Once upon a time, perhaps you (like me) were sitting in a church, and you heard a man on a stage or behind a pulpit say something along the lines of, “You sinned, like all people since Adam and Eve sinned. Your sin separates you from God. God is too holy to look upon sin. So, you needed a Savior to take away your sin.” And then you heard about Jesus, the Savior for you to accept to be “saved” from your sin. When you were convinced of the truth of your sinful condition and separation from God (and potentially scared silly with the thought of eternal conscious torment), maybe you prayed a prayer or raised your hand or got baptized so the blood of Jesus would cover you and bring you back to God. Good.
But let’s back up.
You and I were told that sin kept us from God. We were also told that God is love, God is our father, God is good, God is all-powerful, God is all-knowing.
We were told that God can do ANYTHING. Except…
Be in the presence of us sinners. He can’t do that. That is the one impossibility for God.
Did you ever think about that?
Protestant, evangelical Christianity has given heaps of credit to sin. Omnipotent, omnipresent God can do ANYTHING, except allow unholiness to mingle with his holiness. In that thinking, sin is the one thing more powerful than God. Reformers of old sought to reinstate individual accountability before God, rather the Church managing the details of Creator-creation interactions. This was and is a noble goal. But in doing so, I believe they unwittingly made our sins the central focus of Christ’s advent, ministry, death, and resurrection. Paying the “penalty” for our sins became greater than any message in the good news. Nowadays, if you ask someone to explain the gospel, it might boil down to something like: God hates sin. He literally can’t even be around it. You’ve sinned. Lotsa times. Sin=death. You deserve death. Jesus paid your penalty by dying on the cross as the sacrifice for your sins. Believe in him (or ask him into your heart or get baptized) and you’re covered by his taking the punishment for you. Now you’re good to go to heaven when you die.
Really? That is the entirety of the good news? It sounds like a business transaction.
This “theory,” and it is only a theory, one of several theological interpretations of how Christ’s atonement works, is called penal substitution. This theory says that unregenerate sinners are dead without Christ. To which I can agree.
But then penal substitution goes on to say that because of our unavoidable guilt, God will not forgive without punishing someone for our sin. The penalty for our sin is death according to Scripture (Romans 6:23, James 1:15). But penal substitution takes it a step further by assuming from pieced-together Scriptures that God’s holy nature, divine wrath, and judgment must be satisfied by violent retribution. While verses like Hebrews 9:22 (“without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness”) hearken back to the Levitical sacrifice system, do we assume this to mean the Creator of the universe just really needs blood? Or do we take Jesus as the total representation of God’s love and look at the cross through the lens of Christ?
Is a legal transaction of punishment-replacement actually what the death of Jesus means and accomplished for believers? That Jesus Christ was my substitute for a deserved execution?
While there is legal transactional language in Scripture, is that the end of the story? That my sinful nature, of which I am both powerless to change but completely responsible for, is the most powerful barrier between myself and God? That retributive, violent, punitive justice is core to God’s character?
There are issues with that line of thinking that I won’t go into here, but this article by Greg Boyd reflects so many of the problems I also see with penal substitution. Regardless of how believers wrestle with their understanding of the atonement, it’s time to admit that penal substitution is only a part of a greater dialogue that has been spoken for the last two thousand years. It’s time to stop communicating that this one theory is the gospel. It is not. It is one way of wrestling with the little we understand about our omnipotent God’s incarnation.
It is okay that we still wrestle; it’s okay that the beautiful, good news of how Christ accomplished salvation for us and atoned for our fallenness is mysterious. Mystery is where faith lives. “Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great.” 1 Timothy 3:16.
I am increasingly convinced that we are missing something when we think the gospel/salvation/redemption is solely about God’s holiness needing our unholiness (sin) taken away so we can be in his holy presence. That God’s one recourse to assuage his wrath and defend his own holiness was to punish with violence leading to death. That somehow violent punishment equals love. In any other context, we could call that kind of parent abusive.
But thank the Lord our God IS Love. Think about our Jesus.
Jesus in a manger is the ultimate protest against the line of thinking that our sin is more powerful than God. Our all-powerful God incarnate inhabited a newborn baby’s body. He was born in blood and afterbirth and lain in straw and dirt, cradled by imperfect parents, surrounded by an imperfect world.
Jesus in this world was a continual touching the ordinary, broken, sinful parts of humanity. He looked in faces that religious judgmentalism shunned.
Jesus on the cross is the ultimate in absorbing pain, blame, brokenness. All of it on himself. Perhaps part of it was a “penalty,” a punishment for all the wrongs we’ve committed. Perhaps it was taking on another’s sin the way parents feel and accept responsibility when their own children make dire mistakes. But his outstretched arms were and are big enough to give grace to the broken, and to be broken with us.
Of course, God can be in the presence of our sin! But he doesn’t want it for us. His love is so great, that all the deception and destruction sin brings us breaks his heart.
Sin always starts with pain: Eve’s pain of wondering if her Father could be trusted, if she was enough as she was; Cain’s pain in being second, in being corrected, in being told he needed to change; Saul’s pain in being usurped by a kid after God’s heart.
My pain that my miracle baby died in my arms.
Sin exploits pain. Rather than take the pain immediately to the love of Jesus, of melting into his arms, of weeping on his shoulder, we wear it ourselves and it becomes heavy, breaking us. The weight of self-born pain creates cracks just wide enough for Satan’s deception to edge in. It’s your fault. No one loves you. You’re on your own. You can’t make it through this. No one, not even God, can look at you.
What if part of redemption, the good news, the atonement is God saying, I can take your pain…? What if holiness isn’t so much the absence of sin but of all the pain that leads to sin? What if righteousness is as simple as allowing God to carry us?
In a thoughtful, respectful debate (linked here) between William Lane Craig and Greg Boyd about penal substitution atonement theory, Boyd says, “Why do we need the satisfaction of divine justice motive? I was taught that all-holy God cannot accept sinners as they are and that’s why he has to satisfy his justice by punishing somebody, so Jesus becomes the way that gets taken care of. But Jesus hangs out with sinners all the time and he’s God incarnate; he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. You see God forgiving sinners all the time in the Bible without punishment. And he commands us to forgive without expecting payment. So, God can never forgive freely? He has to collect on the debt. I don’t see why that is. Why can’t forgiveness be the cleansing in itself? Love itself is redemptive, love itself is reconciling, love itself cleanses us.”
I don’t know why, when we share the good news of Jesus, we can’t accept that Christ won the victory over the fearful, punishing view of God. Instead, we keep perpetuating a Father whose righteous wrath against sin outweighs his capacity to forgive freely. But that’s not the Abba I know. The good news that he REALLY IS love, demonstrated perfectly through his Word, Jesus Christ, releases me from bearing my own pain and sin. Oh, praise the Lord, he really does care. Justice is mercy in God’s economy. Justice is vengeance in man’s. Let’s stop trying to explain away the problems with penal substitution in the name of God’s “righteousness.” The most righteous aspect of God is his freely given love.
“And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this, love is perfected with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, for we are as He is in this world. There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So, the one who fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:16-19
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