The Atonement
Not long ago I noticed an incidental reference to the penal substitutionary theory of the
atonement that provoked some thought about its theological implications. The atonement: the
reconciliation of human persons to God through the life and death of Jesus Christ.
Although the Western Church understands the atonement as having been accomplished by Jesus’ death on
the cross,1 Anglican theologian John Macquarrie points out that the early Greek fathers
linked atonement with incarnation. “The cross,” states Macquarrie, “cannot be understood apart
from the life which it ended. . . . It has its significance only in the context of Christ’s life as its
climax and summation.”2
There are many ways of understanding the atonement and there have been many doctrines of the
atonement throughout the history of the Church, but there is no dogma of the atonement and no one
theory can be regarded as universally accepted.
Although the concept of Christ as a sacrifice for our sins is biblical and was present from the earliest
days of Christianity, it was John Calvin and other Protestant reformers who incorporated the idea
of vicarious punishment for sin into this understanding of sacrifice. Calvin was building on St.
Anselm’s theory that Christ suffered in payment of the satisfaction to God owed by us that we
could not pay because we are creatures; therefore that satisfaction must be paid by God.
To my mind, Anselm’s view of the atonement as satisfaction due for a debt that is owed places the
emphasis on balancing the scales rather than on what is for me the core nature of the atonement:
transcendent love. But even Anselm does not go so far as to envision God as demanding punishment
and sending Jesus to be punished in our place. Nor can the penal substitutionary theory of the
atonement be made more palatable by asserting that since Jesus partakes of the divine nature,
God’s own self paid the penalty. The Son is of the same substance as the Father but is a separate
person of the Godhead. Monarchianism, the emphasis on the unity of the Godhead to the point that the
Trinity virtually disappeared, was dealt with and rejected by the Church in the third century. One kind of
Monarchianism, Patripassianism, was called that precisely because without the distinction of the
three persons in the Godhead, the Father would be held to suffer crucifixion in the form of the Son.
The idea of God insisting on evening up the score by punishing Jesus to cancel out the sin of
the world is not consistent with my understanding of God’s nature. Again I appeal to Macquarrie
who indicts the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement (bedrock Calvinist doctrine) as an
“affront . . . to reason and conscience.”3 Paul Tillich states that the term
“substitutional suffering” should not be used in Christian theology.4 And Richard
Norris in the Episcopal Church’s teaching series, Understanding the
Faith of the Church, states that forgiveness is not “a matter of justice but an affair of grace.”
5
I believe God sent the Son to save sinners, not be to be crucified. As Jesus’ ministry unfolded,
it became increasingly apparent that humanity was going to kill Jesus for preaching the Gospel,
healing the sick, upsetting the establishment and challenging the authorities. Gethsemane was a cry
to God to ask if there were not another way to accomplish reconciliation to God except through
a death not decreed by God but by humanity. God’s will was that this reconciliation should occur
and there was no other way because God would not act to override the free will of Jesus’ accusers,
judges and executioners. It is to this that Jesus submits in perfect obedience.
The willing sacrifice of himself has ultimate meaning because the self is the ultimate bastion
of the ego. By refusing to save himself by recanting, physical force, political maneuvering,
untruthfulness, deception or any other means that would compromise the entire witness
of his life, Jesus triumphed—our representative rather than our substitute. Macquarrie points
to what he calls the classic (Christus Rex-Victor) theory of the atonement: struggle and triumph.
Jesus was victorious over sin and death because those things had no power over him; by his death
he broke the bonds which enslave, pervert and control all human persons, thereby separating us
from God, to whom belong our whole love, devotion and allegiance.
One of the most somber biblical passages is one that appears in some variation in all four Gospels,
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save
it.”6 I do not see this as a call to us all to become martyrs for the faith but rather to abandon our idols
and our ego-centered mindset and die to ourselves. As Jesus rose to new life in his resurrection, so we
also will know new life by living in freedom from the idols of power, material wealth, selfish concerns
and whatever other “demons” rule our lives, control our behavior and separate us from God.
But we cannot do this for ourselves; this freedom is only possible through the saving act of God in
Jesus. Thus Jesus must be more than just an example to us, a “moral influence” as another theory
of the atonement is sometimes called. John Stott states it bluntly:
A pattern cannot secure our pardon. . . . We need more than an example, we need a Savior. An example can stir our imagination, kindle our idealism and
strengthen our resolve, but it cannot cleanse the defilement of our past sins,
bring peace to our troubled conscience or reconcile us to God.7
This is accomplished in the same way that God’s grace is received through the administration of the sacraments. Jesus’ very life and death were an “outward and visible” (physical, material) sign of an inward and spiritual grace: God working through the Son to transform human nature itself. Jesus as Sacrament of God is another of the theories of the atonement and one that has great appeal for me because it both honors the mystery and testifies to a profound love for God’s human children that values the dignity, worth and freedom of every person. Jesus bore the sin of the world even unto death, a death that was necessary because God loved us so, God would not overrule our sovereign God-given free will, even when we accused, condemned and nailed our Lord to the cross.
But the atonement is a complicated and difficult concept and one that we probably cannot fully comprehend. What is important, is not how it happened, but that it happened: a one-time event of eternal significance, within history, transcending time.
Kathleen K. Ennis
The Living Church
03/05/2000
1Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3d ed., s.v. “atonement.”
2John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2d ed. (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 311 – 12.
3Ibid., 315.
4Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, Existence and the Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 176.
5Richard A. Norris, with the assistance of a group of editorial advisors under the direction of the Church’s Teaching
Series Committee, Understanding the Faith of the Church, The Church’s Teaching Series, vol. 4 (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1979), 228.
6Lk 9:24. Also Mt 16:25; Mk 8:35; Jn 12:25.
7John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1958; Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 89.