The Judge Judged in our Place

People sometimes ask whether Barth believed in penal substitution, the doctrine which maintains that Christ endured on the cross the punishment which sinners deserve.  Since this doctrine has (rightly, in my view; those who deny it are typically unorthodox on other important points) become something of a shibboleth in evangelical circles, a lot rides on the answer.  Did Barth believe that Jesus bore the wrath of God deserved by sinners, in their place?  Did he believe that the death of Christ was a vicarious death, the righteous taking the punishment which the sinful deserved?

Isenheim Altarpiece

Well, the short answer is yes.  "My turning from God is followed by God's annihilating turning from me.  When it is resisted His love works itself out as death-dealing wrath.  If Jesus Christ has followed our way as sinners to the end to which it leads, in outer darkness, then we can say with that passage from the Old Testament [Isaiah 53] that He has suffered this punishment of ours."  (CD IV/1, 253)

But of course with Barth things are rarely quite so simple!  The yes has to be qualified with a 'but'.  In Barth's understanding, the element of punishment in the cross is not the central element.  It is true that the death which Christ endures is our death, the penalty for our sin.  It is true that "He has suffered what we ought to have suffered so that we do not have to suffer it, the destruction to which we have fallen victim by our guilt, the punishment which we deserve" - and you won't find a much clearer statement of penal substitution than that!  But the deeper thing, the more ultimate thing, is that "in the death and suffering of Jesus Christ it has come to pass that in His own person He has made an end of us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners."

For Barth there certainly is a transaction in the atonement - our sin vicariously borne by Christ - but the transaction rests on a more decisive thing - our being-as-sinners vicariously borne by Christ, and in his death borne all the way to destruction.  Atonement is about reconciliation.  What stands in the way of my relationship with a holy God?  Not merely my guilt, but my whole being as a person given over to sin and rebellion.  In Christ, that sinful person has been put to death, and therefore removed.  "One died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor 5:14).

The action of God in the death of Christ is not to avoid the judgement and the necessary death of sinful man, but to carry out the sentence, fully and completely, but vicariously, in Jesus Christ.  The penal aspect of substitution rests on something deeper - if you like, an ontological substitution, a being in our place which, by walking the sinners road all the way to death and destruction, crowds the sinner out of his place and establishes space for a new creation by faith in the resurrected Jesus.

In our place

In Church Dogmatics IV/1, 240-243, Barth reflects on three directions in which we have to look when we acknowledge that Christ, in his death, took our place as sinners.

1.  Because Christ died in our place, we can and must know ourselves as sinners.  In fact, it is only in Christ that we can see this; if we say we are sinners on any other basis, we are judging by an arbitrary standard of good and evil, something we've invented ourselves.  By taking our place, Christ shows us what exactly our place is, and removes from us the possibility of trying to excuse our sin or understand ourselves in any other way than as those who stand under judgement.  Faith in Christ must therefore always involve confession of sin and repentance.

2.  Because Christ died in our place, we can and must know that our sin is taken from us.  It belongs now to him - not because he is a sinner, but because he has taken our sinful place from us.  "It is true that we are crowded out of our own place by Him in that He made our sin his own."  It remains 'our place' - we are the sinners - but he has taken responsibility for that sin, standing in our place.  Faith in Christ must therefore always mean assurance and confidence before God as the one who has reconciled and forgiven us (as the sinners we are) in Christ.

3.  Because Christ died in our place, we cannot stand in that place anymore.  "If Jesus Christ came and took our place as the Representative of our evil case, then there is nothing more that we can seek and do there even as evil-doers."  Our place as sinners being taken, we can no longer act as sinners.  Neither can we act as judges, as if judgement had not already been carried out.  "There is no 'way back'."

Particular text, particular context

On special occasions we often reach for doctrinal preaching - it's Good Friday, let's preach on atonement; it's Easter, let's preach on resurrection - and that's all well and good, but I was reminded this past Friday of the advantage of preaching through books of the Bible.  I'd arranged it so that our series in Luke's Gospel would reach the crucifixion in Holy Week and the resurrection on Easter Sunday, and I'm glad I did.  I noticed on Good Friday particularly that preaching Luke's account in the context of the series helped me to see some things I might otherwise have missed.

For example, Luke - in common with the other Synoptic Gospels - records the three hours of darkness which accompanied Christ's execution.  Maybe it's because I've run a few Christianity Explored courses, or maybe it's just because I'm a veteran of the Substitution Wars, but I instinctively read this darkness against the backdrop of the darkness in Egypt - as an expression of the wrath of God against sin.  I think that is, in fact, in the background, but the more immediate framing in Luke's narrative is rather different, determined by the saying of Jesus to his captors, recorded in Luke 22:53.  The darkness represents, then, the (Satanic) power of the opposition to Jesus, risen to its final terrible height at the crucifixion.  To know that Christ endured the weight of all the forces of darkness in the hour of their power is actually reassuring in a different way, particularly at this hour of darkness.

Then again, preaching from a particular passage helps to avoid the danger of reductionism in doctrine.  It is very easy to get to a position where your whole understanding of a certain doctrine - or at least, your way of expressing it - depends on one particular strand of the biblical witness.  For example, the cry of dereliction easily becomes the dominant way of explaining the cross and the atonement.  But if you're preaching the cross from Luke, there is no cry of dereliction.  Rather there is an expression of faith as Jesus resigns his spirit confidently into the hands of his Father.  Of course the Gospel accounts are selective - it is entirely possible for Jesus to have said both things - and there is no contradiction.  But taking the particular perspective of this particular text in preaching the cross means that you may have to reach beyond your normal shorthand for explaining the atonement and look at it from a different angle.

There is definitely a place for synthetic doctrinal preaching - preaching that tries to give a rounded theological account of the whole witness of Holy Scripture on a particular doctrinal point.  But I am more convinced than ever that it needs to play second place to consecutive exposition of Biblical texts.

An idle tale

An aspect of the Easter story which I didn't touch on in my brief sermon on Sunday is the initial reaction of Jesus' followers to the news of the resurrection.  We are continuing a long-running series in Luke's Gospel, so picked up the story from Luke 24:1-12.  The women go to the tomb; the stone is moved and the body missing; two angels appear who proclaim the resurrection of Christ.  And then, naturally, they go tell the male disciples.

Who don't believe a word of it.

The way Luke tells the story, they weren't violently opposed to the idea of Jesus being raised; they didn't feel the need to argue about why it was impossible.  They didn't engage with the message at all.  It seemed like nothing more than an idle tale.  A fantasy.

Partly I guess we're seeing the reaction of a misogynistic culture.  As many preachers will no doubt have pointed out at the weekend, the testimony of a woman was automatically suspect in the ancient world, and legally inadmissible.  And of course such attitudes persist.  But I don't think that's the heart of it.

The disciples of Jesus find it easy to dismiss rumours of his resurrection because they know that this sort of thing does not happen.  Their indifference to the report of the women is motivated by the exact same force which lies behind much contemporary rejection of the same report: it doesn't happen that way.  People die and stay dead.  That's just the way it is.

I find this reaction encouraging in some ways.  The first Christians weren't naive; they didn't belong to a time where resurrections were believable.  Bear in mind that according to the Gospel writers, these disciples had witnessed Jesus raising people from death to life; they had also heard his promise that he himself would rise on the third day.  But this was not enough to overcome the basic human intuition, backed up by overwhelming experience, that death is a one-way trip.  The only thing that did overcome it was an encounter with the risen Jesus himself.  To me this makes their testimony more believable.  They were sceptics too, and had to be won over.

I suspect that in some ways it was harder for them than it is for us.  We've had centuries to become accustomed to the idea of Christ rising, even if we still regard it as an idle tale.  As N.T. Wright tirelessly points out, the first disciples knew what resurrection was; it was something which would occur at the end, when everyone would rise to judgement.  This resurrection, of a singular person, was not it.  It ran contrary to everything they knew about the world, just as, for different reasons, it runs contrary to what we know about the world.

But is it an idle tale, though?  Was the world turned upside down, were millions of lives changed, by an idle tale?  Was it a fantasy which brought this all about?

Which story, in the end, is more unbelievable?

A lament for Holy Week 2020

We hang up our harps on garden bushes;
held at home,
how can we sing our familiar songs?

Strange to think this place, so well known,
these four walls,
become our exile; we are strangers here.

I remember how we came, hosanna shouts,
palm crosses,
to celebrate your Triumph; praise your lowly Majesty.
And now from dining rooms
we squint into our screens
and try to hear an echo of the past.

You came to your own, and yet were not at home;
your Father's house
a den, and others led you from the place;

the place where you had made your name to dwell.
Weight of cross
and pain of scourge, and all the time a stranger.

Dialectical Theology and the Mystery of God

"The best theological grammar available to describe [the divine reality] is dialectical and full of reversals."

Thus George Hunsinger, in his essay on Karl Barth's conception of eternity, to be found in the excellent Disruptive Grace, p 193.

But what does dialectical mean here?

Hunsinger is attempting to describe a central theological method deployed by Karl Barth to think about God.  We could perhaps describe it as 'back and forth theology'.  Back and forth theology looks one way, and then looks the other.  It may therefore appear to be full of contradictions; it might seem to continually double back on itself.  Take a quote out of context - take a 'back' without a 'forth' - and it may well seem outright heresy.  Sounds risky - so why pursue it?

For Barth, dialectical theology has to be pursued because there is no other way to give a reasonable account of the revelation of God which we see witnessed in Holy Scripture.  A cracking example is his treatment of the Christology of the canonical gospels (which he broadly equates with the so-called Alexandrian and Antiochene schools; possibly unhelpfully from the perspective of historical theology).  He looks from the synoptic perspective (that this man is the Son of God) to the Johannine perspective (that the Son of God is this man) and continually switches between them.  Neither perspective is possible to reconcile to the other fully in thought or concept, but both are necessary to do justice to the descriptive account of God's action in Christ which we see in the gospels.  So we have to be continually back and forth, back and forth; not balancing one against the other, nor trying to achieve a synthesis, but always mentally moving.  This is not because there is any actual division in Christ; it is simply because our conceptual systems cannot adequately capture the mystery.

The same is true in the doctrine of the Trinity.  Barth moves from the One to the Three and back.  "Since the reality of God's oneness and threeness cannot be reconciled in thought, a 'trinitarian dialectic' must be devised in which statements to the one side are continually 'counterbalanced' by statements to the other." (Hunsinger, 192, referencing CD I/1, 269).  The same method is at play in Barth's account of God's simplicity and his multiple perfections.  Taking both seriously as they are presented in Holy Scripture prevents us from attempting to close the conceptual system and describe God using only one term and not the other.

A word of caution: "Note that Barth does not think God's being is dialectical or antithetical in itself, only that our minds are incapable of grasping its unity through a single principle or system." (Hunsinger, 193).  Our essentially dialectical systems of thought do find their resolution, but it is not in a higher concept or a deeper system of thought; it is in the being of God himself.

I think this is important.  In much of the theological retrieval going on today - the attempt to recover the classical doctrine of God - I think genuine advantages of modern theology are being lost.  In classical theism, God is considered to be ineffable; but I think there is a danger that he is in fact very well understood in that system.  He is simply(!) the concept of ineffability.  That is to say, at some point in the essentially complete conceptual system, there is a need for a border, a conceptual ground which essentially belongs to the system - and to such a concept, everyone gives the name God.  Barth's dialectic points, I think, to the living God who is genuinely know-able, but not susceptible to conceptualisation, not a being we can capture in our ideas even if we can genuinely describe him as we follow his own self-description.

Barth thinks his method is essential because Scripture directs us that way.  I think he's right.  One of the difficulties I have with classical theism is the way in which it resolves the apparent tensions in the biblical witness by enforcing a conceptual one-sidedness - for example, we explain away all the biblical references to God's emotions by simply declaring them to be unreal; for they must be so, if we are to achieve a conceptual consistency with the idea of God's impassibility.  For Barth, we rather press on down both roads, taking seriously God's self-revelation in both ways - leaving, admittedly, a system of concepts which is open-ended in a way which is frustrating to us, but leaving the mystery of God's own being intact.  And note that whereas the classical system, by making much of God's self-revelation unreal, leaves us with mystery without true knowledge, Barth follows Scripture in claiming (on the grounds of revelation) real knowledge of God without transgressing the mystery.  What the Bible says about God is true, even if I cannot think it out into a whole system.

Back and forth theology is, to my mind, simply theology that is constrained by God's self-revelation in Christ, as witnessed in the Old and New Testaments.  That should be okay in anybody's book, right?