77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #51)

51.     Didn’t Jesus bear the guilt of our sins?

He bore the sins themselves, according to Scripture.  He was never guilty of sin, nor did God transfer any guilt from us to him.  Guilt as a concept to be distinguished (much less separated) from sin or conscience has a dubious legacy.  As such, it has no place in the vocabulary of the New Covenant.  God didn’t distill guilt from sin and somehow process it separately by atonement.  Nor did He dissociate the penalty of sin from the sin itself and make Jesus bear only the penalty.  In reality, Jesus endured the actual sins being inflicted on him, but not their penalty!  The perpetrators themselves would tragically bear the penalty for those sins, when God’s patience wore thin, if they refused to change their minds and accept their King’s bearing of their sins.  His bearing their sin is equivalent to his forgiving them their sin, which in turn is identical to not accounting their sin to them—different images all coming down to exactly the same thing.  The only question remaining was whether they would accept this release or repudiate it and bear their own sins, only to expire by degrees in their coiled stranglehold.  Our desperate need is for an atonement that can handle more than ‘guilt’, more than ‘penalty’, in fact nothing less than actual sin, including the harm it inflicts on other creatures.  What God has put together let no theologian separate.

God’s Raising of Jesus Retroactively Endorsed Everything He Had Taught

The Resurrection of Jesus from among the dead invested with Divine and covenantally binding authority everything he had taught, retroactively.  It was precisely because of this one Divine seal of acceptance placed upon the faithful and voluntary sacrifice of the Son of God that his own disciples were enabled to look back over all he had both taught and done and thereby to recognize him as the Christ of God, in truth.  This seal of the Father, soon followed by the outpouring of Wholesome Spirit from God’s own nature, empowered them to testify exuberantly to all they had perceived throughout their disciplehood training.  The light thus generated was subsequently beamed into all nations to draw them also into God’s Kingdom and agelong life.  [01/23/97]

Did Christ’s “bearing our sins” mean that our sins loaded him down?  (Isaiah 53)  Is this, in other words, primarily a figure of oppression and belaboring?  [01/29/97]  In that case it means something quite different from the common Protestant theological and homiletical (i.e., preaching) expressions such as that he “bore our guilt” or that he “bore our penalty.”  For to bear someone else’s sin against oneself incurs neither their “guilt” for inflicting it, much less the penalty they deserve for inflicting it!  [07/08/07]

From popular Evangelical discourse one might almost conclude that the apostles were witnesses of the Crucifixion of Christ.  But the New Testament contains meager explicit evidence that this is the case.  In fact, only John and a handful of women appear to have witnessed Jesus’ public torture and last moments before his death.  After all, it was scarcely the burden of apostolic Proclamation to establish a witness to “the Cross” as factual at all; that was Rome’s role and prerogative and responsibility in the grand scheme of things.  Much rather, it was the mighty unexpected Resurrection to agelong life of the Lord, Jesus Christ that drove the all-consuming flame of apostolic heralding across the face of this stricken planet!  It was for this single-minded purpose that the Wholesome Spirit was poured out—to empower a testimony of one piece with the Resurrection itself!  It was Life in the leering face of a dreaded Death—made  grimly certain by an official Roman state execution, to be sure—that was to be broadcast to all nations for their rescue!

The Crucifixion of Jesus had the attestation of public record—a trial before not one, not two, but three sets of authorities:  the Jewish Sanhedrin (in effect, the instigators of the whole ghastly spectacle), the Roman Procurator Pilate, a cowardly official of Tiberius Caesar (but, as bitter irony would have it, soon to die by his own knife to avoid an ignominious execution by sentence of that same Caesar), and Herod (one of the egregiously corrupt dynasty of Edomite—descendants of Esau—kings of Galilee, and hence Nazareth).  They collaborated on Jesus’ wrongful condemnation and public execution.  Roman authority proffered the official seal for the gravestone, at the insistence of the chief priests and Pharisees, and even endorsed a military detail to secure the site (Mt. 27:62-66).  Everyone was perfectly aware of the whole morbid procedure.  What caught the whole world off guard and gave fresh expectation and wholesome motivation to all who acquiesced in the unvarnished facts was the humanly impossible Divine escape from such an overly guarded tomb by such a manifestly and fatally mangled victim!  lol  [02/01/97]