Affirmations of the Atonement in Current Theology

Second of Two Parts

In the first part of this article (March 3 issue) we surveyed various views of the Atonement: recent studies in the theological giants of yesterday; the call for an objective Atonement by theologians of the Word; the emphasis on Isaiah 53 by the biblicists; the view of scholarly classical Calvinists; and particular themes (Christ as Victor, Christ our Representative, Christ identified with us, and Gospel and myth in Bultmann).

Vi. The Basis For Assessing Various Views

The Word. In seeking to assess the positions of recent writers on the Atonement, we must keep two things in mind: first, that we seek the biblical understanding of the manifold aspects of Christ’s entire work for his people; and second, that this understanding is revealed by the Holy Spirit shining on the Word and is received only in faith.

As we come in sight of Calvary, we are to take the shoes from off our feet, for this is holy ground. As Calvin warns us, to understand God’s sovereignty we must not stop short of what the Word teaches, lest we charge the Holy Spirit with folly in revealing that which we ignore. Nor dare we presume to push our curiosity beyond what God has revealed. Thornwell used the same principles in seeking to interpret the scriptural meaning of the Cross: Go all the way that the Bible leads, and do not go beyond what is there set forth in order to make the logical patterns more complete. Calvin does not hesitate to assert that in an ineffable manner God both loved and hated us at the same time. G. C. Berkouwer continually calls on us to stop where the Word stops, even though that leaves us with unsolved paradoxes. Against abstract theologizing and philosophical transformation, O. Michel battles for the genuine biblical meaning.

We proclaim that God acted directly in the reconciling process and in all his triumphant victories in Christ; but when we say this, we do not deny the satisfaction wrought by Christ in his human love and death as our representative and our substitute. We magnify the grace and love of God, but not in such a way as to establish a hierarchy in the divine attributes that would minimize his righteousness, justice, holiness, and wrath. In his infinite wisdom, God does not vindicate one attribute at the expense of the other aspects of his character. As glowing love is the foreground of the Cross, so justice is its somber background. This presentation of ours, like any other human presentation, may put the picture out of focus. Our intention and striving must ever be to understand our Lord and his gracious work for us on his own biblically revealed terms.

The illumination of the Spirit, that is, faith. Now, only in faith can the mystery of the Crucified One be understood. The reconciliation was wrought for us in his death, but the Gospel of reconciliation is committed to the Church. In preaching we call for faith and repentance. By the grace of the Spirit, the risen, living Christ confronts sinners as the Word is faithfully proclaimed in the Church. Only by the grace of the Spirit does the preacher have the intestinal fortitude to proclaim the Cross in its full Bible proportions. As the Reformers confessed: “The teaching that one is criminated for all is a message that natural reason can never accept; only by the Spirit are our hearts opened to receive the Word of the Cross.”

And the Cross is the very heart of our faith. Ethelbert Stouffer has pointed out that sola fide (faith alone) really means sola cruce (the Cross alone)—it does not magnify my faith as a work or a merit. Faith is necessary, but it is not meritorious. It is a self-alienating principle that denies all worth to me—or even to my faith—and casts me as a helpless, hell-deserving sinner exclusively on that which Christ did for me in his whole life, and particularly on his Cross. Thus I stand with no trust in myself but with all my trust in God’s mercy, which is available to me through Christ’s merit.

Faith, on its intellectual side, as John MacLeon points out in his Scottish Theology, is a cordial acceptance and a hearty approval of God’s way of saving sinners through Christ and his work for us.

In his great work on The Slavery of the Will, Luther insisted that the Holy Spirit is not a skeptic. T. F. Torrance in Theology in Reconstruction reiterates this today:

Surely then the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that the Holy Spirit is given to those who believe in Jesus and that we grow in grace and in knowledge of Christ as we surrender to the creative impact of the Holy Spirit upon us, but that unbelief grieves the presence of the Spirit and quenches His power among us. What else is unbelief but resistance to the Holy Spirit and what can obstruct the renewal of the Church and destroy its witness more than just unbelief? Let it be said quite bluntly that what we need urgently is renewal of faith; of belief in Jesus Christ as in reality God Himself incarnate among men, of belief in the Cross as indeed the objective intervention of God in human existence for the salvation of mankind, and of belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead in body as the first-fruits of the new creation [pp. 356, 357].

Sir William Hamilton long ago pointed out that the limits of our knowledge are by no means the limits of existence. And James B. Mozley described such doctrines as Original Sin, the Trinity, and the Atonement as mysterious truths. Of these we have a real but indistinct conception. Here is the place for faith, for reasonable faith does not require full intellectual comprehension. Where reason staggers, there faith worships. “Justice is a fragment, mercy is a fragment, mediation is a fragment; justice, mercy, mediation as a reason for mercy—all three; what are they but great vistas and openings unto an invisible world in which the Cross is the point of view which brings them all together.”

To this we would add, in the words of A. M. Hunter, “Paul’s faith bears not so much the grammarian’s as the sinner’s touch. It is the theology of the converted man, of one who could say, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’°” (Interpreting Paul’s Gospel, p. 20).

Vii. Resulting Affirmations

This rapid survey leads to several conclusions. First, the Atonement is the great central message of the New Testament, even as the Cross is the symbol of the Christian faith. The four Gospels are passion narratives with extended introductions. The Epistles glory in the Cross. The Book of Revelation focuses upon the Lamb in the midst of the throne, standing as it had been sacrificed. As to the Church, the Cross has always been, as R. W. Dale said, “the symbol of her strength and the prophecy of her victories.”

Then the Cross was God’s mighty act in Christ for man’s salvation. Leon Morris asserts that “in the New Testament there cannot be the slightest doubt but that the Cross is the great central divine act which brings men salvation.” All that Paul was and all that Paul hoped for was centered in the action of God in the Cross. The great stress in Barth’s theology has ever been on the event, the deed—yes, the act—of God. For Bultmann, God acts in the Cross; that is the eschatological event.

Jeremias has shown that such indefinite passives as, “This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” “This is my body which is broken for you,” have as their implied subject God; that is, God broke my body for you (passiva Dei). With this accords Isaiah 53:10, “It pleased the LORD to bruise him …,” to make his soul an offering for sin, and Second Corinthians 5:18, “All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.…” While Christ is the propitiation, yet it is God who set him forth to be a propitiation (Rom. 3:25).

On a visit to Richmond and Atlanta a generation ago, William P. Paterson told the Atlanta pastors: The preaching of religious experience has been powerless to regenerate religious experience; but the preaching of God in his objective reality has always produced great religious experience. At a time when the philosophy of religion has turned Hegelian thought into a so-called Death-of-God Christianity, it becomes God’s believing people to affirm the mighty acts of God, both (with Pannenberg and his school) in Christ’s cross and resurrection and (with the Bultmannians and those of some other schools) in the bringing of men today to existential decision. In Romans, Paul never asserts with the Pietists that it is our magnificent faith that justifies. He repeatedly asserts that it is God who justifies.

Over against the Altizer dirge, let the trumpets of Zion sound forth at every opportunity the joyous fact that God is the living God who has acted and does act. Instead of introducing the recital of the Apostles’ Creed merely as the expression of our faith, why not use some such introduction as this: “Using the Apostles’ Creed, let us confess the living God in his gracious acts for us men and for our salvation.”

Again, this mighty act of God in the Cross of Christ is the act of the Father’s grace. We do not have a God whose mind or disposition has to be changed from harshness to mercy by a commercial bargain. Rather, “God is the subject of the reconciliation in the sense that the initiative originates in His heart. He did not need to be moved, but rather, eternal love moved him in the divine apriority of the initiative to reconciliation” (G. C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, p. 258). The eternal, unfathomable love of the Father’s heart is revealed in the giving of his only Son. This love of the Father precedes and is revealed in the Christ, who declares, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” With his parables of grace—the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son—Jesus manifests the joy in the heart of the heavenly Father and among the angels of heaven upon the return of some of the lost children, who apart from him would be far from God. Over Luke 15 we may write, “He who has seen me receiving publicans and sinners, and eating with them the covenant meal, has seen into the heart of God. For the living God is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Further, this act of God’s almighty grace was wrought in Christ and is received by us in him and for his sake. That mighty act of God in Christ and his cross changed the whole objective relationship between the Holy One of Israel and his guilty creatures. In place of the wrath of the Judge, it gives us the face of the Father. God is for us in Christ in a way that he is not apart from Christ. Thus Calvin can say that no man is loved by God except in Christ and that the sole pledge of God’s love is Christ, without whom the signs of wrath and hatred are everywhere evident (Institutes III. ii.32; III.xxiv.5; III. ii.7).

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that true grace is costly because it condemns sin, and is grace because it justifies the sinner. It is costly because it cost God the life of his Son—“ye were bought with a price”—and what cost God much cannot be cheap for us. It is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

To open the way of fellowship between God and man, God the Son became man also. The Father gave his only Son to bring us back to his arms of love. Christ suffered, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. The Judge came to deliver us from the wrath to come by putting himself under that load of guilt and the wrath it entails and bearing it in our stead.

Although Vincent Taylor admits that Jesus and Paul have such elements in their teaching, he shies away from the word “substitution.” Jeremias has shown that the basis of the thinking of both the primitive Church and Jesus was Isaiah 53; and even one as radical as Rashdall admits (in The Idea of Atonement) that this chapter does teach penal substitution. Norman Snaith (I Believe in …) finds that Isaiah 53 means substitution and concludes, “One fact stands out stark and plain: that death on the cross was a substitution.” J. D. Smart (The Creed in Christian Teaching) explains the substitution in this way: “Jesus took the burden of our guilt upon Himself as though it belonged to Him. Because of His love for us and His hatred of all that separated us from our true life in God, He made Himself one with us that He might make us one with God.”

In The Cross in the New Testament, Leon Morris concludes, “While the many-sidedness of the atonement must be borne in mind, substitution is the heart of it.” Man can do nothing to bring about his salvation but must rest on what God has done for him in Christ. In giving himself in our stead, Christ satisfied the claims of God’s holy justice. “Not only did Christ win a victory, but He secured a verdict. He wrought salvation powerfully, but also legally.” The Confession of 1967 teaches: “He took upon Himself the judgment under which all men stand convicted.” For A. M. Hunter, the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree with the theories that deal in “satisfaction” or “substitution,” that make use of the “sacrificial principle” that Christ’s sufferings were what we can only call “penal” (The Work and Words of Jesus, 1956, p. 100).

And lest we misunderstand, this blessing of Christ for us—so that with his stripes we are healed—comes to us only as we are engrafted into Christ. Our catechism properly describes baptism as a sign and seal of our engrafting into Christ, of remission of sins by his blood, and of regeneration by his Spirit (see also Institutes III. ii.24).

Finally, the grace of God manifested in the Cross of Christ was triumphant. We boast not of any victorious life of our own; rather, we proclaim the ever-victorious Christ. He is the Hero who came of his own free will to meet all the charges against us, to answer all Satan’s accusations. Where the first Adam failed, the final Adam conquered.

There are such mysteries here that Luther was led to say that God overcame God, and Calvin to say that God, in an inexpressible manner, both loved and hated us at the same time. Christ overcame, first, in the things of God. By meeting to the full the requirements of divine justice and thus vindicating its every claim, he so won that Satan, the accuser of his brethren, fell from heaven.

Thereafter Christ has conquered and is ever anew conquering over all his and our enemies—over Satan with his venom, over death with its sting, over the curse of the law, over the prejudices of men. As his written Word is faithfully expounded, the living, risen Word by the power of his Holy Spirit confronts the sinner, “casts Saul of Tarsus in the dust, all bruised and wounded, and draws him behind His chariot of victory” (A. Lecerf, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 240). As he conquered in his own Cross, so is he conquering throughout history, often by the sufferings of his people. And he will keep on conquering until even Anti-Christ, Satan, and death are destroyed.

This discussion can come to no better conclusion than to quote the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, that heroic confession written by Ursinus and Olevian and issued, at the risk of his life and his electoral dignity, by Frederick the Pious of the Palatinate:

My only comfort in life and death is that I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from the power of the devil, and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head: yea that all things must be subservient for my salvation.

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