Affirmations of the Atonement in Current Theology

First of Two Parts

The doctrine of the Atonement, so indispensably central to the New Testament, has once again become an important subject of theological study.

I. Recent Studies Of The Atonement In The Giants Of Yesterday

Several current writers have been bringing the solid testimonies of yesterday’s theologians into fresh view. For example, Samuel J. Mikolaski, of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote his Oxford doctoral dissertation on objective theories of the Atonement advanced by R. W. Dale, James Denney, and P. T. Forsyth. The dean of our Columbia Seminary faculty gives an elective in Forsyth. John Randolph Taylor’s attractive book God Loves Like That deals with James Denney. The noted German preacher Helmut Thielicke has rediscovered Charles Spurgeon—just when some people were discounting any preacher who followed him. Paul van Buren wrote an excellent doctoral thesis on Calvin’s doctrine of the Atonement, entitled Christ in Our Place. One can only regret that under the aegis of natural science and the empirical method, he finds himself unable to accept as a fact the Easter event, which is the prime witness to the living God.

One of the most unexpected returns to the past is found in the commendation by Princeton’s George S. Hendry of the Augsburg Confession, a document that sets forth the doctrine of the Atonement with which Hendry differs so radically in his The Gospel of Incarnation and The Westminster Confession for Today. Here is the fine statement of the Gospel proclaimed by the heroic Lutheran princes at Augsburg:

Also they teach that men cannot be justified (obtain forgiveness and righteousness) before God by their own powers, merits, or works; but are freely justified (of grace) for Christ’s sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by His death has satisfied for our sins. This faith does God impute for righteousness before Him, Rom. 3 and 4.

God, not for our merit’s sake, but for Christ’s sake, does justify those who believe that they for Christ’s sake are received into favor.

Christ is the one Mediator, Propitiation, High-Priest, Intercessor. His passion is an oblation and satisfaction.

No wonder John Calvin signed this magnificent manifesto! Yet the Westminster Standards make faith slightly more personal: saving faith is our receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation as he is offered to us in the Gospel.

Ii. The Call For An Objective Atonement By Theologians Of The Word

Emil Brunner’s The Mediator (English edition: Lutterworth, 1934) is a striking call for an objective Atonement. Against the subjectivizing of reconciliation in Ritschl’s “ethical docetism,” Brunner warns,

So long as we continue to reject the Scriptural idea of Divine holiness, of Divine wrath, and of Divine righteousness in punishment, the process of decay within the Christian Church will continue [p. 48].

That God possesses and exercises penal justice is a central idea of the Bible [p. 466, n. 1].

When man rebelled against his Maker, it was not only that he fled the presence of God. The Almighty drove him out of Eden and placed the cherubim with a flaming sword as a veto against his return. He could come back into God’s fellowship only when the Lord himself opened the way by the Cross of the Mediator.

The Cross is the sign of the Christian faith, of the Christian Church, of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.… He who understands the Cross aright … understands the Bible, he understands Jesus Christ.… Therefore this text—“He bore our sins”—must be understood … as the foundation upon which stands the whole of the New Testament or the Gospel … [a quote from Luther; p. 435].

Luther’s theology was a theologia crucis (theology of the Cross):

The whole struggle … for the sola fide [faith alone], the soli deo gloria [the glory of God alone], was simply the struggle for the right interpretation of the Cross [ibid.].

Karl Barth says that the Father gave effect to Christ’s death and passion as a satisfaction for us, as our redemption from death to life. In him God the Judge gave himself to be judged in the sinner’s place, so that the Cross is the strict outworking of the judicial aspect of the Atonement with its emphasis on representative atonement (see, for example, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 157).

From old Scotia comes a current Edinburgh testimony in T. F. Torrance’s Theology in Reconstruction (Eerdmans, 1966):

Jesus Christ who took our nature upon Him has given to God an account for us, making atonement in our place, and in our name has yielded Himself in sacrifice and worship and praise and thanksgiving to the Father.

Once and for all, He has wrought out atonement for us in his sacrifice on the Cross.

Justification by Christ is grounded upon His mighty Act in which He took our place, substituting Himself for us in the obedient response He rendered God.… In Himself He has opened a way to the Father, so that we may approach God solely through Him and on the ground of what He had done and is.

Nothing in our hands we bring, simply to His Cross we cling.

Iii. The Emphasis On Isaiah 53 By The Biblicists

Joachim Jeremias, the noted Continental biblicist, has offered valuable contributions to the understanding of the Cross in various writings, particularly The Servant of the Lord, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, and The Central Message of the New Testament. In the first of these he shows how the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah underlies every part of the New Testament and thus every part of the testimony of the primitive Church. First Peter applies to Jesus’ suffering the substitutionary language of Isaiah 53:5—“by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Pet. 2:24100).

In The Central Message of the New Testament, Jeremias shows that our Saviour viewed the fulfillment of Isaiah 53 as his God-appointed task, and that he interpreted his death to his disciples as a vicarious dying for the countless multitude of those who lay under the judgment of God. In place of the expiatory vow of the murderer, “May my death expiate all my sins,” Jesus prayed, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Before his conversion Paul had required believers to say, “Let Christ be accursed”; but the Risen Redeemer made his Apostle to the Gentiles add two words—“for me.” When Christ hung on the tree, he was made a curse for us, even for me. The sinless One took the place of sinners. “He takes the very place of the ungodly, of the enemies of God, of the world opposed to God,” says Jeremias. “The atoning power of Jesus’ death is inexhaustible and boundless.” It reaches from his descent into the blackest depths of Hades (First Peter) to his ascension to offer his blood in the holy of holies (Hebrews).

The importance of Isaiah 53 as the basis for the teaching of Jesus and of the New Testament Church is recognized currently by other scholars also, such as Oscar Cullmann and F. F. Bruce.

In The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, Jeremias shows that when Jesus spoke of his blood shed for our forgiveness, he was referring to his sacrificial death. Likewise, according to Hebraic thinking, the close parallelism between “justified by his blood” and “reconciled by his death” in Romans 5 shows that “his blood” means Christ’s death for sinners. The blind spot in Robert H. Culpepper’s otherwise thoughtful book on Interpreting the Atonement is his misinterpretation of blood.

Otto Michel in Römerbrief shows the biblical stress upon the wrath and judgment of God with the gospel answer in the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ as the reconciliation provided by God—without, however, any rational theory (such as Anselm’s).

Iv. Scholarly Classical Calvinists

Turning to British Christianity, we find that Leon Morris has written two volumes on the Cross worthy to stand with James Denney’s The Death of Christ and The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. The thorough scholarship of Morris’s work is not lower than that found in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross vindicates the offering of Christ as a propitiation, his blood as his sacrificial death that turned aside the wrath of God, and the redemption he wrought as a deliverance by the price of his death. Morris won his doctoral degree on his ability to defend these theses in a university where the catchword was: “Thou shalt love the lord thy Dodd, and thy Niebuhr as thyself.”

Having dealt with the great central concepts of the Gospel in his doctoral thesis, Morris has added The Cross in the New Testament, showing that in the Cross God himself intervened to change the whole relation between his Holy Being and guilty sinners. For Peter, Christ bore our sins in his own body on the tree. He suffered for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. In Hebrews, Jesus Christ is the great high priest who offers himself once for all, and the faultless victim whose precious blood removes all sins. No matter how sin is understood, Christ is the answer.

In America, Roger Nicole has valiantly supported Morris in the maintenance of propitiation as the true translation of the New Testament terms and Christ’s blood as referring to his true sacrifice for sins. And John Gerstner of Pittsburgh Seminary has added his popular Primer of Reconciliation.

G. C. Berkouwer of Amsterdam includes in his theological studies a volume on The Work of Christ. In my opinion, Berkouwer is the Charles Hodge of the twentieth century, the ablest systematic theologian of classical Calvinism. I advise my students to read Berkouwer for classical Calvinism in today’s world and Barth for neo-Calvinism. Incidentally, these two leaders think highly of each other. For example, Barth acknowledges that he has learned from Berkouwer on justification, and Berkouwer has an understanding appreciation of what he calls The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth.

In The Work of Christ, Berkouwer faces the currents and crosscurrents of theological thought with an able and scholarly grasp of the Reformed faith. He accepts mystery and paradox and avoids pressing his logic where revelation is silent.

V. Particular Themes

The classical or “victorious” view. Gustaf Aulén in Christus Victor has recovered what he calls the triumphant or victorious aspect of the Atonement. Starting with the mighty God, Aulén sees the vertical coming from above in an uninterrupted line, conquering all his and our enemies. Here Christ is the divine hero, overcoming sin, death, Satan, the law, the curse, and the wrath of God. Luther has some of this in his “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and in his commentary on Galatians. But no full reading of Luther can fail to see that the Reformer also stressed the work of Christ as a satisfaction of divine justice, a propitiation of God’s wrath. In the Scottish Journal of Theology (VII, 3, p. 6), Torrance shows that a true appreciation of the person of Christ needs both this dramatic or “classical” view of the work of Christ and the satisfaction or “Latin” doctrine to do justice to both the divine and the human nature of Christ. An exclusive focus on the former leads to theopaschitism (the view that God suffered in Christ’s passion), at times with overtones of the Monophysite heresy (that the divine and human constitute a single nature in Christ).

Barth emphasizes that the Judge has graciously come in Christ to give himself to be judged in the sinner’s place. Jesus Christ who on the Cross took on himself the wrath of God is “no one else but God’s own Son, and hence the eternal God himself in his oneness with the human nature which he in free grace had taken upon himself” (Church Dogmatics II/1, 446). But the effort to make a higher divine synthesis following only the line from above to below leaves us with the idea of a wrath conflict in God himself. And it is not evident that this is more biblical than the satisfaction of divine justice, the vindication of God’s righteousness set forth in Romans 3:25, 26; 4:25; 5:18, 19; Second Corinthians 5:21; First Peter 2:24; 3:18; First John 2:1, 2.

Christ our representative. According to Vincent Taylor in The Cross of Christ, the death of our Lord was vicarous, done on behalf of man, a representative accomplishment in our name, and sacrificial as a self-offering on our behalf. The person and the work of Christ must be kept together. For as we identify the work with the man, the gibbet becomes a face, the Cross becomes a person. Taylor holds that there is “a substitutionary aspect in the offering of Jesus” and that Paul comes within “a hair’s breadth of substitution” without ever reaching it.

In reply I would point to the use of anti in Mark 10:45 and in First Timothy 2:5, 6; to the use of huper in Second Corinthians 5:15, 21 and Galatians 3:13; and to Isaiah 53. The New Testament uses huper (in behalf of) and anti (instead of) to supplement each other. We teach not an impersonal substitution—K. Schilder prefers the word “substitute” to “substitution”—but one in which Christ gives himself in our stead to benefit us. As he gives his life in our favor, it is precisely the case that he takes our place. From his study of the papyri, A. T. Robertson showed that huper frequently has the meaning of “in another’s stead,” as he finds in Galatians 3:13.

Christ identified with us. The doctrine of Christ’s identification with us, earlier stressed by Macleod Campbell and F. O. Maurice, has been revived by such English writers as C. F. D. Moule (The Sacrifice of Christ) and G. W. H. Lampe (Reconciliation in Christ), by the French scholar Theo Preiss (Life in Christ), and by Kenneth Foreman in the United States. This stress brings out the blessed truth that we are saved in Christ as well as by Christ, that he is the Head and we are the members of his body. Yet this representation did not lead either Paul or Bernard of Clairvaux to deny redemption by his blood or to reject propitiation. It need not lead us to deny his gracious substitution of himself for us when he gave his life a ransom in the stead of many. Preiss finds in Matthew 25:31 f. that Christ mystically identifies himself in sympathy and solidarity with each one who is wretched in a substitution resembling that set forth in Mark 10:45 and Second Corinthians 5:14, 21. Thus he combines an element of juridical substitution and the Son of Man’s mystical identification with his brothers, especially those who are most needy.

On the other hand, G. W. H. Lampe, though he admits that Mark 10:45 and Second Timothy 2:5, 6 are to be united and mean the same thing, entirely ignores the significance of anti, which occurs as a preposition in the former verse and as part of the noun in the latter. For him Christ is our representative, not our substitute. That Christ is our righteousness or that his righteousness is imputed to sinners—either statement is acceptable to Lampe. This means that in union with Christ, man has the covenant status of being in the right with God. “Man is justified in Christ never in his own natural state.”

Gospel and myth in Bultmann. For Rudolph Bultmann, the death of Christ was an event that actually occurred in our human history. More than that, it was an act of God in which he revealed his love to move our love, he entrusted himself to us that we might entrust ourselves to him, he gave himself without reserve for us that we might give ourselves to him. And this existential decision is evoked from us by his grace, not by works, lest any man should boast.

When, however, this distinguished scholar describes the biblical and theological terms in which this gracious transaction was wrought as myths, I greatly fear that he slips into the Abelardian tradition that locates the glory of our redemption not in what Christ did and bore for us on Calvary but in our existential decision. And I fear also that the “demythologizing” of the Resurrection leaves our hope, not in the death and resurrection of Christ, but rather in his death and our faith. While Bultmann undertakes to “demythologize” reconciliation, redemption, propitiation, satisfaction, and resurrection, and Tillich to deliteralize them, Morris, Berkouwer, and others in the classical Reformed tradition receive more literally the terms God has given as the means of apprehending the mystery and the meaning of his mercy and Christ’s merit in our salvation.

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