Did I kill Jesus? Part two with references to books about the atonement

Last updated on: August 19, 2011 at 10:54 pm by Roger E. Olson

Did I kill Jesus? Part two with references to books about the atonement 2011-08-19T22:54:38-05:00 Roger E. Olson

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In Part One of this multi-part message I discussed folk religion and the atonement. Virtually every doctrine of the Christian faith is subject to folk religious distortion. Let me be clear, though. Folk religion is not always completely wrong; it’s expressions (clichés, slogans, mottos, stories, etc.) CAN sometimes be partly right. What’s wrong with folk religion, especially when applied to theology, is the partiality of its truth that distorts doctrine. Earlier I gave the example of the most common folk religious cliché about the Trinity: “one in three, three in one.” Well, that’s not completely wrong. The problem is that it just raises more questions than answers and it seems to express a sheer contradiction. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not a sheer contradiction. The correct “nutshell” expression of the Trinity (and I think nothing less than this will really do) is “one substance, three persons.” Even then, “substance” and “persons” require some explaining to avoid modalism and tritheism. I’m not sure the Trinity can be expressed in any cliché; it was never meant to be put on a bumper sticker or T-shirt or stitched wall-hanging.

The T-shirt slogan I saw at the mall the other day said “I killed Jesus.” That did several things to/for me. First, it reminded me of the chapter I wrote in Questions to All Your Answers about evangelistic slogans often proclaimed with the intention of creating a “missionary moment.” For example, “Jesus is the answer.” Answer to what? Many people in modern becoming postmodern secular society have no idea what “Jesus is the answer” is even trying to say. In that chapter I argued that Christians need to be more sensitive to their social and cultural contexts and not toss about “language of Zion” that hardly anybody will even understand.

More importantly, the T-shirt slogan “I killed Jesus” made me think about the atonement—one of the most hotly debated of Christian doctrines in even relatively conservative, evangelical circles in the last decade. What idea of Jesus’ death is that slogan trying to convey? I think a lot of people in this “buckle on the Bible belt” have some notion of the slogan’s intended meaning relative to human sinfulness. They understand it to mean “We are all sinners and that’s why Jesus had to die.” But what idea of WHY Jesus had to die does it convey? Is it inseparably connected to a particular model of the atonement?

I suspect, though I cannot be sure, if I had asked the young man wearing the T-shirt “Why did Jesus have to die?” I would hear a brief explanation of the so-called penal substitution theory of the atonement. (Of course, many conservative evangelicals and especially Reformed theologians do not think it is just a “theory.” To them it is a transcript of the gospel.) It might go something like this: “Jesus had to die to assuage the wrath of God. He suffered my punishment, in my place, so that God could forgive me.” Actually, there could be much worse expressions of it, so I’m giving the young T-shirt wearer the benefit of the doubt.

As I began to point out in part one of this blog post, there are some problems with the popular understanding of the penal substitution theory of the atonement. The main one is sheer folk religion. It is that Jesus somehow turned God from a wrathful, hateful God who wanted to destroy all sinners, to a loving, forgiving Father.” This is a total distortion of the penal substitution theory. Yes, the theory says that Jesus’ death on the cross assuaged (satisfied, turn aside) the wrath of God, but it also says (and this is clear in all the major theologians who promote this view) that the motive behind Jesus’ death was love and Jesus died voluntarily as God. He was NOT just man God picked on to kill so that he (God) could get his pound of flesh. It is NOT “divine child abuse.” The person dying on the cross was God himself, not just some innocent man God led to the slaughter against his will.

I believe the popular folk religious idea of the atonement as penal substitution is what draws the most criticism, but too many critics burn a straw man with their arguments against it. I think Brian McLaren is one of those, although I would be happy to find out I am wrong. I have heard Brian hold forth against the penal substitution model of the atonement and it seemed to me he was attacking the folk religious understanding (or misunderstanding) and not the model itself as most theologians have explained it.

One theologian who has worked hard to rehabilitate the penal substitution view (in the process perhaps altering it somewhat) is Reformed evangelical theologian Hans Boersma whose book Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker, 2004) won the Christianity Today award for best book in theology for the year it was published. Boersma bends over backwards to correct false understandings of all the atonement theories and even admits that SOME theologians have inappropriately emphasized the dimension of divine wrath. I don’t have time to summarize or review the whole book here. Let me just say it is one of the best books, perhaps THE best book, I have ever read on the subject. Which is not to say I agree with everything in it.

Boersma interacts with all the major critics of the atonement, including especially postmodern thinkers who regard the Christian doctrine of the atonement in almost any form as justifying violence. His chapter on “Atonement and Mimetic Violence” deals especially with Rene Girard’s views on the cross and violence. One gets a relatively complete, introductory course in postmodern theory just by reading this book! It’s worth the price for that alone.

The real heart of Boersma’s book is expressed well on page 163: “I contend that it is not a penal understanding of the cross as such that endangers hospitality, but rather the juridicizing, individualizing, and de-historicizing of the cross that is responsible for an imbalanced approach that legitimizes unnecessary violence.” A little later, on page 177, Boersma suggest a better term for the penal substitionary view of the atonement might be “penal representation.” That’s because, in today’s society, anyway, “substitution” inevitably implies an event concerning individuals within an economy of exchange. Boersma says “Christ died not so much instead of sinners as on behalf of sinners, as their corporate representative.” (177)

Some critics of ANY view that entangles God in violence will still object when Boersma says “To be sure, because the cross is situated on a particular hill outside a certain city and is the result of humanity’s…consistent refusal to accept divine hospitality, God finally comes with the violence of punishment.” (177) But the critics MUST read the surrounding context which makes crystal clear that Boersma DOES NOT believe the cross somehow magically turned God from angry and wrathful to loving and forgiving; all along it is an expression of God’s love intended to draw humanity to himself. “God’s justice on the cross is a form of restorative justice,” Boersma says. (178)

Boersma argues, against some postmodern thinkers such as Levinas, that there is, or should be, no such thing as unconditional hospitality and that violence is, in some situations, necessary. But one should not inflate those claims beyond his intentions. He clearly does not think violence is good (as in the “myth of redemptive violence”) or that the conditions on hospitality should be restrictive (e.g., to protect one’s own property).

I will leave it to readers to decide whether Boersma rescues the penal substitution theory (or something very close to it) from criticisms. What I will say to and about critics is that at least Boersma is trying to take very seriously something that stands at the heart of the biblical message: that humanity’s willful rebellion against God calls forth, even requires, demonstration of God’s holiness and justice.

I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: I don’t see any way to take the biblical message about salvation seriously without holding onto something like the penal substitution theory of the atonement. If, as Hans Frei taught us, the Bible absorbs the world for Christians, we cannot simply say “I don’t like that” to some motif of salvation as integral as substitutionary suffering (or representational punishment) and dismiss it as irrelevant to contemporary Christianity.

Now, my own inclination is toward something like the governmental theory of Hugo Grotius and later Arminians/Remonstrants. It preserves the substitutionary sacrifice of the cross/atonement without the distortions that so commonly infect the penal substitution theory and it moves away from the extra-biblical ideas of atonement attached to Reformed scholasticism (e.g., federal theology with its strongly juridical notions of atonement). In my experience, almost no one understands the governmental theory correctly. It is NOT “merely educative” as especially Reformed critics like to claim. It says rather than God wants to forgive sinners but, because of his holiness, cannot simply forgive without cost. The “cost” of forgiveness, to use an inadequate term, is his own death on the cross to vindicate his righteousness in forgiving sinners. It upholds his moral government of the universe which would be undermined by simply waving a magic want called “forgiveness” without sacrifice. But in this theory, Jesus doesn’t suffer MY punishment or YOURS but an equivalent punishment to the one we deserve.

In Part 3 I’ll discuss another excellent book on atonement—Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement.

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