An OPEN LETTER to Jesse Morrell and FRIENDLY CRITIQUE of The Vicarious Atonement of Christ (2012), part 24

The reason penal substitutionists resist speaking of Christ as a “victim” (even though the early church did speak this way) is because they teach that since Christ surrendered himself voluntarily, he was “not a victim.” Some even go so far as to assert that “no injustice,” therefore, was done! This leads to absurd, preposterous conclusions if carried through consistently. It means that voluntarily taking risks in the face of evils unleashed by criminals or alien military forces (think only of a suicide mission) does not entail victimization or injustice! The problem with this whole line of thought—and this explains why it is so tenaciously held—is that any imputation of an injustice done to Christ would implicate either God or Christ or both, in terms of penal satisfaction/substitution assumptions.

However, on assumptions of God’s premial justice THERE HAD TO BE AN INJUSTICE IN THESE EVENTS OR THERE COULD BE NO SHOW OF CONTERVAILING JUSTICE ISSUING IN COSMIC REDEMPTION! That magnitude of justice is what sinners crave! That image of justice would constitute the Light of the world!

God Himself is the one who ends up bearing the sins of penal satisfaction theologians. He has been absorbing all the theological errors of the whole history of atonement theories: all the shame of being misrepresented, all the defamation resulting from the world’s revulsion from both orthodox and unorthodox caricatures of His authentic character.

And that’s not all. God has taken His lumps gracefully!  He has let Evangelicals and other orthodox Protestants twist Scripture and suppress testimony by the semi-load. Yet He seems fairly unruffled for all that. Such equanimity would befit all those of us who wish to represent Him faithfully.

For his part, Hugo Grotius stretched Scripture on the rack of his punitive and natural law preconceptions, thus achieving predictably tortured exegesis and interpretations. In face, his endeavor concerning the Atonement provides a veritable study in tendentious method. He was evidently a man under compulsion to make the results come out “right.” Using Faustus Socinus as a whipping boy to gain dubious leverage for his own novel theory and give it a color of orthodoxy. However, it fell tragically short of the premial justice exhibited in the resurrectionary Atonement as the New Testament presents it in its own native categories and proportionate usages. A milder degree of “enhanced interrogation” of Scripture would surely have yielded superior information and spared the church a merely alternative way of being punitive regarding the Atonement.

Any acceptilation theory of the Atonement founders and sinks in the face of covenantal realities in Scripture.  God did not merely “accept the sufferings” of His Son as “sufficient” deterrent to permit or enable Him to “save others safely” (?).  They two had a deal going!  (The Devil, incidentally, was not in on it.)  The Son kept his side of it, and the Father kept His. That was the deal, and there were no rough approximations or fuzzy edges to “get all acceptilated over.”  It was a clean operation, secured by God’s own voluntary oath to His Son.

Nor did that transaction evidently turn on relative amounts of suffering between Christ’s cross and the deserts of the sinners he came to save.  The issue, after all, was his obedience in doing God’s desire.

What light is thrown on the nature of sin, guilt, punishment, affliction, evil, and consequences by THE VERY FACT THAT THERE IS A PREMIAL SIDE TO JUSTICE TO RECKON WITH, ESPECIALLY IN CONNECTION WITH ATONEMENT? For if there is, then the whole ambience of Atonement discourse is altered in all directions. Everything changes when the premial element is restored to its authentic soteriological role and prominence.

The dominant imagery of the New Testament writers concerning the work of the Lord Jesus Christ is never of “substitution,” but of him doing something “for” us and “for” our salvation. This is simply what we would expect of “body life” where the body parts serve one another. So much the more where the relation is of the “Head” to or “for” the body and its members. Both Paul and Peter speak of “subjection” of wives to husbands; then Paul of husbands loving their wives as Christ loves the church, “surrendering himself for its sake,” while Peter writes of husbands honoring wives as weaker vessels. John, typically, is prominent in his language of “loving one another” as Christ loves us and becomes a protective shelter around our sins. All such exchanges are irreducible to “substitution”—a leaden footed image that tramples the subtlety and variety of mutuality characterizing the lovely complementarity of loving, caring, saving exchanges of service for each other which we find throughout the New Testament and indeed the tangible Body of Christ empirically.

The mounting influence of a punitive worldview since especially Augustine, then growing throughout the Middle Ages with further dominant impulses from Anselm, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Grotius, Owen, et al, has impelled penal “substitution.”

ON “READING IN” (“EISEGETING”) PENAL ASSUMPTIONS INTO SCRIPTURE

A number of pivotal New Testament passages abruptly (to our sensibilities) juxtapose contrasting elements in such a manner as to beg for further explanation. And at just such junctures penal satisfaction theory has been at hand to supply its full arsenal of punitive weaponry to meet the challenge. Following are a few of these enigmatic verses:

John 10:17

Acts 2:23-24

Romans, 3:25-26, 7:6, 8:3-4

Galatians 3:13-14

Colossians 1:21-22

Hebrews, 2:9, 9:15-17, 10:9-19, 19-22

I Peter 3:18

Such Scriptures could be multiplied. The temptation, which has felled many a doughty theologian within the Western or Latin tradition, is to read in penal satisfaction presuppositions to make “sense” of THE DRAMATIC REVERSAL FROM DEATH TO LIFE. To be sure, we need an explanation, and there is one; yet it is not penal but premial, invoking God’s restorative, rewarding justice in response to Christ’s voluntary surrender to unjust authorities representing sinful Israel plus the Gentiles.

Furthermore, not one of these passages, taken almost at random from the rich lore of apostolic thought, either explicitly supplies the allegedly necessary penal assumptions, or implicitly requires them. A veil has descended upon theology to mask the liberating premial truth and to quench, if possible, the light of life. The time is long overdue to unmask the imposture and reign of ERROR.

~to be continued~

An OPEN LETTER to Jesse Morrell and a FRIENDLY CRITIQUE of his book, The Vicarious Atonement of Christ (2012)—part 4

Next, I want to thank you for scaring up the most surprising and serviceable quotation from John Lightfoot (1602-1675), the great English Hebraist who was an original member of the Westminster Assembly (1643-1653), in your book, Natural Ability, p. 461. I must say, I never expected to see such a bold and expertly nuanced declaration on behalf of the Biblical position coming from a member of that assemblage of Puritans. It is so striking, in fact, that I reproduce it here (and will soon try to locate the fuller context at ECCO or EEBO):

Was Christ so much as punished by God? [Assuming the answer to be obviously in the negative, he continues:] Much less, then, was He overwhelmed by the wrath of God—damned by God? Was a lamb punished that was sacrificed? [Of course not!] He was afflicted, but not punished, for punishment argued a crime or fault preceding. Were the sad sufferings of Christ laid on him as punishments? Certainly not for His own sins; no, nor for ours neither. He suffered for our sins—bare our sins; but His sufferings were not punishments for our sins. [Whole Works, 13 vols., edited, with a life, by John Rogers Pitman (London, 1822-1825), vol. 6, pp. 23-24. Comments and emphasis added, R.L.R.]

This passage is so unequivocal, yet so contrary to penal substitution, whether in Calvin’s economic satisfaction version or in Grotius’s governmental exemplification form (although I cannot speak for the New England Theology), that I wondered you could cite it as evidence favoring your view. So I’ll let Lightfoot’s remarkable words launch this discussion concerning the Atonement. My approach will often compare and contrast elements of Grotius’s or the New England Theology’s rectoral/ governmental/ acceptilation theory of atonement (inquiring about or noting their differences, along the way) with the broadly Calvinistic satisfaction theory of atonement. But my overarching agenda is to employ this kind of clarification (hopeful!) of both these penal theories (boasting different kinds of necessity, whether Calvin’s economistic or Grotius’s exemplaristic variation) in order to unfold the restorative/rewarding/premial side of God’s justice, which, I hope to demonstrate, solves the “problem” of atonement in a very different manner than these traditions have accustomed us to.

I should interject, at this point, that I am not herewith jumping directly into a section-by-section critique of your book, The Vicarious Atonement of Christ. I plan to do that as a culmination of the extended remarks that follow. These are more general responses to what I have read in your online and hardcopy publications. This is meant to establish and elaborate the premial framework of God’s justice in general, but by way of dialogue with the tradition you are reviving. However, I expect there will be a lot of sloshing around with repetition and overlapping in the process. But I notice from your own writing style that you are not averse to that! So here goes.

The preferential language of the Penal Satisfaction doctrine, such as “substitution,” “in our place,” “in our stead,” is employed in order to reinforce the erroneous concept of “payment for sin(s).” So even though the latter type of expression is never used in Scripture, and the former are not used in connection with the work of Christ, they are felt to be necessary to make a point. Economic concepts are misapplied in clearly non-biblical ways and pushed to extremes. This misadventure leads to conundrums that are embarrassing, to be sure, but Penal Satisfaction champions are okay with that and take it as their cross to bear. That’s just the cost of doing business.

Furthermore, their language of “substitution” is required equally by their errant notion that Jesus suffered a divine penalty “in our place,” “in our stead.” Indeed, if the Cross was a punishment from God that we deserved (even though no Scripture ever hints that every sinner and all sins “deserve” such an ordeal) and which Christ certainly did not deserve, then this misplacement of condemnation must somehow be rationalized. Accordingly, God is alleged to “need” to “satisfy” His honor/justice/law/holiness by punishing even the least violation without mercy on someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow. Such vengeful “necessity” is hardly worthy of or warranted by the language of Scripture in either Testament. This is why foreign words are recruited like mercenaries to handle the dirty work, then kept on the payroll, although they are alien occupiers. (In passing be it noted that the Governmental view of Atonement does concede some ground to mercy in God’s “punishment” of Jesus “in our place,” but this, I suggest, is ultimately an ‘unsatisfying’ makeshift, although in the absence of any grasp of God’s premial justice, it is still superior to out-and-out penal satisfaction among minds ‘satisfied’ with half-way measures in lieu of apostolic precision.)

Hence, if Christ himself did not deserve the punishment, then there must be postulated either some economic equivalence or some governmental expedience between his measure of suffering (wrongful) and our measure of penal deserts (rightful). What follows from this are all the tediously familiar rationalizations of the Calvinistic tradition broadly conceived—broad enough to include every attempt to make the results come out “right,” whether that of Arminius, Grotius, Amyraut, Pynchon, Baxter, Fuller, McLeod Campbell, Spurgeon, Moberly, et al. Still, it never comes out quite right, ever.

Only when the rewarding, restorative, or premial justice of God enters the picture is theological harmony ushered in alongside. For exclusively in this unique accounting can God execute the benign avenging of rendering the wrongly injured One directly what he properly deserved, without the bewildering, not to say bedeviling indirection of substitutionary diversions, shifts of “guilt,” transfers of sin and righteousness by imputations, misplacements of penalty—all of which amount to miscarriages of justice and judicial misbehavior, if I can be so bold.

Our Divine Judge also deserves better press than that. Or when does the Heavenly Father get His rightful praise as a genius of justice? “Hallowed be Thy name.”

When the Lord Jesus Christ perfectly fulfilled the Law of Moses and yet was cursed to death by it, something profound changed in the cosmos irreversibly. That Law of Moses (except for whatever Jesus, the Lord, himself reaffirmed) was itself nailed to his wrongful cross while, by stark, explosive contrast, he was thereby exalted to full mastery over the created universe through resurrection from the dead. Now, as Lord over heaven and earth and all nations therein, with comprehensive sovereignty, authority, power, control, honor, glory, thrones, and more, his Word, as taught during his career on earth, now supersedes every other law whatsoever. So if even the Law of Moses (which God Himself had given), was eclipsed by the Messiah’s “better covenant” with a better High Priest, better commandments, better promises, a better expectation, etc. (Heb. 7-10, John 1, Galatians), how much less can any other “moral law” promulgated in history dare to claim any comparable validity. The Word of the Lord Jesus alone abides forever, so as Moses directed Israel: “Hear ye Him!”

Accordingly, we are not to take a “flat Bible” approach to “moral law,” as if the Law of Moses and the Law of Christ were on the same plane, worthy of equal honor; they are emphatically not. The decrees of Moses’ Law, which were hostile to us (especially to Gentiles!) have been read the riot act and eternally demoted as unworthy, anymore, of giving orders to those who have been baptized into Messiah Jesus, the Lord. We are lastingly free from Moses’ imperfect Law from Mt. Sinai and now take our cues from Jesus’ perfect Sermon on the Mount, etc. There’s a world of difference between these constitutions. The old Law is kid’s stuff next to the new Law of the Lord Jesus. He had the divine authority to declare, “You have heard it said to you [out of Moses’ Law], such and such, but I say to you something else, something more, even something different.” Abstract philosophical theories of “universal moral law” are simply not conformable to the kind and quality of law that the New Covenant in Christ’s blood and Holy Spirit have inaugurated with epoch-making force and finality. We must beware of muffling or compromising the absolutely revolutionary quality of this Gospel-altered era. The secularized theorists of “moral law,” any more than of “natural law,” are “not able to know the things of the Spirit, for they are stupidity to them” (I Cor. 2). The classical and stale categories are incommensurable with Biblical wisdom unveiled by Jesus and his inspired apostles.

~to be continued~