of the Gospel we see, that our need of salvation, and our capacity of salvation as contemplated by the Father of our spirits, involved the problem—not ‘how we sinners could be pardoned and reconciled, and mercy be extended to us’; but, ‘how it could come to pass, that we, God’s offspring, being dead, should be alive again, being lost, should be found.’” 68

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Campbell’s view of the primacy of the filial and the vicarious nature of Christ’s humanity and atonement is ultimately grounded in his view of God as Father first before he is judge. It “is only in the light of the relation in which the scheme of redemption stands to the fatherliness of God that the necessity for a natural relation of the atonement to Christianity can be adequately conceived of,” he states. The “great and root-distinction” of the filial view of redemption is the relation in which it stands “to the fatherliness of God.” 69 Atonement originated in the fatherliness of God, and not in his nature as Judge. And its end must be understood from his fatherliness. Even the “demand for the elements of expiation” are found in God as Father. Thus atonement as considered within the person of Christ in life and death does make alienated children to be reconciled, and the lost to be found, rather than the guilty to be justified. He insists, however, that this filial and ontological mechanism does not negate justice, both absolute (justice in God) and rectoral (justice in his dealings, his reign). In fact, it is a way “infinitely more glorifying to the law of God, and more fitted to open a free channel for mercy to flow in, than an atonement consisting in the endurance of penal sufferings by the Son of God as our substitute, would have done.” 70 However, immediately after, Campbell states, “But while this lower ground is tenable, we should not be justified in coming down from the point of view to which the Gospel raises us, to what, while true, is not the ultimate truth revealed.” To give priority to a judgment, legal emphasis would be to put the law above the Gospel for Campbell, and most importantly, to subordinate our relation to “God as the Father of our spirits,” the “original and root relation,” to our relation to “God as our righteous Lord.” 71 The “law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” that is “sonship,” is that “in which alone the power is found to accomplish the fulfilment of righteousness of the law in us,” says Campbell. It is in being reconciled that we find the law of God we have violated “written in our hearts.” The Father is thereby revealed in the Lawgiver, thus “shewing us the law of the Law-giver in its fountain in the Father’s heart.” Revealing the Father in the Lawgiver is in fact what reconciles us to the Father, the “quickening in us of the life of sonship.” 72 With respect to his overemphasis on the fatherhood of God, Andrew Purves, who has offered a fair assessment of Campbell, is thus correct in his assessment in this regard: Campbell . . . opens up fresh vistas of theological insight. In view of his reflection on the nature of the atonement, the doctrine never looks quite the same again. Yet it suffers from single-mindedness. He has taken one soteriological metaphor—our restoration to communion with the Father—and allowed it to open up the whole of the gospel. . . His argument is incomplete in part because of his unremitting pastoral resistance to penal atonement and its effects upon the spiritual wellbeing of his people. 73

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We may say then, that Campbell, in order to correct an overemphasis on forensics and the penal in the atonement, often isolated from the person of Christ and from the being and love of God, advocates for what sometimes seems an overstated emphasis on the filial and the ontological to make his point. As indicated at a few crucial places, he does not completely reject penal substitution, but reframes it. His propensity nevertheless is to emphasize aspects of the atonement other than the sin-bearing and the cost to Jesus of this act, an aspect with which his Reformed community was obsessed. This arguably leads him in overreaction to neglect that aspect. 74 Is McLeod Campbell’s emphasis important, even all important, in grasping what the nature of atonement really is? I would suggest it is. In light of the nature of God as love, which is emphatic in his theology, and in light of the filial aspect of the atonement by which humans in Christ are made sons and daughters of God, and in light of the core dynamic of the atoning work of Christ being in the person and devotion of Christ, the moral aspect of the atonement takes on a different tone to that of imputation and punishment for sins. It is not that Campbell ignores the wrath of God nor his justice. But this is taken care of by the perfect repentance of Christ in his humanity for humanity. It speaks to the beauty of a full heart offered up by Jesus in an act of voluntary obedience and adoration. It casts the cross event as the ultimate perichoretic act of the Son in love to the Father. It was an act that was a concrete expression of what the Son and the Father eternally are and do. Sinbearing, the act of judging sin, must come within that framework. The sweet savor offerings in Leviticus come before the sin offerings. The propitiatory and expiatory sin offerings on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 are completed and climaxed with a burnt offering. The high priest removes his priestly garments and offers his burnt offering in his own clothing, in his own person (vv. 23–25). The only challenge with Campbell’s exposition of Hebrews 10 is that he seems to make so much of this voluntary aspect of the life and death of Christ that the sin offering dimension is neglected. The body of Christ prepared for the Son prior to his incarnation (Hebrews 10:5) and in which he gladly did the will of God (10:7) does indeed fulfill and transcend the offerings of the Old Testament. The writer of Hebrews boldly states, “And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10). Unquestionably it is the inner person of Jesus as Priest offered up in life and death that is crucial to the atoning efficacy of Jesus. But the language that immediately follows this in Hebrews 10 is unmistakably that of the Priest offering a sin-bearing sacrifice, that of his body, his “sacrifice for sins” (10:12), the “one sacrifice” by which “he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (10:14). The antitype for the type which can never take away sins is an antitype that nevertheless corresponds to the type, in that his sacrifice is a sin offering, not just a burnt offering. Even Campbell’s key text, Hebrews 9:14 speaks of his cleansing

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blood (the sin offering dimension, one that is physical), even if its efficacy is dependent on the offering of his soul to God through the eternal Spirit (the burnt offering dimension). One cannot simply excise what one does not like regarding the atonement. Campbell is to be lauded for making first things first, atonement within the person of Christ in his devotion to God, but making them first does not exclude what is second, the propitiation of divine wrath, and the satisfaction of the justice of God so that he is both just and the justifier of those who believe in Jesus (Rom. 3:26). If the adversaries of Campbell were missing his emphasis on the person and vicarious obedience of Jesus, he comes close to missing the mercy seat act of Christ. Rather, it is both/and, though at best, Campbell’s contribution, is to insist that the penal and representative side is made much more viable by the priority of the filial and devotion emphasis. The need for “total atonement” is palpable again. One final example of the all or nothing nature of Campbell’s invective is his discussion of propitiation in the context of 1 John 1:9–2:2 and following. There is definite evidence in this case of elements of moral influence theory. In essence, Campbell emphasizes (rightly) that Christ is the propitiation for our sins. However, the whole emphasis of the passage for Campbell is that Jesus as Advocate for the Father and our propitiation enables us not to sin, rather than providing pardon for us when we sin. The thought of pardon for the believers’ sin is “here rather implied than expressed,” says Campbell. The “value and use of the advocate directly contemplated is his value to those who are called not to sin,” 75 he suggests. Christ’s righteousness, that which qualified him to be our advocate and propitiation is the main theme of the passage, he maintains, and it is our being in Christ as branches in the vine that enables us to live in righteousness rather than sin. Campbell stresses that Christ is our propitiation in his being and in all aspects of his life (to the negation of a completed work of propitiation on the cross) and that both propitiation and reconciliation or oneness with God abides in the person of Christ. Rather than pardon accomplished, and administered to believers upon confession, Campbell insists that the “knowing Christ the propitiation for sin” is therefore “keeping Christ’s commandments.” 76 He finds evidence in the following paragraph, and indeed throughout first John, that the claim to be in Christ is validated by the keeping of his commandments. On this occasion Campbell stridently dismisses the moral power of gratitude entailed in the receiving of pardon that is grounded in the penal substitution motif. The only moral power is the righteousness of Christ. This is a further example of the missing “and” in atonement theology, or one-sided truth in Campbell’s atonement theology. Christ is, of course, the one in whom propitiation exists, and it was in his person that it was accomplished, and it is carried now in his person as our ongoing Great High Priest. He is personified as propitiation because it resides in him. The accomplishment of the propitiation once for all and its administering must be distin-

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guished. The idea of the repetition of propitiation, if the epistle to the Hebrews has anything to say, is unthinkable. “After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven” (1:3). “But he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself ” (9:26). “But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (10:12–14). Both truths of Hebrews 9, in particular, must be taken together to form a full and utterly delightful picture of the reality of Christ for us. He “has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself ” but he also entered heaven “now to appear for us in God’s presence” as our Great High Priest, our Advocate, our Propitiation. Not enacting propitiation over and over again, but bringing the people of God in Christ into the reality of it freshly, especially when they do sin. It is true that John does not expect a child of God to live habitually in sin without ever making progress in sanctification. But he is equally frank about the fact that all Christians do sin. When they do, their confession does not effect salvation all over again. They are restored in their fellowship with the Father upon their agreement with him that their sin is sin, and they are assured of what is already theirs, since he is faithful and just, that is, of forgiveness. The act of confession also has a general cleansing effect in their hearts, all by virtue of Christ in whom they abide. In Christ resides their propitiation, and under his gracious care as their High Priest he also ever lives to make intercession for them. This sense of pardon does evoke transformative gratitude. The transformation is, of course, completely related to the union of the believer with Christ, as John’s writing reveals, but to say that the conscious awareness of forgiving grace and gratitude is not a part of that relationship is unfortunate and unnecessary. There is the completed work of atonement through the sacrifice of the Great High Priest who sat down at the right hand of the Father and there is the continuing intercessory work of our Great High Priest ever living, “standing” to minister to his people to comfort, to cleanse, and to transform, and as Hebrews 9 indicates, there is a third appearing of the Priest (a second on earth): “he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.” This is the consummation, the glorification of the saints who will no longer be struggling sinners. Karl Barth (1886–1968) The death of Christ in Barth’s theology shows an integrated connectedness to Christ’s life and a particularly revelatory Trinitarian emphasis. Barth is well known for his use of the prodigal son parable to describe the vicarious nature

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of the life of Christ, culminating in his death in identification with the people of God (Israel, in the first instance) in their rejection. Humanity (represented by Israel) is the prodigal who has gone into the far country in disobedience to the Father. Jesus as the incarnate Son is sent by the Father to be the prodigal who has journeyed into the far country assuming upon himself the disobedience of the people of God to the Father. By his obedience on their behalf, which is culminated at the cross, he reconciles humanity: “on becoming a human obedient son Jesus identifies himself with the human sons of God (notably Israel), who are disobedient and thus under judgment.” 77 The suffering of the Son in his death is the end result of his bearing the Godforsakenness of prodigal mankind. The Trinitarian nature of this is revealed by Barth’s attestation (albeit muted) that this extreme suffering is shared by the Father, not merely inflicted by him. In IV/2 Barth speaks to this issue: It is not at all the case that God has no part in the suffering of Jesus Christ[;] . . . it is God the Father who suffers in the offering and sending of his Son, in his abasement. The suffering is not his own, but the alien suffering of the creature, of man, which he takes to himself. But he does suffer it in the humiliation of his Son with the depth with which it never was or will be suffered by any man—apart from the One who is the Son. This fatherly fellowsuffering of God is the mystery, the basis, of the humiliation of his Son; the truth of that which takes place historically in his crucifixion. 78

The most important things to notice about this way of seeing the death of Christ is that the emphasis is on the obedience of the Son, that the cross is the “high point of the Son’s obedience to the Father,” 79 that the participation by way of identification and substitution are more ontological than forensic, even if the forensic cannot be dismissed. The forensic cannot be dismissed for the Son is taking the place of a nation, Israel, and therefore humanity, which is under the judgment of God for its repeated and endemic idolatry and disobedience. Above all, the act of the cross for Barth is Trinitarian. It is not the picture of a Father punishing a Son as if these were two isolated individuals related in a tritheistic rather than a Trinitarian way. The Father has sent the Son; the Father remains in close relationship with the Son; the Father suffers in the suffering of the Son. Barth will in this context seek to preserve the impassibility (the idea that God cannot suffer) of the Father in the immanent Trinity, while maintaining that he suffered only in the economic Trinity. This is a contradiction of Barth’s consistent view that there is a correspondence between the immanent and economic Trinities. Barth seeks to preserve what Paul Fiddes critically refers to as “an untouched hinterland in the immanent being of God.” 80 This could be alternatively expressed by suggesting that the Father suffered mediately, while the Son suffered immediately, or to suggest that the Father can will to suffer when he so pleases, but he is not required to suffer. There is strength, however, in what Barth was doing, as

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Pugh notices. He is echoing Luther in his assertions that the “glory of God is revealed in the opposite—the cross. The very forsakenness reveals the otherwise perfect unity of Father and Son.” 81 Barth is consistently Trinitarian and he does not neglect the judgment and wrath of God in his theology of the cross. One might say, he is definitely substitutionary in his approach in a Trinitarian way, even if the emphasis is not on the penal in the Latin way. Pugh interestingly places Barth’s theology of atonement under the category: “The Cross as Transformative Revelation,” and there is a sense of consonance about this at one level, yet not as in the merely moral influence view. There is an undeniable substitutionary dimension to Barth’s work that vindicates the justice of God while making the mercy primary. It is undergirded by ontological and Trinitarian realities that are often missing when some modern evangelicals speak of it. Barth’s way of bringing together the ontological and the forensic without negating the latter, is helpful. In IV/1, for example, Barth specifically makes use of the ontological, that is the incarnational union of the Son with humanity, or the vicarious humanity of Christ, to defend the forensic aspect of the atonement. Barth’s robust doctrine of human sin and of the judgment of God is in evidence in this discussion. The incarnation of the Word is in fact for Barth the very basis for judgment on humanity. “The abasement of the Son” is “the divine accusation against every man and the divine accusation of every man.” The vicarious humanity of Christ simply stresses the inability of fallen humanity to know and respond to God. The fact that the Son shares in our common humanity is the basis for the ultimate judgment of God, and it is also the reason that the Son can authentically take the judgment of God on himself. Thus, the vicarious humanity of Christ provides the foundation of his forensic theology of atonement. It is to be emphasized that the vicarious humanity of Christ does not negate the forensic substitutionary aspect of the atonement for Barth. But the latter needs the former. Justice cannot be seen to be done in the forensic transactional nature of the atonement unless the Son has become one with humanity in its totality. And conversely, the vicarious humanity aspect is not complete without the objective aspect of the atonement. The true objectivity of salvation lies in the fact that, for Barth, atonement is first and foremost an act of God. The actuality of the act of Christ is that which creates the possibility of atonement, and the Son of God takes genuine initiative in taking our place as human beings and undergoing judgment for us. Atonement is total in the sense that it must be both subjective in Christ and objective by Christ. A point of clarification may be required here. It would be easy at this point to confuse the categories of objective and subjective with regard to the atonement. Here we are discussing the objective and the subjective with respect to the person and work of Christ himself. We are suggesting that the work of the healing and purification of sinful human nature happens within

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his own person, and is therefore subjective from his perspective. The work of the judgment of God expressed toward him as our representative and substitute person is the objective aspect we have been considering here. There is another objective-subjective polarity that is often discussed especially with regard to Barth’s work. This refers to the objective and subjective with regard to Christ’s experience of his vicarious life, and of his atonement in his death, and our entering into its reality. Barth has been critiqued from the perspective that he seems to make all of the objective reality of atonement in the history of Jesus Christ, and almost nothing of the human appropriation and possession of it. The judgment takes place within the history of Jesus Christ and that seems to be that! Yet, this is to misunderstand Barth in an unfortunate way. When Barth speaks about human encounter with the atonement he is simply wishing to emphasize the divine end of things which is most crucial. He is also wanting to ensure that we never isolate our human appropriation of salvation from its accomplishment in the history of Jesus Christ. Our entry into it is simply an entry into a reality already extant in the life of God. Ours is simply a reality transition into God’s reality. In one famous sentence Barth wrote, “Everything has happened to us, but in the context of the person of the Son.” 82 It would be easy to misunderstand and caricature Barth at this point. He does not deny what “has happened to us.” Donald Bloesch’s evaluation that Barth elevated the objective Christological pole to the neglect of the subjective human reality, 83 is simply mistaken, as is von Balthasar’s critique that for Barth, humanity other than Christ’s is an “epiphenomenon.” 84 Bloesch accuses Barth of a “theological rationalism,” which leads to neglect of the subjective human pole. When Barth speaks of human appropriation he “has in mind primarily Jesus Christ in humanity, and secondarily those who are engrafted into Christ,” 85 says Bloesch. There is certainly a grain of truth in what Bloesch charges. The human participation of believers in becoming engrafted into Christ does play second fiddle to the objective participation and atonement accomplished by Jesus Christ. But Barth thought this appropriate to the reality of who has accomplished salvation, and I would argue it is a Reformed perspective that evangelical Christianity, with its obsession with human experience, could learn a great deal from. Barth simply wants to keep human appropriation tethered to what has happened to Christ, and he wants to avoid giving any hint that human faith and repentance might be what is needed to make up the deficit in Christ’s atonement in his history. There is no significance to our human experience of the fruit of the atonement outside of the reality of the “fact,” that is, apart from the history of Jesus Christ, and all importantly, his participation, by which he became one with us. Barth’s understanding of the significance of the life and death of Christ will be considered again under the subject of penal substitution.

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James Torrance (1923–2003) Both James and T. F. Torrance were influenced significantly by both John McLeod Campbell and Karl Barth in their theology in general, and with respect to the atonement and the role of the death of Christ within it. James Torrance is well known for his support of Campbell. 86 One of the greatest concerns within the theology of James Torrance was to pay attention to the doctrine of God which shapes the doctrine of the atonement. Torrance lauds Campbell for his attempt to correct the doctrine of God as Lawgiver which undergirded Federal Calvinism and limited atonement. If our God is primarily a Lawgiver, says Torrance, our doctrine of atonement “will imply that God has to be conditioned into being gracious, either by human merit, or by Christ satisfying the conditions of such a law that the Father might be gracious to the elect, as in certain forms of Scholastic Calvinism.” 87 This in turn leads to a high stress on conditions for receiving it, or evidences of repentance that must be demonstratable for there to be assurance of salvation. Repentance that becomes a condition for receiving forgiveness thus becomes legal repentance in contrast with evangelical repentance which is grounded on the benevolence of the God of the gospel and a salvation already procured by Christ. “Conversely, however,” says Torrance, “if our basic concept of God is that of the Triune God of grace who has being in communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and who has created us to share that life of communion, then our doctrine of atonement will be seen rather as God in grace bringing these loving purposes to fulfilment in redemption.” 88 The primary eternal purpose of God is filial, that is, he created us for sonship, to “find our true being-in-communion.” In Christ we are given that gift, “through the Spirit, of being daughters and sons of the Father.” The substitutionary role of the Son is expressed with care by Torrance: “God in grace in the person of the Son, comes to stand in for us, to bring to fulfilment those loving filial purposes by fulfilling the promises and the law for us, and in love submitting to the condemnation of the law for us.” 89 This it seems to me, moves beyond what McLeod Campbell was willing to say. It acknowledges a penal dimension, albeit in the service of the filial, as it should. This way of conceiving the atonement is truer to the intention of the Law that was given, Torrance contends. It is not an impersonal law of contract, one held over even the believing people in post-Reformation Scotland, to keep them ever wondering whether they are one of the elect and fortunate enough to have had its penalty paid by a particular atonement that covers only the elect. Rather, says Torrance, as in the Torah, it spells out the unconditional obligatedness of grace “as the Father’s loving heart coming out to us in the form of commandments,” Christ is “then seen as the Father’s loving heart coming out to us in the fulfilling of that law.” 90 This Trinitarian gospel then, as opposed to that of the Scholastic Calvinists, reveals the “priority of

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grace over law, the filial over the judicial,” and it reveals the God who is God is “a covenant-God of faithfulness, not a contract-God.” 91 Assurance of salvation in this more Trinitarian view, is “God’s gift to God’s children where we look away from ourselves to what we are in the loving heart of the Father and what we are by grace in the gift of Christ the Son, through the Spirit of adoption.” 92 Contrary to our findings above, Torrance does contend that McLeod Campbell did not reject substitutionary atonement, though in his defense of Campbell he does not actually anywhere indicate that this substitutionary atonement was penal. McLeod Campbell was not rejecting the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, as is too often said. Far from it. He had a profound view of Christ standing in our place but he did reject any notion that God the Father has to be conditioned into being gracious by Christ satisfying the law and bearing the penalty of the law. It is the other way round. Christ, the incarnate Son, in grace fulfils the holy requirements of the law, takes its condemnation to himself, that by standing in for us we might be forgiven and given the gift of sharing by the Spirit in his Sonship and communion with the Father. Substitution so understood is the heart of a true doctrine of atonement where it is seen in terms of the Triune God of grace in the Person of his Son coming to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and calling us by the Spirit to participate as sons and daughters in his Sonship, in what he has done for us and is still doing for us today. This is the concept of the wonderful exchange (mirifica commutatio) so dear to Luther and Calvin, that Christ takes to himself what is ours (our sin, enmity, death) to give us what is his in exchange (his righteousness, love and eternal life). 93

It seems that Torrance also shies away from the penal, believing that if the atonement is penal then it must be a conditioning of God to be benevolent toward humanity. It seems to me that atonement can be penal, and indeed in light of the biblical witness it must be if we include the whole of divine revelation in the Old Testament and New, but it can be penal and still not communicate this “conditioning” message. Actually, if God has planned for all eternity a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, his benevolence to all humanity must surely be a given. The problem is that both McLeod Campbell and Torrance are in reaction to limited atonement and that colors their interpretation of atonement as penal, when it need not be the case. Penal substitution of a nuanced kind need not be associated with limited atonement, and it can be associated with a benevolent God. It need not make God a Judge first and a Father second. It need not be associated with a contract God, but can very much be associated with the covenantal triune God of grace who is both merciful and just, wrathful and properly propitiated. This vicarious humanity aspect of atonement is built largely on Johannine sentiments, and these are not to be neglected as indeed has happened with proponents of a “contract” gospel, and of limited atonement, with an empha-

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sis on particular election. It is true that the Johannine emphasis is on regeneration and the drawing of human persons into relationship with the triune God of grace, and their sonship is definitely the first ontic desire of God in salvation. But in addition to those sentiments one must not pretend that when John does become forensic we can simply explain away the texts (such as John 1:29 [“Lamb of God”], 1 John 2:2 [“He is the propitiation for our sins”], 4:10 [“He sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice”] 5:7 [“water and blood”]). Typically, as in 1 John 4, what is expressed first by John is life that God intended to give us: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him,” followed by provision of what has robbed us of life—sin, guilt, and death, “This is Love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice (propitiation/expiation) for our sins.” The background of the word for the atonement here is in Old Testament usage which inescapably entails at minimum the bearing of the guilt of sin and most likely the aversion of divine wrath, God’s settled response to sin, which in its removal by Christ fulfills God’s love for humanity. Campbell and Torrance may not be wrong about the perfect repentance of Jesus for humanity, but it is not enough. It is like the offering of a cereal offering to take way sin, when sin and trespass offerings are required by a loving and holy God. Furthermore, one cannot ignore Pauline perspectives and those of the writer of the Hebrews, which as we have seen reflect undeniable sacrificial satisfaction and substitutional motifs of an undeniably penal kind. In summary, it is not that Campbell or his gracious interpreter, James Torrance, are wrong in their very necessary corrections and assertions about the importance of ontology, atonement in the person of Christ, the priority of the filial and a doctrine of God that is true to the nature of the revealed triune God of the Bible. These are important contributions to any sane and robust theology of atonement, and they weigh in to our thesis concerning participation as the theory of atonement, and the construing of atonement as total. It is just that I don’t think penal considerations properly considered need to change any of that. Not of the crass “one for one” contract kind, but of the kind that does not neglect the juridical realities conveyed consistently throughout Scripture, and the bearing away of sin and guilt in both the physical body and the emotional/spiritual aspect of the person of the Savior. T. F. Torrance (1913–2007) Though T. F. Torrance was not particularly comfortable with the concept of penal substitution, his contribution by way of the concept of the vicarious humanity of Christ, that is, his emphasis on the ontological nature of salvation, must in fact be incorporated into any doctrine of penal substitution that can pass scrutiny. The very title of his most significant work on the atone-

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ment is suggestive: Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ. 94 Torrance more readily acknowledges the juridical element in atonement than does Campbell. As Torrance reviews the atonement background in the Old Testament he speaks of how God will bring redemption in the new covenant, and poses the question, “Who is to bear the righteous judgement upon sin, especially the sin that violated the fundamental basis of the former covenant and excise the sinner from the covenanted means of grace?” His answer is unequivocal: “nowhere is there any suggestion that God will pardon or redeem apart from judgement. There God himself must provide the Lamb as it were.” 95 Before, during, and after the exile the prophets and psalmists know that only God can provide atonement and that “the sacrificial cultus in itself and considered as a means of effecting divine propitiation is an abomination.” So who will stand in the gap? Torrance affirms that Second Isaiah provides the answer: the “Servant of the Lord” (Isaiah 53 in particular). 96 Torrance in fact labors to show, par excellence, how the continuity of atonement themes between the Old and New Testaments, and indeed, how atonement “theories” in the tradition spin off from this narrative. A brief summary of his thought patterns in this regard are now presented, but with a view toward asking the question concerning the death of Christ as to whether it in anyway involves a penal substitutionary element. Torrance thinks of the “theories” (I will stay with his chosen term here) of the atonement under three categories: (i) the dramatic, as in the ransom (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine) and Christus Victor (Gustav Aulén, Tillich, a growing majority of contemporary theologians) theories; (ii) the cultic-forensic aspect, the “cultic” being a reference to the sacrifice of the Mass which he discounts, and the “forensic” meaning the penal aspect distanced from the priestly, present in Tertullian and characterized by Latin language and Latinized concepts. He finds this narrower view of justification in Cyril of Alexandria, and in some versions of Protestant and Evangelical theology. Thirdly, there is (iii) the ontological aspect of the atonement, that has taken two forms, the incarnational, which is based on knowledge gained through the incarnate Christ and his revelation, and mystical union with Christ, as in the Greek Fathers, Ignatius and Clement of Alexandria, and the subjective moral influence theory (including the Stabat Mater tradition). 97 These theories are brought into conversation with the biblical picture regarding atonement in a way that shows their relationship to the biblical data, and some of the deviations away from it. The core of Torrance’s biblical theology in this regard derives in three Old Testament aspects of redemption and in evidence of their resultant presence in New Testament fulfillment. These three aspects of redemption are summed up in the Hebrew words, padah, kipper, and gael. Padah is reflected in redemption “by a mighty hand in sheer grace, at once out of the oppression of evil and out of judgement and death.” It is the

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act of a king. The “mighty hand” is for Torrance “the holiness of Christ, the obedience unto the death of the cross,” and the “mighty hand” is the “blood of Christ, shed freely on our behalf.” It is the nature of the redeeming act that is emphasized in this category. 98 Kipper is reflected in redemption “by an expiatory sacrifice for sin made in the offering of Christ’s life for our life in obedience to the divine will and mercy.” 99 The vicarious life is not over against but complementary to the forensic however. It is priestly, but priest and sacrifice go together in fulfillment of the Old Testament order, just as “servant of God” and “Lamb of God” go together. Ransom and expiation are costly, accomplished by the shedding of blood. The barriers of guilt and enmity are removed between man and God. Reconciliation between God and human results in “a holy communion” between them. Kipper is the mode of the atoning redemption and it is “the restoration to fellowship with God” which it effects that is stressed. 100 Goel has as its core the idea of “redemption by a kinsman-advocate, acting out of a blood tie or covenant bond, or who out of pure love forging such a bond in himself and in the blood of the new covenant, stands in our place, takes our lost cause on himself as his own,” and so assures our redemption in himself, thus delivering us out of our bondage and bringing us into the freedom of the children of God with a rich inheritance. In this category the stress is on the nature of the redeemer and our kinship with him. 101 Thus padah is roughly described by the term “redemption” in the New Testament, kipper by “atonement” or “reconciliation” where the concepts of expiation and substitutionary sacrifice are involved, while goel is described by “reconciliation” where the end goal of “restoration to union and communion with God in Christ is uppermost.” 102 In looking to how the New Testament aspects of redemption then made their way into the theological history of atonement, Torrance ascribes the three Hebrew terms and meanings in the following way: padah, redemption with a mighty hand, he equivocates with the dramatic aspect of the atonement, that is, “the active and victorious intervention of God in rescuing and saving us,” which includes the ransom and Christus Victor motifs; kipper redemption, which is expiatory and substitutionary, is found in the cultic-forensic aspect of atonement; and goel redemption which stresses the nature of the redeemer, finds its expression in the ontological aspect of the atonement. I suspect that Torrance did not see these as hard and fast classifications but rather that they provided a useful heuristic for learning. This is confirmed by Torrance’s concern to stress that “none of these aspects can stand alone or become the major basis of a doctrine of atonement without serious dislocation of the biblical understanding and failure to appreciate the fullness of Christ saving work.” 103

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This is one of the most important statements in all of Torrance’s work on the atonement and it serves to reinforce a major point of our thesis that penal substitution cannot stand in its own, as indeed Christus Victor cannot stand on its own. Penal substitution without the ontological becomes a Latin distortion, a work isolated from who Christ is and who God is as the triune God. Penal substitution without the dramatic (Christus Victor) aspect can be made to sound as though suffering is to be exalted over triumph. Torrance in fact moves in this very direction, showing the insufficiency of each model on its own. The dramatic concept of redemption without the forensic and expiatory “cannot avoid an ultimate dualism” such as is expressed in the notion of ransom paid to the devil. It easily “falls prey to the demand for demythologization and once that is carried out, nothing is left but triviality.” 104 The dramatic element without the ontological dissolves redemption into “mere events,” that is into the benefits Christ gives us, what he does for us, isolated from his personhood. The dramatic without either the ontological or the forensic puts the emphasis so much on the act as transcendent. As for the cultic-forensic element, also called piacular, expiatory redemption, when viewed apart from the dramatic concept, it “degenerates into a pagan notion of placating God.” While it does “involve an act in which God reconciles himself to man and reconciles man to himself in Jesus Christ,” if the emphasis that it is a “pure act of God” is downplayed and the sheer intervention of the divine grace is struck out of it, then it becomes “Pelagian,” as if we cooperate with God for our salvation, and it becomes “sacerdotalist” (a system in which propitiatory sacrifices for sin require the mediation of a human priest), as if we can appease an angry God through human mediation (a prospective typically associated with Roman Catholic “notions of atonement and the mass and its peculiar understanding of merit and satisfaction”). 105 Most seriously, apart from the ontological element, the cultic–forensic “degenerates into a legal and cultic fiction with no basis in actual existence and reality and therefore no relevance to our actual humanity.” 106 A case in point is sometimes evident in popular evangelical preaching of justification by faith isolated from discussion of union with Christ. A deficit in the ontological element also negates the saving significance of the humanity of Christ. The ontological and the forensic are both needed together for a proper doctrine of Christ “as himself the only mediator and our high priest.” The forensic “would degenerate into ritualistic superstition” 107 without the ontological. Thirdly, the ontological element in redemption, that is the element of atonement theology, which lays stress on the fact that Christ himself is our Redeemer, in the constitution of his person, and which emphasizes that his work must never be separated from his person, and which understands redemption to include the incarnation . . . this element, when separated from the dramatic or Christus Victor concept, would “degenerate into a Pelagian

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conception of redemption appropriate to an adoptionist Christology,” 108 as if Christ was a man adopted to become the Son of God. The moral influence theory would be a case in point, as well as the Socinian heresy. 109 Torrance indicates further that the absence of the dramatic element would mean a loss of the anhypostatic nature of the person and work of Christ (that he took on a sinful human nature and healed it) and the denigration of pure grace of God alone in salvation. 110 Without the cultic-forensic, “a doctrine of deification through union with deity” would emerge. It would need to be either “demythologized, or philosophically mythologized,” turning it into sheer idealism either way. Emphasizing the ontological to the neglect of the dramatic and the ontological results in a redemption of the “mystic absorption into the divine” kind. Torrance comments on the difficulty of the ontological for both the rationalist and the mystic mind-set when it is actually properly held together with the dramatic and the forensic. This is because in such an account of the atonement the “finality of the atonement” is “inseparably bound up with the particular and the contingent with its definite place and date in time, in the historical Jesus.” This explains why the rational and the mystic frequently have sought to “re-interpret the historical particularity of Jesus symbolically.” 111 Historical Devolution Torrance draws out the Old Testament background and New Testament considerations concerning the atonement into an evaluation of historical emphases in the tradition. He reduces these into three main groups: the moral influence theory, ransom theory, and penal substitution theory. He believes that these are the three that have been “thrown up in history” and that they correspond “in some real measure” to the “three main aspects of the biblical conception of redemption, though not with exactness.” 112 For example, the cultic aspect is omitted in his account. Most importantly what is missing in an honest evaluation of the history of the doctrine of the atonement is the interconnections between the two as just discussed. This makes the three basic historical aspects Torrance has in mind “much narrower and poorer” than the intertwined biblical concepts grounded in padah, kipper, and goel redemption. How did this happen? The dramatic or ransom aspect has tended “to fall into a ‘ransom to the devil’ theory” or, at best, a Christus Victor concept, in which a ransom is paid to God to liberate humanity. As expressed above, when this theory narrows, it invites a dualistic view of the universe and demythologization. Torrance challenges historians who speak of this view as the patristic and medieval view, when in fact, he contends, it is found only in a small sector of patristic thought, mainly in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. 113 It was not espoused by any of the other great Church Fathers and in medieval times it is

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associated mostly with monastic thought in which dualism was prevalent. Torrance is of the opinion that it “was effectively destroyed by Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux” as a viable theory. 114 Secondly, the cultic-forensic aspect of the atonement, has fallen down into two traditions. First, it fell into a tradition of the cultic notion, perpetuated by liturgical texts and contexts, especially in the sacrifice of the mass, “without adequate relation to Christ himself in his saving activity” 115 and therefore it was devoid of justification by grace. Second, it fell into a penal notion, which, isolated from other influences, and especially the priestly aspect, became a satisfaction conception of the atonement. This derives in the West from Tertullian, and leads easily to legalism, that is a being under the law, rather than emphasizing redemption from the law. Latin language and concepts were responsible for this conception in both Roman and Protestant thought, such that it veered significantly from the account of this doctrine in Cyril of Alexandria. Torrance expresses the view that this emphasis on penal substitution with a narrowing understanding of justification became the dominant view of the atonement in so-called Protestant orthodoxy and Evangelical Protestantism. 116 Thirdly, the ontological aspect of the atonement isolated from the others, tended to fall into two distinct notions: first, an incarnational notion in which salvation comes through knowledge and mystical union, a trend in which the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria, and earlier, Ignatius of Antioch are implicated by Torrance. This became one of the “main strands of the mystical tradition, the stress being laid sometimes more on union with God through mystical vision, sometimes more on union with God through the incarnation.” 117 The second deterioration was expressed in a subjective understanding of the atonement in which the saving element becomes anthropocentrically centered, that is, in the moral influence of the sacrifice of Christ (Abelard), or the knowledge of what God has done for us in his love (Socinius). This affects the liturgy and practices positively, even if not properly conceived, theologically speaking. Torrance here alludes again to the Stabat Mater, or prayer of Mary at the foot of the cross, which invites “the immense power of contemplating the wounds of Jesus.” 118 Torrance, in summary, expresses the view that despite the “fall” in these elements, and the polarization rather than integration of the three perspectives in church history, the celebration of the Eucharist “has tended to give a diverging theories some underlying unity in worship.” 119 The divergences within the tradition on the nature of the Eucharist did over time, however, cause divergences on theories of the atonement to “split even wider.” 120 Torrance then appeals to two other ways in which the three main aspects of redemption originating in the Old Testament concepts, can be properly integrated. The first of these is the threefold office of Christ, the triplex munus, prophet, priest and king. Torrance first acknowledges that the three offices

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are not often spoken of together (only three times in the OT; Micah 3, Jer. 18, and Ezek. 7), and that both testaments speak mostly of a duplex munus, the twofold offices of king and priest (Zechariah and Revelation). However, he explains, this is because the prophetic function is considered to be part of the priestly office. With respect to the “anointing,” however, this undoubtedly occurs for prophets, priests, and kings in the Old Testament. Torrance draws attention to the fact that this emphasis on the threefold office of Christ is present in the Church Fathers, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria, and in many medieval thinkers (especially Aquinas), and in Calvin in the Reformation. Having provided this justification, Torrance makes the following integrative correlations: • Prophet: the Word made flesh, Christ as advocate, corresponds to the incarnational or goel aspect of redemption; • Priest: this corresponds to the cultic–forensic or kipper aspect of redemption—Christus victima, Christ the victim; • King: this corresponds to the Christus Victor, Christ the Victor, or padah aspect of redemption, salvation through the mighty act of God, sola gratia, by grace alone. 121 The second correlative method of pulling together the threefold strand, are the concepts or realities of the passive obedience of Christ, the active obedience of Christ and his incarnational assumption of our fallen humanity. In the same order, the correlation is as follows: The prophet corresponds to the incarnational assumption of our humanity, the Word made flesh. Christ is of course, “more than prophet, for he is the saving Word which he proclaims, that very Word of divine love and pardon enacted in the flesh.” 122 As such he fulfills the Old Testament goel. The priest identity corresponds to the passive obedience of Christ, his submission to the Father’s judgment and his self-offering in sacrifice for our sins, that is, the piacular and cultic side of redemption—the kipper redemption. The king identity corresponds to the active obedience of Christ, “the way in which Christ broke into our captivity to redeem us.” The mighty act here, however, is “the holiness of Jesus’ life, for it was through his holy life within our alienated humanity that he broke the thraldom of evil and emancipated us from its power.” 123 This corresponds to the padah redemption of the Old Testament. It must be stressed that to emphasize the ontological and the filial is not for Torrance a rejection of the Reformed doctrine of imputation, as in McLeod Campbell. Rather, it is to relocate it into the context of participation! Imputation is correctly understood when viewed “not just in terms of imputed righteousness but in terms of a participation in the righteousness of Christ which transferred to us through union with Him.” 124 This relies on

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three aspects of union or participation. The first is the incarnational union of the Son with humanity, so that humanity is itself changed, and so that he can act in a truly representative and vicarious manner for humanity. The second is the union mystica which is the personal union of Christ with the new humanity, his church, once again meaning that his acts are their acts. The third is the personal union of believers with Christ through faith, worked by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, and leading to the reception of all the benefits of salvation, such as justification and sanctification. In his Protestant version of theosis, Torrance has received the same critique as Barth that he emphasized the first of these unions, union of the Son with humanity by nature, the ontological, at the expense of a union of the believer (the third) that is spiritual (through the Holy Spirit). 125 Nevertheless the mastery with which he depicts the “total” nature of atonement in support of our thesis is acknowledged. NOTES 1. John McLeod Campbell, On the Nature of the Atonement (Carberry, UK: Handsel, 1996 [1856]). See also James B. Torrance, Scottish Journal of Theology, 26 (1973), 295–311. For a critique of McLeod Campbell’s viewpoint see Oliver D. Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine: Essays in Reformed Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 2011). 2. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 215–222. 3. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1991), 152. 4. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 152. A unitary view of reality established by the incarnation suggests it is also unitary with differentiation, just as one can differentiate but never separate the two natures of Christ. They are distinct but inseparable. The unitary nature of knowledge means that we cannot divorce being from cosmology, or the empirical from the theoretical in our epistemology (Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation [Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1991], 152). At the same time, these must be distinguished to avoid monism. Torrance clearly affirms both that “there is only one basic way of knowing” and that there are “difference modes of rationality according to the intrinsic intelligibility of the object.” T. F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 9. Torrance no doubt has knowing in theology and in science in mind. 5. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 152. 6. T. F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, 67. 7. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 153. 8. Christian D. Kettler, “Nine Theses on the Vicarious Humanity of Christ in the Theology of Thomas Torrance,” in his blog, The Evangelical Calvinist, November 26, 2011, https:// growrag.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/nine-theses-on-the-vicarious-humanity-of-christ-in-thetheology-of-thomas-torrance/ 9. Christian D. Kettler, “Nine Theses on the Vicarious Humanity of Christ.” 10. Christian D. Kettler, “Nine Theses on the Vicarious Humanity of Christ.” 11. Christian D. Kettler, “Nine Theses on the Vicarious Humanity of Christ.” 12. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 154. 13. Christian D. Kettler, The Vicarious Humanity of Christ, 154. 14. John McLeod Campbell, On the Nature of the Atonement, 215. 15. Gregory on Nazianzus, Letter 101.

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16. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ in the Theology of Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor,” submitted to Bruce L. McCormack, in partial fulfillment of IS001, Christology after Chalcedon, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2007, 10. 17. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ,” 9–10. 18. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ,” 9. 19. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ,” 10. 20. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ,” 10. 21. For more on Edwards’s view of the incarnation see W. Ross Hastings, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Participation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 201–264. 22. Bruce L. McCormack has noted that Calvin did not give much attention to the “ontological constitution of the Mediator” primarily because of his tendency not to speculate where Scripture is silent and also because he was much more preoccupied with the benefits of Christ. Bruce L. McCormack, “For Us and Our Salvation: Incarnation and Atonement in the Reformed Tradition,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 43, nos. 1–4 (March 1, 1998): 281–316. 23. Calvin also adheres to a nuanced hermeneutical version of the communicatio idiomatum (though not an ontological one, such as the ubiquity position of Luther). This version includes the permission of the influence of one nature upon the other in some instances (for example, Acts 20:28 speaks of the “blood” of “God”) and the precluding of influence in others. This allows for the presence of corruption in the human nature of Christ in union with his divine nature without contamination of that nature. R. Michael Allen, “Calvin’s Christ: A Dogmatic Matrix for Discussion of Christ’s Human Nature,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 4 (Oct. 1, 2007): 382–397. 24. David W. Congdon, “The Humanity of Christ,” fn. 35, 8–9. Quotation is from Letter 101. 25. Myk Habets, Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T.F. Torrance (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 82. 26. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 151. 27. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 152. 28. Myk Habets, Theology in Transposition, 82. 29. Others include the calling of the disciples, the life of prayer, his temptation, his human obedience (“The Atoning Obedience of Jesus Christ,” 65–81; “The Doctrine of Jesus Christ,” 117–132), his resurrection, his ascension, and the Parousia (Space, Time and Resurrection, 143–158). Habets notices a trend toward less of an emphasis on the moments and more on the theological significance of events in Torrance’s later writings (Myk Habets, Theology in Transposition). 30. John Calvin, Institutes 4.15.1. 31. T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 152. 32. T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical Unity in East and West (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1996), 103. 33. T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation, 103–104. 34. J. H. S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Hope Trust, 1988), 332. 35. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, intro. James B. Torrance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 2. 36. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 137, citing Jonathan Edwards, “Satisfaction for Sin,” in The Works of President Edwards (New York: J. Leavitt and C.F. Trow, 1843) II. 1–3. 37. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 17. 38. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 190. 39. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 78–79. 40. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 90. 41. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 82. 42. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 132. 43. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 121. 44. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 114. 45. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 114.

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46. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 116. 47. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 120. 48. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 117. 49. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 117. 50. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 118. 51. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 118. 52. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 118. Emphases original. 53. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 118. 54. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 213. 55. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 213. 56. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 217. 57. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 217. 58. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 127. 59. Donald MacLeod, Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2014), 192. 60. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 153. 61. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 127. 62. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 88. 63. Cited in John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 86. 64. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 89. 65. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 90. 66. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 92, emphases original. 67. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 92, emphases original. 68. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 91–92. 69. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 237. 70. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 238. 71. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 238. 72. John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 238. 73. Purves, Andrew. Reconstructing Pastoral Theology: A Christological Foundation. 1st ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 70. 74. One example where this is crystallized is in his appeal to the type of Phinehas in his act of obedience described in Numbers 25 by which God stayed the plague and removed the guilt of the whole people of God. See this account in John McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 108, 109, 115, 133. 75. John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 154. 76. John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 154. 77. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 171. 78. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 357. 79. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories: A Way Through the Maze (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 139. 80. Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 121. 81. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 140. 82. Karl Barth, CD, IV/1, 222. 83. Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus is Victor: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Salvation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1976), 10. 84. Balthasar averred that “Barth ends up talking about Christ so much as the true human being that it makes it seem as if all other human beings are mere epiphenomena.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 243. 85. Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus is Victor, 10–11. 86. James B. Torrance, “The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology.” Scottish Journal of Theology 26 (1973): 295–311. See also introduction by James B. Torrance, in John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1–16. See also James B. Torrance, “The Vicarious Humanity of Christ,” in T. F. Torrance, The Incarnation, Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, AD 381 (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1981). See also, James B. Torrance, “The Incarnation and ‘Limited Atonement.’” The Evangelical Quarterly, 55 No. 2 (1983): 83–94.

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87. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1. 88. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1. 89. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1. Emphasis added. 90. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1. 91. For more on this theme, see James B. Torrance, “Covenant and Contract, a Study of the Theological Background of Worship in Seventeenth-Century Scotland,” Scottish Journal of Theology 23 (1970): 51–76. 92. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 1. 93. James B. Torrance, Introduction, John MacLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 15–16. 94. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Acad., 2009), 2. 95. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 42. 96. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 42. 97. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 56–58. 98. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 52. 99. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 52. 100. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 52. 101. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 52. 102. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 52. 103. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 53. 104. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 53. 105. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 53–54. 106. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 54. 107. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 54. 108. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 54. 109. Socinius (1539–1564) was unitarian and believe Christ was merely a mortal human, who was begotten of the Holy Spirit and re-begotten in the resurrection to be immortal. His death was not considered to be an atoning sacrifice but it was accepted as a ground for forgiveness, according to Socinius. His death was a revelation of the love of God and was to exert a moral influence. 110. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 54. 111. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 55. 112. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 56. 113. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 56–57. 114. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 57. 115. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 57. 116. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 57. 117. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 57. 118. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 58. 119. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 58. 120. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 58. 121. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 58–59. 122. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 59. 123. T. F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 60. 124. T. F. Torrance, “The Distinctive Character of the Reformed Tradition,” In Incarnational Ministry: Essays in Honour of Ray S. Anderson, ed. C. H. Kettler and T. H. Speidell (Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1990), 6 (2–15). 125. Myk Habets, ed. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance (London: Routledge, 2009), 77.

Chapter Nine

Historico-Theological Models Ransom and Satisfaction as Recapitulation or Theosis

There have been many other treatments of these motifs and models of the atonement. In this chapter will be found brief explanations of the concepts, but much more so, some examples in the literature of proponents who saw their model as one among a rich mosaic, all seeking to describe the multifaceted mystery of the atonement, and others who saw them as single models superior to the rest. The necessity of participation, that of the Son in our humanity to become our representative and substitute, and that of believing humanity in the Son by the Spirit will be shown to undergird each motif. RANSOM The ransom motif has a long and somewhat complicated history. One cannot deny the presence of this motif in the Scriptures, as noted in chapter 6. There we spoke of the meaning of “ransom” in Mark 10:45, and of the place that payment has in this metaphor. The tradition understood that payment was implicit in this motif of the atonement. The question that persisted in the tradition, however, has to do with the recipient of the payment. Was it the devil, or God? Ransom models, which include Christus Victor have to do with the defeat of Satan, not payment to Satan or demonic structures. The “ransom to Satan” model involves a payment to Satan made by Christ to relinquish his power over humanity. The ransom-to-Satan model developed in the first few centuries of the church, according to Ben Pugh, “from a profound awareness of evil” that was Satanically inspired. This evoked a dualistic worldview, with God and Satan 177

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on opposite sides and “no neutral ground in between.” 1 Incipient Gnosticism added fuel to the fire, two strands of which —Valentinian and Marcionite— are thought to have been a source of the ransom to Satan theory. 2 At the risk of over-simplification, humanity was seen to be under the sway of the Demiurge, a prominent emanation from the divine who had created matter, matter being unspiritual, preventing the inner self from being enlightened (gnosis) by the Logos, who is “the very mind of the supreme God.” 3 An important part of this drama is that the cosmic Logos “takes on the appearance of physical form to defeat the Demiurge and free all those that have the inner spark to be able to live a more spiritual existence.” 4 The link between Gnosticism and “ransom to Satan” is surprising, given that the Church Father who was the most outspoken against Gnosticism in general, advocated for it. This was Irenaeus (130–c.202 CE). But Rashdall has commented that “Irenaeus simply substituted the devil for the Demiurge.” 5 Justin Martyr had already associated Jesus with the Greek Logos, hence the supposed consonance between the Christian drama to the Gnostic one. As Pugh indicates, “the theory developed in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa,” is of Christ seen as having taken “the form of a frail human delivered into the hands of the devil” who has “bitten off more than he could chew.” Deceived “by outward appearances,” the “result is the devil’s defeat and the liberation of Christ’s people.” 6 The element of deception, which is a prominent Gnostic teaching, thus made its way into the mainstream teaching of the church and this “ransom to Satan” motif came to be “favored by most of the Fathers” though in various forms, “some more crude that others.” 7 From Irenaeus to Origen, to Gregory of Nyssa and to Augustine, one can see the development of this way of looking at the atonement in progressively cruder forms, with two features in common: God deceives the devil, and the devil’s rights over humans are legitimate, and indeed inviolable, even to God. 8 This surprising dualism for a religion of the incarnation is perhaps accounted for by the fact that the passages in the New Testament that speak of Christ’s atonement as ransom (Mark 10:45, Matt. 20:28; 1 Tim. 2:6) do not specify to whom the ransom was paid, and as Pugh muses, “the silence was very tempting to fill.” A general point with regard to authority in theology is that the court of appeal must finally be to the Holy Scriptures and not to any post-apostolic group of persons, including the Fathers who demonstrate an enculturation with respect to this view of the atonement. Pugh comments that this view of the atonement became so prominent in the Middle Ages that “it was to provoke Anselm into writing his Cur Deus Homo? out of sheer irritation with it.” 9 An important reappropriation of the “ransom to Satan” motif may be found in Swedish professor and bishop, Gustav Aulén’s Christus Victor (1930), which followed the conflicts on the First World War. Other reappropriations and developments of it have been made in Paul Tillich’s Christus

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Victor, in the “Word of Faith” version of Christus Victor, feminist theology’s Christus Victor (in Darby Kathleen Ray), and manifestations of it are present also in Walter Wink, Mennonite J. Denny Weaver, in Nonviolent Atonement, and in the emerging Christus Victor (Brian McLaren, Greg Boyd), and finally into the biblical narrative approach of N. T. Wright. These are not at all strictly reappropriations of “ransom to Satan,” as they are an expression of the view that the primary way of viewing the death of Christ was as a victory over spiritual powers (either Satan and his demons, or earthly structures or powers). Indeed, they are, with all their minor variations, really a view distinct from that of “ransom to Satan,” being more truly “ransom models,” all coming under the heading of one model, that of Aulén’s initial book in the 1930’s, the Christus Victor model. We will consider each strand of this motif below. The satisfaction model is associated with Anselm, and will be considered in detail in an appraisal of the Cur Deus Homo? by Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart. The notions of recapitulation and theosis are seen to be included in this model. A brief word defining each of these concepts is in order. RECAPITULATION AND THEOSIS Recapitulation and theosis are connected and both are attributed most often to Irenaeus, 10 though one can discern their presence readily in the New Testament. Recapitulation, as the name sounds, is the re-capitulations or re-heading of the human race (a new capita, a new head). Just as the first Adam acted representatively for the human race in disobedience to God, the last Adam, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, acted representatively for us in his life and death. Being conjoined to Christ incarnate, all humanity is implicated in everything that Christ did in his obedience to the Father, and is able to access his power by the Spirit. The crucial basis of this, of course, is participation: the participation or union of the Son of God with humanity, and humanity’s union with Christ. The most crucial theological event in recapitulation is the incarnation which makes the Son’s representative nature a reality. The death of Jesus is the ultimate representative act of obedience on humanity’s behalf. Jesus was, as Irenaeus said, “summing up universal man in himself even to the end, summing up also his death.” 11 It is an obedience in the face of all opposition and all reasons not to obey. It is thus a “theology of Gethsemane.” 12 It is a theology of a new life principle in humanity as a result of the resurrection of Jesus, “renewing it to holiness and immortality,” 13 thus connecting it to theosis which is the subjective outworking of the objective reality of recapitulation.

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There is the idea of exchange in this model. It is seen explicitly, for example, in this excerpt from Irenaeus’s Against Heresies: “For as the disobedience of one man, who was originally moulded from virgin soil, the many were made sinners, and forfeited life, so it was necessary, that by the obedience of one man, who was originally born of a virgin, many should be justified and receive salvation.” 14 Its emphasis is not on the bearing of sin and guilt in Christ’s death, per se, but rather a reversal of the Fall in which all humanity in Christ participates. H. D. McDonald captures the essence of this model of recapitulation well: He kept fully the commands of God; he lived entirely the life of a man of God; he resisted completely the temptations of the devil; and he accepted finally death at the hands of wicked men. Thus has he made good Adam’s fall. 15

There is a strong emphasis on the obedience of Christ in death as that which leads to our salvation. Irenaeus speaks poetically of this when he states that Christ undid “that disobedience which took place at the tree by that obedience which was accomplished on a tree.” 16 The derivation of this model of recapitulation in Irenaeus are instincts that are obviously Pauline—Paul in two important soteriological sections that deal with the overcoming of sin’s power and condemnation (Rom. 5:12–21) and death (1 Cor. 15: 45–50). The term itself is a Latin translation of the Greek term anakephalaitôsis found in Ephesians 1:10, a word that describes the summing up of all God’s creational and salvific purposes in Christ. The link with theosis is expressed well when Irenaeus writes of the Son “bringing God down to human beings through the Spirit and, conversely, bringing humanity up to God by his own incarnation.” 17 Three comments are in order: the first is that although this motif is not penal substitution, it certainly contains within it the only rationale for why penal substitution properly nuanced actually works—the reality of the Son’s participation in our humanity in order to be able to act representatively for us. The second observation is that it is difficult to see what the mechanism of the exchange implicit in recapitulation really is. The filial and participational dynamics are clear enough. He becomes one with humanity and his obedience reconstitutes humanity, enabling humans to participate in it. But what of forgiveness and what of justification? If not accompanied by some form of forensic substitution, recapitulation seems powerful regarding theosis, as in sanctification, yet powerless with respect to pardon. The obedience exchange may provide the pardon in this model in a way that answers to vicarious obedience in McLeod Campbell, or to the cereal offering of Leviticus 2. Tom Smail, influenced in part by Karl Barth, has attempted to actually reconstitute the idea of penal substitution using recapitulation, and vice versa. He does so by means of a renovation of thought concerning the metaphor of sacrifice.

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His contention is that the transition from Old to new Covenants, “Sacrifice is re-defined as obedient self-offering.” 18 The “obedience expressed in the selfoffering of the whole person” 19 replaces the idea of a blood sacrifice, and this is how Smail imagines we should interpret references to Jesus as our sacrifice for sin in say, Hebrews 10:8–10, for example. His logic, as Pugh describes it is that “the offering up of an animal and the voluntary self-offering of a human being are so qualitatively different as to transform the whole notion of sacrifice.” 20 In short, a representative obedient man, rather than a punished substitute is the means of our salvation. The suffering of the death of Christ in a “place of abandonment” for Smail is not “simply the consequence of other people’s sins but becomes in him the enactment of that trustful surrender to the Father’s will with which he emerged from the wrestling of Gethsemane: Abba, Father, not my will but yours be done.” In fact, he adds, “Where that is not only said but done from the midst of the human mess the new man is born.” 21 These sentiments are rich and moving. However, in essence, this is recapitulation that in seeking to renew penal substitution, ends up revising it beyond recognition. It restricts the realm of sacrifice only to the spiritual or volitional aspect of the person of Jesus, and to vicarious obedience of Christ in life and death and neglects those aspects of sacrifice which are physical and raw and seemingly crude, but which belong in the revelation of God nevertheless. How Anselm invoked both recapitulation and theosis in his satisfaction theory as expounded below will provide another historic instance of the interdependence of the models of recapitulation and theosis in satisfaction theory. The third observation is one made by Pugh that whereas the generationXers might favor Christus Victor in light of its relevance to discernment and defeat of the “powers” behind corrupt governments and corporations, the millennials may find resonance with recapitulation and its connectedness and participation. 22 Recapitulation in the form of Adam Christology has become an important emphasis in New Testament studies through the scholarship of James Dunn, 23 N. T. Wright (whose work we will consider in some depth in the succeeding chapter), with an emphasis on corporate and international participation in the last Adam who is also the new Israel, 24 and Morna Hooker who especially has emphasized the restoration of the image of God in humanity through Christ, the last Adam, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). 25 Theosis, 26 or divinization or deification or “participation in the life of God” can be traced back to the anti-Nicene era, to Irenaeus, and to Athanasius, to whom is attributed the following statement that the Son of God became man “that he might deify us in himself.” 27 It was, however, most fully developed by the Cappadocians. Their theology of deification is thereafter found throughout the history of the church in a variety of traditions, 28 but most particularly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, 29 though it is also

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present in Western theology from Augustine onwards. 30 Various Lutheran, 31 Protestant, 32 and Evangelical 33 versions of a theology of participation have emerged in recent years, and continue to proliferate. These theologies continue to be clarified within ecumenical dialogue, and principally against the backdrop of the Eastern Orthodox version(s) of this doctrine, 34 which are the oldest and most well developed, albeit with a somewhat intentional lack of theological preciseness. 35 The central idea is of the church’s (and its persons) being in union with Christ, leading to justification and sanctification in this life, and ultimately to glorification (some reserve the meaning of deification only to that of glorification when the beatific vision is seen). Theologians in the Lutheran and Protestant traditions observe a clear distinction between justification and sanctification, whereas in the East and the Catholic West these are conflated. The link to recapitulation is quite obvious, in that union in Christ or participation with Christ is what enables the last Adam to be a corporate person, the collective Christ, the totus Christus, understood in differing ways among the traditions. We turn our attention to the work of Anselm, often associated with satisfaction theory, to discover surprisingly that his ideas of the atonement were more of a mosaic than monolithic. SATISFACTION AND RECAPITULATION/THEOSIS IN LIGHT OF ANSELM’S CUR DEUS HOMO TOWARD TOTAL ATONEMENT The elasticity and coinherence, or totality, of models of the atonement is illustrated in David Bentley Hart’s evaluation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. 36 He is certain that the transactional aspects of Anselm’s satisfaction theory are in fact best explained by Anselm’s implicit understanding of recapitulation, and with that, there is evidence also of a Christus Victor element in his theory. Hart’s bias against the juridical in the atonement shades his opinion of what is undoubtedly present in Anselm, if not in the “vulgar” ways in which some Western theologians have extrapolated it. Despite this, Hart engages in ecumenical rapprochement, overcoming the divide between East and West, which has been wide in respect of the atonement. Hart begins by making reference to caricatures of the Western narrative of soteriology offered by the Eastern Orthodox, which have sometimes reduced it to “the status of a simple transaction, enacted more or less entirely on the cross, and intended solely as an appeasement of the Father’s wrath against sin,” to the neglect of the “significance of the resurrection, or of the ontological dimension of salvation opened up in the incarnation, or of the superabundance of God’s mercy (which requires no tribute of blood to evoke it).” 37 The critique has been that the focus on penal substitution has caused

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the West to lose sight of who Christ is as the “conqueror of death and the devil,” ontologically speaking, the One “who joins us—in the Spirit—to the new creation he has established in himself in order to divinize us,” 38 filially speaking. Hart is keen to overcome the false impression that these imbalances came from Anselm himself. Anselm wrote shortly after the schism, and is sometimes thought of in the Eastern tradition as the source and epitome of the Western view, which had already drifted from “the high road of Patristic orthodoxy” 39 on the atonement. Hart begs to differ. Contra theologians in both the West (Aulén) and the East (Lossky), he finds a remarkable consonance of Anselm’s work with that of the Patristic theologians. Contrary to the opinions of Harnack and Ritschl, it is not so much a “catastrophic breach” from that of the Church Fathers, but a mere “change of accent.” 40 Recovering the “actual text” of Cur Deus Homo, Hart shows that atonement is not linear and crudely moral or forensic in Anselm, and that penitential practice as understood by Anselm does not itself remove guilt, but is accomplished alone in the “superabundant benefit of Christ’s sacrifice.” 41 As “redemption applied,” one might say, it is included in the “redemption accomplished” by Christ. As Hart expresses it, if grace includes the “penitential return of the sinner,” this is because “prayerful humility is the fitting form of a redeemed life,” or “a thoughtful piety that responds to (and is the result of) an unmerited and transforming grace.” 42 Anselm, in fact, expressed a connection between “the vocation of humankind to a prayerful and penitent life and the overcoming of the sinful human will in Christ’s human life of obedience to the Father.” 43 Hart, in fact, sees shades of recapitulation in Anselm’s dynamics of the atonement in that Christ (as the last Adam), offers to God the love “which humanity owes him” and “by bearing the weight of sin’s consequences” shows “the triumph of humility over pride,” and so “provides humanity with both a model of obedience.” 44 Hart goes on to say that the prayer of penitence “comes to participate in the satisfaction Christ has made on one’s behalf.” 45 In sum, Hart insists that despite the imperfections of Anselm’s work, especially its apparent dichotomy of justice and mercy, it was still an “important first step” in the development of the doctrine of the atonement. 46 But what exactly is Anselm’s model, as Hart sees it? Despite popular conception, as Harnack has noted, Anselm’s is not a theory of salvation through penal suffering. 47 He does indicate that it is guilt and not death which estranges creation from God. Anselm also does not espouse the idea of a ransom being paid to Satan, and in this respect he corrects this primitive concept sometimes present in the Church Fathers. In fact, Hart debunks many of the assumptions, especially Eastern theologians such as Lossky, who have articulated concerning Anselm: “the legalism of juridical categories, the ruthlessness of the God it depicts, the mechanical simplicity of its model of the atonement.” 48 This might be summed up by

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saying that Lossky sees in Anselm’s work a complete deficit in ontological content. He points his readers in the direction of Athanasius’s De Incarnatione Verbi Dei for a much more satisfying account of the atonement. This Athanasian account has much more “color” with a wider range of “soteriological models,” is much more “narrative” in its genre, and so avoids its devolution into a “single, definitive and exhaustively rational account of atonement.” 49 Hart offers a strong riposte of Lossky’s critique of Anselm. His assertions that Anselm focuses on juridical categories and says little in the ontological realm on the incarnation and resurrection, are acknowledged but answered by reference to authorial intent. Complexity, as in Athanasius, sometimes begs for simplification and focus. Hart suggests that Anselm “is already situated in the Christian theological tradition, he already knows that Christ has recapitulated human nature in himself and conquered evil on our behalf.” 50 So what is the motive behind Anselm’s simplification exercise with regard to the atonement? His “reduction of the tale,” as Hart refers to it, is according to his purpose to “grasp the inner necessity of its sacrificial logic.” 51 Anselm’s contemplation of the cross has in mind “the grave inner meaning (or inevitability) of God’s condescension.” 52 He has in mind to correct a patristic blindspot, its failure to show that the resurrection does not merely reverse, but vindicates Christ’s self-offering. As Hart suggests, “Easter is the triumph not of an indestructible other worldly savior, but of the entire notion of Christ’s sacrificial life of devotion to his Father; the overthrow of death and the devil is accomplished by the peaceful self-donation of one whose life fulfills entirely the vocation of humanity to offer itself in love to the God who gives all things in love.” 53 Furthermore, Hart believes the “critical concentration” in Anselm’s simplification methodology makes it understandable that he would emphasize the “tragic condition” that makes the cross the necessary way of reconciliation; that is, that his seeking to understand the dynamics of satisfaction would restrict his focus on the juridical elements of the cross. Hart defends his lack of explicit emphasis on the resurrection on this basis. Anselm actually thought of the cross in aneconomic terms, according to Hart. That is, he believed that the death of Christ purchases nothing, “whereas his obedience to the Father calls forth a blessing.” Thus, Anselm’s view of the atonement is “governed by the knowledge that the Father does not retain the price of Christ’s blood as a ransom (in the human sense of a tribute given in exchange for mercy) but rather raises Christ up freely, according to the non-retributive nature of his justice.” 54 In response to the absence of a clear ontological dimension in Anselm’s account, that is, “talk of change wrought in human nature that might balance out its the ‘forensic’ and ‘fiduciary grammar,’” Hart points out that Anselm’s context was always the “church’s pneumatological life,” and he finds this to

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be in accord with the ecclesial nexus of the transformation of human nature for all of the fathers. 55 Lossky’s greatest concerns about Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo lies in the area of theology proper, that is, its inferences concerning who God is. He finds distasteful the notion that God would take “infinite offence” at an insult to his honor, and then a “vindictive desire for a corresponding infinite restitution,” and the “need for a juridical recompense to appease his wrath.” 56 The God who “requires the violence of sacrifice to restore his order,” 57 in other words. In defense of Anselm, Hart clarifies that “honor” in Anselm’s context, though difficult to pin down, should certainly not be understood as grounded in some divine pride that prevents him from forgiving. 58 Furthermore, in the text of Cur Deus Homo itself, it is clear that God’s honor is inseparable from his goodness, which imparts life and harmony to creation, “the rejection of which is necessarily death.” 59 God’s honor is grounded in creation’s “beauty and order,” and in his justice, not his wrath. It is manifested in the justice of God’s government, “its righteousness and moral beauty.” 60 Hart also points out that very little mention is made of expiation or reparation, except in the sense of the reparation of a nature deprived of its original beauty and destiny. There is actually no suggestion in the Cur Deus Homo of God being appeased by the death of Christ viewed from a penal perspective. Rather, Christ’s sacrificial death is seen as an offering that ultimately “‘secures’ forgiveness by satisfying the demands of divine righteousness, on our behalf.” 61 Hart, contra Lossky, in fact finds many of the themes of Athanasius’s account in the Cur Deus Homo. He cites the following examples: the presence of the language of punishment but in subordination to the narrative of complete and unmerited forgiveness; the “language of law being used to describe the depths of an infinite mercy”; over against juridical transaction in a forensic type of reconciliation, atonement is depicted as an “assumption of solidarity with us by an infinitely merciful God in order to fulfil in us that beatitude intended in our creation.” 62 This entails satisfaction, not substitution. Hart concludes that the simplicity or clarity of Anselm’s thought actually masks an “essential paradoxicality” such that “God’s order is preserved through his own assumption of the conditions of estrangement; his mercy is imparted in the acceptance of Christ’s voluntary death; the highest law of God’s inviolable justice is boundless mercy; God’s sovereignty necessitates his condescension; the goodness that condemns the sinner requires that sin be forgiven.” 63 The crucial dynamic which Anselm sought after in God’s fulfillment of these paradoxical aims was emphatically not a “God divided against himself.” 64 Despite supposedly expounding a penal logic of the atonement, Anselm did not in fact see Christ’s sacrifice as an “economic gesture” intended to stabilize a distorted cosmos and a wrathful God. Rather the dynamic is acted

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within “the infinite motion of God’s love, in which justice and mercy are one and can never be divided one from the other.” 65 Indeed, says Hart, Anselm “has recognized Christ’s act as an infinite motion towards the Father, belonging to the mystery of the Trinity,” 66 and over against an economic or forensic transaction, Hart sees Christ’s work as belonging to “the Trinitarian notion of love,” which is “given entirely as gift,” a gift that “should not have needed to be given again, by God, and at a price that we, in our sin, imposed upon him.” The whole creation is thereby drawn “back into the eternal motion of divine love for which it was fashioned.” 67 Hart insists that the violence which Christ is the victim of “belongs to our order of justice, an order overcome by his sacrifice, which is one of peace.” 68 And the key dynamic Hart sees in Anselm’s theory of the atonement is that it is a sheer gift of a God who is always who he is, a God of “sheer ‘redundancy’ of the good that flows from the infinite gesture of his love” with a “generosity in excess of all calculable economy” and so undoes the logic of our own economy of justice. 69 All of this adds up, Hart opines, to the model of recapitulation, though not in the typological or aesthetic sense, and not therefore in accordance with the corresponding motifs shared between the narratives of the first and last Adams. Rather, his concern for recapitulation is the same as that of Irenaeus who speaks of the Christ who “takes up the human story and tells it correctly,” allowing humanity to be “resituated through his death within the retelling of their story,” so that they are through Christ restored to fellowship with “the God of infinite love who created them for his pleasure.” 70 Hart points out that for Anselm it was not Christ’s suffering that was redemptive, but rather it was his innocence. And the death of Christ for Anselm, as for Hart, “does not even effect a change in God’s attitude towards humanity; God’s attitude never alters: he desires the salvation of his creatures, and will not abandon them even to their own cruelties.” 71 Thus, at the heart of the atonement which Anselm expounds, and which Hart affirms, is the notion of “the primordiality of the gift” which is, in fact, “the truth of Christ’s paschal donation.” 72 It is the gift given in creation now given again, “ever more fully, in defiance of all rejection, disobedience, injustice, violence, and indifference”; and there is thus “no division between justice and mercy in God, on Anselm’s account, because both belong already to the giving of this gift.” 73 At its core, Anselm’s theory of the atonement, as Hart interprets it, has to do with the gift of obedience offered up by Christ as the vicarious human, indeed the representative human, which provides “satisfaction,” overcoming or atoning for the disobedience of the rest of humanity but not in forensic terms. The gift infinitely outweighs any guilt of humanity. This is not so much a penal payment for guilt accrued, but a gift which overcomes all debts owed on the part of humanity.

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Referring back to our biblical reflections, Hart’s “primordiality of the gift” concept seems to be in the spirit of the burnt offering and the cereal offering, a sweet savor to God offered by the obedient Christ in life and death, whose fragrance to God atones for all humanity represented in Christ. In the spirit of Hart’s own work on the atonement, 74 it is the beauty of the offering up of the person of Jesus Christ in obedience to the Father which is a beauty overcoming the ugliness and ravages of sin, and as such, a gift far more valuable than any moral debt incurred by human sin. Hart believes that in the person and work of Christ “totality’s economy of violence” is defeated by the “infinity of God’s peace,” such that the old order of sacrifice is overcome by another. Sacrifice is to be viewed no longer “as the immolation of the beautiful,” for it has been displaced in Christ and his one offering of “infinite beauty,” 75 a gift far exceeding any debt. 76 In his evaluation of Anselm and in his own work, however, Hart seems to neglect the sin and guilt aspects of justice in the atonement, that are inherent in the sin and trespass offerings. In his account he might protest that the whole old order has been displaced, and therefore this distinction is null and void. However, the function of the Old Testament sacrifices as type has to mean something in the antitypical fulfillment, and the New Testament speaks clearly of the offering of Jesus as a fragrance to the Father and as a sin offering (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 8:3, Heb. 1:3, 10:12, among others in Hebrews which convey a purging and sin-bearing dynamic). Hebrews 10:8 actually mentions both categories of offerings and then their fulfillment in the incarnational and crucifixion obedience of Jesus (9–14), with explicit reference to his “sacrifice for sins”: First he said, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them”—though they were offered in accordance with the law. Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. (Heb. 10:8–14)

The concept that God’s judgment against sin, and not just the gift offered by God to fulfill his promise to created beings, can be viewed as a beautiful expression of a God whose holy character holds together mercy with judgment in perfect harmony, seems not to appeal to Hart. Hart is very much attune to the dichotomizing of justice and mercy in the nature of God, and this is indeed a valid concern for Western atonement theologies of a penal

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kind, as if with his justice he judges and with his mercy he forgives. But is it possible that while still speaking of them as “undivided” one could still speak of them as “distinct” and held in tension within the one personal God. On a similar note, Hart shows a clear aversion to the notion of the wrath of God. On all of these issues, clarity of thought is required, but casting aside the notion of wrath and retributive justice is simply to cast aside the widespread and consistent witness of Holy Scriptures, even when properly interpreted on these matters. At the end of the day, whether it be Anselm, the Eastern tradition, the Western tradition, or the writings of the Church Fathers, for that matter, their witness must be as those who are norma normata (the normed norm), that is, their reflections must be considered under the final authority of and in constant iteration with the Holy Scriptures, the norma normans (the norming norm). How the Scriptures are to be interpreted is of course the issue beneath the issue, here. Suffice it to say that all three traditions recognize some role for the ecclesial community in interpretation, and that the best of scholarship within all three traditions recognize the importance of the plain sense of Scripture, and the legitimacy of the grammatical, historical, rhetorical hermeneutic, even if it is only, for some, a grounding for a more spiritual interpretation. There is no greater ecumenical force than the ongoing dynamic searching of the Scriptures, and in the matter of the atonement to exclude the forensic altogether, to bypass the wrath appeasing nature of the sacrifice of Christ, simply flies in the face of the witness of Holy Scripture. The epistle to the Romans is ample testimony to the wrath of God revealed against sinful, broken, and rebellious humanity (1:18–3:20), and of its resolution in the person of Jesus Christ for and on behalf of the world (3:21–28). To make recapitulation an important part of what transpires in the life and death of Jesus, as Hart does, is a legitimate move based on what Romans 5 unfolds. This does make atonement filial and ontological (it is in fact grounded in the stories of the first and last Adams, however). But to miss the dynamics of Romans 3 and make recapitulation the sum total of atonement, without a forensic component, as Hart seems to do, is to be guilty of selective reading. It is monochromatic rather than multicolored, total atonement. Participation, though not mentioned here by Hart, plays a crucial role in the gift or beauty dynamic (the sweet savor offering dynamic) as well as in the sin/ guilt judgment of the recapitulate Christ. It would be lovely to imagine an atonement with both elements. They cannot exist without each other. The offering up of the life of Jesus in death on a cross, yes, must surely be a gift beyond all calculation, infinitely pleasing to the triune Godhead. But the mystery cannot neglect the just and holy nature of God, and rather than reject the raw nature of sin and judgment one must embrace the fullness of the mystery. The offering up of the gift to the Father is an undeniable and worshipevoking dynamic of the atonement, and that its value accrues to us because

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the Son participated in our humanity and offered it on our behalf is a wonderevoking, joyful reality. But the other side is a reality also. He does bear our sin, according to the witness of the Old and New Testaments. He bears its judgment for us, within his own being as Judge and the Judged, so that recapitulation has some moral grounding. The justice and mercy do operate together in this fuller or total atonement. The agonies of the cross for Jesus as depicted in various genres and ways, in messianic Psalms (22, 69, 102), in prophetic oracles (Isa. 53, Lam. 1:12), in historic narrative (the Gospel accounts of Gethsemane and Golgotha, including the cry of dereliction), and in epistolary exposition (Heb. 5:7–10, the purgation of a sinful human nature through obedience; 10:1–18, the offering of a sin offering, for example as in verse 12: “But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God”), cannot be explained on the basis of the gift or sweet savor dynamic alone. They require a depth of suffering that can only be explained by the words of the hymn-writer: “what it meant to Thee the Holy One, to bear away my sin” (K. A. M. Kelly [1869–1942]). In sum, Hart has sought to rescue Anselm from the “coarser characterizations of his critics,” and to demonstrate the fidelity of the Western tradition as sourced in Anselm to the “ancient sources.” But does Hart succeed in his attempts at rapprochement between East and West? One might say that he succeeds at convincing the Eastern theologian that Anselm did not actually reflect the caricatured concerns of Western atonement theology; that is, juridical obsession, neglect of the filial and ontological, neglect of the vicarious nature of the incarnation and life of Jesus and his resurrection, failure to be Trinitarian, justification to the neglect of divinization, and so on. He has also perhaps convinced the East (and the West, for that matter) that Anselm was by and large in line with the patristic tradition in his implicit commitment to recapitulation and Christus Victor (sans payment to the devil). He is less convincing for the Western and specifically Reformational theologian, in that Hart is largely dismissive of the forensic in Anselm’s account. At best, he points to recapitulation as a speculative undergirding of the juridical aspects of Anselm’s thought. A more satisfactory and ecumenical way to include both the forensic and the filial, with the forensic grounded in the filial, is found in the Eastern Orthodox theologian Khaled Anatolios, which we have considered in chapter 1. 77 NOTES 1. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 3. 2. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 4. Pugh cites Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1920), 34–35 in this regard. 3. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 4. 4. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 4.

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5. Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (London: MacMillan, 1919), 245. 6. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 4–5. Pugh notes that R. S. Franks, A History of the Work of Christ in its Ecclesial Development, 2 vols. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1962) 1, 15, has indicated that it was the Marcionite Gnostics who first used 1 Cor. 2:8 (“None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”) as a NT precedent for the devil being misled by the devil, and that this passage made its way into patristic writings in support of the idea that God deceived the devil. It was common to all forms of Gnosticism that Christ only seemed to be crucified. 7. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 5. 8. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 5. 9. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 7. 10. However, Justin Martyr first used the concept. Irenaeus quotes Justin in Against Heresies, IV, 6.1. 11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 1. 12. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 26. 13. R. S. Franks, The Atonement, 80–81. 14. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 18.7. 15. H. D. McDonald, The Atonement of the Death of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985) 129. 16. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 29.1. 17. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 1. 18. Thomas Smail, Once and For All: A Confession of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1998), 111. 19. Thomas Smail, Once and for All, 111. 20. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 29. 21. Thomas Smail, Once and for All, 111. 22. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 26. 23. James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM, 1982), 14–15. 24. N. T. Wright, “Adam in Pauline Christology,” SBL Seminar Papers (1983), 359–389; “Jesus and the Identity of God,” Ex Auditu 14 (1998), 42–56. 25. Morna Hooker, From Adam to Christ: Essays on Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)/(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008) and Not Ashamed of the Gospel: New Testament Interpretations of the Death of the Death of Christ (UK: paternoster, 1994). 26. This section draws on material from my book, Jonathan Edwards and the Life of God: Towards an Evangelical Theology of Participation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). 27. Athanasius, Letter 60, to Adelphius, 4. Cf. paragraphs 3, 8 (NPNF, 2d series 4, 575–578). 28. See Stephan Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, eds. Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006); and Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung, eds. Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). These two volumes explore participation in both Eastern and Western thinkers, including Augustine, Anselm, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Karl Rahner. 29. Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 120. 30. As Bonner has noted (“Augustine’s Conception of Deification.” Journal of Theological Studies 37 [October 1986], 369–386), the belief that Augustine embraced the doctrine of theosis and that his view of justification and sanctification was conditioned by it, has not been noticed or widely accepted by Protestant scholars who have interpreted Augustine in his antiPelagian writings with lenses focused on issues of depravity and forensic justification. Edwards, like Augustine, crosses the traditional lines of the divide between the Greek East and the Latin West with respect to justification and deification, as this is reflected by authors such as V. Lossky (“Redemption and Deification” in In The Image and Likeness of God, [London & Oxford: 1975], 71–110; The Vision of God, [London, 1963], 9–20), Jouko Martikainen,

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(“Man’s Salvation: Deification or Justification?” in Sobornost, series 7, no. 3 [1976], 189), and Christos Yannaras, “Orthodoxy and the West” in Eastern Churches Review, iii, n.3 (1971), 286–300. 31. See the sizeable bibliography on Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue recorded in R. Saarinen, Faith and Holiness: Lutheran—Orthodox Dialogue 1959–1994 (Kirche und Konfession 40), (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) and from 1994 on, in the following website http:// www.helsinki.fi/~risaarin/lutortbibl.html. See also John Meyendorff, John and Robert Tobias, eds. and intro., Salvation in Christ: A Lutheran—Orthodox Dialogue (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992) and Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). 32. See T. F. Torrance ed., Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1985). See also, Thomas Hopko, “Lutheran-Reformed-Orthodox Theological Conversation in North America,” in Nils Ehrenström, Orthodox Church and Churches of the Reformation: A Survey of Orthodox-Protestant Dialogues (Faith and Order Commission, World Council of Churches, 1975). 33. Robert V. Rakestraw, “Becoming Like God: An Evangelical Doctrine of Theosis,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 40 (June 1997), 257. 34. See for example, the following: Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue: The Moscow Statement Agreed by the Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission, 1976: With Introductory and Supporting Material, ed. Kallistos Ware and Colin Davey (London: SPCK, 1977); John Meyendorff and Joseph C. McLelland, The New Man: An Orthodox and Reformed Dialogue (New Brunswick, NJ: Agora Books, 1973); T. F. Torrance, ed. Theological Dialogue between Orthodox and Reformed Churches, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985); Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000) which is the product of dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation (influenced by the Finnish interpretation of Luther) and the Catholic Church; Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdamns, 1998). For further references on Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue on theosis, see Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), (hereafter ‘Neder 2009a’), endnote 32, p. 120. 35. Michael McClymond’s work on the comparison of Gregory Palamas with Jonathan Edwards makes this point. See McClymond, 2003a, 139–160. The Orthodox critique of Western theology that it is overly rationalistic and cognitive, and that it does not value silence and the experiencing of the mystery enough is well taken! However, this should not lead Westerners to doubt the intellectual acumen of the Orthodox tradition which is considerable, obviously. On intellectual theological pursuit, Palamas was that he distinguished helpfully between God as inaccessible and God as inexhaustible. Though I am not sure I can go as far as McClymond does in suggesting that both Palamas and Edwards “concur in accepting religious experience as a starting point or basis for theological reflection” (153), I do think that both included it in their theologizing—as McClymond says, they were both “personally engaged with divinization as a practice rather than simply as a theory” (153). Both, it seems to me, knew of a knowledge that is known through more than mere intellect. 36. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?,” Pro Ecclesia VII, No. 3 (1998), 333–349. 37. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 334. 38. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 334. 39. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 335. 40. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 335. 41. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 340. 42. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 340. 43. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 341. 44. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 341. 45. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 341. 46. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 337–338. 47. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 338. 48. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 340.

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49. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 340. 50. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 344. 51. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 344. 52. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 344. 53. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 344–345. 54. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 345. 55. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 345. 56. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 345. 57. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 345. 58. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 345. 59. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 346. 60. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 346. 61. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 346. 62. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 347. 63. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 347. 64. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 347. 65. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 347. 66. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 347–348. 67. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 348. 68. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 348. 69. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 348–349. 70. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 348. 71. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 348. 72. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 349. 73. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 349. 74. D. Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite : The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004). 75. D. Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 344. 76. D. Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 360–372. 77. Khaled Anatolios, “Creation and Salvation in St. Athanasius of Alexandria.” In Matthew Baker, Seraphim Danckaert, and Nicholas Marinides, eds. On The Tree of the Cross: Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Doctrine of Atonement (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2016), 59–72.

Chapter Ten

Historico-Theological Models Christus Victor

The Lutheran Gustaf Aulén (1879–1977) has, through his best known work Christus Victor, 1 provided the impetus for a resurgence of this so called “classic” view of the atonement in contemporary theology (N. T. Wright, Greg Boyd, Hans Boersma). The motif at the heart of this “model” is that of victory: the advent of Jesus Christ as that which has conquered sin and Satan and death. This motif is certainly present in Scriptural revelation, both by way of anticipation in the Old Testament (Psalms 24, 68, for example) and in actuality in the New. Most notably, Jesus speaks of his death as that which would defeat Satan, for example, in John 12:31–33. In a context in which he teaches Greek people that if they wanted to “see Jesus,” they needed to see him in light of his death, Jesus gives a profound teaching on the meaning of his death. It would bring a portrayal of glory to the Father, and it would produce fruit, a fecundity of redeemed people in a new human community. He would be the touchstone of humanity. But instrumental toward both outcomes was his perpetration of Satan’s defeat, paradoxically by his death: “‘Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” The most notable references in the epistles are Colossians 1 and Hebrews 2. In Colossians 1:13–15, Paul beautifully combines three motifs of the atonement. In verse 13 he speaks of what might be termed recapitulation leading to theosis: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ.” In verses 13b–14, however, he moves from the filial to the forensic, and uses the legal meta193

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phor associated with penal substitution: “He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. But this somehow also involves a defeat of the powers, over which he triumphed, not just by the resurrection, but by the cross.” In verse 15, Paul states, “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” The filial is the grounding for the forensic and through both the ontological change and the forensic justification which the cross accomplished, the accusations and malevolence of the devil and his demonic forces are robbed of their traction and their sting. A kaleidoscope of motifs is also present in Hebrews 2 which contains the other great text of the Christus Victor motif (Hebrews 2:5–18). There is a strand of recapitulation and theosis that is the foundation again for the juridical. The author speaks of Jesus and redeemed humanity as being “of the same family,” and of his participation in humanity that enables our participation in his: “He too shared in their humanity.” There is an ontological dimension to his atonement for he tastes death for every human that every human might live, one assumes. There is an ontological dimension also that relates to what happens within the humanity of Christ: it was “fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered” (v. 10). When his atoning work is finished, he is able to say, “here I am and the children God has given me” (v. 13). But one purpose of his participation in humanity that enables our participation in his is stated clearly . . . “so that by his death he might break the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” This is the Christus Victor element. However, in the same context, the author speaks of a “merciful and faithful high priest” who is qualified to “make atonement for the sins of the people.” Atonement in a strict Hebrews sense is very much expressed in language that is sacrificial and substitutionary. One simply must acknowledge the Christus Victor motif, but one also cannot separate it from that which has to do with sin and not just Satan. One cannot separate the forensic from the filial, nor deny each. Gustaf Aulén’s emphasis on the victory motif is biblically unsurprising in one sense. The doctrine is present in key texts of the New Testament, as well as in the narrative trajectory of the whole of divine revelation. What is surprising, given even a cursory survey of its presence among other motifs in these biblical texts, is that Aulén made it the primary and even sole model of the atonement. Aulén’s not so subtle distinction between “Latin theories” of the atonement in which the filial is absent, and what he calls the “classic theory” (Christus Victor) rings a few theological bells. Whether it is in Trinitarian doctrine 2 or in theology of the atonement, a certain cloud of hubris is

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discernible in the use of this term. For Aulén, Anselm’s satisfaction theory was the “chief example” and source of the Latin theories, “serving . . . as the exemplar of everything decadent and legalistic in mediaeval Catholic theology.” 3 Hart has challenged Aulén’s assessment profoundly, not the least for his ironic trusting of liberal Protestant scholarship for this opinion of Anselm. As Hart has shown, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is not a “radical break from Patristic thought,” and nor is it a “narrative of salvation that makes Christ’s humanity be the sole agency of atonement” that “stands at odds with the Pauline, patristic and (genuine) Lutheran view of Christ’s saving work as a unified divine campaign against sin, death, wrath, and the devil.” 4 Aulén’s further concerns that Anselm places justice in opposition to mercy and that his whole discourse is “a monstrous exaggeration of penitential discourse.” 5 Anselm and his Cur Deus Homo must be left behind if the church is to rediscover the true meaning of the atonement, is Aulén’s opinion. And what is that “classic” meaning? It is, in short, the Christus Victor motif, which Hart describes as that in which “redemption is a single continuous divine action, God’s descent into the deepest abyss of human estrangement in order to vanquish death, worldly powers, sin, and condemnation, and to raise humanity up to everlasting life.” 6 For Aulén, the notion of sacrifice is downplayed in the “classic” or conquest view of the atonement. Rather than being a ransom paid to the devil (a view which Anselm himself had ironically already corrected), he describes it after the fashion of “Gregory the Theologian” (Gregory of Nazianzus) as a sacrifice which the Father receives from the Son in a way that affects the persons of the redeemed, sanctifying them (theosis, in other words), rather than affecting their just standing before God in a forensic manner. Divine justice operates in Aulén’s model as requiring that “Christ alone should overcome the tyrants that hold humanity captive.” 7 In this way, on the one hand, the dualism inherent in the ransom from Satan view is averted, and on the other hand, Christ’s sacrifice becomes “an internal relation” of the one divine will, rather than being “an extrinsic exchange of expiatory death and forensic merit.” 8 The complete absence of forensic or imputation language in Aulén aside, he does demonstrate the inclusion of participation and of theosis in his account, and thus, while strongly recommending one view he holds to be the “classic,” view, the Christus Victor, he cannot escape something of a collage of models. The critiques of Aulén’s model have been around four primary themes: his focus is too much on the mythology of the past, and too little on the ongoing life of victory appropriated in the Christian life; his tone and content is too triumphalistic, failing as it does to take into account “the human and even tragic elements of the story,” that is, it fails to “acknowledge tragedy and suffering both in the gospel narrative itself and in human life generally”; his “neglect of the human dimension in the atonement”; 9 and my own cri-

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tique that it completely neglects the forensic element in atonement, which flies in the face of the content of the New Testament. More broadly, Boersma notices his refusal to appreciate “the contributions made by the other models of the atonement.” 10 The resurgence of the Christus Victor model in theology up to the present time is sometimes attributed to the decline of Enlightenment rationalism, and with that a renewed belief in the supernatural evil power at work in the world, which gives credibility to the idea of atonement as “a cosmic victory over such powers, however incomplete the mopping up operation.” 11 We will trace the development of the doctrine from Aulén onwards, with brief comment on all but the most sophisticated form of it in N. T. Wright. Wright’s version will also illustrate the benefits of a mosaic rather than monolithic approach. A survey of Christus Victor reappropriations would be incomplete without a mention of Rene Girard’s influential theory of mimetic violence, which does employ some elements of Christus Victor. Our aims are not well served by a detailed consideration of the many “helpful aspects” of this deep and complex atonement theology of the scapegoat. Some of the most “serious drawbacks” to his theory are described by Hans Boersma who states that he “attempts to dissociate God from all involvement in the cross by arguing that the violence of the mob turned Jesus into a scapegoat.” 12 Given that “the New Testament witness reveals the scapegoat mechanism, however,” Boersma concludes that “the cross becomes the revelation that lifts the ignorance surrounding the process of mimetic violence.” 13 An element of Christus Victor is evident in Girard when “he insists that it is when human beings become aware of the mimetic violence of the single-victim mechanism that redemption is accomplished.” 14 In response, Boersma writes that “Unfortunately, Girard’s explanation of the scapegoat mechanism implies that violence lies at the root of all human culture, which implies an ‘ontology of violence’ (John Milbank) and makes it difficult for Girard to present the building blocks of a politics of hospitality.” 15 Paul Tillich’s version of Christus Victor is a version which has sought to recontextualize the model within a postmodern context, one which has influenced the emerging church’s adoption of the model. He shows keen awareness that the patristic version of the doctrine, which he does not particularly affirm (in fact he speaks of Origen’s version as “almost a comedy”), 16 originated largely because of prevalent fear of demonic powers in the early church. The “Word of Faith” Christus Victor has been documented by Ben Pugh and William Atkinson 17 and most notably involves a decisive blow to Satan’s dominion, releasing humanity from Satan’s authority which it had come under at the Fall. This view sometimes entails “a highly dramatic showdown between Jesus and the devil in hell,” in some opinions at least, involving the heretical “Jesus Died Spiritually” (JDS) doctrine, and a crass form of substi-

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tutionary atonement that involves Christ taking on a satanic nature on the cross. The resemblance to Gnostic influences in the patristic version of the “ransom to Satan” model are clear. However, as Atkinson has pointed out the dissimilarities which are that the notion of ransom is never mentioned, or anything by way of payment to the devil, and the location of victory is in hell rather than on the cross. It is a version of Christus Victor though not one easily embraced within historic orthodoxy. Feminist theology’s Christus Victor has been expressed in the work of Darby Kathleen Ray, its strongest advocate. In common with Denny Weaver she is a sharp critic of Anselmian and Abelardian models of the atonement, because neither of these models helps us in seeing and confronting the power of evil in the lives of women, men, and children. She maintains that under the “guise of neutrality and universality” the Christian church has supported abuse and oppression and violence especially in Third World countries. Christ as the “Conquering One” has been “emulated by those in positions of power” as the One who “sanctions their power,” on the one hand, and on the other, “Christ as the Conquered One,” the one “falsely accused, brutally beaten, and tortured in death” is the One with whom the poor and marginalized can identify; the One “who sanctions their powerlessness.” She concludes that together, “these two sides of the same Christological coin feed the violence of the few and the passivity of the many.” 18 The attraction of the Christus Victor model, then, to Ray is based on the notion of nonviolent resistance of evil. She reappropriates the patristic versions of “ransom to Satan” atonement with special emphasis on the work of Irenaeus. God, despite being almighty, “chooses, Narnia-style, to enter into negotiations with the enemy and set humankind free from the power of evil by observing the rights ceded to it by human sin.” 19 The evolving developments in ransom theory in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, which include images like Christ as the bait “concealing the hook of divinity that catches the satanic fish” 20 are all reappropriated by Ray. She sees them all as “metaphorical attempts to express the conviction that the powers of evil were defeated at the moment of their apparent victory, and that, paradoxically, Christ was triumphant at the moment of his defeat on the cross.” 21 The reappropriation mechanism for Ray is the demythologizing and broadening of the concept of ransom paid to the devil to that of a ransom paid to evil. 22 She is in this regard influenced by the work of Paul Fiddes’s, Past Event and Present Salvation. In seeking an honest answer as to how we can claim comprehensive victory has been won through the death and resurrection of Jesus when so much evil still prevails, or even that a “turning point in the war” (Aulén) had at least been achieved, Fiddes identifies the three tyrants outlines in the Pauline epistles as having been conquered from God’s point of view: sin, the law, and death. This, as Pugh suggests, was a move from an emphasis on “victory over demons” to “victory over less mythologi-

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cal and more specific evils.” This is appealing to the feminist theological instincts. In response to the taunt that this move is really just a “fictitious victory” with no traction for Christian living, she appeals to a volitional element. 23 Failure to resist evil is giving evil permission to reign, and in the application of this to women, this is a “failure to assert oneself,” a sin she considers just as serious as the “masculine” sin of pride or avaricious use of power, that “traditional depictions of the cross are intended to address.” 24 Ray is concerned that depersonalization of evil as in removal of the “myth” of a literal devil, easily leads to a re-personification of evil through these male and female sins. On the female side, feminist theologians are concerned that all talk of Christ being a sacrificial victim “leaves women anchored in their victim status which is justified and romanticized as identification with the Savior.” 25 Ray would have in common with Walter Wink the view that the acts of violence perpetrated against Jesus on the cross exposed “the towering wrongness of the whole way of living that their violence defended.” 26 And she would no doubt also share Weaver’s sentiments that since Jesus in his nonviolence “is an active participant in confronting evil,” 27 this removes the “problematic” sacrificial image of Jesus as victim. While in complete harmony with the sentiment that women should definitely not be “anchored in their victim status,” and in sympathy with the notions of Christ’s victory in and through active nonresistance and apparent defeat, it is difficult to understand how this can actually subvert any idea of sacrifice in light of the Old Testament backdrop to the cross, and then the exposition of its meaning in the New Testament. I find myself puzzled also about how Ray’s model accomplishes what she herself conceives of as the evil-conquering dynamic of the cross. The cross does expose and condemn the abuse and immoral violence of humanity to be sure. But if a primary message of the cross was that it was intended to specifically condemn abuses of power and the passivity of the poor, the Scriptures are all but silent on this. Not that the Scriptures are silent on abuses of power and concern for the liberation of the poor, but this is not a primary connection the biblical authors make with the cross specifically. The cross is surely, on Ray’s own account, the voluntary relinquishing of power by the man who is fully God. Indeed, it conveys the kenosis of God himself, willingly, in full awareness of who he is (John 13:1–7). The moral influence of the cross for both women and men is surely the model of a Savior of the basin and the towel, and of the cross, who in full possession of his identity can serve sacrificially and die with wholeness and being and love intact. This retrieval of the “ransom from Satan” model runs the risk of becoming revisionism. 28 The Nonviolent Atonement theory developed by Walter Wink and J. Denny Weaver represent another version of Christus Victor. One major contribution to this conversation made by Wink principally through his book, Engaging the Powers, 29 was to develop further Aulén’s use of the language of the

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“powers,” building on advances in New Testament scholarship on demonology. The Historic Peace Churches in America developed a robust literature on nonviolence built around a combination of Christus Victor atonement theology and Wink’s view of satanic evil as systemic or structural, that is, “rooted in human systems” such as “oppressive governments, multinational corporations, some form of popular culture.” 30 Christus Victor has a particular appeal for Peace Church scholars because it predates the Constantinian era, an era considered to have been disastrous for the church by this school (the reality that penal elements are also present in the fathers pre-Constantine notwithstanding). The cross for Wink and this tradition is the ultimate paradigm of nonviolence, and the accomplishment of salvation and the kingdom of God through the nonviolence of Jesus. The cross has the effect of the “unmasking of systemic violence” which proliferates all over the world, “resensitizing humanity to its own propensities towards this kind of evil,” 31 just like attempts to destroy a dandelion head by blowing on it. 32 This enables the gospel of the cross to be put together with the gospel of the kingdom: “The reign of God means the complete and definitive elimination of every form of violence between individuals and nations.” 33 J. Denny Weaver, from the Mennonite tradition, and representing Anabaptist churchmanship, expresses a similar theology of atonement and ethics with a particular emphasis on “narrative Christus Victor,” that is the Christus Victor as it has been in evidence in God’s story throughout history. The book of Revelation is important to Weaver’s commitment, for in it one sees the “historical framework of emperors and the construct of church confronting empire.” 34 The Gospels are, in turn, regarded as supporting this “universal and cosmic story of the confrontation of reign of God and rule of Satan.” 35 The death and resurrection of Jesus “reveal the basis of power in the universe, so that the invitation from God to participate in God’s rule . . . overcomes the forces of sin and reconciles sinners to God.” 36 The principalities and powers spoken of by Paul are understood not as the devil, or literal demons, but as with Wink, they are human institutions, organizations, and cultures. Christ’s nonviolent resistance toward these powers in his day led to his death. This brings good news to the victims of abuse, and here Denny is concerned particularly for the racially victimized and the concerns of victimized women. He states that with Jesus’s confrontation of “the rule of evil . . . there is no longer the difference of a problematic image for victims of abuse. Jesus depicted in narrative Christus Victor is no passive victim. He is an active participant in confronting evil.” 37 This of course sets off a debate which is crucial in atonement theology— that concerning the legitimacy of violence and wrath in God. Hans Boersma, for example, has engaged robustly with the assumptions of the so-called nonviolent approach of Wink and Weaver to make a case for limited violence within the hospitality of God toward humanity as epitomized at the cross. He

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makes two comments in critique of the nonviolent approach. The first is the inconsistency within the argument of these authors by which they limit active resistance to nonphysical methods, while “condoning physical interference in other cases (such as stopping a child from crossing the street).” 38 Boersma adds another case where violence might be a good, that of stopping someone from committing suicide. The physical harm in such an instance may well be justifiable, he argues. It is therefore not nonviolent. The second argument Boersma undertakes to expose the fallacy that social structures that impose poverty are violent, whereas economic boycotts and strikes can be acceptable nonviolent acts of resistance. Boersma suggests that they both cause harm, but we “find the harm acceptable under certain circumstances.” 39 Having challenged the viability of total nonviolence and having justified a qualified violence, Boersma states his conclusions: Not all violence is justified. Marjorie makes a similar point when she argues that violence is sinful whenever it is unnecessary. Violence may be unavoidable and even morally required under certain circumstances. But is should be avoided and countered as much as possible. . . . Justified violence, in an Augustinian paradigm, can be an act of love. What this means is that the practice of hospitality does not exclude all violence. Now we see that a significant theological tradition argues that the use of this violence is not always wrong. If hospitality is to be practised, doing so requires a certain degree of violence. 40

This hospitality “in this more fragile and limited sense” provides a window of understanding of God’s wrath or “violence” in his extending of hospitality to the world in the person of Jesus Christ and his cross. If wrath is seen as something in opposition to God’s love, this creates the idea of an “arbitrary or even schizophrenic God in whom good and evil have positions of equal significance.” If such were true, “God’s hospitality and faithfulness would be compromised because of his anger and wrath.” 41 Such fears of a dualistic God should not, however, cause us to ignore the biblical expressions of God’s wrath which are many and graphic. Hiding behind the possibility that the expression of God’s wrath is “just a metaphor,” or to say that “we attribute ‘anger’ to God because we have no language other than human language with which to comprehend God,” a solution offered by Joel Green and Mark Baker, 42 simply will not do. As we have stressed before from the work of Colin Gunton, metaphors are not just metaphors. They convey reality in the only way in which we are capable of grasping it. Boersma stresses this point: But isn’t all language about God metaphorical? Can we speak about God at all without using metaphorical language? . . . The various models of the atonement all base themselves on these metaphors. The biblical use of metaphors to describe the meaning of the cross does not somehow make them less valuable or less real. They are not just metaphors. 43

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Thus, having cut off an escape through metaphor, Boersma speaks of a justified violence as crucial to the hospitality of God. This theme of the place of violence in the hospitality of God is similar to that of the place of wrath in the love of God. Tony Lane’s essay “The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God” 44 addresses this issue well. These considerations, necessary to express as an orrective of nonviolent theology, will be expanded upon when we look at the place of penal substitution in the following chapter. Emerging Christus Victor is a category introduced by Ben Pugh 45 to describe the work of people like Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, 46 and Greg Boyd, who, since the 1990’s have somewhat uncritically adopted postmodernism in their sometimes valid critique of the “modern” church and its theology. With respect to deconstructing atonement theology in particular, Pugh speaks of “a commitment to embrace all ways of looking at the atonement,” which is the “kaleidoscopic view.” 47 Pugh’s view that the kaleidoscopic view is a product of postmodern deconstruction seems questionable at best. This view is legitimate given, as we have shown, it is supported by the plethora of biblical motifs. The only question is whether one particular theory or model or motif is dominant over the others and shapes them. I am contending that representative or participatory substitution is the key to all the others. This model seems the most under-valued and under siege within the postmodern era. This group of theologians, rather than being classified by an encouragement of a kaleidoscopic total picture, is best described as being Christus Victor theologians who elevate that model above the others and who have differing views on any legitimacy for a sacrificial and substitutionary view. Rob Bell, in his brief account of atonement, certainly expresses the importance of metaphor (as not just metaphor). He promotes a kaleidoscopic approach, seeming to accept the sacrificial and substitutionary model among many, while at the same time downplaying their significance in contemporary culture, and he also hints at Christus Victor as the primary model. This may be seen in the following very evocative passages of Love Wins: So back to the question: What happened on the cross? Is the cross about the end of the sacrificial system or a broken relationship that’s reconciled or a guilty defendant whose been set free or a battle that’s been won or the redeeming of something that was lost? Which is it? Which perspective is the right one? Which metaphor is correct? Which explanation is true? The answer of course, is yes. 48

Why so many different explanations of the cross, Bell asks? In helping to explain the “massive and universe-changing” nature of the cross event, the first Christians needed multiple similes and metaphors. Bells states,

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The kaleidoscopic viewpoint seems clear. And then, the hint that the Christus Victor is the jewel of the crown is evident: “For a thousand years or so of church history, the metaphor of victory in battle, Jesus conquering death, was the central, dominant understanding of the cross.” 50 There are also subtle ways in which the sacrificial aspect of the cross is downplayed as being culturally passé. Since we don’t think in sacrificial categories in this day and age, therefore songs and speech about the efficacy of the blood must be of limited cultural value for us. It is the hegemony of present day culture in Bell’s theology which, more so than a kaleidoscopic viewpoint or even the prevalence of the Christus Victor viewpoint, gives pause for thought. Greg Boyd has been the most constructive and detailed voice for the Christus Victor school of thought, and in his case, he has expressed the view that the deep and unified reality that undergirds all the motifs is not decidedly not that of substitution, but Christus Victor. This is grounded for Boyd in “the fundamentally cosmic and demonological context in which salvation in both Testaments is understood.” 51 Elements of the ransom model are clearly evident in Boyd’s work. For example, he states that the “truth embodied in the most ancient ways of thinking about the atonement was that God did, in a sense, deceive Satan and the powers, and that Jesus was, in a sense, bait.” 52 Boyd’s version of Christus Victor is nuanced and seeks to overcome its “notorious crudity.” 53 He does so in a way that still echoes the Gnostic overtones of the patristic version, in that it appeals to the fact that though the demons knew who Jesus was, they were “seemingly not aware (as in 1 Cor. 2:8) of why he came since their evil blinded them to the sacrificial love that has sent the Son into their realm.” Pugh further comments that the Christus Victor as retrieved constructively by these authors may have appeal to a “new generation of churchgoers who are conscious as never before of pernicious global evils to which more individualistic versions of the gospel message seem to have few answers.” 54 It is not that the Christus Victor model, based in a biblical redemption and victory motif, does not have significance, even great significance. The only questions we raise is whether it can rise to the task of the chief motif of Holy Scripture, and whether it can actually function without the sacrificial and substitutionary motif. The final proponent of Christus Victor we consider is

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its most able expositor, who does not negate the substitutionary motif, but clearly sees it as subservient to the victory mechanism of atonement. N. T. WRIGHT, A MOSAIC CHRISTUS VICTOR A much more recent and sophisticated edition of this view, which is more inclusive of other models has been expressed in the work of N. T. Wright, most explicitly in his The Day the Revolution Began. 55 It is inclusive in that it does not altogether deny the forensic dimension of the saving work of Christ. It rather seeks to say that forensic justification is not all that happens in his atoning work, thereby appropriately correcting crassly individualistic (Jesus paying the price for my sins), Platonized (going to heaven when we die), paganized (the angry Father punishing the Son as if they were two individuals), and moralized (sin is merely violation of a moral code instead of a fundamental idolatry by which humans entrusted with stewardship of the earth have given it away to the powers) evangelical caricatures of Paul’s exposition of propitiation and justification. In the realm of academic scholarship on the atonement, as opposed to popular evangelicalism, to say that imputation and forensic justification is not all that happens seems strange, in the sense that the tide has so turned that one can scarcely find a place for it. It certainly, in its caricatured version, is not the nub of the atonement even for Wright, for a gospel that is reduced to “Jesus bore God’s wrath in your place so you could go to heaven when you die” abstracted from the history of humanity in Adam, and from the history of Israel, is not the gospel that fits the narrative of the Holy Scriptures. It is based on an individualistic and moralistic “works-contract” understanding of the dealing of God with humanity, rather than one based on a “covenant of vocation.” As Michael Horton has aptly expressed it, Wright “exposes the wider redemptive-historical canvas that challenges tendencies to domesticate the gospel to a platonized eschatology focused on the salvation of the individual believer from this world rather than the redemption of all believers with this world.” 56 What is that wider perspective? First, it concerns God’s covenant of vocation with Adam and Eve, a relationship God established with Adam and Eve which involved commission to rule by subduing and stewarding the earth as God’s regent, or royal official. Thus when Adam and Eve sinned, this was more than a personal, legal issue. Second, therefore, the apparent sin involved in the Fall of humanity was in fact a symptom of something much deeper, that of the sin of idolatry. That is, their rebellion was a turning from the worship of the one true God, and a surrendering of the authority God had given them to idols, that is, the principalities and powers of darkness. As the biblical story unfolds, the covenant of vocation was resumed with the calling of Abram, with

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a worldwide family in view through his seed. Israel was seen as the new Adam through whom God would save the world. Despite the fact that the nation failed again and again in its vocation, just like Adam had done, God was faithful to his end of the covenant even in the exile, during which Israel was promised God’s presence and the rebuilding of the ruins of Jerusalem by God himself. When Jesus comes, he is both the God who fulfills the covenant and also the true Israel in and through whom he does it. Third, since the root and most telling nature of the fallen human condition is idolatry, it is that which is at the heart of what the cross of Jesus Christ rectified. Christ’s life and death was first and foremost to be viewed as victory over the evil powers, which is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins (viewed as a means to the larger end of defeating Satan), which the cross effects. Thus, what is restored by God through the atonement of Jesus Christ is first and foremost our human vocation to be prophets, priests, and kings, in the here and now. In answer to the question as to what the first Christians had in mind when they spoke of Jesus as the One who “died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3), Wright’s answer would be: “A revolution had been launched.” Fourth, Wright’s view of the atoning person and work of Jesus concerns what salvation has as its ultimate aims, the recovery of life in the covenant of vocation now, fulfilling the cultural mandate, and upon death, the primary hope not of disembodied life in heaven, but of resurrection of the body, eternal life in heaven-come-to-earth, as well as peace in the intermediate state of the believer between death and resurrection. 57 Most of these themes I heartily endorse, and I am grateful that Wright has brought to the attention of the contemporary church its enculturations and skewed notions of the Christian gospel. Most commendably, Wright is inclusive of forensic aspects of the atonement, even if they are to be considered penultimate and a means to a victorious end. One can endorse the root of all sin as idolatry, or transgression of the higher table of the Decalogue, though as Horton points out, this is already a theme in the key figures in the Reformation. If it is the root then the remedy must address it. But here is the challenge: idolatry is still sin, even if engaging in it gives power to the principalities and powers. Gaining victory over these powers is important but surely the just manner in which God grants both forgiveness and release from Satanic powers is as crucial to their defeat as the defeat itself ? It may be true as Horton magnanimously acknowledges that in their defense of penal substitution, “evangelicals have sometimes exaggerated the penal aspect and reduced Christ’s work to vicarious substitution alone.” 58 But surely in the theological academy, the problem is the other way around. There one finds precious little defense of penal substitution perhaps through an enculturation of theologians arising in liberal scholarship, despite the wide-ranging witness of Holy Scripture. One can also completely endorse the covenantal dynamic

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Wright retrieves and bemoan the prevalent individualism and the contract nature of the popular gospel, a theme James Torrance 59 highlighted well before Tom Wright. However, always when the pendulum swings in theology, one wonders if it may swing too far. By that I mean, while affirming the communal nature of the faith and its creational and ecclesial orientation, one must be careful not to dismiss the truly personal, if not individual, nature of the relationship between the covenanting God and his loving purpose in the atonement. Again, the Paul who speaks of how Christ gave himself up for the church to redeem her (Eph. 5) is the same Paul who can say, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). It is not either/or but both/and when it comes to person and community. I opt therefore for a victory motif and a penal substitutionary motif on equal footing, and I opt for both a personal and a communal aspect to the telos or benefits of the atonement, though in both cases, covenantal, not contractual. This is not to deny that the doctrine of God which has undergirded the forensic aspects of some Reformed atonement theologies and penal substitution has been askew. A case in point has been Jonathan Edwards whose starting point in atonement theology has been adjudged not to be the triunity of Divine Persons, but the justice of God. James Torrance expresses this opinion: Edwards, like John Owen before him in England, started with a prior scholastic definition of God and the divine attributes, derived in measure from natural theology, and then fitted his doctrine of atonement into it. Justice is the essential divine attribute (interpreted in terms of jurisprudence) by which God is related to all, but the love of God, shown only to the elect, is arbitrary. 60

Justification in Edwards thus becomes a primarily judicial and individual matter rather than an act of God in which he demonstrates his faithfulness to his covenant people, with filial intent. And the conversion experience and sanctification become the major evidences of the election of the individual. Assurance and sanctification thus become primarily subjective and individualistic. The Religious Affections are interpreted in this light by Michael Jinkins. 61 One can see why there might be an aversion and even a revulsion to the forensic seen in this light. But a much more covenantal and communal yet personal approach, as opposed to an individualistic and contractual approach has been demonstrated in the work of Karl Barth, for example. It is the triune God in his fullness of love who breaks in to human history and in mercy and justice comes to the cross, atones for the sin (idolatrous nature) and the sins of humanity, thereby conquering the accuser’s stinging accusations, and destroying the devil’s power in death by the death and resurrection of the Son. And thereby forming a new humanity in the last Adam, reigning

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again, stewarding creation, and living in ecclesial communities of union with Christ, these are a harbinger of the kingdom that is yet to come in fullness. NOTES 1. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: SPCK, 1953). 2. See Jason S. Sexton, ed. Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014) for a classification that makes the psychological Augustinian Trinity the “classical” Trinity over against the social Trinity (puzzlingly called the “relational Trinity” given that both views are relational). 3. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?,” Pro Ecclesia VII, No. 3 (1998), 339. 4. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 339. 5. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 339. 6. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 339. 7. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 339. 8. D. Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt,” 339. 9. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad, 2006), 20. 10. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 20. 11. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 13. Pugh cites Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad, 2006), 193–194, in support of this point. 12. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 13. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 14. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 15. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 16. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. II (London: Nisbet, 1957), 198. 17. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 13–16. Pugh draws here on William Atkinson’s The Death of Jesus: A Pentecostal Investigation (Leiden: Brill, 2009). This includes the contributions of E. W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin, and Kenneth Copeland. 18. Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse and Ransom (Cleveland, OH.: Pilgrim, 1998), 88. 19. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 16. 20. This is a reference to a section in Gregory of Nyssa, Greater Catechism, 24 (https:// orthodoxchurchfathers.com/fathers/npnf205/npnf2038.htm#P3971_2624610). 21. Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse and Ransom (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1998), 121. 22. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 17. 23. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 17. 24. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 17. 25. Elaine Storkey, “Atonement and Feminism,” Anvil 11.3 (1994), 227–235. 26. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 139. Emphasis added. 27. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 211–212. 28. Hans Boersma’s review of Ray’s proposals leads him to say that “not all the current reappropriations of the Christus Victor theme are equally promising.” Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad, 2006), 20. 29. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 139. 30. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 19. 31. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 19.

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32. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 143. 33. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, 149. 34. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 27. 35. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 34. 36. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 45–46. 37. J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 211–212. 38. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 46. 39. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 47. 40. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 48. 41. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 48. 42. Green and Baker, Recovering the Scandal, 54. 43. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 48. 44. Tony Lane, “The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God” in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 138–167. 45. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 21–23. 46. Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 121–157. 47. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 22, 121–157 is included in this category. 48. Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 127. 49. Rob Bell, Love Wins, 128. 50. Rob Bell, Love Wins, 128. 51. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 22. 52. Gregory A. Boyd, “Christus Victor View” in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, contributors, Gregory A. Boyd, Joel B. Green, Bruce R. Reichenbach, Thomas R. Schreiner; eds. James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy; (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Acad., 2006), 23–66. 53. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 22. 54. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 22. 55. N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016). 56. Michael Horton, “N. T. Wright Reconsiders the Meaning of Jesus’s Death,” in The Gospel Coalition reviews, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-day-the-revolutionbegan/. My summation of Wright’s work borrows somewhat from Horton’s summary in this article with my own observations added. 57. I am pleased for the place both Wright and Horton have given to a “distinction between heaven and earth” in the present age and the intermediate state theology which, as Horton says “our grandparents found comfort in on their deathbed along with the hope of resurrection.” In an overreaction to Platonism, Berkhouwer, for example, disallowed this hope, given it seems to separate body and the inner being of the departed. As I have written elsewhere the plain sense of a number of Scriptures (Phil. 1; 2 Cor. 5; Luke 23:43) must trump fear of consonance with an “-ism.” Clearly 2 Corinthians 5 indicates that the intermediate state is not the norm. It is better than life here but the resurrection existence is best of all, according to Philippians 1. Horton also invokes OT instances of an intermediate state affirmed by Jewish scholars: “Nevertheless, David was comforted that he would see his dead son again: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:23). Where was he going to go? Jewish theologian Jon Levenson has demonstrated that the intermediate state (the soul going to heaven upon death) was a widespread belief prior to any Hellenizing influence. “God is in heaven and you are on earth” (Eccl. 5:2). He then questions whether “Wright’s claims about ‘going-to-heaven-whenyou-die’” being “foreign to the mind of a Second Temple Jewish person” are “somewhat overstated?” “After all,” Horton says, “the lawyer’s question to Jesus, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life’ (Luke 18:18) was probably not provoked by his reading of the Timaeus.” Horton tellingly poses the question, “Is there an argument that makes allowance for assumptions of heaven—and going there—other than Plotinus’s ‘ascent of the alone to the Alone’?” So, I propose that we are going to heaven when we die, but heaven is coming to earth when we are resurrected.

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58. Michael Horton, “N. T. Wright Reconsiders the Meaning of Jesus’s Death,” in The Gospel Coalition reviews, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-day-the-revolutionbegan/. 59. James B. Torrance, “Covenant or Contract? A Study of the Theological Background of Worship in Seventeenth-Century Scotland,” Scottish Journal of Theology 23 (1970), 51–76; “Covenant or Contract? The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 26 (1973), 295–311; “The Incarnation and Limited Atonement,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 2 (1984), 32–40. 60. James B. Torrance in a commendatory preface to the PhD thesis of Michael Jinkins, A Comparative Study in the Theology of Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and John McLeod Campbell (PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1990, San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), x, xi. 61. Michael Jinkins, A Comparative Study in the Theology of Atonement in Jonathan Edwards and John McLeod Campbell: Atonement and the Character of God (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), 170–175. See also Michael Jinkins, “‘The Being of Beings’: Jonathan Edwards’ Understanding of God as Reflected in his Final Treatises,” Scottish Journal of Theology 46 (1993), 161–190. It should be noted that Jinkins does concede that in his final treatises, Edwards did develop a more Trinitarian approach: “In his final treatises, Edwards moves well beyond the view he shared with Federal Calvinism in his discourses and sermons, of a contractually bound Godhead.” Jinkins, “The Being of Beings,” 182.

Chapter Eleven

Historico-Theological Models The Origins of the Penal Substitution Model

J. I. Packer has called the doctrine of penal substitution “a distinguishing mark of the world-wide evangelical fraternity: namely, the belief that the cross had the character of penal substitution, and that it was in virtue of this fact that it brought salvation to mankind.” 1 Packer’s strong apologia sets the tone for a fresh defense in light of further critiques in our time, though it has to be said that most of the criticism was already present when he wrote his articles on this subject. Packer quotes in detail the case against penal substitutionary atonement expressed in 1948 by Camfield. This is a sample: And this, not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive, but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural. Thus Dr. Vincent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the “Idea of Atonement in the New Testament” gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings; that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament; that even St. Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of substitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them. 2

There are really four concerns before us in these next two chapters. First, we need to seek to understand the penal substitution model and its origins, and overcome caricatures of it all too visible in the contemporary church, its sermons and its songs. Second, we want to draw on the work of some of its recent thoughtful proponents in the face of its major critiques. The major critiques are as follows: (i) that it involves a doctrine of retributive justice in God, and, thus, (ii) that God’s love is conditioned and limited by his justice, since God cannot exercise his love to save humanity until his righteousness 209

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(justice) is satisfied, and God’s love is therefore set in opposition to his righteousness, creating a tension and problem in God; (iii) that its popular presentations involve the severing asunder of the Holy Trinity in that the Son is “separated” from the Father on the cross (a charge we have begun to answer in previous chapters); (iv) that its current form emerges “out of modern Western individualism with its conception of ‘autobiographical justice’”; 3 4 (v) that the penal substitution viewpoint “is guilty of doctrinal isolationism—an inability to look beyond itself,” that is, it cannot embrace “three vital aspects of the Christian faith,” which in turn leads to the three remaining objections; (vi) it “has no place for the life of Jesus” (a contention countered by the chapter on the vicarious humanity of Christ and that on recapitulation); (vii) it “cannot account for the cosmic scope of the work of Christ on the cross” (one wonders why, when the atoning death of Jesus, referred to explicitly as “his blood shed on the cross,” is spoken of by Paul as the means of the reconciling of all things in heaven and on earth [Col. 1:20]); and (viii) it “undermines the need for moral renewal in the life of the believer subsequent to conversion,” and in fact may even influence “wrong, abusive behaviour.” 5 Calvin’s grounding of justification and sanctification in union with Christ, and his treatment of penal substitution below will counter this objection also. Though not all of these objections will be countered in detail and sequentially, most will be addressed by way of consideration of nuanced accounts of this model. Implicit in our account is the proposal that the validity of penal substitution is as one among other models, and not the only model. Third, therefore, we will consider whether penal substitution may be considered as a candidate for the most core and crucial model upon which all others are ultimately dependent. Is penal substitution the model which holds all others together, or which is required for all the other models to work, as is contended by Roger Nicole, for example? Fourth, we will pose the question: How important is the undergirding doctrine of participation for this model of penal substitution, and for all the models as they intersect with the substitutionary model? Answering these four questions will begin in this chapter, and continue into chapter 12. UNDERSTANDING THE MODEL AND ITS ORIGINS First, then, we need to seek to understand the penal substitution model and its origins. Hans Boersma, in his landmark book on the atonement as hospitality, offers a qualified approval of penal representation as that which, along with moral influence, works under and toward the Christus Victor as his model of choice. With respect to what he acknowledges has become in contemporary theology, the “most problematic of the traditional models,” 6 he debunks the

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charge that its association with Anselm implies it was a construct of a “Constantinian arrangement.” This he does by showing that the Church Fathers “already worked with substitutionary elements and that these cannot be the result of shifts in power arrangements.” 7 This has been confirmed by Garry Williams who finds elements of the doctrine of penal substitution to be present, along with other models of the atonement, in the works of Justin Martyr, Eusebius of Caesaria, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Gregory the Great. 8 Williams rebuts the anachronistic idea that penal substitution could not be present in the Fathers because it had not yet been developed as precisely as it was in the time of the Reformation. 9 He questions the scholarship that has expressed doubt about the presence of the essence of penal substitution in the writings of these Church Fathers. 10 The criterion employed by Williams was to say that a Father was an adherent of the penal doctrine “if he plainly states that the punishment deserved by sin from God was borne by Jesus Christ in his death on the Cross.” 11 Space does not permit a detailed exposition of the presence of penal elements in the Church Fathers, and the controversies surrounding the quotations made to give evidence of this. Just a few well-chosen and uncontroversial quotes will suffice to reveal penal elements in the atonement theology of the Church Fathers which offer a line of evidence not always sought after in the past for this doctrine: 12 Justin Martyr (c. 100–165): For the whole human race will be found to be under a curse. For it is written in the law of Moses, “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them” [Deut. 27:26]. And no one has accurately done all, nor will you venture to deny this; but some more and some less than others have observed the ordinances enjoined. But if those who are under this law appear to be under a curse for not having observed all the requirements, how much more shall all the nations appear to be under a curse who dishonor idolatry, who seduce youths, and commit other crimes? If, then, the Father of all wished His Christ for the whole human family to take upon Him the curses of all, knowing that, after He had been crucified and was dead, He would raise Him up, why do you argue about Him, who submitted to suffer these things according to the Father’s will, as if He were accursed, and do not rather bewail yourselves? For although His Father caused Him to suffer these things in behalf of the human family, yet you did not commit the deed as in obedience to the will of God. 13

The concept of participation is implicit in this text, as the underlying reality that enables the Son to endure the curse of the Law for “the human family.”

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Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 275–339): And how can He make our sins His own, and be said to bear our iniquities . . . , except by our being regarded as His body . . . , according to the apostle, who says: “Now ye are the body of Christ, and severally members?” And by the rule that “if one member suffer all the members suffer with it,” so when the many members suffer and sin, He too by the laws of sympathy (since the Word of God was pleased to take the form of a slave and to be knit into the common tabernacle of us all) takes into Himself the labors of the suffering members, and makes our sicknesses His, and suffers all our woes and labors by the laws of love. And the Lamb of God not only did this . . . but . . . was chastised on our behalf . . . , and suffered a penalty He did not owe, but which we owed because of the multitude of our sins; and so He became the cause of the forgiveness of our sins, because He received death for us, and transferred to Himself the scourging, the insults, and the dishonor, which were due to us, and drew down on Himself the apportioned curse, being made a curse for us. 14

It is pertinent to our account to observe in plain view that for Eusebius, participation or union of the Son with humanity is the key to understanding the mechanism by which penal substitution works. This is argued both from the theology of the incarnational union of the Son with humanity in the incarnation (“since the Word of God was pleased to take the form of a slave and to be knit into the common tabernacle of us all”), and from the unio mystica, the union of Christ the Head of the church, with his church the body (“except by our being regarded as His body . . . , according to the apostle, who says: ‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and severally members?’”). Even though Eusebius uses this latter union argument retrospectively, he is confident that the union of the church with Christ who suffers on their behalf is already extant in the mind of God. It is pertinent to our own account also to note that Williams does not for a moment suggest that penal substitution is the sole model of the Church Fathers: My plea is not for Christus Vicarius to the exclusion of all other language and concepts. Again, let Aulén have his prize. Certainly the themes of restoration and victory were present, and in some writers they were the primary categories. But that does not mean that they excluded retributive notions. Rather than adducing general evidence of restoration or victory and using it to trump specific retributive vocabulary, we should maintain the integrity of all of the descriptions in the passages in question and allow the richness of patristic views of the cross to stand out. 15

Athanasius (c. 300–373) It is important also to make the distinction between satisfaction and substitution in the Church Fathers, however. Athanasius for example, in On the

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Incarnation, might at first reading be interpreted as an adherent of penal substitution, Thus taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did for sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was therefore voided of its power for men. 16

He elsewhere uses the language of exchange (the cross is spoken of “sufficient exchange for all”), 17 the payment of debt, 18 and ransom. 19 However, this is not actually penal substitution, but something more akin to satisfaction rendered to God, based on the “offering” of the body of Christ to the Father (not his being treated as a substitute for guilty humanity). The results of this offering up are conveyed in ontological terms (removal of death, or the law of death) more so than juridical (removal of the curse of the moral law). Having said this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some places, this greatest of the theologians of the early church does indeed express the atonement in retributive terms and a penal view of the atonement. For example, on his Four Discourses against the Arians he states: “Formerly, the world, as guilty, was under judgment from the Law; but now the Word has taken on Himself the judgment, and having suffered in the body for all, has bestowed salvation to all.” 20 Athanasius is especially conscious of the importance of the incarnation as the beginning of salvation seen as theosis, and as the basis for the satisfaction and substitutionary aspects of the atonement. Thus, referring to John 1:14, Athanasius states, “For, as when John says, ‘The Word was made flesh’ we do not conceive the whole Word Himself to be flesh, but to have put on flesh and become man, and on hearing, ‘Christ hath become a curse for us,’ and ‘He hath made Him sin for us who knew no sin,’ we do not simply conceive this, that the whole Christ has become curse and sin, but that He has taken on Him the curse which lay against us (as the Apostle has said, ‘Has redeemed us from the curse,’ and ‘has carried,’ as Isaiah has said, ‘our sins,’ and as Peter has written, ‘has borne them in the body on the wood.’” 21 The profoundly intertwined way in which Athanasius keeps incarnation and atonement together, the filial with the forensic, and indeed, the filial aim before the forensic accomplishment of the atonement is clear also in Ad Epictetum where he states, For what John said, “The Word was made flesh” has this meaning, as we may see by a similar passage; for it is written in Paul: “Christ has become a curse for us.” And just as He has not Himself become a curse, but is said to have done so because He took upon Him the curse on our behalf, so also He has

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become flesh not by being changed into flesh, but because He assumed on our behalf living flesh, and has become Man. 22

The doctrine of penal substitution is also present in the medieval period, prior to the Reformation period. Though Anselm’s view is one of satisfaction, his writings nevertheless influenced the Reformers. We will consider his contribution briefly and then that of Aquinas. Anselm (1033–1109) Having already considered Anselm’s satisfaction model in chapter 9, and its interwovenness with recapitulation and theosis, we give only a brief description of this model here. This summary of J. I. Packer will suffice, along with further clarification shortly, in our consideration of Aquinas: Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon and their reforming contemporaries were the pioneers in stating it. . . . What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction), the main mediaeval category for thought about the cross. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, which largely determined the mediaeval development, saw Christ’s satisfactio for our sins as the offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done, but the Reformers saw it as the undergoing of vicarious punishment (poena) to meet the claims on us of God’s holy law and wrath (i.e. his punitive justice). 23

Anselm’s concept is of Christ making satisfaction for sin and the wrath of God by the offering of himself rather than becoming a sin offering who bears our punishment. Yet, the influence of Anselm on the development of the doctrine of penal substitution by the Reformers is evident. Aquinas (1225–1274) The development of the doctrine of penal substitution by Thomas Aquinas, well before the Reformers, should not be neglected also. Douglas Farrow’s recent treatment of the nature of the atonement in Anselm and Aquinas, “Satisfaction and Punishment: Reckoning with Anselm,” 24 provides a nuanced treatment of the similarities and differences in the atonement theology of these great medieval scholars. The essence of this discussion is to distinguish between the atonement of Jesus as offering satisfaction (satisfactio) for sin (Anselm) or as enduring the punishment (poena) of sin (Aquinas). Both believed that sin could not be “winked at” 25 by God, and that it was neither just nor merciful for God to excuse sin. The key question is, how had sin been expiated by Jesus? One might say, at the risk of over-simplification, that Anselm espoused the satisfaction model, and Aquinas, the penal substitution model. Engaging in a brief comparison will place the viewpoint of Aquinas in bold relief, while providing clarity on Anselm’s viewpoint.

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It is common to envision the atonement as “the carrying out of a fit punishment borne by the savior rather than by the sinner—as if Jesus had said, ‘Punish me, not them,’ and the Father had replied, ‘My justice is satisfied so long as the punishment is meted out.’” Luther’s viewpoint, Farrow suggests, is that the justice of God demanded that he exercise judgment toward sinful humanity and that in the mercy of God, the Saviour who deserved no punishment endured it voluntarily for us. 26 But this is not how Anselm viewed the atonement, and in this he differed from Aquinas. Farrow points out that the Protestant Reformers did not resolve this difference between Anselm and Aquinas, as their primary focus was to insist on the sufficiency of the atonement for the forgiveness of sins, in a way that “did not allow any room for augmentation by the sacraments or penitence.” 27 The Catholic response to the Reformers did not deny the sufficiency of the atonement but it did affirm “the need for sacramental participation in it,” a notion, says Farrow that was difficult for Protestants to process given, (a) their nominalist (as opposed to realist) commitment to univocity (rather than analogy), and (b) their emphasis on sola fide, which was undergirded by an increasing emphasis on human autonomy doctrine and a decreasing attention to sacramental solidarity. Let us then examine the differences between Anselm and Aquinas on the nature of the atonement. For Anselm, justice is restored by Jesus’s atonement, either by satisfaction or by punishment if the satisfaction is not appropriated. Thus the chief hamartiological (sin) category for Anselm is “debt,” rather than guilt. The sinner defrauds God “of the honour due him” and it defrauds the creation order that brings shalom and holiness, by forsaking justice. 28 Though sin properly has no nature, 29 its essence is the “failure to render to God” what is his by right, “gratitude and obedience.” Since the sinful human is not able to pay what is owed to God, she or he is subject to punishment. It is the offering up of this eucharistia and obedientia that Christ offers up to God on our behalf, something “only the God-man can do, and does, for he alone among men preserves justice in himself, doing the Father’s will and rendering thanks freely” that sin is atoned for. 30 The infinite worth of this offering of the God-man on behalf of humanity outweighs by an infinite amount every debt, and every offense against God. But those who refuse baptism and fail to appropriate the satisfaction of Christ come under punishment, eternal punishment at that. The goodness of God’s renewed creation, in Anselm’s view, is upheld by the just and proper punishment of those who, despite having rational souls, fail to avail themselves of the satisfaction rendered by Christ and the generosity of divine mercy. In sum, as Farrow states, “Anselm thinks that sin requires either payment or punishment and that payment averts punishment.” 31 But crucially, for Anselm, this payment is one of satisfaction rather than substitution. Christ’s obedience and thankfulness to God expressed in his offering to the Father is of infinite worth and by far supercedes

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any debt owed for the sin of humanity, defined primarily as a deficit in obedience and thankfulness. Jesus’s offering of obedience in going to the cross was “offered precisely where it need not be offered” and “the reward he earns from God for the gratuitous donation of his life is more than sufficient to cover the entire human debt.” My own reflection would suggest that in Anselm, punishment is averted not because every sin has been punished in Jesus as in a guilt offering, but because positively, the offering of the Son seen perhaps best as a burnt offering, the offering up of positive obedience and thanks, is more than sufficient for every sin’s debt. Anselm portrays a human appropriation of this satisfaction through the reception of the gospel and humble reception of the sacraments. 32 But how does the account of Aquinas’s view of the atonement differ from that of Anselm? Farrow points out that Aquinas does not draw the distinction of Anselm between satisfaction and punishment. The distinction he does make is between punishment viewed simply (poena simpliciter), which is the punishment “attached to particular sins by reason of their affront to just order,” and “satisfactory punishment” (poena satisfactoria), which is “freely received for the purpose of conforming the soul to God and restoring its lost powers or out of charity toward another who is not himself able to bear it.” 33 In this respect, Luther’s schema is like that of Aquinas, in that Jesus, who is without sin, original or actual, and therefore not under punishment, receives the punishment from God that belongs to the rest of humanity, and bears it vicariously. For Aquinas, as for Luther, therefore, the suffering of Christ on the cross is more than physical and more than what the fullness of human iniquity afflicted him with, and more than the onslaught of Satan’s worst. Aquinas adds a suffering of sin’s punishment at the hand of God on behalf of sinful humanity. 34 The crucial difference Farrow sees between Anselm and Aquinas lies in Anselm’s insistence in contrasting satisfaction and punishment. For Anselm, it is satisfaction or punishment; for Aquinas, the “or” is elided, so that satisfaction is by means of punishment. Aquinas thinks that the removal of divine punishment is because Jesus has suffered it for us, whereas Anselm thinks it is removed “because Jesus has offered a satisfaction that makes it unnecessary and unfitting . . . ” 35 The distinction is subtle but real. Both would agree that a debt has been accrued and both agree that it has been “freely paid by the savior,” but one “calls the payment satisfaction: the other calls it satisfactory punishment.” 36 Is it possible that there is a both/and answer to this dilemma? I think it is possible to assert that in a total atonement, symbolized fittingly by the Levitical offerings, Anselm’s is an atonement that answers to the burnt and cereal offering, and Aquinas’s atonement is merely to add the sin and guilt offering aspects. Indeed these facets of a “total atonement” are confirmed by New

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Testament texts which express both: Ephesians 5:1–2 and Hebrews 9:14, in the case of the first, and 2 Corinthians 5:21 and 1 Peter 3:18 in the second. However, there cannot be a both/and answer in at least one respect to the distinction between these two great theologians of the tradition. Anselm “does not have God punishing Jesus” for us, but in fact punishing humans who do not avail themselves of the atonement provided. Aquinas does have “God punishing Jesus through man,” 37 that is, God in his sovereignty ends up punishing Jesus through the punishment that humans gave him. Anselm thinks of the sacrifice of Christ as averting punishment whereas Aquinas sees it as payment for the bearing of punishment. 38 Farrow opines that “the difference matters to our penitential theology.” 39 Though clearly Aquinas and Anselm differed on the agency and role of divine punishment, it seems to me that both of these views of the atonement might still be accommodated within an appreciation for the polyvalence of the doctrine which allows for a composite meaning, such as is suggested by the five Levitical offerings. Farrow attempts a mediation of his own based on a subtle distinction. For Aquinas, he states, “punishment does come upon Jesus from God,” while for Anselm, “it is not directed at Jesus by God.” 40 Borrowing from Augustine, Farrow differentiates between the temporal punishments attached immediately to a sin itself, and eternal punishments which affect death and beyond. 41 The latter are effected by the last judgment and lead to the “second death” spoken of in the Apocalypse. Why is this distinction relevant to the discussion of atonement as satisfaction (Anselm) or as punishment (Aquinas)? Farrow suggests that in the case of atonement as punishment, we are forced to say that “justice is served only if Jesus bears the punishment due our sin” in its totality, that is, he bears both the temporal and the eternal punishment. This means that we must think of Jesus’s Golgotha experience, from a justice perspective, as the equivalent of hell. By contrast, the satisfaction theory does not include the bearing of eternal punishment. It does, however, require that Christ bear the temporal punishment, though exactly how is not clear. But on Anselm’s model of the atonement, it is clear that “what Jesus suffers, he suffers from man, not from God.” 42 He is punished “for being faithful to God, not by God for being faithful to man.” 43 Jesus lived his whole life in the place of identification with those already being punished by and for their sins, and his decision in Gethsemane is to complete this commitment to being in the place “where man is handed over to suffering and death and the wiles of the devil.” 44 He voluntarily lays down his life, endures the curse of the law, “enduring every man’s temporal fate, undergoing the sentence of death that falls on all who are born with original sin.” 45 This union of the Son with humanity, all the way in faithfulness, sharing “the punishment that falls by general providence on sinful man” is called by Anselm “a union of love.” 46 Farrow sees shades of Irenaeus’s recapitulation theory in Anselm at this point.

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But is God punishing Jesus in all this? Anselm would answer in the negative. These punishments come to him from God only in a permissive way, in that they are the temporal punishments proper to fallen humanity, but not by God’s directive or punitive will. What kind of place is this place of identification of Jesus with the temporal punishment of humanity? What does this union of love mean for Jesus in his atoning death? Farrow insists it would be wrong to say that it is a place “where God is not,” for no such place exists in this world. But it “is a place where God hides himself from man.” 47 On Anselm’s account of the cross, therefore, the cry of dereliction is, for Christ, a human experience of absence. It is even a human experience in which the Son feels turned away from in solidarity with this human experience of seeming abandonment. But the cause of this suffering is not God. God is not causing it with a view to punishing Jesus. For Anselm, this would not be fitting for God, for Jesus has done nothing worthy of punishment. 48 Rather what Jesus does suffer comes from man, and not from God. “Yes, he is punished,” says Farrow, but, to reiterate, “he is punished by man for being faithful to God, not by God for being faithful to man.” 49 Anselm is clear that we must not assert that Jesus suffers from God on behalf of man. God does not directly cause his suffering, and he is not condemned by God or punished by his just judgment. And Farrow insists, following Karl Barth, that the “popular thesis” that he did suffer at the hands of God is not found in the New Testament 50 or in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. 51 Farrow is not satisfied that the texts of Scripture, such as Isaiah 53, are indeed answered fully by this Anselmian approach. God in his sovereignty does indeed seem to be active in these texts, and not merely the human agent. He quotes Karl Barth at length to nuance the view that God is indeed active in punishing the Son with the punishment which we deserve. It is nuanced in two ways: (i) this must not be seen as the main concept or central feature of the atonement, as in “older presentations” (in this sentence, 52 Barth mistakenly ascribes this view to Anselm!); and (ii) this must be kept within the perspective of the centrality of the person of Christ. This reflects Barth’s emphasis on ontology or personhood, and his theme of “the Judge judged in our place” (the title of 59.2) which preserves the notion that the Son is God, with the Father and the Spirit, in this event, as well as the representative man who has taken on sinful humanity in order to cleanse it at its ontological root, as it were. That we are spared punishment by what Jesus has done for us is not given much attention by Barth. Farrow assesses Barth’s position by saying that he views the self-sacrifice of Jesus “as bringing an end to all sacrifice, rather than bringing all sacrifice to its proper end.” 53 These two statements seem to me to create an unnecessary dichotomy, for both are true for Barth and any theologian who reads the book of Hebrews carefully. The sacrifice of Christ has fulfilled all the Old Testament types yet its efficacy continues as mediated through our Great High Priest.

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Farrow’s final evaluation of the work of Aquinas and Anselm looks something like this: the former asserts that Jesus does undergo the punishment that fallen man deserves, which is suffering and death, while the latter insists that it is not punishment that satisfied divine justice but rather the superabundant offering of Jesus. Anselm also insists that the punishment Jesus does undergo is by reason of the permissive will of God rather than his punitive will. Farrow affirms each theologian in each of these assertions. He does however wish to warn of two “great mistakes” often made by those who put punishment in a central place. He implies that Aquinas made the first of these. These are (i) to suppose that the place of punishment occupied by Jesus is actually hell; 54 and (ii) to suppose that the atoning experience of the cross is a divine hell. This last one is the worst of the two errors, for it seeks to understand the atonement in a way that breaks up the Trinity, thus violating the impassibility of God, a doctrine to which both theologians were committed. Farrow is adamant rather that it is Jesus, the God-man, as man, who suffers either or both human and divine wraths. 55 He is sure, therefore, contra McCormack (chapter 2) that the Trinity or “God qua God,” does not suffer, contra much modern theology which proposes “some eternal paroxysm of divine suffering.” 56 Farrow further asserts that it is not “Jesus from whom the Father turns.” Rather the Father turns “from us as we ourselves turn against God in Jesus.” In Christ, God and the one truly free man has chosen to “side with man even in deciding against him.” God has thus chosen to be for humanity and because of that choice, “the wrath of man is given the divine object it sought, and the wrath of God is applied to man redemptively rather than destructively.” 57 Farrow is certain that the cry of dereliction does not mean that the Trinity is broken up. There can be no breach between the Father and the Son, one perhaps needing “to be overcome by the Spirit,” for example. The only breach was that between God and man, which was a “hamartiological or volitional breach that is overcome by the God-man.” Jesus, the Son, “in perfect unity of will with the Father” goes to the place that God cannot go and “just there presents himself to the Father on our behalf to shrive us of our rebellion and sin.” Farrow concludes that “there is no atonement that takes place in the secret recesses of the divine eternity, as if the doctrine of the Trinity were the doctrine of the atonement. There is only the atonement that takes place in and through the God-man, acting as man.” 58 This might at first glance seem to suggest that Miroslav Volf’s depiction of the depths of the atonement as making space within the triune being of God for sinful humanity 59 is unorthodox. However, Volf is equally clear about the fact that there is no ontological breach within the Trinity. The difference between Farrow (and Anselm) and Volf (and Barth and Torrance) seems to lie in the necessity of divine punishment and purging of the sinful humanity Christ assumed, at least anhypostatically and vicariously. The last

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statement Farrow makes in this right-minded defense of the integrity of the Trinity does seem to me to go too far, however. He states, “For the Son did not make an offering of God to God, but of man to God.” 60 While I am in full agreement that the primary efficacy of the offering up of Jesus is as a Man for humanity, once again, the rubric of the five offerings may account not only for the insights of both Aquinas and Anselm, but it may in its portrayal of the burnt offering suggest there is a God-to-God dimension which is part of the satisfaction, the sweet savor, of the cross event. Hebrews 9:14 would suggest so—“How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!” Is it not possible that the eternal perichoretic relations of the Father and the Son are enacted in a specific case and manner in the work of atonement? Does not the Son as the divine Son not delight to please his Father, as indeed Scripture confirms: “And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29). And are we not given a glimpse of this divine interpenetration and inter-animation and mutual glorification in anticipation of the cross in John 12:27–28—“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” It is as both God and man that Jesus offers himself up. The burnt offering facet of the diamond that is the cross permits of a God-to-God love affair. This does not break up the unity of the Godhead. It simply acknowledges the irreducible identity of the persons of the one divine communion and one divine essence of the Trinity. Drawing on these origins and building upon Reformational development, what then can we conclude about the nature of the penal substitution motif or model of the atonement? It is in many evangelical and Reformed traditions the only model known. In fact it so inhabits our liturgies and songs that many parishioners would not know it as a model, but simply as the way the Bible depicts the cross event and describes its significance. Caricatures of it abound also, unfortunately, when it is conceived outside of proper Trinitarian and Christological contexts. What it is in its essence is that the Son of God who has assumed our humanity becomes not just humanity’s representative but also its substitute, bearing the penalty of the guilt of the sin of all humanity, in its place, in its stead. Substitution is thought by some to be a stronger term than representative, and yet the words of J. I. Packer are salutary as he expresses the meaning of “substitutionary”: What does this mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitution as “the putting of one person or thing in the place of another.” One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus’ death was

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vicarious and representative deny that it was substitutionary; for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms! Representation is said to mean “the fact of standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, especially with a right or authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another.” And vicarious is defined as “what takes or supplies the place of another thing or person; substituted instead of the proper thing or person.” So here, it seems, is a distinction without a difference. 61

Citing Pannenberg, 62 Packer goes on to say “that nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which ‘Christ died for us’ (ὑπέρ, on our behalf, for our benefit), and ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us’ (ὑπέρ again) (Rom. 5:8; Gal. 3:13), and who accepts Christ’s assurance that he came ‘to give his life a ransom for many’ (ἀντί, which means precisely ‘in place of,’ ‘in exchange for’), 63 should hesitate to say that Christ’s death was substitutionary. Indeed, if he describes Christ’s death as vicarious he is actually saying it.” 64 One could say that as a representative he suffers with us, but as a substitute he suffers for us, and that both are true. Pugh has suggested that participation is that which permits representation. Thus, as our Great High Priest, because he has become one of us, he can go to the Father on our behalf in a way that affects us. He can sympathize with our sufferings since he has suffered. By contrast he thinks that with respect to substitution, only Jesus could do this and all that it entails for us. In other words, he thus “suffered instead of us so that we would not have to.” 65 Pugh interprets representation to be Anselmian (the offering of Jesus on our behalf is satisfaction) and substitution to go beyond Anselm, as is the case for Luther and Calvin. This distinction has validity as Pugh intends it but one has to say that participative theology enables both representation and substitution to be true. That is, if the Son of God assumed humanity, that is, became one with our humanity, this is solid ground for both a representative and a substitutionary Christ. What is the difference between his capacity to represent us before the Father as our High Priest today at the Father’s right hand, and his capacity to bear our sin, and stand in our place in his vicarious life and death? It is true in both cases that he goes where we cannot go, whether it be into the immediate presence of God in ascension, or his descent into the atoning, propitiatory suffering of the cross. The fact that we are relationally in him does not mean that there is no ontological distinction between us and him, a distinction that does permit him to go where we cannot go and die as a substitute for us, just as there is no mixture of divinity and humanity in his hypostatic union, which is “without confusion.” I submit therefore, that by participation of the Son of God in humanity, and then our participation by the Spirit in Christ, both representation and substitution are equally viable. Participation enables representation, and Anselm’s satisfaction view, and participation enables substitution as in Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin.

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One among a number of biblical texts (see for example, Isa. 53:4–6; 1 Pet. 2:24; 3:18) which reflect this participation theory comes within the primary soteriological category of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5, which speaks of God who “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting men’s sins against them” (5:19). As if to explain in more detail the mechanism of God’s reconciliation in Christ, to explain how God could in justice not count men’s sins against them, Paul reveals the substitutionary dynamic in verse 21—“God made him (Christ) who had no sin to be sin (a sin offering) for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Penal substitution is graphically described by a quotation from Martin Luther’s commentary also on Galatians 3:13 (“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree’”) in which Paul is speaking of the only possible ground for a person’s justification. He depicts Christ suffering on the cross for everyone, for he has agreed to “be the person who has committed the sins of all men [humans]” and so “Now the law comes and says ‘I find him a sinner, who takes upon Himself the sins of all men. I do not see any other sins than those in Him. Therefore let Him die on the cross.’” 66 Luther’s description shows no signs of the particular atonement that will become visible in Calvin and central in scholastic Calvinism. For Luther, Christ absorbs the sins of everyone such that none can be seen outside of him. The judgment of God over every sin of every human person is exhausted in the penal substitutionary act of Christ on the cross. It is clearly penal, it is clearly related to the inviolable law of God, it includes the notion that Christ averted the wrath and judgment of God, and it is clearly participational in the sense that Jesus can only act as our substitute if he is one with us in our humanity, but perhaps also in the sense that, on one account, Luther’s soteriology is one of theosis, 67 and it is recapitulative, and it is received by faith and not works. That is, it works because the Son became one with fallen humanity in its guilt and sin, and so can act representatively and as a substitute for humanity. And in the Lutheran account, since Christ is the Son become flesh, the last Adam, all humanity is the beneficiary of his death. The doctrine was incipient in Martin Luther and then full blown in John Calvin. It is, however, well-developed even in Luther’s theologia crucis, which involves a radically substitutionary understanding of the cross for five main reasons. The first is the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther will have nothing to do with any way of salvation that has even a hint of synergistic cooperation between God and humanity. Thus, as Pugh affirms, the notion of God as the “crucified God” is prominent in the redemptive work and it “must absolutely take man’s place.” 68 Pugh further indicates that since crucicentrism was prevalent, justification had to be “linked to the cross in some way.” 69 Penal substitution thus became “a justification–eye view of the atonement.” 70 Pugh comments that this is the reason why theologians have

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found this view of the atonement so limiting as a complete explanation of the cross, for it is really an explanation not of the cross but of justification by faith. On the other hand, one might counter by saying this is Paul’s precise aim in Romans 3:22–27! It seems folly to have a theology of the atonement without this aspect to it. The second reason relates to his affirmation of the concepts and reality of the judgment and wrath of God, though it must be said that Luther believes that mercy, and not wrath, will have the last word. In fact Luther places so much emphasis on how Christ has absorbed the wrath of God, that he is much less concerned about the eschatological aspects of hell than later Protestantism. Humbling ourselves before the wrath of God that is revealed in the cross leads to the revelation of his justifying mercy, but this is only possible because Christ has taken our judgment. For Luther, God’s mercy is concealed beneath his justice. As far as Luther was concerned God was not to be found in the speculations of the theology of the Schoolmen. It is in keeping with Luther’s notion of the hiddenness of God (Deus Absconditus), the idea that his truest attributes are hidden beneath their opposite, that is, it is in his wrath poured out in a concentrated way at the cross that the sweetness of the mercy of God is revealed. 71 The third reason serves to explain the wrath of God in its settled nature, which has to do with the holiness and inflexibility of the law of God (Moses), which was in turn, the consequence of his immutability. The relationship between Law and Gospel in Luther, and in Calvin, is complex. Luther embraced the first and second uses of the Law, that is the civil use in the state, and the convicting use, that is, its use of bringing people to the Gospel. He did not embrace the third use of the Law, its normative role in guiding the ethics of the believer. Calvin embraced all three uses. They are united in the belief that the Law prepares the sinner for the Gospel. Promoters of the idea that Luther and Calvin crafted their doctrines of penal atonement as a result of the influence of the punitive and compensatory judicial revolution of their time simply fail to recognize that these theologians were not prone to such trivial enculturations, and that their focus was on the law of God especially in the letters of Paul to the Galatians and the Romans, and on what they observed in Holy Scripture regarding the atonement. What really drove Luther in the expression of a penal concept of the atonement was a forensic definition of justification, and evidences from the New Testament of just such a conception. The fourth reason relates to the seriousness of sin in light of God’s law and his response to its violation in just judgment. In a context in which the selling of indulgences trivialized personal sin, Luther recovers through Augustine a depth view of human sin in its guilt and its rendering the human person unable to contribute to her own salvation. Hamartiology is a key factor in the recovery of justification by faith alone, and therefore in penal

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substitutionary atonement. It is thus one of the chief distinguishing aspects of Reformed theology. It helps to explain why other traditions do not acknowledge the need for a penal substitution, one that does not just accrue merit through Christ’s representative obedience but entails Christ’s enduring of the judgment of God according to his inviolable law. The fifth reason, which undergirds all four, is simply that Luther (and Calvin) looked to the holy Scriptures as their final source of authority in these matters. Sola Scriptura was their guiding principle, and while this does not mean that they neglected the tradition or ecclesial interpretation (it was not nuda scriptura), their final court of appeal was the serious exegesis of perspicuous properly interpreted Scripture. Luther’s love for exposition of Holy Scripture marks his life, and of Calvin, this is even more so the case, as is evidenced by his many commentaries and by the fact that his Institutes are “a forest of biblical citations.” 72 Another reason may be added. This has to do with Luther’s view of divine revelation and hiddenness, that is, the revelation of God in his hiddenness in revelation through the cross. This enabled him to find a principal place for the dereliction and suffering within the Godhead within his theology of the cross, over against the assumptions of the “theology of glory.” As Dennis Ngien has written, “Because the theologian of glory expects God to be revealed in glory, majesty and strength, he deduces that God cannot be present in the cross of Christ. He rejects the scene of dereliction on the cross as the self-revelation of God.” 73 By contrast, Luther writes that “it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.” 74 The crucial center of Luther’s theology of the cross, which in turn influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is presented succinctly by Alister McGrath: The Christian is forced, by the very existence of the crucified Christ, to make a momentous decision. Either he will seek God elsewhere, or he will make the cross itself the foundation and criterion of his thought about God. The “crucified God”—to use Luther’s daring phrase—is not merely the foundation of the Christian faith, but is also the key to a proper understanding of the nature of God. 75

McGrath goes on to point out that “a fundamental contention of the theologia crucis is not merely that God is known through suffering . . . but that God chooses to be known through suffering.” 76 In other words, it is exactly in the concealment of suffering, where God appears to be absent, that he, in fact, chooses to make himself known. This is the hiddenness of God in revelation. 77 God is, through the cross, seen to be both Deus crucifixus and Deus absconditus. Robert Fennell, in seeking to clarify what Deus absconditus actually entails in Luther’s theology, has suggested that it has three dimensions: first, God’s hiddenness due to human alienation, ontologically, moral-

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ly, and epistemologically; second, God’s self-concealment as an accommodation to human frailty; and third, God’s will to “remain eternally unrevealed in some measure.” 78 McGrath offers a simpler scheme, indicating two main senses: “Deus absconditus [as] the God who is hidden in revelation,” and as “the God who is hidden behind revelation.” 79 He also believes that it is the first which pertains to Luther, and that there is little in common between the two. Expressing this more fully, for Luther, the “revelation of God in the cross lies abscondita sub contrario, so that God’s strength is revealed under apparent weakness, and his wisdom under great folly.” Thus, notes McGrath, “it must be appreciated that this understanding of the ‘hiddenness’ of divine revelation means that Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus are identical.” Importantly, therefore, God’s revelation through and in his suffering was seen by Luther to be active on God’s part, and is the sole means of salvation to which the human could add no merit. It was perceived and appropriated by faith: “In the single event of revelation, the eye of faith discerns the Deus revelatus, where sense-perception can only find the Deus absconditus.” 80 Even if a little credence is given to the other meaning of Deus absconditus, that of the veiling of the totality of who God is, there remains an element of transcendent mystery in the suffering and abandonment of the cross for Luther. He receives the salvific revelation by faith, and even as he seeks understanding, knows that it will always be limited. NOTES 1. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin, 25 (1974), 3 (3–45). 2. F. W. Camfield, “The Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonement,” SJT (1948), 282ff. Packer explains that Camfield is referring to Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching. Packer comments that “Taylor, while allowing that Paul ‘in particular, is within a hair’s breadth of substitution’ (p. 288), and that ‘a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x. 45, Romans vi. 10f., 2 Corinthians v. 14., 21, Galatians iii. 13, and 1 Timothy ii. 5f., is more difficult to dislodge than many. New Testament students (p. 289), reject substitution as implying a redemption ‘wrought entirely outside of, and apart from, ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits’ (p. 125).” Cited in J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin, 25 (1974), 18. 3. Green and Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 29. 4. Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitution: A Response to Recent Criticisms,” in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/1 (March 2007) 71 (71–86). 5. Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitution,” 71. 6. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 7. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 8. Garry J. Williams, “A Critical Exposition of Hugo Grotius’s Doctrine of the Atonement in De Satisfactione Christi” (D.Phil. thesis, Faculty of Social Studies, University of Oxford, 1999), 70. See also Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitution: A Response to Recent Criticisms,” in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/1 (March 2007) 71–86, which engages with critiques of penal substitution by pastor Steve Chalke, and biblical scholar, Joel Green.

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See also Michael J. Vlach, “Penal Substitution in Church History,” in The Masters Seminary Journal 20/2 (Fall 2009), 199–214. 9. Garry J. Williams, “A Critical Exposition of Hugo Grotius’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” 67. 10. See Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitutionary Atonement in the Church Fathers,” Evangelical Quarterly 83.3 (2011), 195–216. Here Williams responds to the critique of Derek Flood, “Substitutionary Atonement and the Church Fathers: A Reply to the Authors of Pierced for Our Transgressions,” Evangelical Quarterly, 82.2 (2010), 142–159, who is responding to Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2007), chapter 5, 161–204, which is based largely on Williams’s doctoral thesis. 11. Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitutionary Atonement in the Church Fathers,” 195. Williams overcomes objections raised by Flood that “satisfaction” must be mentioned and that “only when the purpose of substitution is the satisfaction of God’s retributive justice via penalty can an author be said to endorse penal substitution as it is understood in Reformed theology.” This seems to be an anachronistic analsyis on the part of Flood. 12. Even J. I. Packer does not claim patristic accounts of penal substitution. See J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin, 25 (1974), 3 (3–45). 13. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 95, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, 10 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 1:247. 14. Eusebius, Demonstratio Evangelica, x. 1; BEPES, 28:55; The Proof of the Gospel, ed. and trans. by W. J. Ferrar, 2 vols (London: SPCK; New York: Macmillan, 1920), 2:195. 15. Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitutionary Atonement in the Church Fathers,” Evangelical Quarterly 83.3 (2011), 215. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300–368) expressed similar sentiments. Hilary, Homilies on the Psalms 13, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF), Series 2, ed. Philip Schaff, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976) 9:246. 16. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 34. 17. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 35. 18. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 49. 19. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 51. 20. Athanasius, Four Discourses against the Arians, NPNF, 4:341. 21. Athanasius, Four Discourses against the Arians, NPNF, 4:374. See also Athanasius’s statement, “He also carried up our sins to the Tree.” Athanasius, Letter to Maximus, NPNF 2:4:578, though this may indicate satisfaction as much as substitution. 22. Athanasius, Ad Epictetum, NPNF, 4:573. For much more on interpretation of Athanasius on the atonement, see Garry J. Williams, “Penal Substitutionary Atonement in the Church Fathers,” Evangelical Quarterly 83.3 (2011), 203–210. 23. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 3–4. 24. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2018), 101–126. 25. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2018), 102. 26. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 102. 27. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 101. 28. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 102. 29. In footnote 4, 103, Farrow quotes Sarah Coakley in her suggestion in “Sin and Desire in Analytic Theology: A Return to Genesis 3” (Journal of Analytic Theology 5) that failures of justice are rooted in disordered desire for good things, and then clarifies that for Anselm, the original disorder as introduced by the devil lies in the distortion of the highest possible desire which is to be like God. 30. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 103. 31. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 105. 32. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 105. 33. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 105–106.

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34. In a passage in ST, Aquinas speaks of how Christ “properly atones” first through the “exceeding charity from which He suffered”; then secondly, “on account of the dignity of His life which He laid down in atonement, for it was the life of the one who was God and man.” To this point, Aquinas sounds like Anselm. But then he adds, “thirdly, on account of the extent of the Passion, and the greatness of the grief endured, as stated above.” Thomas Aquinas, ST 3.48.2. That which was “”stated above” may be found at ST, 3.46.6. “the magnitude of the pain of Christ’s suffering can be reckoned by this, that the pain and sorrow were accepted voluntarily, to the end of man’s deliverance from sin; and consequently He embraced the amount of pain proportionate to the magnitude of the fruit which resulted therefrom.” 35. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. 36. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. In footnote 17 on this page, Farrow indicates that Romans 8:32 is a key text for Aquinas in this regard. It affirms that God “delivered Him up for us all.” Aquinas argues that this “delivering up” is evident first from “God’s eternal will” by which “He preordained Christ’s Passion for the deliverance of the human race, according to the words of Isaias” (53:6, 10 . . . “and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . . Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.” [NRSV]), and second, from “the infusion of charity” by which God inspired the Son with the will to suffer for us (presumably referencing Isa. 53:10b . . . “When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.” [NRSV]) and third, by God’s “not shielding Him from the Passion, but abandoning Him to his persecutors.” ST 1.47.3. Farrow comments that this all sounds Anselmian until Aquinas states that the goodness of God here “shines forth, since by no penalty endured could man pay Him enough satisfaction.” Here the elision becomes clear. 37. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. 38. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. 39. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. 40. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 107. 41. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 108. 42. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 111. 43. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 111. Here Farrow reflects Cur Deus Homo 1.10. 44. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 109. 45. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 110. 46. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 110. 47. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 110. 48. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 111. 49. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 111, reflecting Cur Deus Homo, 1.10. 50. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 112. This Barth states in CD IV/1, 253. Yet Barth asserts elsewhere (IV/1, 175, cf. 165, 185, 203, 215ff.) that Jesus does concede “that the Father is right” in leading him to the cross because in taking sinful human flesh, Jesus “stands under the wrath and judgment of God.” 51. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 112. Para. 603 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church reflects the Anselmian view: “Jesus did not experience reprobation as if he himself had sinned. But in the redeeming love that always united him to the Father, he assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin, to the point that he could say in our name from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Having thus established him in solidarity with us sinners, God ‘did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all,’ so that we might be ‘reconciled to God by the death of his Son.’” Para. 615 does the same: “Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.” 52. Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 246. 53. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 116. 54. The death of Christ is a sacrifice for sins, a propitiation of divine wrath, necessary for the forgiveness of sins, but “we must not suppose that in any of this God was tormenting Jesus . . . God’s wrath against sin is real . . . Heaven is no longer open. The beatific vision is blurred. The Father’s comforting voice is no longer heard. . . . But in all of this he loves the Father with a perfect love. And who would say that the Father loves less well than Jesus? Who

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would dare imply that Jesus, even momentarily, is not the object of his love? Were Jesus, at any point, not to be loved by the Father, either the incarnation would cease to be or God himself would cease to be.” Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 118. Farrow also states that the cross cannot be hell, “because God, in turning away from man . . . is still, in the person of Jesus turned toward him” (117). For Farrow, as for Anselm, the offering up of Jesus does not so much exhaust the “penalties that sin under judgment brings but rather” it acts “by meriting a stay of judgment and deliverance from sin’s deserts” (117). 55. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 120–121. 56. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 120–121. 57. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 120–121. 58. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 121. 59. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 127. 60. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations, 121. 61. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 17. 62. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, (SCM, London, 1968), 268, 259. 63. See R. E. Davies, “Christ in our Place—the Contribution of the Prepositions,” Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970), 72ff. 64. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 17. 65. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 63–64. 66. Martin Luther, Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe. 120 vols. (LW). Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–1929 26, 280. This is cited in Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 70. 67. See Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds. Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). 68. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 71. 69. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 76. 70. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 76. 71. See Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 150. 72. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 76. 73. Dennis Ngien, The suffering of God according to Martin Luther’s theologia crucis (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), 51. 74. Luther, “Disputation,” Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings. Timothy F. Lull, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 43–44. 75. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 1. 76. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 214. Emphasis original. 77. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 206. 78. Robert C. Fennell, “Deus absconditus: Luther and the Hiddenness of God” Touchstone 33, no. 2 (June 2017), ATLA Religion Database. I acknowledge here also the work of Gloria Chung in her essay “Luther’s Deus Absconditus: The Hiddenness of God in the Work of Martin Luther,” in Theology 1 at Regent College, December 2018. 79. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 220–221. 80. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 165.

Chapter Twelve

Historico-Theological Models Proponents of the Penal Substitution Model

Having perused the origins of the penal substitutionary model, we begin our survey of its recent thoughtful proponents, in the form of suggestive vignettes, while beginning to address the questions as to whether penal substitution may be considered as a candidate for the most core and crucial model upon which all others are ultimately dependent (this will reach its culmination in chapter 13). We will then, in chapter 14, assess the undergirding doctrine of participation for this model of penal substitution, and indeed, for all the models as they intersect with the substitutionary model. RECENT AND CURRENT PROPONENTS A full survey of nuanced accounts of the penal substitution model within serious orthodox scholarship is not possible, but the salient features of this account will be presented by highlighting the work of selection of its proponents. John Stott (1921–2011) Stott’s account of penal substitution is worthy of note. His academic theological context was not much different to ours: it was largely not pro-penal substitution. In his introduction in The Cross of Christ, he speaks of the then noted Methodist New Testament scholar, Vincent Taylor, who having undertaken “comprehensive scholarship” of the atonement in the New Testament, exemplified in his three books, Jesus and His Sacrifice (1937), The Atonement in the New Testament Teaching (1940) and Forgiveness and Reconciliation (1946), employed “many adjectives to describe the death of Christ such 229

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as ‘vicarious,’ ‘redemptive,’ ‘expiatory,’ ‘sacrificial,’ and especially ‘representative.’” But, says Stott, “He cannot bring himself to call it substitutionary.” 1 What Taylor could affirm was the Christ’s work was “accomplished on our behalf but not in our stead.” 2 Stott comments, however, on the “clearly uneasy” manner in which Taylor made these notions: “Their vehemence leaves us unprepared for the concessions which he later feels obliged to make.” 3 In this regard, Taylor wrote, “the most striking feature of the New Testament teaching concerning the representative work of Christ, 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.” 4 Stott notes that Taylor even confesses on behalf of his fellow New Testament theologians that “too often we are content to deny substitution without replacing it,” and that “we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess.” 5 This leads Stott to declare his intent in writing the Cross of Christ: “What, however, I shall try to show in this book, is that the biblical doctrine of atonement is substitution rate from beginning to end,” assuring us that “what Taylor shrank from is not the doctrine itself, but the crudities of thought and expression of which the advocates of substitution have not infrequently been guilty.” 6 Stott embraces the satisfaction model, but only that which entails the satisfaction of God himself. In the conflict between the majesty of a holy God and the gravity of sin, God must “satisfy himself ” in the offering of forgiveness. That is, “he cannot contradict himself, but must act in a way that expresses his perfect character of holy love.” How could this be accomplished? Stott’s answer is “that in order to satisfy himself he substituted himself in Christ for us,” in a manner that may be called “‘self-satisfaction by self-substitution’ as the essence of the cross.” 7 Of the consequences of the cross, Stott speaks of three spheres: the salvation of sinners, the revelation of God, and the conquest of evil. With respect to the first, Stott looks at four New Testament words that describe what salvation means, propitiation, redemption, justification, and reconciliation. We will investigate his treatment of propitiation in some detail shortly. Crucially, however, Stott is emphatic, that substitution is not another image in this category; “it is the reality that lies behind them all.” God’s love and justice are both “fully and finally revealed by exercising them in the cross.” And, significantly, Stott adds, “When substitution is denied, God’s self-disclosure is obscured, but when it is affirmed, his glory shines forth brightly.” 8 The revelation of God’s holy love, Stott’s second designation for the consequences of the cross, follows from this objective achievement of salvation through the cross, and the latter is also the basis for the conquest of evil, the Christus Victor. 9 This provides a precedent for our contention that penal substitution should have a much higher priority among the models than is

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held in contemporary scholarship. What our project offers though, is an undergirding mechanism beneath all of the models, that of participation. One of Stott’s most important contributions to the defense of penal substitution was in helping to overcome what is the most common and most deeply held objection, which is an aversion to the wrath of God and therefore an aversion to the notion that propitiation might mean aversion of the wrath of God as our representative substitute. This is sometimes what guides exegetical and hermeneutical detours in texts in which this dynamic is clearly at work. I fear that modern biblical scholarship and theologians of a nonviolent atonement, for example, have crafted a God in our own modern (postmodern) image who bears no resemblance to the holy God of the Bible, Yahweh, the triune God self-revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and Jesus the Pantocrator and Judge, the One to whom all judgment has been committed (John 5). For the revelation of the wrath of God is manifestly present everywhere in divine revelation, in Old and New Testaments. Rather than being something outside of the goodness of God, Old Testament scholar, Iain Provan, comments that, “Biblically: the wrath of God is GOOD, and the great hope for those who suffer injustice and violence.” 10 For example, on this day in which I am writing this section, I have in my daily Scripture readings read of the wrath of God in each section of the Bible: in the prophets, we read Ezekiel’s stunningly raw judgment sermon in chapter 7, “The end is now upon you and I will unleash my anger against you” (v. 3); in the epistles we read in Revelation 3:1–7 of the roving and searching eye of the post-cross, risen and ascended Christ exposing the inauthentic spirituality and unfulfilled intentions of the people of God in Sardis, and threatening their existence as a church if they failed to repent; and in my Psalm for the day, 38, I heard David’s fear that he might be rebuked in anger or disciplined by the wrath of God. Of course, each passage has a context. Psalm 38 is confessional and expressed in a period where the chastening of God is at work in the psalmist’s life. Professions of love for God far outweigh those of fear of God in the Psalms, and the love of God is hard to distinguish in the poetic literature of the Bible for the “fear of the LORD.” But wrath is nevertheless a reality acknowledged by the covenantal community of God. The prophecy of Ezekiel comes after centuries of the pleading of God for his people to return to him, to do away with their idolatry, and to keep the sabbath. On any occasion of such repentance, Yahweh poured out the ever-ready-to-be-poured-out, abundant mercy. This is his settled disposition toward his people. In light of the complete biblical revelation we may be assured that the design and desire of God are “for humanity.” Judgment is his strange work (Isa. 28:21), love is what defines him (1 John 4:16). He loves in freedom. But to excise the judgment and wrath of God from his character is to reduce him to become a projection of our own psyches, just as Freud indicated. It is to make him a projection of a sentimental father with no

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backbone, incapable of outrage when his children are abused or lost to illness and death. The theme of the wrath of God is not a subsidiary one in both Testaments, and we cannot ignore it or be embarrassed by it. But nor is it the final answer. Psalm 30:5 expresses the relative weightings of love and wrath in God: “For his anger lasts only a moment; but His favor lasts a life-time.” As Bruce Hindmarsh has expressed, “Love is essential to God’s character in a way that wrath is not. Love endures forever, and anger is more limited. So there can be no Manichaean God. But still, God as holy warrior and as judge, Christ as Pantocrator—these themes cannot be ignored.” 11 In fact, I am siding with those New Testament scholars who say that “propitiation,” or “mercy seat” (Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2), does indeed suggest that at the cross, God’s wrath is absorbed and consumed by his mercy, because it is hard to imagine that the wrath of God, given its prominence in the biblical text, could fail to be a factor in whatever goes on in the terrible physical sufferings and the more terrible mysterious spiritual sufferings of the cross. The Son, who is both Judge and the Judged, both metes out wrath and absorbs it in his divine-human self. Mysteriously, but manifestly! Our task is not to reduce God to what we want him to be, but to humbly respond to divine revelation of wrath and grace, and contemplate the mystery. This is the “elephant in the room” of atonement theology. It is avoidance of this reality that shapes so much opinion in atonement theology. Voicing what I believe in this regard makes me sound like a relic or an uncritical Edwardsian scholar, but stick to my guns I must! One wonders why, culturally speaking, there is such an aversion to themes of wrath, conscience, judgment, and propitiation in our time. Is it in fact in reaction to an era in human history where these themes were overly prominent? Edwards’s sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and the church’s consciousness of sin and judgment and atonement among the people of his day has been understood by providing “a deep context for their understanding of atonement, judgement and conscience in eighteenth-century law.” 12 Hindmarsh has spoken of the possibility that “there was an exaggerated emphasis on sin, guilt, fear and punishment in Western culture since the middle ages.” 13 In a Liverpool lecture given in 2008, he states, The notion that Western Europe in the medieval and early modern period can be characterized as a “guilt culture” has been argued in several academic disciplines. Jean Delumeau is a French historian of mentalité who wrote a book entitled, Sin and Fear, 14 that takes 677 pages to argue that a culture of guilt emerged in western Europe during the 13th to the 18th centuries, characterized by “a pathological anguish before God’s judgment, an escalation of doubts, a rumination on sin . . . and a fixation on death. Hence,” he says, “the diagnosis of a collective guilt complex.” 15

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However, Hindmarsh hastens to add that though he is “willing to go part way here to concede the possibility that Western Christendom became a little unbalanced in its focus on sin, fear, guilt, penitence, the mass, etc.” He “would stop far, far short of historicizing this away.” To the contrary, he writes that “the traditional four last things of death, judgment, heaven, and hell still seem to me to be an essential part of the gospel, and, moreover, the story of the Western Christian conscience formed under these conditions is one of the religious ‘sources of the self.’ The modern or postmodern critic saws off the plank they are standing on to ignore this.” 16 If it is indeed the case that five centuries of juridically focused and guiltdriven society influenced theology and atonement theology, without doubt the pendulum has swung well over to the opposite side in society and now in church theologies. Cultureless interpretation does not exist, yet it is possible surely to arrive at interpretations of the text on the wrath of God and its relation to the atonement guided by the Spirit, and guided by the church’s scholarly tradition over the centuries until today. A nonviolent atonement or a wrathless atonement is well outside of the tradition. A well-nuanced understanding of wrath, and of Christ’s propitiation of it lie well within it. On this matter of articulating a theology of the atonement in which wrath and penal substitution, including by propitiation, are not neglected, the work of John Stott is still unsurpassed. 17 The Cross of Christ containing sixty references to “wrath,” does not avoid the subject and its place in the making of atonement. Stott masterfully debunks a number of fallacies in this area, such as the notion that the God of wrath belongs to the Old Testament, while the God of the New Testament is love; or that God’s wrath is merely an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe, not the personal attitude of God toward humanity. The five metaphors from the Bible he uses to illustrate the fact that God’s holiness cannot coexist with human sin 18 are a particularly helpful corrective for an academy which is embarrassed by a God who has wrath and expresses it. However, anticipating the concern that this may justify inappropriate expressions of human wrath, or anticipating the fear and revulsion of abused people to fits of uncontrolled anger, Stott speaks of clear distinctions between divine and human anger. Human wrath is not to be denied or repressed, on the one hand, for we are image bearers even in this regard, and these tendencies can lead to depression, anxiety, or a failure to claim one’s personhood and adulthood. However, in our fallenness we do not process anger well, having a tendency to repress it to our own detriment, or to express it in rash and sinful ways, rather than to experience and then confess it, where appropriate. The expressions of God’s wrath, by contrast, are his settled and just response to sin. C. E. B. Cranfield famously said that God’s orgê is “no nightmare of an indiscriminate, uncontrolled, irrational fury, but the wrath of the holy and merciful God

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called forth by, and directed against, men’s asebeia (ungodliness) and adikia (unrighteousness).” 19 The chapter, “The Self-Substitution of God,” 20 in Stott’s Cross of Christ, acknowledges the dynamic of wrath in what transpires on the cross. 21 Stott is comfortable to speak of the fact that Jesus “bore the wrath of God.” 22 However, this is carefully nuanced. Stott censures the idea of speaking of “God punishing Jesus, or of Jesus persuading God,” as well as of the conceiving of Jesus on the cross as merely man, or only as God, rather than as the Chalecedonian God-Man, who is eternally in Trinitarian relation with the Father. 23 Stott affirms that “God in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man . . . was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them.” 24 On the question of whether propitiation or expiation is accomplished by the cross, Stott opts for both, but makes a case for the rendering of the hilaskomai word group by “propitiation” 25 and offers a nuanced version of what transpires in the event of the cross in this regard. It is one thing to say that propitiation is the correct translation, it is another to portray what this means, especially given the pagan background of appeasing angry and capricious gods. He is insistent that a truly biblical doctrine of propitiation must run counter to pagan ideas of this concept at “three crucial points, relating to why a propitiation, who made it, and what it was.” 26 The why question is answered by the fact that sin arouses the wrath of God, but Stott assures us “there is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the holy God,” for he is “never irascible, malicious, spiteful or vindictive.” He is predictable in that it is “evil and evil alone,” that provokes his wrath, a wrath defined as “unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms.” 27 On the question who makes propitiation, contrary to pagan contexts in which humans seek to avert the divine anger of offended deities by offering sacrifices, in the biblical notion of propitiation, humans are incapable of doing anything to placate divine wrath, and so the initiative is solely God’s and the whole event from beginning to end is enacted by God. It is not even that Christ by his sacrifice has prevailed on God to pardon us. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 3:18–19), and God was in Christ propitiating his own wrath. As Romans 3:25 indicates, God presented (“put forward”) Christ as the propitiatory sacrifice. Verse 1 John 4:10 informs us that it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for us: “God’s love is the source, not the consequence of the atonement.” 28 Stott notes that even in the Old Testament the sacrifices “did not make God gracious, but they were provided by a gracious God.” 29 Similarly, P. T. Forsyth quoted here by Stott, pithily comments that “The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace.” 30 As Stott himself confirms,

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God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us. If it is God’s wrath which needed to be propitiated, it is God’s love which did the propitiating. If it may be said that the propitiation “changed” God, or that by it he changed himself, let us be clear he did not change from wrath to love, or from enmity to grace, since his character is unchanging. What the propitiation changed was his dealings with us. 31

Stott looks to P. T. Forsyth again for support: “The distinction I ask you to observe, is between a change of feeling and a change of treatment. . . . God’s feeling toward us never needed to be changed. But God’s treatment of us, God’s practical relation to us—that had to change.” 32 On the question of the nature of the sacrifice, after clarifying that it was not a thing but a person, Stott offers a profoundly Trinitarian answer: “and the person God offered is not somebody else, whether a human angel or even his Son considered as somebody distinct from or external to himself. No, he offered himself. In giving his Son, he was giving himself.” 33 At this point Stott invokes the aid of Karl Barth for the expression of these Trinitarian realities of the cross. Barth repeatedly emphasized that the sacrifice, “was the Son of God, i.e. God himself.” By way of example, Barth states, “the fact that it was God’s Son, that it was God himself, who took our place on Golgotha and thereby freed us from the divine anger and judgement, reveals first the full implications of the wrath of God, of his condemning and punishing justice.” He continues, “because it was the Son of God, i.e. God himself, who took our place on Good Friday, the substitution could be factual and procure our reconciliation with the righteous God. . . . Only God, our Lord and Creator, could stand surety for us, could take our place, could suffer eternal death in our stead as the consequence of our sin in such a way that it was finally suffered and overcome.” 34 This was an expression not only of God’s holiness and justice, but of “the perfections of the divine loving,” indeed of God’s “holy love.” Stott sums up his apologia for propitiation, in particular, by affirming that “God himself is at the heart of our answer to all three questions about the divine propitiation.” It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins. Thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us. There is no crudity here to evoke our ridicule, only the profundity of holy love to evoke our worship. 35

Stott emphasizes that his defense of the semantic range of hilasterion as inclusive of propitiation, does not exclude the nuance also of expiation. He cites New

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Testament scholar F. Büchsel who wrote that “hilasmos . . . is the action in which God is propitiated and sin expiated.” 36 David Wells elaborates, In Pauline thought, man is alienated from God by sin and God is alienated from man by wrath. It is in the substitutionary death of Christ that sin is overcome and wrath averted, so that God can look on man without displeasure and man can look on God without fear. Sin is expiated and God is propitiated. 37

But, to follow Stott's line of reasoning, with occasional personal comment, if our understanding of propitiation includes the actuality that Jesus as the Son of God within the Holy Trinity truly endures and absorbs and averts the wrath of God, what does Christ endure, and what does this mean for the nature of the Trinity? That is, the reality remains that God was in Christ reconciling the world, the whole indivisible Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was (were) present at the cross, and yet there was an unavoidable assigning of the weight of wrath upon the Son conjoined with humanity for humanity’s sake, according to the Trinitarian doctrine of appropriations. He is, as Barth has said, both Judge as God and the Judged, as Man. What transpired is mysterious and deep. It invites deep contemplation. Yet it is also important to declare what did not and could not transpire. The Trinity could not break up. C. E. B. Cranfield has expressed these tensions well, when he emphasized both that Jesus experienced “not merely a felt, but a real, abandonment of by his Father” and “the paradox that, while his God-forsakenness was actually real, the unity of the blessed Trinity was even then unbroken.” 38 These dual realities express precisely why the doctrine of a triune God is a necessity if atonement was actually worked at the cross and if it makes any sense at all. Indivisibility of the persons in essence and in economy, and appropriation of economic roles is in evidence at the cross. Jonathan Edwards’s desire to prove the Trinity from first principles rather than having to employ it to account for the Trinity, is all very well, but aside from any epistemological issues, the atonement in which God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, is the most needed and profound revelation of the Trinity. It facilitates both propitiation in the Son and propitiation set forth by God. But even given that the Trinity cannot break up, ontologically speaking, what transpired within the inner being of the Son? Is this where one draws the veil? It is certainly beyond our human capacity to fully fathom. The hymn-writer seems to have grasped the unfathomable depth of this when he pleads, “Oh, make me understand it, help me to take it in, what it meant for Thee, the Holy One, to bear away my sin.” 39 The cry of dereliction on the cross, a direct quotation of Psalm 22:1, along with other lament passages in various Psalms (69, 102) may offer a little insight into that. John Calvin was explicit about the necessity of the spiritual aspect of the sufferings of the cross for Jesus: “If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. . . . Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been

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the Redeemer of bodies alone.” As a result, “he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man.” 40 Stott therefore suggests that “an actual and dreadful separation took place between the Father and the Son; it was due to our sins and their just reward; and Jesus expressed this horror of great darkness, this God-forsakenness, by quoting the only verse of Scripture which accurately described it, and which he had perfectly fulfilled, namely, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’” 41 While insisting this does not mean that the Trinity broke up, Stott’s strong averral of “and actual and dreadful separation,” does invite closer examination. Stott, in context here, contrasts the cry of dereliction with Jesus’s statement about his status prior to the cross in John 16:32, “You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” He claims that prior to the cross this was true, but on the cross the cry of abandonment implies some form of separation between the Father and the Son. 42 As indicated earlier, it is important to observe biblical language closely, and to notice that the so-called cry of dereliction is not addressed to the Father of the eternal Son who is always in the heart of the Father (John 1:18), but to the God before whom the Man Jesus, who is both Judge and the Judged, hung, bearing the wrath of God. John 16 may alternatively be understood to reinforce what John says not only in 1:18 but in other Johannine sayings, that he is always in the Father, always doing what he sees the Father doing. Though in general agreement with Stott’s great treatment of the atonement, I am uncomfortable following Stott in this regard. Separation is too strong. Perhaps a voluntary and brief “estrangement” or “relational perturbation,” may do justice to what transpires. Somehow, the Godhead is present and makes space for a fallen, rebellious humanity assumed by the Son’s participation in humanity, his anhypostatic identification with humanity’s sin and guilt. Paradoxically he bears God’s own wrath, which includes his own wrath; he endures relational estrangement as a man for humanity, before a holy God. Jada Twedt Strabbing Strabbing has recently offered a philosophical defense of penal substitution by putting it together with the participatory model. 43 She critiques a participatory model (Bayne and Restall) that is not wedded to another model that does require the death and resurrection of Jesus. She couples the participatory model with penal substitution to overcome this deficit in the participation model and in order to overcome the effects of sin in their totality—as deontological, ontological and relational (following the Bayne and Restall classification). The deontological aspect is remedied by penal substitution which involves physical death on a tree as an expression of bearing the curse of the law. It brings about a “non-alienated status with God, even when sin is

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conceived of as an ontological and relational problem.” 44 Strabbing’s detailed philosophical argument seeks to overcome the moral objection sometimes raised with regard to penal substitution that it is morally wrong to have an innocent person take the punishment of the guilty. She shows convincingly to my mind that this does not succeed in the case of the atonement, which is one of “the rare instances in which penal substitution is permissible.” 45 In sum, she argues that penal substitution is possible when: 1) The offender cannot bear the punishment; 2) a substitute can and is willing; 3) there is no viable alternative to the offender taking the punishment but penal substitution; and 4) the substitute’s taking the punishment enables the offender to be restored to the status that he would have had were it not for his wrongdoing. 46

She also argues that “3) holds in the case of the atonement because, due to the expressive function of punishment God cannot let us off the hook or substitute a less severe punishment that we can bear without undermining His moral goodness and authority, at least to some extent.” 47 Christ’s taking our punishment is thus the only way for us to be transformed morally. Strabbing also maintains that her appeal to the “expressive function of punishment” 48 rather than the retributive function, makes penal substitution at its heart about God’s mercy, rather than his wrath. She concludes that “In choosing penal substitution, God mercifully takes amongst His available options the best option for us—the only one that allows us to be morally transformed and restored to a right relationship with Him.” 49 This philosophical account of the justice of penal substitution is a fine contribution by Strabbing. The chief point of difference between Strabbing’s account and our own lies in the use made of participation. For Strabbing it is a model alongside penal substitution in a “hybrid model” which rescues the participation “model” from its failure to need the death of Jesus. In our account, participation is a reality undergirding all the models, inclusive of penal substitution. Participation is a framework, or a “theory” of the atonement, an ontological reality in the incarnation and in the union with Christ that is worked by the Spirit. J. I. Packer Packer’s contribution to normalizing penal substitution for the evangelical church is first to clarify what it means to do theology, or, how to do it (theological method). This includes within it the need for awareness of the mystery of the triune God who is like us, since we are made in his image, and yet very much unlike us, since he is the transcendent God. This evokes humility in the theologian, based not only on the grounds of the ontological remove between God and humanity, but also on the nature of theological language. Packer notes that the “verbal forms” for all the mysteries of God

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have been expressed throughout the history of the church with “remarkable consistency” and that the church has recognized both “their built-in logical strangeness” and the sustenance they provide for the people of God. In particular, he shows that with regard to the mystery of the cross as a sacrifice by which God in Christ has made substitutionary “reparation for human sin,” the abundance of “liturgies, hymns and literature, homiletical, catechetical and apologetic” have expressed the church’s acknowledgment of this mystery, no matter how “uncouth and mythological such talk sounds.” 50 Even in the midst of different accounts of the atonement by which teachers sought to express the mysterious doctrine, and even through periods where very “little actual theologizing about the cross went on,” the hymns and eucharistic liturgies carried the doctrine in all ages of the church. Packer, in fact, expresses the view that the peculiarity of Christian theological language with its paradoxical and “incoherent-sounding features” is in fact consonant with the fact that what is being described arises within and derives from a triune Creator God who is after all, transcendent, a God who while he has revealed himself and chosen to image himself in humanity, “shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact.” 51 As a particular instance of this, Packer makes reference to Calvin’s response to “John’s declaration in I John 4:8–10, ‘God is love. . . . Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’” That unhesitating response was to say that “The word propitiation (. . . Greek, ἱλασμός) has great weight: for God, in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo), at the very time when he loved us, was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christ.” 52 Packer points out that Calvin’s phrase “in a way that cannot be put into words” is “his acknowledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp.” In seeking to overcome the objection to penal substitution that it makes for a dualistic God whose mercy is subject to his justice, Packer points out that “To Calvin, this duality of attitude, love and hostility, which in human psychological terms is inconceivable, is part of God’s moral glory; a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads, but at which John certainly would have nodded his.” 53 Hans Boersma Boersma, while approving penal representation in a qualified way, nevertheless strongly critiques the context and nature of penal substitution arising within scholastic Calvinism. For one thing, the double predestination assumptions of that heritage intrinsically work contrary to the revelation of a God who is hospitable toward his creation and humanity. He believes that this Calvinist tradition “fell prey to juridicizing, individualizing, and dehistoricizing tendencies that led to a view of the cross dominated by a strict

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economy of exchange that obscured the hospitality of the cross.” 54 Boersma’s defense comes rather from within the “new perspective” of Pauline theology. He shows that Paul “viewed Christ’s death on the cross as the divine punishment of exile.” He asserts that given “the exilic curse is a national punishment that takes place at a specific point in history, it is possible to insist on Christ’s representative penal suffering while avoiding some of the drawbacks of the scholastic Reformed tradition.” 55 Fleming Rutledge In considering this subject matter, I wish to direct some attention to Fleming Rutledge’s work, Crucifixion. 56 The tributes paid to this work from a wide range of academic theologians are glowing. They merit a close study of what is a must read for all students of Scripture interested in the atonement of Jesus (which student wouldn’t be?). It has been spoken of as surpassing John Stott’s The Cross of Christ and Tom Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began. 57 She shows awareness of the fact that the central mystery of the Christian faith has come under severe critique of late, and especially the notion of penal substitution, along with allegations of “cosmic child abuse” referred to above, or supposed contradictions of justice. In conversation with Rutledge, we will sum up our discussion of penal substitution. One of the essential features of Fleming Rutledge’s thesis is that the motif (a term she prefers over the overly analytical term “theory,” as it preserves a sense of mystery) of penal substitution actually cannot be defended if it is unbundled from the other motifs. Her primary defense of a properly nuanced version of penal substitution, however, is that it must be understood in light of the ontological realities of Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity. Rather than offering a summary of this voluminous tome which is the product of a lifetime of preaching the cross and theological reflection, and which includes discussion of all the biblical motifs of the crucifixion (The Passover and Exodus, The Blood Sacrifice, Ransom and Redemption, The Great Assize, The Apocalyptic War: Christus Victor, The Descent Into Hell, Recapitulation), I want to focus on the timely defense offered by Rutledge of penal substitution. I will do this by first highlighting three (among others) dangerous caricatures of penal substitution, and then by offering Rutledge’s nuancing of the doctrine, inserting my own occasional comments, in a manner that may invite further curiosity and study of a theological reality dear to our Reformational and evangelical heritage. Caricatures of penal substitution abound in the church, as we have noted, and they are dangerous and invite critique. One may frequently hear preachers say something on Good Friday like “the Son was punished on the cross by the Father for our sins,” or that “for a brief moment the Father and the Son were separated.” The experience of forsakenness whatever it means, cannot

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imply that God the Holy Trinity broke up on the cross, for this is an impossibility. As noted, it denies a crucial Trinitarian axiom that the persons and the works of the Trinity are undivided and indivisible. The insights which flow from the nature of God as Trinity, which will be shared in brief below, are crucial to a proper understanding of what transpired on the cross when Christ the Man took the place of humanity in a propitiating act that involved not just the Son as the God-Man, but the Father and the Spirit also. The insights of Christology are also crucial, as has been noted. The Man Jesus is judged there for us, in our place, and hence the cry of dereliction. But He is also, as God, the Judge as well as the Judged. Just as Abraham and Isaac “went both of them together” up the mountain of sacrifice, so the Father and the Son through the Spirit are coinherently together on the mountain of Calvary, and in a mysterious manner, the Man who is God, Jesus, through the eternal Spirit (Hebrews 9:14) offers himself and bears our sin and its consequences, in the presence of the Father, the Son as God, and the Spirit. A space is opened up in the life of God for sinful humanity. We must avoid another caricature—that of the cross viewed through the lens of the “theology of glory.” Alister McGrath describes a theologian of glory as one who “observes what is understood,” 58 by trying to discern the invisible things of God by means of an understanding of created things, in effect “seeing the cross through a filter,” whether it is religious, philosophical, or cultural. 59 As McGrath indicates, God does not will to be known either according to his invisible attributes, “virtue, godliness, wisdom, justice, goodness, and so forth,” or through his creation, seeing that “men misused the knowledge of God through works.” 60 Pertinent to our discussion, Dennis Ngien observes that “because the theologian of glory expects God to be revealed in glory, majesty and strength, he deduces that God cannot be present in the cross of Christ. He rejects the scene of dereliction on the cross as the self-revelation of God.” 61 Thus the theology of glory is devoid of salvific power and leads to condemnation. Martin Luther expresses these sentiments well when he stated that “it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.” 62 The evident centrality of the cross in Luther’s theology is, as McGrath has indicated, distinguished from common (mis)understandings of Christianity, because it functions not just as an exemplary instrument of God’s self-revelation, or even as a symbolic focus of the faith, but as an assault upon any human attempt to get to God. 63 McGrath stresses that “a fundamental contention of the theologia crucis is not merely that God is known through suffering (whether that of Christ or of the individual), but that God chooses to be known through suffering.” 64 This is summed up well by Gloria Chung who notes that “it is precisely in the concealment of suffering, where God is apparently absent, that He chooses to make Himself known. This is the hiddenness of God in revelation.” 65

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Another caricature is the crass accounting of each sin for each penalty, that is, it becomes too individualistic. Rutledge’s primary interlocutor in rescuing penal substitution is Karl Barth. She notes that Barth “continues to differentiate his treatment of substitution from the ‘older presentations of the doctrine of atonement’ (IV/1, 273).” Here Barth means the scholastic Reformed approaches which Rutledge affirms “allowed a rigidly schematic concept of penal substitution to become an idée fixe, crowding out all the other biblical models.” 66 It thus denied the richness of the total biblical imagery and focused too much on the theme of punishment. Another caricature of penal substitution is that it is so dependent on forensic imagery that it overpowers the filial reality of the God of love, and denies the “determining apocalyptic perspective” of the New Testament which it is said, is not focused on individuals, but “a tripartite contest involving not only God, and his rebellious creation, but also the actively hostile occupying Powers.” 67 Rutledge counters that the forensic motif is not mutually exclusive with the apocalyptic perspective. The problem, she insists, is when “the forensic is given precedence over other imagery, especially Christus Victor, and is allowed to obscure it.” 68 And, I would argue, the same applies when the forensic is isolated from and given precedence to the filial and the ontological. The telos of atonement is relationship with God, our being adopted as children of God, persons becoming fully human in the last Adam, and participating in the new creation which the atonement has effected. Yet another caricature is the notion that penal substitution is the only model of the atonement. Rutledge, drawing on Barth again states that “Barth has rescued the substitution motif from ‘theory’ and has restored it to us in the form of the biblical story.” 69 How did he do so? One way was that he conjoined it to other motifs. This is exemplified when she cites the following summation of Barth’s essential understanding of substitution: The passion of Jesus Christ is the judgment of God in which the Judge Himself was the judged. And as such it is at its heart and center the victory which has been won for us, in our place, in the battle against sin. By this time it should be clear why it is so important to understand this passion as from the very first the divine action . . . the radical divine action which attacks and destroys at its very root the primary evil in the world; the activity of the second Adam who took the place of the first, who reversed and overthrew the activity of the first in this world, and in so doing brought in a new man, founded a new world and inaugurated a new aeon. 70

The motifs of Christus Victor and of recapitulation are present in this rich and resounding riposte. Now for a brief summation of Rutledge’s nuanced version of penal substitution, which she insists is still valid and crucial to reflecting the biblical story and texts. Most of her points are derived from Barth’s treatment of the atonement in volume IV/1 of his Church Dogmatics and specifically a long

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section called “The Judge Judged in Our Place.” We can consider only a few of these points, and follow this up with some comments summarizing the triune nature and suffering of the God of atoning love. A Narrative Approach Rutledge explains that “For Barth, the entire story of Jesus Christ, from birth to death and resurrection, is atonement.” 71 Christ is for Barth both our representative and our substitute, and these are not two separate motifs. He does this, she contends, as a “true inheritor of the Greek Fathers,” that is, “within the context of the incarnation and the three persons of the Trinity.” She expresses her appreciation of Barth’s description of the atonement in which he “eschews abstractions and focuses on the passion narratives themselves.” Crucially, in other words, the “passion of Christ is an event, and the proper mode of communicating it is narrative.” “We are,” she says, “invited to behold the cross, and to tremble. The Isenheim altarpiece is the illustration, and the cry of dereliction is the sound track.” 72 The Biblical Narrative of Salvation The point here is that for Barth, the story does not begin in Eden, but rather with the doctrine of the Word of God who preceded the first Adam. “In other words,” she states, “the judgement of God is preceded by the grace of God,” just as in Romans, the gospel is proclaimed in 1:1–17 before judgment is pronounced. It is one of “Barth’s great contributions to the Reformed tradition, which has emphasized the wrath of God against sin,” that “throughout the Church Dogmatics, he insists that God’s judgment is entirely enclosed by his mercy” (510). This mitigates the obsession with divine wrath that sometimes characterizes those who take up the cause of penal substitution, and yet it does not deny the reality of divine wrath. It merely says that in Christ it is not the last word. God is pro nobis, for us, in Christ. The Incarnation as the Original Substitution Barth’s “perspective on the cross” is from “within the totality of the incarnation.” 73 In the spirit of the Church Fathers, atonement begins in the incarnation and all that Jesus does in his life and death is vicarious, for he is both the representative Man and the One who stands in our place. Much has already been said on this matter in earlier chapters. God as the Acting Subject This is the crucial matter of agency we have referred to above already. Barth is crystal clear that “God is the acting subject in all that happens through His Son.” 74 For Barth, “Jesus is no less God in the incarnation and on the cross

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than he is in the eternal Godhead,” surmises Rutledge: “God must be seen to be undertaking the atonement himself.” 75 This reinforces what has been stated above. We must never speak of the “separation” of the Father and the Son. “God,” says Paul, “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19, NKJV). This is emphasized in Rutledge’s own words in an earlier section in which she compares the offering up of Isaac by Abraham with the cross event: When Jesus came to the cross to bear the sin of the world in fathomless darkness, there was no substitute for him. He himself was the Lamb. God did not withhold his Son, his only Son. The Son himself became the substitute— for us. But the crucial difference between the Akedah and the cross, finally, is that the Father is not sacrificing the Son. God the Father and God the Son together, with a single will, enacted the eternal purpose of God that the second person of the blessed Trinity would become “once for all” the perfect burnt offering, for us human beings and for our salvation. 76

Now for a few final comments gathering up the strands of Rutledge’s thought on penal substitution. What occurs within the Godhead at the cross, in the hours of abandonment or dereliction, and in the descent into hell, as the creed expresses it, must remain somewhat mysterious. Nevertheless whatever words we do use to describe it must reflect the reality that the Trinity cannot break up, the Godhead cannot be dissolved, and that God is at work in Christ in his reconciling work. This question cannot be separated from the question of the suffering of God. In the hours of dereliction, or in the descent into hell (which is synonymous with the dereliction for some), the capacity of the Son as Man to suffer is unquestioned. But what about Christ’s divine nature, and what about the Father? Is it possible that the Father suffered immediately while the Father suffered mediately? In this vein, with some reservation related to the model of the Trinity he employs, as stated earlier, von Balthasar believes that “by bringing the sins of mankind into the being of the Son, the sins are simultaneously brought into the Trinity, where even as the Father unleashes His wrath against sin onto the Son, the Holy Spirit will unite both of them in the divine love. In other words, the descent is a trinitarian event in that all three Persons experience it, albeit in different ways.” 77 Balthasar believes that Jesus suffers by being abandoned by the Father, while the Father suffers the loss of his Son and “the Holy Spirit connects Father and Son in their reciprocal abandonment.” 78 He suggests also that Christ’s descent into hell “does not indicate a transformation of God’s Trinitarian love into separation, curse, suffering and pain; rather, they are accounted for by the radical character of God’s absolute love and the mystery of God’s Trinitarian life, which allows for great distance within the very life of God.” 79 This is the manifestation of the triune love of God. Barth expresses similar

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sentiments: “God’s love, which manifests itself in Jesus Christ’s identification with sinful humanity to the point of experiencing hell is grounded in the completeness, vitality and abundance of God’s eternal love.” 80 If the descent of Christ into hell is the abandonment, rather than the hours of darkness on the cross, we may well ask what is accomplished by that descent. Some scholars have gone as far as to say that this phrase in the creed ought not to be there, despite its antiquity. J. I. Packer helps to provide context and purpose to this descent. He suggests that by his presence “Jesus made Hades into Paradise, not only for the thief but also those who died trusting Him during His earthly ministry.” 81 Besides making the Hades into Paradise, Packer believes that Jesus also “perfected the spirits of Old Testament believers, bringing them out of the gloom which Sheol had hitherto been for them into this same Paradise experience.” 82 Bethune-Baker indicates that between the death and the resurrection, “Jesus descends into Hades, overcoming the devil, destroying the power of Hell and releasing the Old Testament Saints. And that the purpose of descent is to carry the good news of the fulfilment of the hope of Israel to those who had believed under the old covenant.” 83 A common objection to penal substitution is that it is new in the tradition, having been articulated only at the time of the Reformation. One of the answers to this objection must be that while one does consider antiquity in the tradition to be important, it is not all important. In a situation where the creeds are silent, and where there is uncertainty in the tradition of the scholarship of the Fathers and Schoolmen, surely one must appeal, as orthodox theologians always have, to the Holy Scriptures, as properly interpreted. The generations of theologians who articulated the creeds of the church did not appear to need to write a creed on matters of the atonement and soteriology because the eucharistic liturgies made these realities a given. Even if there had been an ecumenical council or creed on the atonement, surely the church in every generation would still have appealed to Holy Scripture. I recognize that there is a difference of opinion between the Catholic and Protestant ways of viewing the relative authority of the creeds. Karl Barth, representing Protestantism would have said that the creed in the norma normata (the normed norm), whereas the Scriptures are the norma normans (the norming norm). The absence of creedal material on the nature of the atonement invites us even more urgently back to the Scriptures as interpreted in the normal hermeneutical manner that, of course, must include consultation with the church and its scholarly tradition. Adam Johnson (John Walton, Greg Beale, Jon Bryars) One apology for the doctrine of penal substitution has arisen within the extensive biblical metaphor of “temple.” This perspective will serve to locate

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penal substitution within the rich strands of the whole biblical story. We will first describe this metaphor as a central biblical theme, and then consider the atonement in light of it. Jon Bryars, following the lead of Adam Johnson, 84 expresses the possibility that temple “provides a rich and illuminating framework in which to house other atonement metaphors and motifs.” “Indeed,” Bryars argues, “such is the scale of the temple theme, I will argue that it provides a conceptual backdrop on which to build an atonement theory.” 85 This theory is grounded in the doctrine of creation as this has been articulated especially by John Walton’s work on Ancient Near East (“ANE”) cosmology, as well as in the biblical theological approach of G. K. Beale and the theological atonement work of Adam Johnson. The relation between God and creation, the “architectonic center of [one’s] theological vision,” as expressed in the early chapters of Genesis, is the logical point at which to recognize the biblical metaphor of temple. 86 For other ANE communities, the temple was often linked to the origins, 87 the functioning, 88 and the center of the cosmos from which everything was governed. 89 In the case of other cultures, who conceived of a temple-sized microcosm, the Genesis account actually conveys the idea of a “cosmic-sized temple.” 90 There are significant intratextual affirmations in the Old Testament of support of a cosmic temple reading which are suggestive of this significant biblical temple metaphor. 91 G. K. Beale confirms support of a cosmic temple reading of Genesis, concluding that, “viewed together they have a significant collective effect, pointing to Eden as the first temple in garden-like form.” 92 A covenantal and functional ontology, and the significance of the imago Dei as the priestlyroyal center of the Temple further confirm this reading. Thus, as Bryars notes, “equipped with a creator God theology, a cosmic temple cosmology, a priest-king anthropology and a covenantal ontology we are positioned to contemplate the nature of sin within the cosmic temple theme.” He suggests that the “primordial Adam’s response of fear and shame to the God who he had previously communed with, 93 and his disconnection from the tree of life 94 by expulsion from the garden 95 are all reminiscent of Israel’s relationship with the presence of God in the Temple.” 96 Johnson observes God’s response to Israel’s sin: it was to leave (‫)עזב‬, to forsake, or to hide his face. 97 He notes that Israel, and indeed Adam, were not in a neutral position but sat between “the mutually exclusive alternatives [of] God’s saving presence or Israel’s total destruction”. 98 This reflects a hamartiology found in Athanasius, Augustine, Barth, and more recently Milbank. “Despite the presence of the serpent, often interpreted as the source and substance of evil,” Bryars notes, the “privatio boni (privation of the good) sees evil as having no ontological substance.” 99 As Athanasius states, “sin is de-creation,” 100 an inversion of the “divinely ordained ascent of humanity from nothingness to communion with God”. 101 If “the ongoing giftedness of creation is participation with God and participation with God enables the ongoing

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giftedness of creation,” 102 that is, if “being is intrinsically relational, a decision of autonomy is a decision towards non-being.” 103 Thus, for Barth, for example, “Das Nichtige (Nothingness) is . . . being that rejects, neglects, and suppresses the ultimate grace of God.” 104 If the function of the image is abandoned the material is also abandoned to death. 105 Bryars concludes therefore that The original priest-king and subsequent priests and kings of Israel chose autonomy and were thus forsaken by God. We may conclude that eternal life does not consist outside of the eternal function, and reconciliation must simultaneously constitute ontological and relational restoration. 106

Despite this, God persists in his covenant to dwell with creation, and the commission given to Adam in his priestly-kingly role is reinstated to Israel in the form of tabernacle and Temple construction throughout the Old Testament. 107 N. T Wright’s interpretation of the Second-Temple period proposes that the Temple continued to act as the central religious and political symbol of Judaism. 108 Bryars states that the “forgiveness of sins continued to be mediated through the sacrificial system of the priesthood and the Temple.” 109 The coming of Christ is the fulfillment of that Temple, as indicated especially in John 1:14, where John declares that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, an intentional tabernacle allusion. 110 As Stephen Um indicates, the incarnate Son is the new living location of God’s presence on earth, a new living temple. 111 This reflects Athanasius who described Christ as the “topos, the ‘place’ of God’s engagement with creation”. 112 Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the temple of his body continues the theme. This anticipates Jesus’s cry of dereliction when he entered the holy of holies on the cross. Johnson speaks of the abandonment of the Son by the Father, 113 but John Milbank, by contrast, reflects the sentiments of our work more closely when he emphasizes Jesus’s use of the word “God” and not “Father.” He thus confirms that the abandonment is not between Father and Son but between Godhead and manhood, between Creator and creation. 114 What happens to the veil of the Temple and the accompanying seismic activity 115 speaks for Beale to the fact that the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy, speaking of his broken body, corresponds not just to the Temple in Jerusalem but to the entire cosmos. Thus, as Bryars states, “the judgment upon the temple, the dereliction of humanity, and the abandonment of creation were at once experienced in Christ. The forsaken cry is not just an echo of the Psalmist, but of all history. 116 Or more accurately put, all of history is an echo of that forsaken cry.” 117 He adds that this is thankfully, “only half of the story. The torn veil, traditionally interpreted, also symbolises the new access we have been granted into the Holy of Holies and therefore the inauguration of a new temple” in a new creation anticipated in Jesus’s interaction with Nicodemus

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expounded in Paul, and brought to completion in John’s revelatory vision of the garden-city and Temple. This is all “confirmed with Christ’s other saying on the cross; the triumphant tetelestai (‘It is finished’), 118 itself an echo of the completed creative work in Genesis.” 119 This was all expressed long ago by Athanasius who said, “the renewal of creation has been wrought by the selfsame Word who made it in the beginning”. 120 Thomas H. McCall If penal substitution is to have any weight it must account appropriately for the cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Tom McCall has probed the meaning of this cry in his work, and we will observe and converse with it also. McCall has wisely pointed out that whether one prefers the social Trinitarian (in which the irreducible identity of the three persons who are three centers of consciousness, one in essence and one in perichoretic communion, is emphasized) or the Latin view of the Trinity (in which the oneness of the Godhead is stressed, and in which persons are more like relations than persons, and indeed are numerically one, and not just “generically of the same nature”), it is not possible for the Trinity to break up. 121 On the Latin view, the Father is not the Father apart from his relation to the Son, and so if this relation is “broken,” there is no Father and there is no God. And for the social view, it is the perichoretic union that unites and defines the persons-in-relation, and so a rift is impossible. And on all sides, the works of the Trinity are undivided, as we have noted. Richard Bauckham has expressed the difficulty of this theological area with nuance when he states, “It is essential to recognize both that the forsakenness of Jesus is concretely real and also that both Jesus and the Father remain faithful to each other.” 122 As McCall has also shown, the “broken-Trinity” views, whether from Moltmann, 123 or arising within conservative evangelical contexts, are mostly modern and out of touch with the patristic and medieval traditions, and especially the texts of Matthew and Mark which say nothing as to the meaning of the cry. He states also that they fail to note that Psalm 22, being quoted here by Jesus, ends with the Savior being heard, and in triumph, answering to the triumphant cries of Jesus as he dies, “Father into your hands I commit my spirit,” and “Finished!” Rikk Watts has commented in this regard, that “while not detracting at all from Jesus’ suffering, it is hard to understand why Mark would work so hard at evoking Ps. 22 if he did not also expect his informed readers to know exactly what was coming next: a startling reversal and deliverance.” 124 Of course it must be said that this does not answer the question of what goes on in the hours of darkness in which the cry is given, which comes before the triumphant utterances. For proponents of some form of abandonment of the Jesus on the cross, the fact that the triumph comes

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before he dies does not contradict the invocation of all of Psalm 22. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that Psalm 22:1 is not the only messianic text to speak of the abandonment of the coming Messiah. Psalm 69, for example, has, according to a long tradition, expressed the words of the derelict One: “I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched, My eyes fail, looking for my God. Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head, many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me. I am forced to restore what I did not steal. You, God, know my folly; my guilt is not hidden from you” (69:3–5). Here we see the same sense of abandonment, not just to his enemies, but from his God (again, not his “Father”), and that vicariously for the sin of others. Jesus, in fact, uses verse 9 of this Psalm selfreferentially (“zeal for your house consumes me,” see John 2:17), so we are on solid ground in our Messianic application here. In another Messianic Psalm known as such by its citations in the New Testament, Psalm 102, the same themes are evident: Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you. Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly. For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. In my distress I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones. I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof. All day long my enemies taunt me; those who rail against me use my name as a curse. For I eat ashes as my food and mingle my drink with tears because of your great wrath, for you have taken me up and thrown me aside. My days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass.

The great Messianic section of deutero-Isaiah also contains an anticipatory text which has fuelled the atonement theology and the affections and music (Handel’s Messiah, for example) of the people of God for centuries. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. . . . Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

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These passages do, I believe, speak in support of this via media view of abandonment which I will outline below. How can one ever enter into or fathom the depths of what the holy Son of God felt in his soul as he becomes the person in the Godhead responsible for bearing sin and sins? Even if it is decidedly not Father against Son, it is the divine-human Son bearing sin in the presence of Father, divine-Son, and Holy Spirit in wrath and grace as human sin is atoned and human nature cleansed. It seems that the classical view of the meaning of cry of dereliction, according to McCall (following Athanasius, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, John of Damascus, Peter Lombard, and Aquinas), is two-fold: first, it is a cry of identification with the humanity Christ represented and its abandonment from God, and second, it is a cry relating to the fact that the Father abandoned the Son to his physical enemies and over to death. God the Father could have saved him from dying but he did not, and the Son submitted to this. And this is good news, because it means that God, Father and Son and Spirit, is for us. It also accentuates the ontological aspect of the atonement. McCall’s discussion of this issue is very helpful. He seeks to avoid extremes. On the one hand, there is the extreme view which says that Jesus did not really suffer at all on the cross and was not abandoned at all. This is a position that entails the ancient heresy of Docetism, which envisaged a Christ who only appeared to be human, but was not truly human. The horrors of the sufferings of Christ on the cross suggest otherwise. We need not “‘safeguard’ God from something that God does not shield himself from.” 125 On the other hand, McCall warns against the approach that states that the Son’s humanity is abandoned during the crucifixion. This would not only fracture the hypostatic union of the two natures of Christ in one person (the Cyrilline and Chalcedonian view of the incarnation), it would be to invoke another ancient heresy, that of Nestorianism. This view is the “two person” view of the incarnation. The eternal person of the Logos was thought to enter into an already extant human person, rather than the One divine person of the Son assuming a human nature. McCall sums up his consideration of the texts, the classical tradition and the modern tradition by affirming three things: (i) the Son was abandoned by the Father, but not in any essentialist or relational or spiritual sense, but by having his Father leave him to die, rather than rescuing him; (ii) Christ’s union with humanity was unbroken throughout his passion and death (and on into his ascension), and as such he identifies with us in our fallenness—McCall expresses here his opinion that Christ did not have a fallen human nature, a comment to which I shall return shortly; and (iii) the Son’s relationship with the Father is unbroken, since the works of the Trinity are undivided. 126 This is a sensible approach on the whole. However, it does leave some questions open. I am not quite so ready to abandon the relational abandonment option. Cranfield, for example, makes the point that “the cry ought to

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be understood in the light of [Mark] xiv.36, II Cor. v. 21, Gal. iii. 13. The burden of the world’s sin, his complete self-identification with sinners, involved not merely a felt, but a real abandonment by his Father.” 127 I have wondered if we should not propose a via media concerning the matter of spiritual suffering and abandonment of the Son on the cross that keeps the relationship intact. By this I mean to propose a relational interaction between the human-divine Son and the Father, and the Spirit, and indeed a relation between the human Son and his own divine nature. That is, to propose a real and voluntary relational absorption of wrath and pain in the Godhead. We do not assume that when two human persons resolve a conflict that they will break up. Of course, this very anthropocentric example seems to create a conflict within the Godhead. However, in defense of this, it is a conflict invited and voluntarily invoked, one actually anticipated in the eternal electing council of God, where the triune God decided to create and then, through Christ, redeem a fallen world. And it is a conflict resolved in such a way that Christ and the Father are glorified (John 12:27–28). If there is no differentiation of persons on the cross, there seems to be no point to Jesus’s conversation with the Father before it in the Garden of Gethsemane. This differentiation permits an interaction in the Trinity in which the three divine persons encounter a sin-bearing human Son and do whatever needs to be done in those awful hours of darkness. Crucially this way of seeing the event of the atonement still admits of the undivided works of the Trinity, alongside that other Trinitarian axiom, the appropriation of economic roles. One that affirms the immediate nature of the sufferings of the Son and the mediated reality of the suffering of the Father, by perichoresis. One that keeps the divine and human natures together but yet allows for proper differentiation of the natures. Thus might it be possible to say that Jesus as a Man endures a temporary relational estrangement and the bearing away of divine wrath, in a manner suggested by Barth’s Judge and the Judged? If Calvin, for example, can distinguish between the human nature of Christ as being now at the right hand of the Father, and his divine nature, in such a way that the communicatio idiomatum between the natures do not include his omnipresence, can we not also propose that there are some things which the human Jesus experiences, which his divine does not? In a sense, talk of the disruption of the hypostatic union is a red herring. The kenotic state of the Son would surely suggest that when he suffers on the cross and dies, his humanity experiences the full force of the abandonment of his God (as opposed to just his Father). Is there therefore within the perichoretic triune being of God going to be some turbulence of interaction, which is not the same as the breaking up of the Trinity? And won’t that, from the human Son’s perspective, cause him to feel like the Father’s face has been turned away, as Calvin suggested? 128 Or that relational space has been opened up within the Trinity for the human-divine Son to bring fallen hu-

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manity into it and to forgive and cleanse it? It is crucial that we envision the whole triune God in this event, as reflected in texts like “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself ” (2 Cor. 5:19), and in accordance with the undivided nature of the being and works of the Trinity. The event I am suggesting would preserve that while allowing for the differentiation of persons and roles as in the axiom of appropriation, and in accordance with the historic social view of the Trinity which affirms that differentiation goes beyond the mere eternal relations, but includes economic distinctions which can be read back into the processions (the Son incarnate assumes a Son incarnandus, for example). The upshot of all this is that it is decidedly not that the Father is wrathful and the Son is all love for us. There is a perichoretic action in which sin is borne by the human Son, the only person of the Trinity to become human, and somehow there is a divine event in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in love and in accordance with their just and holy wrath, deal with the presence and consequence of sin in the cosmos. The matter of the bearing of sin and the purification of sinful human nature (Rom. 8:3) also presses for further discussion as to what transpires on the cross. The two verses, 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:16, which speak of Christ being made a sin offering and bearing the curse of a broken law seems to suggest Christ’s enduring of the penalty of sin. Is this through mere physical death or is there a relational-spiritual component to this suffering? Romans 8:3 speaks also of what Christ does to sinful human nature as an operative principle, on the cross and in resurrection: “God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh.” We have spoken already at length about whether Christ had a sinful nature, while remaining sinless. If we must follow the Church Fathers and Schoolmen concerning what dereliction means, might we not also follow them in regard to this issue. The majority position was that the Son took on a sinful human nature vicariously (anhypostatically) while being enhypostatically a holy person in all his being and doing. What happens on the cross therefore is not only the bearing of sin’s penalty, but the purging of human nature as sinful. The theologians who suggest that Christ took on a sinful human nature vicariously and purified it in life and especially in death, can more readily explain the disturbance and pain of the cross for Christ, immediately, and for the Father, mediately. Theosis is accomplished in the humanity of Christ and this can be participated in for those who are united to Christ by faith. In sum, I am suggesting that the dereliction of Jesus is that experienced within his human consciousness as One who knew no sin, became a sinoffering for us. This does not break up either the hypostatic union, nor the Trinity. One of the confusing aspects of this debate is that the timing of the abandonment needs to be clarified. For some it is his spiritual suffering on

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the cross. For some it is his death and descent into hell (despite the fact that he committed his spirit to the Father and promised the thief he would be with him that day in paradise). If the cry of dereliction is mysterious and stretches our capacity to grasp, the death of a person who is both God and man is no less mysterious. It also presses us to bring a distinction, the kind of distinction I have suggested for the dereliction. That distinction is between the divine and human natures of Christ when Christ dies. Surely we cannot imagine that God dies on the cross? God the Son takes death up into his being and transforms it into life, but it is surely the body of the man who dies, just as it is the man who endured the wrath of the whole triune God? There is no communicatio idiomatum between his divine nature and his human body, just as there is none today with respect to omnipresence as he is seated at the right hand of God. It seems to me, given what Jesus says to the thief (“today you will be with me in paradise”) and to his Father (“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”), that at death, the divine-human inner being of Christ rose to be with the Father perhaps making a visit to Hades en route, and the human body of Christ, just like our human bodies when we die in Christ, went into the ground, that is, the grave, into Hades or Sheol, where there is no human consciousness. Just as one cannot avoid making distinctions without separating the divine and human natures of Christ on the cross, so one must do the same after it. There is one final comment I would like to make regarding the most appropriate model of the Trinity. McCall gives an excellent summary of the differences between the social Trinity and the Latin one, sometimes called the classical one. He shows, as we have said, that neither allows for a Trinity break-up on the cross. So far, so good. What I wish to add is that the social Trinity works much more so than the classical when it comes to understanding what might have transpired between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on the cross. The Latin model which differentiates the persons solely on the grounds of their processions or relations to one another, cannot account for the differentiation between Father and Son. If, as I think is the case, there is a relational disturbance or interaction between Father and Son, there must be irreducible identity of divine persons as well as oneness of divine essence and perichoresis of origins and communion. The Latin model does not allow for this. In fact, I believe even if you take the classical view of the dereliction as the Father’s abandonment of the Son to death, the Latin view of personhood is insufficient. The death of Christ is the place where we see supremely revealed the nature and character of God. I may not follow Moltmann in his conclusions about this, that is his panentheistic statement that the separation in the Godhead is where we learn about God. But, in the spirit of Luther and Barth, I affirm his approach to the cross as the primary revelation (in the hiddenness) of God, and the matter of social versus psychological Trinity is resolved precisely here.

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NOTES 1. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 16. 2. Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching (London: Epworth, 1940), 270. 3. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 16. 4. Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, 288. 5. Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, 289–301. 6. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 16–17. 7. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 329. 8. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 329–330. 9. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 329–330. 10. A personal communication by e-mail, August 11, 2018. Emphasis original. 11. Bruce Hindmarsh, personal communication, August 10, 2018. 12. Bruce Hindmarsh, personal communication, August 10, 2018. 13. Bruce Hindmarsh, personal communication, August 10, 2018. 14. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 15. D. Bruce Hindmarsh, “Early Evangelical Conversion in the Light of Early Evangelical Mission History,” a lecture presented in Liverpool, 2009; The quote from Jean Delumeau is from Sin and Fear, 297. Hindmarsh indicates that this contention is made also “by New Testament critic Krister Stendahl who famously claimed in 1961 that the ‘introspective conscience of the West’ had distorted the understanding of St Paul.” Hindmarsh, “Early Evangelical Conversion,” 4. See Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” in Paul among the Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays, ed. Krister Stendahl (London: SCM Press, 1976), 82–83. 16. Bruce Hindmarsh, personal communication, August 10, 2018. 17. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 20th Anniversary Edn. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 133–164, 200–248. See also Tony Lane, “The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God” in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 138–167. 18. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 110. These are height (God is high above us and our sin), distance (we are far away from God in our sin), light, fire and vomiting. 19. C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, Vol. 1, iii. 20. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 133–164. 21. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 134, 141, 150, 151, 158. 22. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 91, 106, 141, 151, 158. 23. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 149–151, 171. 24. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 156. 25. Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament is cited in support. There Morris states, “Throughout Greek literature, biblical and non-biblical alike, hilasmos means propitiation. We cannot decide that we like another meaning better” (349). This runs counter to the linguistic argument of C. H. Dodd which defended the view that hilasmos be rendered as expiation: see C. H. Dodd, The Bible and the Greeks (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935), 93; Johannine Epistles (London: Harper and Row, 1946), 25–26. Morris’s research, though now dated, has not really been controverted. 26. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 202. 27. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 202. 28. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 203. 29. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 203. 30. P. T. Forsyth, Cruciality of the Cross, 78, cited in John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 203. 31. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 203. 32. P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, 105. 33. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 203. 34. Karl Barth, CD II/1, 398, 403. 35. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 204.

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36. F. Büchsel, “Hilaskomai, Hilasmos” in G. Kittel (ed.) Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 301–318 (314–316), cited in John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 204. 37. David Wells, The Search for Salvation (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1978), 29. 38. C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel according to St Mark: An Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 458–459. 39. K. A. M. Kelly (1869–1942). 40. Calvin, Institutes II, xvi, 10 and 12. 41. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 96. 42. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 96. 43. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 7, Jonathan Kvanvig, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 239–269. 44. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 263. 45. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 268. 46. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 268. 47. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 268. 48. Here Strabbing cites Joel Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in J. Feinberg and J. Coleman, eds. Philosophy of Law, 7th edn. Wadsworth, 2004. Feniberg speaks of “punishment as a conventional device for the expression of condemnation, incorporating negative reactive attitudes . . . and judgments of disapproval.” He speaks of four functions of punishment of which two are relevant with respect to God and the atonement. The first is “authoritative disavowal” and the second is “vindication of the law.” Failure to punish leads to discrediting the justice of the judge, and it devalues the law. See Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 251–252. 49. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution,” 269. 50. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 9–10. Packer adds a footnote to this effect: “Of the church in the patristic period H. E. W. Turner writes: ‘Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience’ (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption, Mowbray, London (1952) 13; cf. chapter V, ‘Christ our Victim’).” Packer offers also a corrective of T. F. Torrance’s sharp critique in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1948) “that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of selfsalvation.” Packer counters employing Robert S. Paul’s comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1961), 37, note 2: “To me he has made his case almost too well, for at the end I am left asking the question, ‘In what sense, then, could the Church change this much and still be the Church?’” 51. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 10. 52. Calvin, Inst. II. xvii. 2. 53. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” 10. 54. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19. 55. Han Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, 19–20. 56. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. 57. Review by Andrew Wilson, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-crucifixion/ 58. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 204. 59. Alister McGrath, Luther’s theology of the cross, 206. 60. Martin Luther, “Disputation,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, Timothy F. Lull, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 43. 61. Dennis Ngien, The Suffering of God according to Martin Luther’s Theologia Crucis (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), 51. 62. Martin Luther, “Disputation,” Theological Writings, 43–44. 63. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 206. 64. Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 214. 65. Gloria Chung, “Luther’s Deus Absconditus: The Hiddenness of God in the Work of Martin Luther,” Research Paper, Theology 601, Regent College, 2018, 6.

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66. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 516. 67. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 505–506. 68. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 506. 69. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 522–523. 70. Barth, CD IV/1, 253–254. Emphasis added by Rutledge. 71. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 508. 72. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 509. 73. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 510. 74. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 511. 75. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 511, emphasis original. 76. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 266. 77. Lyra Pitstick, Christ’s Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger, and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 5. 78. Lyra Pitstick, Christ’s Descent into Hell, 6. 79. Lyra Pitstick, Christ’s Descent into Hell, 6. 80. David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement and the Christian Life (New York: Routledge, 2004), 126. 81. J. I. Packer, Growing in Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 57. 82. J. I. Packer, Growing in Christ, 57. 83. J. F. Bethune-Baker, The Faith of The Apostles’ Creed: An Essay in Adjustment of Belief and Faith (London: Macmillan, 1918), 119. I am indebted to Mark Lui, student in Theology 1 at Regent College, for his research in this area of the descent into hell and its purpose. 84. Adam J, Johnson, “A Temple Framework of the Atonement.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54, no. 2 (June 2011): 225–237; The Reconciling Wisdom of God: Reframing the Doctrine of the Atonement (Bellingham, WA.: Lexham, 2016). 85. Jon Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” an essay in Atonement Seminar APPL/THEO 725, December 2018, 1. 86. Matthew Baker, Seraphim Dankaert, and Nicholas Marinides, eds. On the Tree of the Cross, 39–40. 87. John H. Walton, Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 109 88. John H. Walton, Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology, 102. 89. John H. Walton, Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology, 109. 90. John H. Walton, Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology, 179. 91. See, for example, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool, what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the Lord.’” Isaiah 66:1–2 ESV. 92. G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God. (Downers Grove, IL.: Apollos, 2004), 80. 93. Genesis 3:10. 94. Genesis 3:22. 95. Genesis 3:24. 96. Jon Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 5–6 See Ezekiel 9:3; 10:4, 18–19; 11:22–23. 97. Adam J. Johnson, “A Temple Framework of the Atonement.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54, no. 2 (June 2011), 226. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001848285&site=ehost-live. 98. Adam J. Johnson, “A Temple Framework of the Atonement,” 227. 99. Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 6. See also Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 423. 100. Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius. Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 89. 101. Matthew Baker, Seraphim Dankaert, and Nicholas Marinides, eds. On the Tree of the Cross, 51. 102. Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 6, reflecting Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius, 95 and John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2011), 8.

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103. Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 6. 104. Hans Vium Mikkelsen, Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue, 136. 105. Genesis 2:17. 106. Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 6. 107. G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, 94. 108. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God. First North American ed. Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 411. 109. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 435. 110. Stephen T. Um, The Theme of Temple Christology in John’s Gospel. Library of New Testament Studies, 312 (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 154. 111. Stephen T. Um, The Theme of Temple Christology, 153. 112. Colin E, Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 102. 113. Colin E, Gunton, The Doctrine of Creation, 234. 114. John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, 99. 115. Matthew 27:46–51. 116. Psalms 22:1. 117. Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 9. 118. John 19:30. 119. Genesis 2:1, Jon Bryars, “Cosmic Temple,” 9. 120. See Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ed. John Behr , Popular Patristic Series 44b (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2014), 26. 121. Thomas H. McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross and Why it Matters (Downers Grove, IL.: IVP Acad., 2012), 30–37. 122. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 267–268. 123. Moltmann speaks of the abandonment of Jesus as the very heart of God’s revelation of himself: “In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God.” The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 4. It is a proper understanding of God to see the shattering of the communion between the Father and the Son, for Moltmann. Jesus did not just feel abandoned, as in Calvin. He really was abandoned, and this was crucial to the history of God’s being which is profoundly affected by humanity’s history. This reflects a panentheist view of God which Moltmann gained from Hegel and Schelling. 124. Rikk Watts, “Mark,” in Commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Acad., 2007), 236. 125. Tom McCall, Forsaken, 43. 126. Tom McCall, Forsaken, 42–43. 127. C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to Saint Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 458. Emphasis added. 128. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 444–446. Calvin states that God could never have been hostile or angry toward His beloved Son with whom his soul was well-pleased.

Chapter Thirteen

Historico-Theological Models Prominence of the Penal Substitution Model

Having sought to clarify and nuance a defense of penal substitution in conversation with its recent and contemporary proponents, we now ask the question as to whether penal substitution might indeed be the model which holds all others together, or which is required for all the other models to work. If participation is the overarching theory or framework or mechanism of the atonement that subsumes all the models, could there still be one model that is more prominent than the others and more influential upon the others. Roger Nicole, in his “Postscript on Penal Substitution” in The Glory of the Atonement, 1 makes precisely this case. ROGER NICOLE We will summarize Nicole’s arguments, and in so doing we will offer a summary of the other models, most of which have been considered in earlier chapters. Nicole intends to say that substitution is in fact “the major linchpin of the doctrine of the atonement.” 2 Without going into great detail, he supports his claim that this doctrine and the particular requirement of sacrificial blood for the atonement is present in the tradition all the way back to Justin Martyr in the second century AD. Nicole is anxious to note not only the centrality of the redemptive doctrine of atonement in both the Jewish and Christian faiths, but the fact that this doctrine is actually centered in “the substitutionary interposition of a sin-bearer” who absorbs the fearful, divine wrath and effects access to God and our receiving of amazing grace. 3

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In this short essay, Nicole seems well aware of the intellectual stumblingblocks presented by such an atonement model. He highlights all the major objections to the doctrine of penal substitution. For example, the well-worn objection that human justice does not permit substitution. The guilty party, and no one else, can bear the punishment of the law in human legal systems, so the argument goes. Nicole at first proposes the invocation of other models to avoid this scandal. 4 If I might make an interjection of my own at this point, it would be to point out that it concerns me when divinely revealed justice is trumped by concerns arising within human legal systems to cast aspersions on the “justice” of penal substitution. Surely revealed justice must trump justice discerned in merely human ways. We are speaking here about divine mystery, not “Judge Judy.” At any rate, such an effort Nicole thinks of as futile and indeed it carries with it a denigration of what Christ accomplished by dying in the place of the sinner. 5 Note that Nicole goes so far as to say that penal substitution is the linchpin on which all other models depend for their value. In pithy fashion he offers a persuasive apologia that none of the other models yields its particular benefits, valuable though each is in its own right, without personal participation, and indeed, without substitution, of persons. Take the moral exemplar model, for instance. This is the model in which Christ’s work is seen merely as a courageous martyr’s death. 6 As Nicole notes, the Scriptures do in fact speak of the death of Christ as an example in 1 Peter 2:21: “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” Nicole argues that any exemplary action must have an appropriate motivation. His argumentation is along the lines that jumping into water to save a child makes sense, but if I jump into dangerous water simply to give an example to those watching, I would rightly be adjudged insane rather than virtuous. Thus the denial of substitution actually takes away the validity of the exemplary nature of his death. 7 These observations are confirmed by even a cursory glance at the context of 1 Peter 2:21–22: “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. ‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’” Clearly the exemplary action of the suffering Christ we are meant to follow actually involves the kind of suffering that bears away the sins of humanity, in a context of the just judgment of God. This results in a death to sins and a life lived for righteousness that is a direct result of the vicarious participation of Christ in humanity such that what is true of him has become true of them.

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The moral influence theory originally associated with Abelard comes next under Nicole’s evaluation. This approach typically has tried to avoid the vicarious or substitutionary nature of the atonement by making the primary problem that necessitates atonement one of the wrongness of the attitude of fallen humans toward God, specifically hatred and distrust. 8 This is accomplished in the sending of Jesus Christ who shows great concern for humans in their fallen condition and its consequences of disease and death. 9 The “moral influence” lies in the notion that sinners are thereby convinced of the superlative love of God for them, and are thus reoriented to faith and love for God. Nicole is quick to show that this approach is also null and void without substitutionary atonement. For one thing, the parable of the prodigal Son does not convey all aspects of the reconciling work of God and it should not be read beyond its parabolic nature. It does not on most accounts even have a Christ figure in it (although Barth, McLeod-Campbell, and the Torrances have seen the prodigal son precisely as Jesus who goes into the far country for humanity). The principal argument Nicole employs is simply that a death that is not actually required for the redemption or relief of the ones loved is not actually love. By way of illustration, he speaks of Mother Theresa, who entered into the plight of the people she served in Calcutta. It would not have made any sense for her to jump into her death in the Ganges to show her love for them. Nicole recounts the shift in the thinking of Horace Bushnell (1802–1876), noted promoter of the moral influence theory in America, when he realized that greater moral transformation was evident in the ministry of those who preached substitution than those under his ministry as a proponent of the moral influence theory. 10 He therefore reworked his treatise Vicarious Sacrifice (1866) to express the view that the “Godward relation of the death of Christ is the basis of its necessity (Forgiveness and Law, 1874).” 11 The third view which Nicole evaluates is that which he calls the mystical view of the atonement. The human predicament is at least acknowledged in this model at least with respect to the corruption of sinful humanity which is seen as if it were a polluted river. The antidote for this is the incarnation by which the Son of God, the sinless one, in entering humanity provided a “new purifying stream” such that humans in union with Christ by faith are regenerated and sanctified and will one day be glorified when they see the beatific vision. 12 While Nicole observes that this approach rightly perceives the need for supernatural transformation for corrupted, sinful humanity, he avers that it neglects the juridical reality of the guilt of past sins (Rom. 3:24–26). A prisoner who is reformed in prison cannot, despite their change, cancel the condemnation and penalty of their sin, and so much the more at the level of the justice of God. 13 Penal substitution that deals with the penalty of sin is needed alongside and even as the foundation of the regeneration and sanctification of the sinner. The mystical view centers on the incarnation therefore,

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but on Nicole’s account it underplays the great emphasis in the New Testament on the death of Christ. 14 The view Nicole has outlined is attributed to Kaspar Schwencckfelf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Richard Rothe, Hans Lassen Martensen, Frederick Denison Maurice (in part), Brooke Foss Westcott, and Vincent Taylor (in part). However, he may have applied his critique with the views of John McLeod Campbell, T. F. Torrance, and Karl Barth in mind. The latter retrieved the importance of the incarnation for the atonement from the Church Fathers in a way that honored the role of the incarnation as atonement, though not merely as preparation for the atonement in his death. These theologians, however, did not neglect the death of Christ nor juridical matters in the way that the first group of authors did. They do, rightly in my judgment, ascribe atonement to the incarnation, and to his death, indeed; to the atonement in the prison of Christ, but I suspect Nicole’s emphasis, being determined by the witness of the New Testament to the death of Christ as atoning, would be on that death rather than the incarnation. 15 The Christus Victor model is a further model which Nicole speaks of as still requiring penal substitution at its foundation. He celebrates this emphasis as being a biblical one (1 Cor. 15:54–57; 1 John 4:4–5; Rev. 6:2). The sinner does indeed face hostile forces which she cannot overcome: Satan and sin, disease and death, the law and the wrath of God. Humanity does require a champion to wrestle down these forces and give us victory. The problem is that the categories in which victory is needed are not all the same. Some, such as disease and death, are related to our being. Sin and Satan relate to the problem of our corruption. And Law and the wrath of God are judicial. In this third category, the struggle is not against an external hostile power or internal corruption, but a just God and his righteous Law, and our only hope is to plead for mercy in the court of God, 16 grounded in a substitute who can satisfy divine justice and divine holy wrath. 17 Nicole perceptively comments that the neglect of this juridical aspect of the atonement by theologians of Christus Victor means that we remain exposed to God’s judicial wrath. 18 The biblical emphasis on this exposes the incompleteness of Christus Victor. My own observation is that the great Christus Victor passages invariably acknowledge the juridical realities in atonement and indeed depend on them. Hebrews 2:14–17 is a classic case in point where destruction of the devil and death are coupled with the statement that Jesus the Great High Priest became human (17) with us and “makes atonement” for us (17). In Colossians 2, similarly, the disarming and defeat of the “powers and authorities” is grounded in the “nailing . . . to the cross” of the guilt of sin enabling the “forgiveness of sins.” When the guilt of sin is removed the accuser has no voice. What characterizes all of these views or models expressed so far is a failure to do justice to the justice of God, Nicole opines. He culminates his

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discussion by speaking of two views which do emphasize the justice of God, but which still lack what penal substitution provides. The first is governmental or rectoral position articulated initially by Duns Scotus (thirteenth century) and developed more fully by Hugo Grotius (seventeenth century). These theologians emphasized the notion that the supremely just God was first and foremost concerned with manifesting his justice in the universe through the cross. The death of Christ does leave God free to forgive the sin of all who repent and believe, without there being any doubt about his justice in doing so. But this is secondary to and a consequence of the manifestation of God’s hatred of sin and his justice through the cross. It is not, however, because God has transferred the “sinner’s guilt to the sinless Christ.” 19 The flaw in governmental theory is that the suffering and death of Christ cannot be an expression of divine justice without Jesus bearing real rather than merely hypothetical sin. Justice is thus seen to be revealed by proponents of this view, but not exercised. And since the death of Christ was an injustice, unless it was an expression of the Lord’s taking the place of the sinner in redeeming love, it could not possibly manifest justice. 20 Once again, without penal substitution, governmental theory does not work. The last view which Nicole considers is the vicarious repentance view of John McLeod Campbell (R. C. Moberley and Vincent Taylor, in part, also). The scope of the atonement in this view becomes all of humanity, over against the standard Reformed definite atonement view. A sense of the justice of God is in mind in this view, but all that God requires of sinful humanity under the justice of God is repentance that reflects God’s hatred of sin. 21 Since all humans are incapable of such in-depth repentance, “Christ has taken our place” in that his baptism (Nicole does not mention this) and ultimately his act of vicarious repentance on the cross is offered for all humanity. 22 The foundation for the universality of this act is the incarnation by which the Son became one with humanity as an ontological entity. His repentance, as a human who represents humanity, is vicarious on our behalf and our response in repentance, though truly ours, is contained in his. 23 The critique of this view offered is that substitution is contained in it, but of a kind that is impossible. Nicole insists that only the person who has sinned can repent of that sin. One might critique this assessment in light of the fact that penal substitution allows one person to bear the guilt of another! However, Nicole continues his critique with the observation that Scripture does not ever speak of Christ repenting, even vicariously. The common gospel response expected of those who avail themselves of what Christ has accomplished for them, not in repenting for them, but in bearing their sin, is repentance that is ours, not his. It is true that we cannot even respond in repentance and faith apart from participation by the Spirit in Christ. But this participation is participative, not monistic. It is truly we who repent. The

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crucial point here is that even if Christ did repent vicariously for us in his baptism and death, thus enabling even our subjective response to the gospel, this has no traction unless the guilt and penalty of sin has been addressed. The vicarious repentance view seems as though it is half of the gospel, and the lesser half at that. It is the subjective response of the gospel neglecting the objective propitiation and reconciliation which is the primary Christological grounding to which repentance is the grace-enabled response. Nicole concludes these evaluations of the other models of the atonement with the strong assertion that penal substitution is indeed the linchpin without which no other model works, and conversely, that when penal suibstitution is acknowledged, all the other models have an important contribution to make. 24 Nicole also particularly emphasizes the Trinity and the incarnation and the deity of Christ and the sinless human nature of Christ as crucial to a nuanced understanding of the atonement in all its facets. 25 The polyvalence of the riches that are together the jewel of the atonement, and the particular dependence of the Christus Victor model on penal substitution, has been noticed, as seen above, by John Stott, 26 and also by Sinclair Ferguson. 27 Ferguson’s account accents what cannot be emphasized enough in the theology of the atonement, the reality that atonement is in the person of Christ. Ferguson has shown that the Christus Victor model expounded in Colossians 2:14–15, for example, is compatible with, no, even grounded in, that of penal substitution. His assertion that the “great exchange” of righteousness for guilt in God’s act of reconciliation in Christ is, in fact, the basis for “both forensic justification and spiritual emancipation.” 28 NOTES 1. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” in The Glory of the Atonement, 445–452. 2. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 445. 3. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 446. 4. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 446. 5. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 446. 6. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 447. 7. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 447. 8. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 447. 9. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 447. 10. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 448. 11. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 448. 12. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 448. 13. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 449. 14. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 449. 15. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 449. 16. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 449. 17. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 450. 18. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 450. 19. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 450.

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20. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 450. 21. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 451. 22. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 451. 23. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 451. I have added further perspectives on the vicarious repentance view here. 24. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 452. 25. Roger Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” 452. 26. John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 329–330. 27. Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Preaching the Atonement,” in The Glory of the Atonement, Essays in honour of Roger Nicole, Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III, eds. (IVP, 2004), 426–444. 28. Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Preaching the Atonement,” 436. The orientation of Ferguson’s account of the atonement in typical Reformed fashion is toward particular atonement.

Chapter Fourteen

Historico-Theological Models Participation and the Penal Substitution Model

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARTICIPATION Finally we come to the question: “How important is the undergirding doctrine of participation for this model of penal substitution, and for all the models as they intersect with the substitutionary model?” We must first review a proposal to consider participation as a model of the atonement (Bayne and Restall) before describing it as a theory, or framework for all models. Participation as a Model of the Atonement We have commented that one reality in favor of the polyvalence of the atonement, among others, is the taxonomy of sin and its relation to atonement, that is, the polyvalent nature of sin. Multiple models of the atonement, including penal substitution, are required by the multiple effects of sin. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall have conceptualized sin in three ways, and one way of considering the atonement in Jesus Christ is that it must address all aspects of this taxonomy: sin is deontic, that is, it has a moral debt associated with it; sin is relational, that is, alienation from God and fellow-humanity and creation; and sin is ontological, affecting being. 1 Two important categories, sin or evil as trauma, and sin experienced as shame, fit within this larger ontological category. Bayne and Restall are concerned that too much emphasis has been placed in the past on the deontic and relational models at the expense of the ontological. While this may be true, one cannot altogether rule out the nature of sin as deontic and neglect the various atonement models 267

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which address this aspect. These authors provide a good summary of these models: According to Anselm’s satisfaction model in Cur Deus Homo, the debt is paid when Christ gives God the honour that the human race owes him (see Aspenson . . . ). The debt is dealt with by payment: the death of Christ qualifies as payment for the sin of humanity. According to the penal model (Morris . . . Packer . . . Porter . . . ), the debt is dealt with by punishment: Christ is punished in place of our non-payment of the debt. On Swinburne’s (1989) sacrificial model, Christ’s death constitutes reparation and penance for non-payment of the debt. And on the merit model the debt of sin is forgiven rather than repaid: Christ’s life and death is a meritorious act that persuades God to forgive the debt (Quinn . . . Cross . . . Putrill . . . ). 2

The complaint against the deontic nature of sin and its deontic atonement is primarily that the obligations that give rise to the debt are unclear, and most importantly, that a deontological approach to sin runs counter to the ontological: If sin is something under which we (together with the rest of creation) labour, then it is not clear that we are morally responsible for it. An inability to do something is normally thought of as excusatory. As the slogan has it, “ought implies can.” The sick need a doctor not a judge or jailor. Even if deontic models of the atonement are able to deal with sin as a deontological problem, they fail to deal with it as a problem of human nature. 3

This assessment of sin and its culpability is too closely wedded to the analogies to which it is reduced. The biblical account is replete with statements to the effect that human beings are indeed responsible and culpable for their behavior, and with statements which reveal the power of sin in fallen human beings. Bayne and Restall wish to emphasize the ontological nature of the atonement overcoming the ontological nature of sin, and they do so by means of participation. Unlike our own approach, in which participation is seen as the crucial framework which makes atonement possible in all the models, Bayne and Restall envisage participation as the model itself, and the only model at that. Unlike all the other models, this one goes right back to Paul! 4 The function of participation (framework vs. model) is one issue. Another is the actual content of participation which these authors describe. It emphasizes human participation in Christ with very little reference to the participation of God the Son in our humanity through the incarnation. The authors do make the statement that any theology of the atonement must include the incarnation, but say next to nothing about how this divine aspect of participation plays into the doctrine of participation. They draw attention to New Testament scholar Morna Hooker’s work on the union of the believer with Christ in his death and resurrection in Pauline theology:

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The sin of Adam was reversed and the possibility of restoration opened up when Christ lived and died in obedience and was raised from life to death. Those who are “baptized” into him are able to share his death to sin (Rom. 6:4–11) and his status of righteousness before God (2 Cor. 5:21). Since Adam’s sin brought corruption to the world, restoration involved the whole universe (Rom. 8:19–22; Col. 1:15–20) . . . [Christ] shared our humanity, and all that means in terms of weakness . . . in order that we might share in his sonship and righteousness. To do this, however, Christians must share in his death and resurrection, dying to the realm of flesh and rising to life in the Spirit. Thus Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ in order that Christ may live in him (Gal. 2:19–20). The process of death and resurrection is symbolized by baptism (Rom. 6:3–4). By baptism “into Christ,” believers are united “with him,” so that they now live “in him.” These phrases (in particular “in Christ”) express the close relationship between Christ and believers that is so important for Paul. 5

That these sentiments are true and edifying is not questionable. However, what they describe is not a new model of the atonement but the old model of theosis made possible by recapitulation. Opting for this model as a solo model neglects what surrounds these biblical texts and ignores their wider contexts. This point is made also by Jada Twedt Strabbing, who expresses agreement with Bayne and Restall on the point that any Christian theory of atonement must explain how the atonement is related to the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, but suggests that their “participatory model on its own fails to make the crucifixion and resurrection necessary.” 6 The model Bayne and Restall present is only half of Pauline soteriology. To be “in Christ,” without doubt the most pivotal prepositional phrase for Paul and indeed, the New Testament, means not just to be in a union that transforms the human person, but one that grants the believer justification and forgiveness of sins (Romans 3–5). The ontological is the basis for the deontic, to be sure. That is, Christ’s assumption of humanity, his purifying of humanity in his vicarious life, and his offering up of that humanity as both a sweet savor and a sin offering, are all vital to the justifying efficacy of his life and death. Union with Christ, as in Calvin, has two graces (duplex gratia), justification and sanctification, and Bayne and Restall seem to vouch for one only. The authors do contemplate a possible hybrid for a while, “where participation in Christ’s death and resurrection deals with sin as a relational and ontological problem, and some form of the deontic model deals with sin as a deontic problem” but then reject it. 7 Instead, they are more “inclined to adopt the view that the atonement deals with sin as a deontic problem as a byproduct of dealing with the sinner: if the sinner is the ‘old person,’ and the old person died with Christ on the cross, then there is no one who ought to be regarded as guilty for their sin; indeed, there is no longer anyone who ought to feel guilty for their sin.” All notions of moral debt “to be punished or forgiven,” or of “satisfaction or reparation” are ruled out and instead, if such

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culpability does exist, “it is dealt with by changing the identity of the sinner: strictly speaking, the person who is in the wrong before God no longer exists.” 8 Apart from serious doctoring and revision of the contents of the biblical texts, these assertions flounder. Objections that penal substitution requires a self-conflicted Trinity and that a forgiveness requiring justice on God’s part sets God against himself are simply reductionistic. It ignores Barth’s exemplary Christological focus in atonement theology in which Christ is both the Judge and the Judged for us, in participation with us. The Bayne-Restall account fails to respect the mystery of God, and it reflects the contemporary cultural disdain for matters of judgment, and for a violence which is necessary within hospitality. Participation as a Framework for Penal Substitution (All Models) The importance of the participation or union of God the Son with humanity, the unio hypostatica, for a theology of penal substitution has been noted on a few occasions in these last two chapters. It is vital to the credibility of the notion of representation and substitution that Jesus is revealed to be one with humanity, and to be able to mediate and suffer the penalty of sin for humanity. His participation in humanity is essential if he can justly and realistically stand in our place and act for us. It could be said also of the models of recapitulation and theosis, and that of the vicarious life and repentance of Jesus, that they too require the incarnation in order that the union of the believer and the church with Christ (unio cum Christi and unio mystica), enabled by the Spirit’s work in the Son as well as in his people who are one with him, may enable them entry into the ontological realities of adoption and transformation. The relation between the incarnational union and the personal union of the believer with Christ, and the mystical union of the church with Christ, is implicit in the New Testament, and the many sayings of the Church Fathers of the type, “He became one with us, that we might become one with him,” reflects this. However, it is for penal substitution, or the juridical and forensic aspects of the atonement that participation of the Son is so that he can act truly as humanity’s substitute, seems, for some reason, necessary to defend in our era of theological history. Participation of the Son in humanity and of humanity in the Son by faith, as the grounds for recapitulation, and for theosis, and for the vicarious humanity model, and for the victory metaphor by which Jesus conquers in our stead and for us, all goes unchallenged. Yet the basis or grounds for the juridical aspects of salvation are the same. Justification as a forensic reality and as an act of covenantal faithfulness on God’s part, is dependent on penal substitution, and therefore on the union of Christ with humanity. This is true, biblically speaking, in Paul, for example: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent

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his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship” (Galatians 4:4–5). Notice Paul’s reference to the incarnation (“God sent his Son, born of a woman”—the Son becomes one with humanity) is the grounding for both the forensic (“born under the law, to redeem those under the law”—though Paul uses the redemption metaphor here it is redemption from the penalty of the law in context, and is equivalent to justification from the penalty of the law; see 3:10–14, and 3:24, “So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith”) and the filial (“that we might receive adoption to sonship”) realities of salvation that come from our being one with Christ. Apparently Paul believes that the Son of God who has become fully and truly human can indeed act judicially in our place and for us. Another passage which makes this linkage is found in John’s writing. John, who is the apostle of love and union par excellence, does not hesitate to speak readily of the importance of the incarnation, the Son’s union with humanity, for the forensic notion of propitiation (or expiation, if you must). In his first epistle, John says, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:9–10). Typical of John, the ontological or filial comes first in this statement, but he does not shy away from the reality of the forensic and the necessity and even the implied dependence of the filial on the forensic. The point seems incontrovertible. The biblical authors believe Jesus can, with perfect justice, die physically and suffer spiritually for the sins of the world. How? On the basis of his hypostatic union with humanity. And that on this basis, humans can, by the work of the Spirit, appropriate the atoning work of the Son by entering into the reality of that union. And that this includes both justification forensically, and sanctification or transformation into the image of Christ. But this linking of the Christological union with justification is also evident in the history of the church, as we have noted. The theologian most responsible for recovering and developing the truth of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, is John Calvin. His defense of penal substitution, as we have seen, is precisely in the service of justification, 9 and his defense of penal substitution has participation at its core. It is common to point to Calvin’s emphasis on the union with Christ, and a number of studies of the relationship of the twin graces to the unio cum Christi have been done. 10 The reliance of this union of the believer with Christ upon the union of the Son with humanity, which is the foundation of the union with Christ, is also evident in Calvin, and it is this which enables Calvin to maintain the categories of imputation leading to justification, and indwelling leading to sanctification. The mistaken assumption that Calvin’s Osiander debate 11 signalled the triumph of forensic imputation over against participation, is corrected by

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Todd Billings, who asserts that Calvin “holds together (while distinguishing) pardon and indwelling as essential aspects of union with Christ and the duplex gratia.” 12 Billings indicates that “imputation is inextricably tied to union with Christ: believers come to ‘possess’ Christ and his righteousness.” 13 Most pertinent to our contention here is that Calvin’s response to Osiander was not, as Canlis has stated, “extrinsicism but koinonia, a carefully articulated relationship between humans and the humanity of Christ, by the Spirit.” 14 In his commentary on John, Calvin makes clear that in Christ, imputation of righteousness, that is justification (“Christ is made to us righteousness,” 1 Cor. 1:30) is “likewise said to have been ‘made to us sanctification . . . ’ because he has, so to speak, presented us to his Father in his own person, that we may be renewed to true holiness by his Spirit.” 15 To which Canlis adds, “In the wide world of koinonia, imputation has a central place by being the direct result of unio cum Christo, a distinctively participative category.” 16 The relationship between the unio hypostatica and the unio cum Christo must not be neglected. How they relate to each other in Calvin in light of his particularistic view of election will differ from how they relate in Barth, with his universalistic Christocentric view of election. Calvin’s emphasis seems to be more on the unio cum Christi as entered into in faith through the Spirit by the believer. 17 Barth’s emphasis is more on the unio mystica, and thus on the ordo historia of Christ for humanity, all of it, as the grounding of the ordo salutis. Bruce McCormack has especially emphasized the important link between the incarnation and the atonement in Barth’s theology, in particular. 18 In both cases however, it is important to note first, that imputation and sanctification are grounded in both unions, albeit one is sometimes emphasized more than the other. Participation is crucial for imputation and for penal substitution in Calvin, this much is evident. That penal substitution is therefore firmly ensconced in participative, filial categories may be a surprise for many. It is a relational participation in Christ’s person and therefore in his righteousness. Penal substitution is not, therefore, the primary model or theory in atonement theology. Participation in the fullness of its meaning is, and from it flow all the models, including penal substitution. The diffidence of many theologians to imputation grounded in participation is surprising, given they are usually comfortable with participation as the ground of other models. Even those who prefer the satisfaction model based on an offering offered on behalf of humans reject an offering offered in the place and to take away the guilt of humans. If one were to reference the offerings in Leviticus again, they welcome the sweet savor but reject the sin and trespass offerings. Divine revelation suggests strongly that both are required in the total nature of atonement accomplished by the Savior. Perhaps our defense of it may lead to an acceptance of the amazing grace of justification pronounced over our heads among the other models and grounded in the union of Christ with us and our union with Christ.

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NOTES 1. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” in Yujin Nagasawa and Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 150–151. 2. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 151. 3. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 156. 4. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 162. 5. Morna Hooker, “Paul,” in Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hugh Piper (eds.) The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 522; cited in Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 163. 6. Jada Twedt Strabbing, “The Permissibility of the Atonement as Penal Substitution” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 7, Jonathan Kvanvig, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 239–269 (263, n. 31) 7. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, “A Participatory Model of the Atonement,” 164. 8. Tim Bayne and Greg Restall, 164. 9. Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories, 76. 10. See, for example, Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Julie Canlis, Calvin's Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). 11. Hunsinger states that “for Osiander mystical union led to infusion; for Calvin, to imputation.” See George Hunsinger “Calvin’s Doctrine of Justification,” 16. 12. Julie Canlis refers to this in Calvin's Ladder, 144. The reference is to Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, 15, 57–61. 13. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, 15. 14. Julie Canlis, Calvin's Ladder, 144. Emphasis added. 15. Calvin, Comm. John 17:19. 16. Julie Canlis, Calvin's Ladder, 144. 17. Union with Christ in Calvin implies a real, living union, entered into through the faith of the believer. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. states that “Union . . . does not exist apart from or prior to faith but is given with . . . faith” (“Justification and Union with Christ,” in David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback, eds., A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes [Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008], 259). He adds that “Union with Christ . . . is forged by the Spirit’s working faith in us. . . . Faith is the bond of that union” leading to the reception of the twofold grace, justification and sanctification. He speaks of this “union-twofold grace” as the structure which “determines the framework” of Calvin’s thinking with regard to redemption applied (253). He concludes, “This, at its core, is Calvin’s ordo salutis: union with Christ by Spirit-worked faith” (259). 18. Bruce L. McCormack, For us and For our Salvation: Incarnation and the Atonement in the Reformed Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary Press, 1993), ed. David Willis-Watkins.

Chapter Fifteen

Total Atonement Applying the Atonement as Sufficient for All

The conclusion that participation is the key undergirding framework in the Christian theology of the atonement, in all of its models, necessitates some further clarification as to how the incarnational participation of God the Son in humanity relates to human participation in Christ by the Spirit of those who believe, repent, and receive the benefits of the atonement, and indeed, the mystical union between Christ and his covenantal community, the church. The way in which the latter question, of the interrelations of the unions of soteriological theology, is answered, has a significant influence on how we address the issue of the scope and the effects of the atonement. In a nutshell, how does the divine Christological participation of God in humanity, by the Spirit, relate to the human reception, or better, the participation of human persons in the Son, by the Spirit? The necessity of both for our salvation is clear, a necessity that is expressed well by Alan Torrance with reference to the two uses of homoousios in the theology of Athanasius: To affirm that Jesus is “of one Being with the Father” does not of itself solve the problem of epistemic access to the Godhead. Two conditions are required for knowledge of God to be mediated by Jesus. First, the being of God must be identified with him, and second it must be recognized to be so. Without the latter condition, the incarnation simply does not succeed in facilitating knowledge of God. The incarnation of God as Jesus would no more be an event of communication than if God had become incarnate as a fish in some mountain stream! 1

Torrance goes on to insist that Athanasius points with clarity to the fact that “the New Testament bears witness not only to God’s identification with 275

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humanity in Jesus, but also, simultaneously, to God’s presence with humanity in the person of the Holy Spirit, who gives us the eyes to perceive who Jesus is.” He notes that the Letters to Serapion affirm the homoousios of the incarnate Word to be “inextricably bound up with affirming the homoousion of the Holy Spirit” and that there is, therefore, “in short, an essentially and irreducibly Trinitarian structure to the faith of the church.” 2 This expression of the work of the Spirit as the “necessary subjective condition for the recognition of Jesus” is necessary because, on the Reformed account of theological anthropology, the human condition is described as dead, “dead in transgressions and sins” (Eph. 2:1). We begin therefore with a brief discussion of the state of human beings by nature, prior to and when the gospel is apprehended by them. If theological anthropology requires that the human person be regenerated prior to or in the event of expressing faith and repentance, this implies the work of the Spirit bringing dead persons to life as he brings them into union with Christ. If the union of Christ with humanity at the incarnation is a reality that affects all humanity, that is, if it is ontological for all humanity, what about the echo in which human persons noetically receive this awareness as the Spirit brings them into living union with Christ? Is this a work of the Spirit present to all human persons? The starting point for this discussion is the state or condition of all human persons apart from the encountering and enlivening work of the Spirit. Reformed theologians, whether they be scholastic or Barthian, are agreed that the need for divine encounter is paramount, for all are agreed that apart from the gracious work of the Spirit, all are dead. THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY REQUIRES THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT IN EFFECTING HUMAN PARTICIPATION To be described as “dead” is not a very complementary description of “sophisticated” human beings, especially in a day when everyone is “spiritual.” It should be borne in mind that Ephesians 2 is not the only passage that gives a teaching on the fallen human condition. The total witness of all of biblical revelation is that humankind was created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and that after the fall, this image was damaged, that is, effaced, but not erased (Genesis 9:9). The image understood as a “non-degreed” image 3 remains in fallen humanity, and forms the basis for an understanding of human rights for all persons, irrespective of their IQ or EQ or age or mobility; it is always being given rather than being a given, a relatedness to God who was the initiator in the imaging act, 4 yet not a living relationship with God until new birth in the last Adam. Fallen humans are still capable of rational thought, horizontal relationships, and vocational, artistic, and scientific achievement, but not divine life or relationship with God. There is a givenness of the image

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related to creation, though in Protestant thought it is being given by the analogia relationis rather than a given by analogia entis, an analogy of being. It is non-degreed by creation. Rationality and vocation are extrinsic rather than intrinsic to the image. Down’s syndrome babies cannot be aborted simply because they may be low on the IQ scale. There can be no such thing as “useless mouths,” as Hitler put it. All human beings, from implantation to death, are image bearers and with that have inalienable human rights. This is the result of the relatedness of all human beings to God by creation. This is the core meaning. The image is a product of the declaration of God to be in relatedness with humanity and it is one also of teleology—God’s desire is over every human being that they will be saved (1 Tim. 2:3–4, “God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved”; Matt. 18:14, “your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost”). This is incontrovertibly God’s desire and design that all are and that all will be his. The first humans pre-fall were in relationship with God, not just in relatedness. After the fall, though nothing can hinder the core relatedness that comes from God’s side, human persons are dead to relationship with God. They have a conscience, are capable of ethical reflection, and even of doing good deeds (see Romans 2:14–15). In Ephesians 2:1–2, Paul indicates that spiritual death did not preclude life in other aspects of human existence: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live.” The Reformation doctrine of “total depravity” (better rendered “total inability”) does not mean that all human beings are as bad as they possibly can be. It simply means that sin has affected all aspects of the human being and above all, that humans are unresponsive to God and incapable of saving themselves. This invites the age-old nature/grace distinction which has been a source of contention between the traditions, and even within them. It must be acknowledged by all traditions that nature, including all of humanity is engraced, that is human persons, are made in the image of God and that they could not exist apart from the providence of a good God who lets his rain fall on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). The breath and lifespan and geographical location of every human being is in his hands and under his care, and this sensus divinitatis invokes the sense of morality or obligatedness and some awareness of God present in all human beings (Acts 17:24–27; Rom. 2). However, the distinction between common grace and saving grace is present in especially the Reformed and evangelical traditions (the Orthodox tradition makes less of this given that the view of the fall of humanity is less severe in this tradition, being more like immaturity than inability). The belief that human beings are dead in trespasses and sins and unable to respond to the gospel apart from this saving grace, and that there are indeed no “points of contact” between humans in their natural state is strongly held for biblical and theological reasons by the Reformational tradition. Unlike the majority

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Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant views of our human capacity, which suggests that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,” 5 this tradition insists on the basis of Paul’s teaching, that what is required is “no mere rejigging or re-polishing or repairing of human nature: but rather the crucifixion of the flesh, and the raising of the new creature. Regeneration is expressed not in the figure of repair or restoration, but of new birth, a completely new start.” 6 Trevor Hart develops this line of thought by expressing further that Nature is not, in its historical state, predisposed towards grace, but resists it. The old creation is not capable of the new creation, i.e. there is nothing in the old Adam, the flesh, which could simply be developed or extrapolated to posit the new Adam. Redemption, therefore, is not a matter of evolution, or of development, or perfection: but of revolution, crisis and crucifixion. 7

Furthermore, Reformed theology resists developing an ontology that bridges the divine-human divide on the basis of nature, and on the other hand requires, as Alan Torrance has said, the “radical and dynamic continuity between the divine and the human that is the event of Christ.” 8 Exactly what capacity a human person has to respond to God is a question which led to a well-known dialogue on this matter between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. This controversy between two theologians from the same stable, who might have agreed amicably in less climactic times, serves to illustrate what is at stake here. Barth’s “Nein!” response to Brunner on the matter of “points of contact” is well known. 9 Barth here firmly discounts “points of contact” and natural theology. 10 What Brunner meant and how Barth heard him has been ably discussed by Trevor Hart. He suggests that, in fact, what Brunner meant by a “point of contact” was a receptivity that was not a predisposition toward grace, but a capacity for language, an ability to hear the words even if they are alien to the listener. This, as Hart has suggested, is a valid distinction, alternatively expressed as an ontic as opposed to a noetic capacity for revelation: what is there to be seen, as opposed to the ability to see it. It was thus, in fact, quite close to Barth’s own view, even if arrived at differently. Brunner made a distinction between the formal capacity all humans have by nature to receive revelation and to have a sense of “oughtness,” and the material capacity which they do not have, apart from grace. Barth’s concern was that to acknowledge even a formal capacity was to pave the way for natural theologies including the Nazi nationalistic one. Trevor Hart’s resolution that both could have agreed that humans apart from grace have the “capacity to receive the capacity” for receiving revelation by grace is helpful. In fact, what is so surprising about this debate is that while Barth is adamant that nature and all purely human philosophies and religion have come under the sentence of death in Christ crucified, he does in fact

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affirm the universality of grace through God’s redeeming action in Christ. Thus, in fact, by means of the analogy of relations (analogia relationis), that is, by the constant outpouring of grace from God to humanity, which is in relation to God in Christ (rather than the Catholic notion of analogia entis, the analogy of being), Barth can in fact affirm that which is good in human culture, but not any negation of the need for divine encounter in the matter of human salvation. INCARNATIONAL PARTICIPATION AND HUMAN PARTICIPATION BY THE SPIRIT, AND THE SCOPE OF ATONEMENT Having established the need for the application of divine grace and regeneration for human participation in Christ by the Spirit, of the atonement accomplished through the participation of the Son in humanity, we now ask the question: what is the scope of each participation and its effects? A feature of Sinclair Ferguson’s essay 11 on preaching the atonement which we encountered in the previous chapter is its expression of the doctrine of particular atonement. This may be unremarkable given Ferguson’s Reformed tradition, and inasmuch as he presents his case competently. However, on this occasion of his writing at least, the author does not show awareness of another Reformed alternative, which is that offered by Karl Barth. Even if, as Ferguson avers, we preach Christ as Savior, and not the benefits of the atonement, we are left with the “scandal” of particular election of some human persons and not others. The counter to Ferguson is that this could be deemed to be a failure to value the ontological nature of the humanity of Christ, his becoming human for humanity. It also isolates the person of Christ, his incarnation and vicarious life, from his death. It also seems to negate the primary tone of the New Testament in regard to God’s character as “God our Savior” and his universal love for humanity and his desire and even design for all human persons “to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:3–4). There can be very little doubt, as we listen to Scripture, that this text and others affirm a universal atonement (1 John 2:2; John 1:29). At the same time, there are an abundance of texts in the New Testament that assert that not all will believe, and that many will in fact find themselves in hell, despite God’s design and desire for them. So, how does one reconcile this? The participation of the Son in humanity and for humanity, leading to a universal atonement, does not apparently lead to all humans participating in a vital union with Christ by faith. Not all have faith, and in fact Jesus predicts that as the age of the Spirit, the eschaton, unfolds, it will in fact be scarce (Matt. 24:12–13; Luke 18:8). It has been pointed out also by Bruce McCormack that whereas Paul never speaks of hell, Jesus spoke of it frequently. Whereas, on

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the one hand, “Paul is committed to a universal atonement [e.g., 1 Tim. 2:3–6]—as well as the understanding that faith in Jesus Christ is effected in human beings by God’s grace alone,” this is in tension, on the other hand, with “Jesus’ teaching on hell, especially,” which “was taken to be the fixed pole,” by Reformed theology. Thus, “in its orthodox expressions” it always committed itself to a limited atonement, whereas “Paul’s commitment to a universal atonement had to be negotiated out of existence.” 12 One can move, it seems, in at least three directions: (i) assume the particular or “intentional” atonement option, which the Reformed tradition, following Calvin, 13 has largely done by minimizing the texts that seem to indicate a universalist atonement, and insist that since only the elect were died for, so logically, only the elect receive its application. This has the logical consistency that the effect of the unio hypostatica corresponds to the result of unio cum Christo and justification and sanctification for only the elect. Clearly the weight of Scripture as properly exegeted in these atonement texts, as well as the whole tenor of the disposition of a loving God toward his image-bearing creatures, as well as the challenge of particularistic election of the Deus absconditus over against the God revealed in Jesus to be for humanity, makes this a challenging position. Within this viewpoint the Lombardian formula, a distinction made between the atonement as sufficient for all, and yet efficient only for those who believe, has been expressed, but this is not the standard Calvinist position. Secondly, (ii) one can adopt the soteriological universalist position, and say that everyone is included ultimately in both the atonement as accomplished by the participation of the Son in and for humanity, in the life and death of Jesus, and also in the work of the participation of the Spirit in the application of the atonement to human persons. In this case, the scope of unio hypostatica is the scope of unio cum Christo. This also has an internal consistency in that redemption accomplished is redemption applied. This view obviously requires a different view of election, one that is Christological and communal, not particularistic. Christ is the elect, chosen by the triune God in his eternal covenant of grace and redemption, to be the Creator of the cosmos and humanity, and to redeem creation in its totality, and humanity, in its totality, in himself, as the last Adam and the new Israel. This view has elements of Karl Barth’s thought within it, though it is not clear that Barth was a universalist, soteriologically speaking, even if he affirmed a universal atonement. The third view, (iii), is probably obvious—election and the atonement are universalist in their intent and sufficiency but apparently not in their application. This view is heavily critiqued by the Reformed who suggest that if redemption accomplished is not the same as redemption applied, the atonement has been limited in its power rather than its scope. This vice-grip logic is hard to resist. The words of T. F. Torrance on undue rationalism in atonement theology are appropriate:

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Here we see that man’s proud reason insists in pushing through its own partial insight into the death of the cross to its logical conclusion, and so the great mystery of the atonement is subjected to the rationalism of human thought. That is just as true of the universalist as it is of those who hold limited atonement for in both cases they have not yet bowed their reason before the cross of Christ. 14

This viewpoint that the unio hypostatica provides the universal atonement of all humanity and all creation, but that this must be held in tension with the reality that not all will enter into union with Christ by faith, seems to me a simple reality of divine revelation. It is gleaned by faithful listening to Scripture, and the two realities are to be held in tension until resolution at the end of the eschaton. Bruce McCormack contends that this is the case, without employing any reductionistic or simplistic solutions. His resolution lies first in the assumption that if this is a tension in the New Testament, it is “because God wanted it there” and that there “must be a reason for it.” If forced to guess what the reason might be is that it is “the fact that those awakened to faith in Jesus Christ in this world are still sinners.” If the answer was revealed before the eschaton, McCormack believes “we would harm ourselves on one side or the other.” On the one side, if it was revealed that there is universal salvation, “we would very likely become lax, antinomian even” and that the “sense of urgency that is pervasive in Paul’s Christian existentialism would be lost.” On the other side, that is, if God revealed that limited atonement pertains, he surmises “we would very likely despair of our salvation.” We would spend an inordinate amount of time in self-examination (my words), since we can never quite be certain that “the atoning death of Christ was really intended for” us. Thus McCormack concludes tentatively that the tension “is divinely intended—in order to protect us from ourselves.” 15 McCormack goes on to suggest that the Westminster Assembly erred in seeking to resolve this issue by opting for limited atonement “in advance of the return of Christ in glory”—just as it would “be a mistake for any church today to teach universalism.” His sage advice to theologians and churches on how to proceed with this matter, is that, given that these “are simply the logical possibilities that arise on the soil of the Reformed understanding of the relation of grace and faith” and that “they constitute the walls within which we are to live in this world,” there must be a freedom for all to “tilt more to one side than the other.” There must also be freedom for individual theologians who wish “to conclude to one or the other—for the sake of exploring implications and relationships among the various Christian doctrines,” to do so since this “belongs to their unique calling.” However, he ends with the admonition that “churches need to be responsible for all the faithful. And for that reason, I would say, neither limited atonement nor universalism should ever be made church dogma.” 16

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This is, more or less, the view taken by C. S. Lewis and by Karl Barth, both of whom argue that God will not bring to heaven those who do not want to go (Lewis), and that they will go to hell not because they were not elect, but despite being elect and justified in the eyes of God (Barth), they simply and stubbornly refuse to accept God’s gracious verdict of them in Christ. The zero sum game that we must opt, either for the assertion that Christ’s atonement is limited in its scope, or the assertion that it must be limited in its efficacy, is not self-evident. The view that the atonement merely made justification a potentiality or possibility for humanity may be true to Arminian theology, but it does not apply to Barth. Nor does the view that full atonement for all humanity, in its scope and in its efficacy, necessarily imply universalism. Barth thinks of election first as the election of Christ, the election by God (including Christ as God the Son) to be for humanity, the election by God in the Son to become human for humanity, to be the covenant partner of God as representative humanity. Forensic justification is actually grounded first in the reality of a human nature forever changed by the incarnation, and then the filial reality of a Son who pleases the Father in all he does in life and death. The participation of God the Son in humanity is the foundation of the participation by faith of the justified by God the Spirit. The election of the individual is but a small echo of the election of Christ, and then the church community as a whole. Barth believed that individual persons could refuse heaven, but they could never blame their not being elect for that. God would not coerce persons to go to heaven against their will. Barth certainly reflects the tension McCormack speaks of and is instructed by it, veering, some would say to the side of universalism. Beyond the ways in which this tension instructs us, as McCormack has indicated, I wish to say that, in addition, this leads to true gospel preaching. To preach that God offers salvation but it may or may not be true that he has prepared it for the preacher’s hearers, seems not to be a viable gospel. The defense that the preacher can with integrity preach that if you truly believe, you will have salvation is one I am familiar with. The challenge is that the focus of attention becomes anthropocentric . . . how can I know I have truly believed? How much evidence of changes in my affections and actions is sufficient . . . rather than the focus being on the triune God who is love and who loves us, and on the loving, redeeming, all-conquering Christ who saves. The tenor and tone of preaching that is true to the gospel, the good news, the euangelion, that God is for us, may be heard in this segment from T. F. Torrance: God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. In Jesus Christ God has actualised his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back

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upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself. Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. 17

THE EFFECTS OF IMBALANCES IN TOTAL PARTICIPATION: A CASE STUDY OF TWO THEOLOGIANS What are the effects of the atonement when there may be an inappropriate emphasis on either the incarnational union or the human union of the believing saints with Christ, by the Spirit? Justification and Sanctification and Assurance There is within the moderate Reformed theological camp an acknowledgment of building blocks or heuristics which have been gleaned by human beings on their journey toward the encounter with Christ, the revealed God. Yet, there is no divine life until it is imparted by that divine revelation. Revelation is not merely a knowledge category, it is a communion category. As such, the knowledge of the real God through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit at the inception of what we are calling human participation in God (the ordo salutis), that corresponds and echoes dimly the participation of God in humanity (the ordo historia), is a communion event in which Christ is encountered. It is the sovereign event by which the Spirit of God regenerates a human person, giving them new sight or a sense of things they did not have before, like saving repentance and faith by which they receive the effects of the atonement, like the love of God, the beauty of Christ, their own sinfulness, and new affections like love of God for God’s sake, hatred of sin, love of neighbor, and so on. If this concept of saving grace resounds with the perspective expounded masterfully by Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, for example, it will perhaps be surprising that Edwards also acknowledged the presence of vestiges of true religion in other religions which provided a heuristic for the acceptance of the gospel once heard, resonating at this point with Hart’s description of the “capacity to receive the capacity” to believe. 18 Edwards went beyond his Reformed predecessors, even his mentors Frances Turretini (1623–1687) and Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), in arguing for a greater knowledge of religious truth among the heathen, and conceding even the possibility that the heathen could be saved. McDermott finds a movement in Edwards toward a broader soteriology, by

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which the drama of redemption would be seen to be more just, and therefore aesthetically excellent, resulting in the magnifying of God’s glory. Edwards actually demonstrated a fascinating and almost “unique” way of bringing the dialectical and the analogical together in many aspects of his theology. His giving of a central place to the conception of God as “Being” or “Being in general” suggests a Thomistic and analogical orientation. If, as it has often been said, the Roman Catholic vision of God and reality is analogical, and by contrast, the Protestant view is dialectical, 19 Edwards is both Catholic and Protestant. That a Puritan Calvinist should be labelled Catholic may be a shock for fans of Edwards in the Reformed tradition, but his Catholic leanings have been commented on frequently in the past century. An example of this that goes beyond creation theology is with respect to his doctrine of justification, which we will look at closely, along with the whole Edwardsean ordo salutis. On the one hand, he is typically Reformed in his dialectical approach to this, suggesting that justification is by faith alone, and it is all of God, from start to finish, with no human contribution. On the other hand, there is in his “Justification,” evidence of the analogical, with the concept of “natural fitness” between the human soul and justification, with faith becoming (with love and obedience) a “condition” for justification, 20 which ends up sounding a lot like a Thomistic synthetic approach. His use of the concept of disposition even in the heathen, provides evidence of the same. In this sense Edwards is an important bridging theologian for Protestant-Catholic dialogue. 21 Karl Barth offers a different approach to the scope of salvation, but he does so not at the expense of Reformed anthropology. Nor does he assume the standard Calvinist position that a limited or particular objective atonement implies a particular subjective atonement, and that a primary task of the Christian life is to evaluate one’s own soul for evidence of that subjective work of grace. The inward turn in Edwards is replaced by an exocentric turn toward the Christ who is for humanity, in Barth. For Barth, the incarnational union, and indeed Christ himself, is the primary movement in human salvation which renders the subjective reception of it as a mere echo of the great objective realities of the God of the incarnation and the atonement. Barth grounds his understanding of subjective participation in Christ in his “historical” construal of the hypostatic union, as Adam Neder has shown. 22 That is, the participatio Christi in Barth is the unio hominus cum Christo, that is the “mutual indwelling that occurs between the Word and human beings,” 23 is closely modelled on the unconfused and asymmetric nature of Barth’s understanding of the relationship between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Christ. 24

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Pneumatology follows Christology for Barth We may state emphatically that Christology is the key to Barth’s understanding of the subjective reality of salvation, sanctification, and the nature of the church. For, as Neder affirms, “the category within which Barth explores the history of Jesus Christ—his one person and work—is the ‘mutual participation’ of the human essence in the divine and a divine essence in the human. The event of this mutual participation is the event of his person—unio hypostatica—and the accomplishment of the exaltation of humanity. The participation of humanity in Jesus Christ occurs objectively within this history of mutual participation and subjectively in a way that corresponds within this history.” 25 Union with Christ, echoing Christ’s union with humanity, is thus the key reality when it does come to the subjective reception of the gospel, in Barth, as in Calvin. The twin graces (duplex gratia) in Calvin of justification and sanctification, become the triple graces of justification, sanctification, and missional vocation in Barth. Justification is the great Christological reality in Barth, a reality pronounced over our heads, and faith is really seen as a reality transition. Sanctification consists in prayer and ethics, rather than internal soul-searching. Clearly in this way, Barth’s soteriology, grounded in incarnational participation, has something to offer as a corrective for the inevitable inwardness of Calvinist and especially Edwardsean sanctification, and their weakness with respect to assurance of salvation. 26 However, conversely, some might well ask, did Barth in fact neglect pneumatic participation of the human in Christ? Might Edwards have helped Barth achieve a fuller pneumatology given that this is sometimes assumed to be a weakness in Barth’s theology, and given that he is often accused of universalism, 27 and given the challenges surrounding the doctrine and practice of personal holiness! In answer to this it should be remembered that Barth was not able to write volume V of his Church Dogmatics, in which he intended to describe the work of God the Redeemer, and therefore pneumatology as a primary locus. As a result, Barth’s pneumatology must be gleaned from descriptions of the person and work of the Spirit in the context of the first two of his primary Trinitarian theological arch-themes: revelation and reconciliation. Hunsinger’s corrective against inadequate interpretations and toward an informed and appropriately nuanced view of Barth’s pneumatology provides an incentive that gleaning this from Barth’s discussions of revelation and reconciliation is worthwhile. Hunsinger’s well-taken point is that “Barth saw ‘revelation,’ ‘reconciliation’ and ‘redemption’ in a set of relationships that were subtle, flexible and complex.” 28 Bearing this in mind, I contend that Barth’s pneumatology is less inadequate than is popularly thought, and that in the specific area of how the Spirit and Christ operate with respect to human salvation,

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Barth must be heard. His assignation of a significant soteriological category, that of “redemption,” to describe the work of the Spirit is surely evidence of this, and that any “underdevelopment” of his pneumatology was not due to anything but temporal reality. Hunsinger points out, nevertheless, that Barth’s pneumatology is primarily Augustinian in its conception and therefore focused upon the Spirit as the mediator of communion, in a way that sounds very similar to Edwards’s concept of the Spirit. Hunsinger notes that Barth stressed that the Spirit is the mediator of communion in the economy of redemption because the Spirit is that antecedently in the immanent Trinity. He specifically challenges the viewpoint of Alan Torrance that revelation receives emphasis at the expense of communion in the trinitarian theology of Barth. 29 He suggests that Torrance can only contend this by overlooking the mutual coinherence of “revelation” and “communion.” Hunsinger contends that revelation in Barth is actually the effecting of participation in the self-knowledge of God. He insists that “knowing and loving in God are inseparable” (CD II/1, pp 22ff.) and that therefore “Knowledge of God, in Barth’s theology, is essentially a form of koinonia.” Interestingly, this concept makes Barth’s pneumatology, in this aspect of it, analogous to the Edwardsean notion that participation in God is effected by the Spirit as the mutual love of the Father for the Son. Hunsinger interprets Barth to say that through the gospel, by the Spirit, we participate in the self-knowledge of God in that “the Father knows the Son and the Son the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit” (CD II/1, p. 49). When Hunsinger gives an overview of Barth’s understanding of the role of the Spirit in salvation, his languaging again easily evokes Edwardsean images: he (Barth) regards the Spirit as the “mediator of communion.” The “communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Corinthians 13:14) in which believers become “individually members of one another” (Romans 12:5), is established as the Holy Spirit unites them with Christ by faith. Furthermore, through their definitive union and communion with Christ, as mediated by the Spirit, they are also at the same time given an indirect share in the primordial communion that obtains between the Father and the Son to all eternity. It is finally because the mediation of the Spirit obtains at this primordial level, as the eternal bond of love within the Trinity, that the Spirit can serve as mediator of communion in other ways. 30

Thus far, these sentiments could reflect the pneumatic theosis theology of Edwards. However, at this juncture in Hunsinger’s discussion of Barth’s view of participation in Christ, 31 he makes a crucial move that Edwards should have made more emphatically. This move was to start with the Spirit’s role as mediator of communion in the Man Christ Jesus rather than with the saints. In other words, the appropriate order for the strands that make up the knot of Trinitarian salvation is Trinity, incarnation, and then, and only on

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the basis of incarnation, deification or participation in Christ. As Hunsinger argues: The Spirit thus plays a role in originating and maintaining the incarnation, or the communion between Christ’s deity and his humanity (communio naturarum), as well as a role in sustaining through time the primordial communion between the incarnate Son and his heavenly Father. The loving bond between Christ and believers by which they are incorporated into him as a community, as the body of which he himself is the head, takes place by the Spirit on this Trinitarian and incarnational basis. The mediation of the Spirit thus moves in two directions at once: from the eternal Trinity through Jesus Christ to humankind, and from humankind through Jesus Christ to the eternal Trinity. 32

This makes, “The communion of the Trinity” as Alan Torrance has said, to constitute “the arche and telos of all that is. It provides the hermeneutical criterion of all that has existence (of good as well as evil) and compels us to conceive and reinterpret Being in terms of divine personhood and the ultimacy of the intradivine personal communion.” 33 How then does what the atonement seems to promise, in its total sense (recapitulation, theosis, substitution), come to fruition in Barth’s theology of participation? First, Barth’s participation theology avoids the prospect of any confusion of the divine and the human as is the case with the Cyrilline and Chalcedonic view of the unconfused divine and human natures of the Son of God. Participation, in fulfillment of the total biblical narrative makes humanity truly human. 34 Secondly, holiness is indeed an aim of sanctification in Barth, but it is not an inward venture. The crucial difference as the doctrine of participation developed from Calvin into the theologies of Barth and Edwards relates to the expectation of transformation. Whereas Edwards, like Calvin, is very concerned with the doctrine of formation and life transformation (habitus), and indeed takes the expectation of change in the convert to new levels via an emphasis on the infusion of the Spirit into the life of the believer, in Barth there is no spirituality, no habitus to speak of. In fact, Barth moves back to Luther’s simul iustus et peccator, and holds little hope of the homo sanctus in this life, though this needs to be unpacked. For one thing, this latter point is not unanimously held by all interpeters of Barth. Joseph Mangina does make assertions concerning a theology of habitus or transformation in Barth in his book Karl Barth on the Christian Life (which Neder contests). 35 For another thing, it should not be imagined that Barth does not encourage the life of holiness. It is simply that he does not think this is a human possession. Rather, holiness, along with faith, love and hope are only meaningful as they are constantly being received from Christ and in participation with him. This is confirmed in Neder’s perception:

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Chapter 15 If Barth has a spirituality, it is this: “Faith never in any respect lives from or by anything other than the Word.” In faith, human beings are united to the Word, elevated outside of their own range of possibilities and potential, and given a share in an event which, while real and determinative for their whole existence, does not involve an inward transformation of their humanity as such. 36

As a result, Barth’s orientation in sanctification is not the inward look, but the outward look to Christ, and the discovery of faith, love, and hope in response to the justification, sanctification, and vocation they are given in Christ, will be incidental, not ultimate. That does not mean they are not intentional. For Barth, these virtues, if they can even be called that, are external to the human person, not inherent within them. That is, they are a function of their relatedness at any given point to Christ, and never part of the human being per se. It is in fact true to say that Barth’s view of participation, which is a union or mutual indwelling of Christ with the believer, leads to the creation of new human beings, not new natures within human beings. In this sense, Barth’s view is existential, that is, having to do with new being (we do not mean here existentialism as a method of theological inquiry). Jesus creates new human beings by raising them from the dead and giving them faith and obedience by which they actively live and exist in him. Faith is living outside of oneself in Christ. 37 Rather than a turn toward spiritual practices that entail any kind of introspection, Barth’s “spirituality” entails two main dynamics, prayer and ethical action. It is in some senses, behavioral rather than introspective. The mutual indwelling of Christ and humans is not the actualization of a natural human capacity. It is “the liberation of human action by God’s sovereign grace, which energizes human creatures to freely do that which by nature is impossible for them.” 38 Another factor which mitigates the effects of particularistic election is Barth’s emphasis on the communal nature of divine election and of the people of God. A particularistic view of election, as opposed to Barth’s Christological and communal view, has an influence toward too great an individualism that can prevail in evangelicalism and even Reformed views of salvation. In this regard, Kimlyn Bender notes that “the relationship between Christ and the individual Christian is for Barth based upon the same patterns as that between Christ and the community. Barth refers to the union of Christ and the community as totus Christus; he refers to the union of Christ and the believer as a unio cum Christo, a union with Christ. . . . Barth sees the relationship between Christ and the Christian like that between Christ and the community, as predicated upon the unique relationship between the Word and flesh of Christ.” 39 This is not to negate the personal reality of salvation, but given the nature of human persons as “persons in relation” in a manner analogous to divine persons, the person cannot receive salvation without the church, which even in a Protestant setting mediates faith to converts.

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Thus, while the distinction between common grace and saving grace is necessary, these concepts must be kept together, and remain inseparable. This will be seen to be the case especially once the concept of hypostasized grace is replaced by an understanding that grace is personal, that is, that it is the disposition of the God of all grace in Jesus Christ who is present to us in gracious ways, pre- and post-conversion, rather than some imaginary “pocket” of something called grace. HEALING OF TRAUMA We referred in chapter 11 to the taxonomy of sin, and how the atonement meets sin at every turn. Considerations of sin as ontological include both trauma and shame. We now consider the way in which the atonement is applied in the healing of one of these two aspects of the consequences of sin. Space does not permit evaluation of the healing of sin as shame, and reference is made to the treatments of this topic offered by Eleanore Stump and Mark McConnell. 40 On sin experienced as trauma, by both perpetrator and victim, this is spoken of also by Michael Rea as the “stain of the soul,” 41 though he acknowledges a debt to Marilyn McCord Adams in this regard. Rea is seeking to complement and fill out the concept of the stain of the soul expressed in the work of Eleanore Stump, emphasizing the effects of wrongdoing on the intellect, the will, even on the memory and cognitive capacities that underly “mindreading and empathy” all of which have a deleterious effect on relational realities, especially related to the hurt inflicted on relations, “even if he is forgiven by his victims.” 42 Rea’s own concern is that this definition of stain and its solutions would seem to be addressed merely humanly by therapeutic methods, instead of being a “problem from which we need divine salvation.” This definition, which he summarizes as “lingering, morally undesirable leftovers within the psyche of great moral evil, leftovers that come in the form of what is now unwelcome experiential knowledge and the memories thereof, and a history whose consequences, impair our relationships and even alienate us from ourselves” are “not caused by our sins alone.” He draws attention to the fact that “things that happen to us can stain our souls no less than things that we do,” 43 including “unshakeable feelings of guilt and shame.” Even God’s forgiveness, “a divine ‘let’s forget about this’ response” is not an “appropriate (or even morally acceptable) way of dealing with the stains left by victimization.” 44 Furthermore, Rea points out that victims of trauma often blame God for his agency at whatever level, which, whether warranted or not, nevertheless “contribute to people’s alienation from God” from which he states, “a ‘let’s forget about this’ response on the part of God is exactly the wrong approach to dealing with the stains left by their traumas, and pointing to Christ’s

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empathetic engagement with their trauma will (insofar as they partly blame Christ as one of the causes) will be of no psychological help whatsoever.” 45 So what is Rea’s solution to these traumatic effects of sin that are not resolved merely by the forensic dimension of salvation, and even the sympathy of the high priestly Christ? It is first an appeal to the Christus Victor dimension (my words) of the atonement: “that at least part of this further story must be that Christ’s work somehow both defeats the badness of the evils—particularly the horrendous evils—in which we participate as victims and perpetrators, and redeems for us the parts of our lives that have been touched by those evils.” 46 And secondly, the solution lies in an appreciation of the biblical truth of the ontological or filial salvific dimension (my words) of adoption into the family of Christ, resulting in the gift of a “new identity,” so that “the work of Christ contributes to the defeat of the evils in which we have participated and the redemption of territory claimed within our souls by sin (both ours and other people’s) and its consequences.” 47 It is thirdly an appeal to narrative and the important role it plays in “identity-development, meaning-making, and healing in the wake of trauma together.” Pertinent to this, Rea speaks of the “tremendous impact” that sin, victimization and trauma have “on our self-defining memories.” They “threaten to consume the narratives that shape our sense of self.” He speaks of the hope expressed eloquently in the New Testament in “the work of Christ” which “provides tremendous resources for embedding our sins and traumas in new, redemptive narratives of our lives.” He points also to how this “constitutes a new source of family stories and memories that are vividly called to mind by the Lord’s Supper and other liturgies of the church, and are available for use in the co-authoring of our sense of self.” It thus becomes possible, as the work of Christ is operative in us through these practices, “that sin and its consequences for us (as either perpetrators or victims) no longer dominates the story of who we are.” He concludes that “we would seem to have here a promising story about how the work of Christ redeems us from sin, reclaiming the territory within us— territory in our histories, our memories, our relationships and relational capacities, and much more—that has been colonized by sin and its consequences.” 48 In general terms I find myself to be in agreement with these sentiments. However, I would wish for more tacit evidence of biblical dependence of these assertions, and I am particularly not quite so ready to eliminate the direct help of the God who the psalmist speaks of in these terms, for example, “The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down” (Psalm 145:14). The mature soul (under wise pastoral care when needed) recognizes that even though all circumstances are within the purview and permission of a sovereign God, he cannot be attributed with evil, and he works redemptively in us in the pilgrim narrative that is the Christian life. The Lord has a particular empathy and ministry for the broken-hearted— Psalm 34:18: “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who

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are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 147:3 further affirms that “he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Isaiah 61 anticipates the nature of the ministry of the Messiah who himself becomes the broken-hearted, as precisely the means of the healing of traumatized hearts: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives” (61:1). In particular, the broken-hearted experiences of our Great High Priest as expressed in a number of texts must be invoked in answer to the question of trauma, both for its victims and its perpetrators. What are some cases in point? . . . When he weeps at Lazarus’s grave at the spectre of death in its particularity in a close friend, and especially because of its presence as the enemy of humanity made in the divine image . . . when he weeps at the sight of a people obstinately unwilling to be shepherded . . . but most especially as he anticipates the unparalleled trauma of the cross in the Garden, where he sweat drops of blood and, as the writer of Hebrews describes it, he uttered “fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission” (Heb. 5:7). The “being heard” was not until as Son “he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek” (Heb. 5:8–10). This trauma is what leads the writer to the Hebrews to speak elsewhere of the efficacy of the Great High Priest to minister to those with whom he has become one, who go through soul trauma, including the “persecution fatigued” people to whom this author wrote. They had suffered as Jews in the diaspora, and were now suffering as Christians through loss of property, intimidation, imprisonment, martyrdom of their loved ones, and impending martyrdom of their own. The affirmations of the qualifications and ability of the Son who “learned obedience from what he suffered” to minister trauma care to his people cannot be minimized. The writer affirms in chapter 7:26, “Such a high priest truly meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens.” “He truly meets our need” because, as chapter 2 affirms, he shared in our humanity, that is, he participated in our morally and metaphysically fallen humanity to free us from the fear of our greatest trauma, that of death: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:14–15). He truly meets our need secondly, because as a man who has experienced testing and temptation to the full, he is merciful with us and faithful to us when we fail: “For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that

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he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:16–18). This is reemphasized in chapter 4, only with an emphasis on the ascension and ascended triumph of that Son of God become Man. He truly meets our need in this, the often unemphasized enhypostatic reality that the person of the incarnate Son has taken our humanity into the triune life of God, where he is for us in all our trauma and tragedy, and eternally so: “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (4:14–16). The sacrificial aspect is very much part of this priestly ministry, however, and cannot be separated from the ontological aspects of the High Priest’s ministry. Thus he truly meets our need as sinners, not just the sinned against, the perpetrators as well as the victims, who stand in need of forgiveness for their real guilt. This is answered in two ways: first by means of the forensic and sacrificial nature of his death, penal substitution, if you like—“Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” This is the finished work of the cross. But as if to grant double assurance, we are informed that the efficacy of that sacrifice and the effects on us are everlasting, grounded as they are in the eternal, indissoluble life of our Great High Priest who in an “unfinished” way ever lives to make intercession for us: “but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (7:24–25). In other words, there is no narrative apart from the narrative of our Great High Priest who is sustained and sustains our journey in the “power of an endless (indestructible) life” (7:16). How do we access both that freedom from our guilt, and the comfort healing of our trauma? We are urged to enter the presence of God (“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” [4:16]), to bring our wounded and guilty selves to God. Yet, even in that we are engraced. We cannot pray as we ought, often because we are too broken, too distracted, too grief-stricken, too inarticulate. We are enabled by the ministry of the Holy Spirit within, who expresses our groans, which are taken up by our interceding Priest and presented to the Father, who in turn dispenses the ministry of healing and forgiveness and comfort, in the Priestly Son and by the Comforter Spirit, often through the people and counsellors in the ecclesial community around us.

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CONCLUSION A passage in the communion liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer is a fitting capstone for our reflections on the atonement. The BCP is the liturgical book used by churches all over the world of the Anglican Communion. The First Prayer Book, which was enacted by the first Act of Uniformity of Edward VI in 1549, was prepared primarily by Thomas Cranmer, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1533. The encouragements offered here will apply irrespective of tradition, however. The greatest response I could hope for in writing this book is that communion would be central again in all church traditions where it has become peripheral for a host of reasons, including a misconstrual that communion is for the worthy, or the perfect who have by means of strenuous confession come to believe they are worthy. Paul is emphatic that yes, we should examine ourselves, and then . . . eat! It is the spiritual food that every believer needs very often, and given that the church is defined by the Eucharist, that should mean every week. Participation in communion is an outworking of covenant, not the achievement on our part of our side of a contract with God! The view of the Eucharist reflected in this tradition is that of reenactment and Real Presence. By reenactment is meant the reality that the ordo historia, Christ’s history in incarnation, death, and resurrection is reenacted in a spiritual sense in each occasion of the communion, and that the church collectively, and each Christian personally, enters afresh into union with Christ in that history. This is the remembrance component, but it is more than a cerebral act. It is fresh participation in his death for us, and his ascension for us. Christ comes down to us by the Spirit’s perichoretic presence, and we are caught up in the upward vector of his history into the heavenlies in the ascended Christ. By Real Presence, the view of John Calvin, is meant the reality that Christ is mysteriously made present to his people through the bread and wine, even though bread and wine remain bread and wine, so that they may feed on him by faith in taking bread and wine. This is the visceral component, the feeding on Christ in our souls. Calvin insists that the Eucharist is Real Presence; Karl Barth insists that the preaching of the Word is also Real Presence, as the words of the human preacher becomes by the Spirit and as a result of exegetical integrity, the words of God. Now, to this section of the liturgy which will lead to the words of institution and the sharing of the bread and wine: Blessing and glory and thanksgiving be unto thee Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memorial of that his precious death, until his coming again. 49

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Just a few comments which will pull together the primary tenets of total atonement: • There is a clear assertion that the scope of Christ’s atonement is the whole world and its sins, thus atonement is total in its scope, at least as far as God’s desire and design for human beings; • The incarnation is expressed in a participative way—“to take our nature upon him”—and in a manner that involves Christ’s suffering of the ontological consequence of sin, death, as well as the forensic consequences that are implicit in the fact that Christ’s death is viewed as satisfaction, oblation or offering, and sacrifice. Thus atonement is total in the sense that it involves the whole history and being of Jesus Christ, and in the sense that it is both ontological and juridical; • The words that are amassed to describe the death of Christ and their adjectives convey the notion that atonement is total in the sense that it is a full atonement, covering every aspect of the nature of sin and its consequences—satisfaction for the moral debt which sin incurs, the offering up of Christ’s devotion and obedience for us which is far, far greater in worth and glory than any debt, and which brings virtue to all in Christ, not just justification, a word suggestive of the sweet savor offerings of the Levitical order, and then the sacrifice for sins, answering to the sin offerings of Leviticus. The way in which the language was expressed in Elizabethan times around these three aspects of the atoning death of Christ needs to be translated. It seems that the adjectives cumulated at the start of the phrase belong in an ABCCBA pattern with the nouns. Thus the intent was to convey that his life and death were a full satisfaction, and a perfect oblation and a sufficient sacrifice. The language of Hebrews seems to underlie this wonderful piece of liturgy: “But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (10:12–14). NOTES 1. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion: Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 56. 2. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion, 56. 3. The notion of image as present in all humanity as “non-degreed,” over against the degreed nature of that image in regenerate people as they are sanctified or deified, is expressed in the work of Christa L. McKirland, “The Image of God and Intersex Persons.” Paper presented at the Logos Institute, St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews, October 12, 2016. 4. Torrance interestingly notes that God is the primary actor when it comes to human beings bearing his image: “It is, fundamentally, God who does the beholding of the image. He images Himself in man.” T. F. Torrance, Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, 42.

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5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 1, Article 8, Response to Objection 2. 6. Trevor Hart. “A Capacity for Ambiguity: The Barth-Brunner debate revisited,” Tyndale Bulletin 44.2 (1993), 300. 7. Trevor Hart. “A Capacity for Ambiguity,” 293. 8. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion, 209. 9. This essay is contained in Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth, transl. Peter Fraenkel (Portland: Wipf and Stock, 2002). 10. T. F. Torrance allowed for a qualified natural theology but made it clear also that the sensus divinitatis (perception of the divine, or human consciousness and behavior rather than knowledge of God received by revelation) is not the same as the sensus Dei (a revelatory encounter with the God of our Lord Jesus Christ). T. F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 40. 11. Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Preaching the Atonement,” in The Glory of the Atonement, Essays in honour of Roger Nicole, 426–444. 12. Bruce L. McCormack, “So That He May Be Merciful to All: Karl Barth and the Problem of Universalism,” in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011, 239–240. For more on this issue see Habets, Theology in Transposition, 105–106. For T. F. Torrance’s view see James B. Torrance, “The Incarnation and Limited Atonement,” Evangelical Quarterly 55 (1983): 295–311. 13. In answer to the question of Roger Nicole, “Is Christ as mediator, in the thought of Calvin, the representative of mankind at large, or did he come into this world principally as the head of the covenant of grace, and specifically for the purpose of representing and redeeming the elect?” (Roger R Nicole, “John Calvin’s View of the Extent of the Atonement,” The Westminster Theological Journal 47, no. 2 (1985): 197–225, 211), it would seem that the fairest answer is that for Calvin the second answer is correct. Calvin was most likely aware of the Lombardian formula that the atonement was sufficient for all but efficient only for the elect, but does not seem to adopt it. The centrality of Christ’s sacrifice as a penal substitutionary offering is evident in Calvin's Institutes (Institutes II.16.2, Institutes II.16.5–7) and especially his commentaries (“Romans 3 Calvin’s Commentaries,” https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ calvin/romans/3.htm) and sermons (John Calvin, Sermons on the Saving Work of Christ, trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1980), 80, 140–141). That he espoused the limited atonement view is also clear (Institutes 2.16.2, Institutes 2.15.6; III.24.15, 16, see also commentary on 1 Tim. 2:6, Jean Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1979), Vol. 21, p. 60). Richard Muller confirms this: “Calvin was quite clear on this point: the application or efficacy of Christ’s death was limited to the elect.” (Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition, 61.) I am indebted to Jacob Raju for his work in this area contained in the following term papers: “The Fury Of God’s Love: The Wrath and Love of God in Calvin’s Theology of the Cross,” Atonement seminar, Regent College, October 31, 2018, and “Calvin and the Extent of the Atonement,” Regent College, Theology II, July 1, 2018. 14. T. F. Torrance, Atonement, 187–188. 15. Bruce L. McCormack, “So That He May Be Merciful to All,” 240–241. 16. Bruce L. McCormack, “So That He May Be Merciful to All,” 240–241. 17. T. F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 94. 18. Gerald R. McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and the Salvation of Non-Christians,” Pro Ecclesia IX, No.2 (2000), 208–227. McDermott’s sources are Miscellany 27, 29, 241, 393, 492, 847, 1299, 1338, and History of the Work of Redemption in YE 9, 179. This reflects Edwards’s adherence to the Prisca theologia. See McDermott, “Jonathan Edwards and the Salvation of Non-Christians,” 211. 19. See Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 253–258 (inspired by David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination), cited in McClymond and McDermott, 2012a, 699. 20. See Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 95.

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21. See Michael McClymond and Gerald McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 695–704, for a summation of Edwards’s Catholic leanings. 22. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), xiv. 23. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, xii. 24. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, xii, 6. 25. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 61. 26. For more on this topic see W. Ross Hastings, “Discerning the Spirit: Ambivalent Assurance in the Soteriology of Jonathan Edwards and Barthian Correctives.” Scottish Journal of Theology, 63 (04), 2010, 437–455. 27. The essential flaw in Barth is as Moltmann states, that he “uses a non-trinitarian concept of the unity of the one God—that is to say, the concept of the identical subject” (Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God [London: SCM Press, 1981] [hereafter “Moltmann, 1981a”], 144). It should be cautioned, however, that Barth’s emphasis on unity in the doctrine of God did not derive from any idealization of mathematical or numerical oneness, nor the idealization of a principle of simplicity, but rather it was a concern with identity. Barth wished, as Alan Torrance suggests, to emphasize that when we meet God’s revelation, or are met by the revelation of God, we are met not by part of God, nor by instantiations of the divine, but with the Person of God, the identical divine Subject in his singular totality. This is what leads Barth to affirm that what God is toward us he is eternally and antecedently in Himself— “God is action and relatedness antecedently in Himself” (Torrance, Alan J. Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation with Special Reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s “Church Dogmatics” [Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1996] [hereafter “Torrance, A. 1996a”], 213–215). Thus, when God meets us we are met by God as he is in Himself. Hence Barth’s interpretation of the threeness of God as referring not to “three instances of one deity” but “three events of one deity.” CD, I/1, 370ff. Torrance (Torrance, A. 1996a, fn.10) alerts us to the fact of the triviality of appeals to the numericals “one” and indeed, “three,” for the doctrine of the Trinity. In support, he cites Gunton’s comments concerning the “famous and futile quest for analogies of the Trinity in the created world,” their “weakness is their employment as attempts to illustrate the divine Trinity: The world is used to throw light on God, rather than the other way around, so that attention falls on irrelevancies like the number three rather than on the personal nature of the triune God” (Persons, Divine and Human, Eds. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton [Edinburgh: 1991], 55). This has definite bearing on Augustine, and Edwards who persisted in the use of analogy “from below.” 28. George Hunsinger, “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth , ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177. 29. George Hunsinger, “The Mediator of Communion,” 189, also, footnote 17, 194. 30. George Hunsinger, “The Mediator of Communion,” 179. 31. An important fundamental conviction that act and being are one in Barth’s theology. This actualistic concept of essence is worked out into his doctrine of the Trinity (the modes are Each eternal instantiations of the Other), and then all the way down into humanity. A human being is as she acts, for Barth. Barth expressly rejects the concept of deification again and again in the CD, but this needs to be understood not so much as a rejection of deification per se, but as a protest against any form of the confusion of the divine and human essence, but especially it is a rejection of the confusion of divine and human actions and decisions, and therefore, the confusion of divine and human essences. In this sense, Barth is firmly in the Calvin camp, over against Osiander, with respect to what is involved in participation. See Adam Neder, Participation in Christ: An Entry into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 13. 32. Hunsinger, “The Mediator of Communion,” 179. Emphasis added. 33. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 259. 34. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 90. 35. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, fn. 40, 114. 36. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 11–12.

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37. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 12. 38. Adam Neder, Participation in Christ, 12. 39. Kimlyn Bender, Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 203, n. 12. 40. On which see Eleanore Stump, “The Atonement and the Problem of Shame,” Journal of Philosophical Research, 41 (2016), 111–129, and Mark McConnell, “From ‘I have done wrong’ to ‘I am wrong’: (Re)Constructing Atonement as a Response to Shame,” in Locating Atonement: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, eds. Oliver D. Crisp, Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 168–188. 41. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” a paper presented at the Logos Institute for Analytical and Exegetical Theology, University of St Andrews, June 7, 2018. 42. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 1. Rea is here referencing Eleanore Stump, Atonement (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology Series) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also Eleanore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 43. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 1, emphasis added. 44. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 1–2. 45. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul, 2. 46. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 2. 47. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 2. 48. Michael Rea, “The Ill-Made Knight and the Stain on the Soul,” 2. 49. Book of Common Prayer, 82.

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Index

Abelard, 80, 129, 135, 171, 261 Abraham and Isaac, 56, 107–108, 110, 241, 244 Akedah, 56, 107, 110, 244 Anatolios, Khaled, 15–19, 21n13, 21n35 anhypostasis, enhypostasis, 26–28, 143, 145, 153, 170, 219, 237 Anselm, 2, 10n15, 17, 30, 79, 134, 150, 171, 178, 179, 181–189, 195, 197, 210, 214–219, 221, 226n29, 227n51, 268 Apollinarius, 28, 38, 39 appropriations, doctrine of, 50, 58, 59, 236 Aquinas, Thomas, 53, 56, 58, 60, 83, 86n54, 97, 172, 214–219, 221, 227n34, 227n36, 250 assurance of salvation, 150, 164, 205, 283, 285, 292 Athanasius, 15–20, 20n11, 21n13, 21n24, 88, 101n5, 102n49, 137–138, 144, 148, 181, 184, 185, 212–214, 246–248, 250, 275 Augustine, 53–56, 58, 64, 88–89, 167, 178, 182, 190n28, 190n30, 211, 217, 223, 246, 296n27 Aulén, Gustav, 79, 81, 167, 178–179, 183, 193–199, 212 Ayres, Lewis, 53 Baker, Mark D., 17, 74–75, 79, 120, 121, 122, 134, 200

Barth, Karl, 26, 29–33, 35–37, 40–43, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 57, 62–63, 65, 82, 84, 89–91, 99, 100, 124, 130–131, 136, 140n6, 143, 145, 147, 148, 160–163, 173, 175n84, 180, 205, 218, 219, 227n50, 235, 236, 242–247, 251, 253, 261, 262, 270–271, 276, 278–279, 282, 284–288, 293, 296n27, 296n31 Basil the Great, 59, 102n49 Bauckham, Richard, 248 Bayne, Tim, 4, 75, 121, 122, 237, 267–270 Beale, Gregory, 245–247 Bell, Rob, 201–202 Billings, Todd, 271–273 Bloesch, Donald G., 163 blood of Christ, 13, 14, 24, 88, 94–97, 99–100, 109–110, 112, 114–117, 120, 124–125, 137, 150, 155, 158–159, 165, 167, 180–182, 184, 202, 209–210, 219–220, 229, 259, 290–292 Boersma, Hans, xi, 196, 199–201, 210, 239–240 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 26, 29, 33–34, 224 Boyd, Greg, 13, 35, 179, 193, 201, 202 Bromiley, Geoffrey, 52 Brümmer, Vincent, 13 Brunner, Emil, 278 Bryars, Jon, 245–248 burnt offering, 107, 110, 111, 112, 116, 155, 158, 159, 187, 215–216, 219–220, 244 303

304

Index

Calvin, John, 26, 35, 41, 43, 51, 65, 91, 97–100, 124, 136, 147, 148, 150, 155–156, 164–165, 172, 174n22, 174n23, 210, 214, 221–224, 236, 239, 251, 257n128, 269, 271–273, 273n17, 280, 284, 285, 287, 293, 295n13, 296n31 Canlis, Julie, 99–100, 271–273 Cappadocians, 52, 53, 55, 58, 146, 181 Cary, Philip, 62–63 Casarella, Peter, 57 Chalcedon, 2, 27, 29, 34, 37–40, 42, 61, 66, 69n47, 130, 146, 147, 250, 287 Chalke, Steve, 35–36, 43 Christus Victor model, 32, 35, 36, 79, 81, 88, 109, 119, 129, 167–170, 172, 177–179, 181, 182, 189, 193–202, 210, 230, 240, 242, 262, 264, 290 Coakley, Sarah, 226n29 coinherence, 36, 47, 52–53, 60, 98, 111, 182, 286 communicatio idiomatum, 37–39, 89, 100, 147, 251–252 Congdon, David, 146–147 Cranfield, C.E.B., 233, 236, 250–251 Crisp, Oliver, 73–79, 84, 98 Cross, Richard, 53–54, 56 Cyril of Alexandria, 37–38, 45n37, 146–147, 167, 171–172, 211, 250 Dale, R.W., 80 Danaher, William, 55–56 Denney, James, 80 descent into hell, 240, 244, 245, 252 Diller, Calvin, 4–5, 10n14 Dooyewoord, Hendrik, 100 Dunn, James D. G., 181 Edwards, Jonathan, 51, 54–56, 60, 97, 99, 147, 148, 150, 155, 190n30, 191n35, 205, 208n61, 236, 283–287, 296n27 election, 41, 62–66, 100, 102n60, 150, 165, 205, 271–273, 279–280, 282, 288 Eucharist, xi, 2–3, 19, 20, 38, 92, 93, 97–99, 102n60, 108, 117, 171, 245, 293 Eusebius of Caesarea, 212 Evans, William B., 98

Farrow, Douglas, 215–219, 226n29, 227n36, 227n51, 227n54 feminist theology, 1–2, 9n3–9n4, 13, 29, 120, 178–179, 197–198 Ferguson, Sinclair, 264, 279 Fiddes, Paul, 161, 197 Forsyth, P.T., 234–235 Girard, Rene, 196 Glover, Daniel, 91–92, 98 grain offering, 111, 112, 131 Green, Joel, 74–75, 79, 108, 117–118, 120–122, 134, 200 Gregory of Nazianzus, 26, 61, 195, 211 Gregory of Nyssa, 53, 59–61, 167, 170, 178, 197 Grudem, Wayne, 129 Gunton, Colin, 10n15, 75, 78–82, 85n29, 121, 200, 296n27 Habets, Myk, 174n29 Hart, David Bentley, 179, 182–189, 194–195 Hart, Trevor, 277–279 Hastings, Rashdall, 178 Hays, Richard, 124 Hegel, Georg, 42–43, 80, 257n123 Hindmarsh, Bruce, 232–233, 254n15 Hodge, Charles, 35, 85n26, 91, 93, 97, 102n60 Holy Spirit, 23, 43, 51–52, 57–60, 87, 97, 124–125, 134, 148–149, 164, 172, 176n109, 236, 244–245, 250, 252–254, 275–276, 283, 286, 292 Hooker, Morna, 181 Horton, Michael, 203, 204, 207n57 Hunsinger, George, 46n62, 62–63, 285–287 immutability, 39–40, 42, 223 indivisibility of persons and works of the Trinity, doctrine of, 27, 36, 49, 50, 58, 111–112, 148, 236, 240 Irenaeus, 25, 32, 67, 88, 91, 93–94, 99, 137, 144, 178–181, 186, 197, 217 John of Damascus, 53, 250 Johnson, Adam, 13–14, 85n26, 245–247 Johnson, Marcus P., 92

Index Jüngel, Eberhard, 4, 130 Kant, Immanuel, 80, 129, 135 Kettler, Christian, 144–145, 173n4 Kimbell, James, 119 Kretzmann, Norman, 64 Kuyper, Abraham, 14, 100 Lane Craig, William, 64 Lane, Tony, 201 Latin heresy, 122 Lebeau, Paul, 99 Leftow, Brian, 64 Letham, Robert, 98, 102n60 Lombard, Peter, 250, 280, 295n13 Lossky, Vladimir, 183, 185, 190n30 Luther, Martin, 38, 147, 162, 165, 214, 215, 216, 221–225, 241, 253 MacIntyre, John, 83 Martyr, Justin, 88, 99, 172, 178, 211, 259 McCall, Tom, 248, 250, 253 McCormack, Bruce, 29, 34–42, 45n55, 58, 62–64, 174n22, 219, 279, 281–282 McDonald, H.D., 180 McGrath, Alister, 224–225, 241 McKim, Donald, 88 McLeod Campbell, John, 124, 143, 145, 148–150, 155, 158, 164–165, 172, 180, 261, 262, 263 McLeod, Donald, 153–154 Melchizedek, 65, 290–292 Milbank, John, 196, 246–247 mimetic, scapegoat theory, 129, 196 Moltmann, Jürgen, 248, 253, 257n123, 296n27 monotheletism, dyotheletism, 69n47 moral influence/exemplar model, 129–131, 134–135, 139, 260 Morris, Leon, 254n25, 268 Mozart, 36 Muller, Richard A., 43, 46n78, 295n13 Mullins, Ryan, 64, 140n6 narrative approach to salvation, 15, 16, 64, 82, 93, 107, 117, 118, 119, 178–179, 182–185, 188–189, 194, 195, 199, 203, 243, 287, 290, 292 Neder, Adam, 89–91, 284–285, 287

305

Nevin, John Williamson, 91–93, 97–98 Ngien, Dennis, 224, 241 Nicole, Roger, 210, 259–264 non-violent atonement model, 35, 178–179, 197–201, 231, 233 Norris, Richard A., 88 ordo historia, ordo salutis, 34, 89, 129, 139, 271–273, 273n17, 283, 284 Origen, 167, 170, 178, 197 Owen, John, 26, 136, 150, 205 Packer, J.I., xi, 83–84, 86n52, 86n54, 209, 214, 220–221, 225n2, 238, 239, 245, 255n50, 268 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 4, 221 peace offering, 110, 112–113 perichoresis, 54, 55, 60, 61, 147, 251, 253–254 Plantinga Pauw, Amy, 55, 56 pneumatology and Christology, 283–289 priesthood of Christ, 4, 23, 43, 64, 94–95, 113–114, 132, 247, 292 propitiation, 24, 32, 48, 114, 115, 120, 136, 137, 158–160, 165, 166, 203, 227n54, 230–236, 239, 263–264, 271 Psalm 22, cry of dereliction, 30, 47, 50, 57–58, 116, 153–154, 188–189, 218–219, 224, 236, 240–241, 243, 244, 247, 248, 250, 252–254 psychological, “classical” Trinity, 52–60, 140n6, 253–254 Pugh, Ben, 161–162, 177–178, 181, 190n6, 197, 201, 202, 221, 222 ransom model, 109, 177–179, 202 Ray, Darby Kathleen, 179, 197–198 Rea, Michael, 289–290 real presence, 98–99, 293 recapitulation model, 25, 29, 32–34, 49, 137, 177, 179–183, 186–189, 193–194, 209–210, 214, 218, 240, 242, 269–270, 287 reconciliation, 1, 4, 14, 25, 32, 33, 39, 51–52, 56, 66, 73–74, 80, 88, 112–113, 121, 134–135, 148–149, 159, 168, 184–185, 222, 230, 235, 243, 247, 264, 285

306

Index

Restall, Greg, 4, 75, 121–122, 237, 267–270 Rutledge, Fleming, 10n15, 79, 240–244 Sanders, E.P., 14 Sanders, Fred, 27–28 satisfaction model, 179, 214, 230, 268, 271–273 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 80, 85n26, 102n60, 262 scope of atonement, 210–211, 263, 275–289 sin offering, 26, 67, 94, 113–116, 131–132, 155, 158, 187–189, 214, 222, 252, 269, 294 Smail, Thomas, 180–181 social Trinity, 34–35, 41, 52–58, 74–75, 248, 251–254 Stott, John, 229–231, 233–237, 240, 264 Strabbing, Jada Twedt, 4, 237–238, 255n48, 269 Strobel, Kyle, 55 Studebaker, Steve, 55 Stump, Eleanor, 64, 289 Tanner, Kathryn, 58 Taylor, Vincent, 209, 225n2, 229–230, 262–263 theosis, 33–34, 37, 38, 88, 96, 129, 137, 139, 146, 148, 172, 177, 179–181,

190n30, 193, 194, 195, 213, 214, 222, 252, 269, 270, 286, 287 Tillich, Paul, 129, 167 Torrance, Alan, 99, 140n6, 275, 278, 286, 287, 296n27 Torrance, James, 164, 166 Torrance, T.F., 2, 3–4, 26, 62, 64, 69n50, 91, 122–124, 143, 148, 164, 166, 173n4, 262, 280, 282, 294n4, 295n10 Trueblood, Elton, 3 vicarious humanity of Christ, 4, 10n12–10n13, 23, 26, 28, 29, 34, 38, 49, 94, 129, 143–150, 154, 155, 162, 165, 166, 173n4, 209–210, 270 Vidu, Adonis, 58 Volf, Miroslav, 66–67, 219 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 25, 175n84, 244 Walton, John, 245–246 Warfield, B. B., 44n27 Watts, Rikk, 248 Weaver, Denny, 35–36, 179, 197–199 Wheaton, Gerry, 108 Williams, Garry, 211, 212, 226n11 Williams, Rowan, 57 Wink, Walter, 179, 198–199 Wright, N.T., 14, 124, 179, 181, 193, 196, 203–205, 207n57

About the Author

W. Ross Hastings is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College where he teaches theology, ethics, theology and science, and pastoral theology. He has two earned PhDs, one in organometallic chemistry at Queen’s University (ON), and the other in theology at St. Andrews University, in his native Scotland. Ross has published many articles and the following books: Missional God, Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelizing the West (2012); The Life of God in Jonathan Edwards: Towards an Evangelical Theology of Participation (Fortress, 2015); Where Do Broken Hearts Go? An Integrative, Participational Theology of Grief (2016); and Echoes of Coinherence: Trinitarian Theology and Science in Conversation (2017). Ross has also preached in many churches in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and various countries in Africa and Asia.

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