by Ben Pugh.
Penal Substitutionary Atonement: love it or hate it, it is eminently comprehensible. Subtle it is not (nuance generally has to be added), but there is a certain logic about it. In fact, so great is its elegance that it has become a tract-writer’s dream (I have a small collection of these tracts, going all the way back to 1976). It is completely soundbite-able. It can be summarised easily and without remainder in one sentence. Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is as Tweetable as it is logically compelling.
Trouble is, ideas that are that condensable become part of the furniture after a while. They get woven into our working assumptions. They cease to be examined and become a lens through which we examine everything else. I see it all the time. Many good Christians are locked within a set of ideas that are all about death as the penalty for sin introduced at Eden – all sin, however minor, carries this penalty. Then, we follow the familiar, almost arithmetic logic: Christ died as a substitute to pay that penalty, to take that punishment, all inflicted by the Father who turns his face away. When pressed about what we mean by death (since Adam and Eve did not immediately drop dead) we might sooner or later end up with a variation of Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) in Hell.
These are good people who believe this. They are lovely. Yet this version of the ‘good’ news nestles between two pieces of horrific news, one pointing back in time and the other pointing forwards. We are pointed back in time to the cross and told ‘you deserved that,’ and we are pointed forwards in time to Hell and told ‘you will deserve that.’ And the solution in the present is that, by faith, we accept what Christ has done for us. Most would probably not put it in quite such stark terms, of course. But that’s just the problem. Many don’t even think about it for long enough to see that that is in fact what we are saying.
However, there are signs that this PSA-ECT superstructure is melting away. I was recently giving a teaching session with a church that most would consider to be conservative. I presented four views of Hell ranging from ECT to Hopeful Universalism.As far as I could tell, not one person in the room was willing to defend ECT. Ok, perhaps I could have presented it a bit more charitably but, reading the room, I got a sense that everyone had been quietly moving away from the idea for some time; they just didn’t know what the alternatives were.
So, one side of the equation: ECT, has become so unmentionable it is fading away for lack of oxygen. But there remains the other side: PSA. There is still, in many sincere Christians, a failure to see how unappealing this message would seem to someone not yet inducted into that way of seeing things.
My summer project is to answer the question: is there a way to explain the work of Christ that might sound like genuinely good news to people, and which is elegant enough to be explained with brevity? The first thing I would highlight is that there has already existed – for almost two millennia – an alternative gospel soundbite. It is a phrase that recurs so often in the Greek Fathers, it is described as a ‘formula.’ Scholars call it the Exchange Formula. The most quoted version of the Exchange Formula is in Irenaeus: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, through his superabundant love, became what we are so that he might make us altogether what he himself is.’[1]
In the Exchange Formula it is the incarnation that tells us everything we need to know. And it works in two halves: a divine-human union shown in God’s descent to us results in lots and lots of divine-human unions as we ascend in Christ.
This way of seeing atonement welcomes back into the picture the entire breath-taking sweep of the coming of Christ. Through this lens can see how Christ enters every phase of human existence, even to its very depths as he undergoes an unjust and violent death. He assumes and heals the entire human experience on behalf of the entire human race. That’s the gospel.
I call this Easter through Christmas spectacles.
Problem: when we look at things this way, doesn’t his death become a bit less important? It’s no longer an essential piece in the arithmetic of penalty-payment and substitution. Space is limited but, there are some excellent biblical reasons to see the whole consecrated life of Christ, culminating in his self-offering on the cross, as being the key thing that fulfilled the whole purpose of the sacrificial system and the covenant.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve got so far:The gospel is that, in Jesus of Nazareth, we recognise that the Son of God came to live our life and die our death, dedicating himself to God on behalf of wayward and violent humanity and rose again from the dead so that we, by the power of the Holy Spirit joining our lives to his risen life, might get another chance at life, a dedicated life, an abundant life, the life of the age to come.
[1] Irenaeus, Against Heresies V, Preface.
Theology Everywhere 
We’ve been told over and again that when Adam & Eve sinned they were cast out of Eden with punishment of tilling the hard ground and hard childbirth, that from then on God has turned away from sinners. Try reading Genesis again – they were not ‘cast out’ but made to leave in case they ate of the tree of eternal life; they were not ‘punished’ but suffered the consequences of their action i.e. hard work to live, and in finding their sexuality suffering the pain of childbirth. Nor did God turn his back on them but went out into the world with them and has been with humanity ever since. It’s in the Eastern Church that both incarnation and the cross show the utter love of God for people – Jesus did not come to change God’s view of humans [through death] but to change humanity’s view of God. It’s when you hear people supporting the penal substitutionary theory you realize how far that intention on God’s part in Jesus has to go.
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Last week, on one of the other UK Methodist websites, one contributor wrote that whole point of the church is to get people saved. That, of course, begs the question “Saved from what?” It seems that one popular line within the church is that the more horrendous one paints the consequences of not being the right kind of Christian, the more wonderful salvation seems, and the easier it is to persuade people to make sure that they get themselves safely on the right side of the dividing line. But it is rather tortuous thinking to suggest that God is a God of love and at the same time to say that most of the people who have ever lived are now in eternal torment because they weren’t the right kind of Christians when they died. When someone queried recently how anyone could be happy in Heaven knowing that some of their friends and relatives were being tortured in Hell, they were told that God would wipe those people from their memory.
After a recent Methodist church service, an experienced local preacher told me that there has to be a Hell, because a God of justice would have to punish people like Hitler or Stalin. He seemed to forget that, according to traditional Christian thinking, if one of those condemned at the Nuremberg trials had said the sinner’s prayer in their death cell, their sins would have been forgiven and they would now be in Heaven whereas the thousands of Jews they had abused and murdered would all be in Hell because they weren’t Christians. Not my idea of justice. And how does that fit in with love and grace?
If the PSA-ECT superstructure is melting away, it is doing so quietly and slowly. Meanwhile, the loudest voices in Christianity are still declaiming that Jesus died to pay for our sins and that those who don’t turn to him are destined for eternal condemnation. There seems to have been an upsurge in street preaching recently, based on groups going into town centres on a Saturday and taking it in turns to shout at people over loudspeakers or amplifiers that they are all going to spend eternity in Hell unless they repent. For each one they reach with their message they put thousands off Christianity. There are some influential people within Methodism who claim that this is a “recovery of authentic Christianity” and thus, by implication, that those who think differently are not real Christians.
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On the basis of all that’s said in the article and promoted by hard-core evangelicals etc., there is a simple answer to ‘saved from what?’ The answer is ‘God!’
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We might expect that descriptions of God and his actions would reflect our current understanding of the cosmos, biblical scholarship and human psychology – whilst respecting the way faith was expressed in earlier times. Yet an emphasis on beliefs, rather than on relationships – despite Jesus saying that everything depends on the two great love commandments – makes it difficult for churches to adapt to the explosion of knowledge over the last century and to changes in culture. As a result, churches in Western Europe are experiencing heavy falls in attendances and a loss of credibility and social influence.
We talk to a people with no experience of enslavement of being “redeemed from the slavery of sin.” We speak of God’s atoning sacrifice in Jesus to a generation that equates animal and human sacrifice with primitive superstitions. We preach of penal substitution being necessary to satisfy God’s wrath two generations after this country abolished the death penalty as unacceptable. Torture is regarded as barbaric. Yet, the church teaches that a loving God could not forgive humans without his son being tortured to death in our stead. This is then all related back to Genesis 3 and the belief that our ur-ancestors disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. Despite all the scientific evidence about the origins and history of life on Earth, and despite the fact that probably the large majority of European clergy accept privately at least a significant part of that evidence, the church still will not openly challenge first century thinking and medieval interpretations of that thinking.
We persist in thinking that in the supposedly perfect world that was the mythical Eden, human, animal and plant life was intended to be immortal, and that death, pain and danger only came into existence because of human sin. We don’t think about what would have happened if the forbidden fruit had not been eaten and the commandment to be fruitful had been obeyed. Nor do people consider what the world would have really been like if everyone had everything they wanted without any effort. It would be a world without generosity, without compassion, without courage, without aspiration, without striving. None of the qualities mentioned in the Beatitudes would exist.
The largest groups within Christianity insist there’s only one way to God which is through a particular belief in who Jesus was and in what he achieved by his death. The way is through a narrow gate which few can enter. A smaller group believes in many ways to reach to God, just as there are different routes to the top of a mountain. Both have missed the key point. It’s not about what we achieve. We can’t earn God’s love by our deeds; we can’t buy it with our beliefs and we can’t win it by searching. It’s a gift, not a reward. In the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son, it is God doing the searching or who comes rushing down the road. “For the Son of man came to seek what was lost.” It doesn’t matter what road we’re on, even if we’re on a route leading away from God, God finds us.
Jesus reached out to people rather than judged them. He associated with those considered ‘undesirable’ by the religious authorities. He responded to their needs and saw potential within each of them. As a result of meeting him, these people felt themselves to be of value in God’s eyes and were able to live more fully as a result of the hope, self-belief and faith that this created in them. He was keen to help people to remove the ‘demons’, the unhealthy passions, guilts and complexes that controlled their lives. Salvation can be viewed in terms of healing our spiritual failings, restoring us to wholeness. It is taking into our lives the empowering love that enables us to realise our full potential as human beings. That’s why Jesus came, lived a human life and suffered a human death.
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Thank you, Pavel.
I have ‘saved’ this piece.
It is inspired!!
God is with you
Margaret – <*}}})><
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We so often present the cross as a transaction. Jesus dying for us is God’s side of the deal. To benefit from this, as our part of the deal, one has to repent/ say the sinner’s prayer/ answer an altar call/ be baptised into the right church/ recite a creed. It becomes all about what one does and/or what one believes. Yet, in the gospels, Jesus promises salvation or forgives sins or heals without making any such requirements. The thief on the cross alongside Jesus, the paralytic, the woman with the bleeding problem all receive the blessing of Jesus without him demanding or expecting anything from them. There is no deal in these cases – just grace. The great evangelist Watchman Nee wrote that it is all about reaching out to God. “The basic condition of a sinner’s salvation is not belief or repentance, but just honesty of heart towards God. God requires nothing of us except that we come in that attitude. For it is the fact of the gospel, making possible the initial touch with Jesus Christ, that saves the sinner, and not the sinner’s understanding of it.”
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