Contra Parris

Over the Easter weekend, Matthew Parris published an article complaining that the exaltation of victimhood, based in the victimhood of Christ, is ruining society.  I do not think he was entirely wrong.  At the very least, I have big questions over the application of the word 'victim' to our Lord in his death; whilst the NT does present Christ as the sacrificial victim, the fact that it also presents him as the offering Priest rather heavily qualifies the sense of victimhood.  It seems clear to me, at least, that the contemporary use of victimhood cannot be applied to the Lord Jesus.  I think that in some cases where this language is used of Christ contemporary progressive politics rather than the gospel is setting the agenda, or perhaps it is just an over-egging of the Dominion thesis.  That Scripture shows God as being on the side of the weak and marginalised is certainly true; that it somehow makes weakness and marginalisation a virtue is false.

Anyway, Parris has now followed up with a second article, this time in the Spectator, in which he argues that "the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle".  "Trying to make sense of it", he thinks, "is a waste of time".  And yet, many millions of people seem to think that it does make sense, that it is coherent and powerful as an idea, and moreover that it is a liberating and saving reality.  Parris advances very weak arguments for his position, but since they are in public it may be worth briefly taking the time to refute them, to which end I offer the following analysis.

After an initial complaint about the language of Christian doctrine, which he suspects is meaningless even to many believers, Parris makes his first substantial(ish) point, about authority.  "Where does the doctrine of atonement through Christ's crucifixion find its roots?"  Parris is surprised to find that Jesus said nothing on the subject; I am also surprised to hear this, since I find in my Bible that Christ clearly taught that he had come to offer his life as a ransom for many.  Matthew Parris, presumably not seeing this and similar verses, advances the tired old argument that it was really St Paul who invented the idea of atonement.  Now, I will cheerfully grant that some of the clearest teaching about the atonement in the Bible comes from the pen of the Apostle Paul, but this simply does not mean what Parris thinks it means.

The argument that 'Jesus never said anything about that', even granted it were true (as in this case it is not), will not carry the weight Parris puts on it, and it's worth thinking through why because of course this argument is used in other cases.  Christians do not treat the words of Christ as somehow a canon within the canon, as if it is the words of Jesus which have the real authority.  No, we see that the whole of Scripture bears witness to the work of Jesus.  So behind the gospel narratives stands the whole Old Testament history of sacrifice as a means to cover guilt and gain access to God.  It is inconceivable that when the gospel authors record the tearing of the temple curtain at the point of Christ's death that they are not thinking of his death in terms of sacrifice, propitiation, the removal of the sin and guilt which prevents sinful humanity from gaining access to God.  We do not need specific words of Jesus to draw this very clear inference.  And in fact that is all that St Paul is doing when he writes on the atonement; seeing Jesus as the Messiah, the fulfillment of all the Old Testament story, and drawing out the meaning of the death of Christ in that way.

Moreover, by way of an aside, I would point out to Mr Parris that in fact the church does teach that the Apostle, in his writing of Scripture, "could never have been wrong".  But even if it were not so, the understanding of Christ's death in terms of redeeming sacrifice is demanded by the events themselves as seen against the backdrop of the Old Testament.  So much for the question of authority.

The second part of the argument, if I've followed it correctly, is that Paul was essentially a salesman, and needed a hook to get the Gentiles interested in Jesus.  Salvation "from our own misdeeds" was the offer, and a powerful one, since everyone has conscience troubles.  But for Parris this means the crucifixion was not about justice, but about "rescue from justice".  This account ignores two things.  Firstly, that St Paul was not an obvious choice for salesman to the Gentiles.  How did he come to want them to believe in the first place?  The idea that this devout Pharisee just suddenly decided to break out of the bounds of Judaism is utterly implausible; the only possible answer is that Mr Parris is incorrect when he asserts that Paul never met Jesus!  Second, Parris ignores the Apostle's careful argument about God's justice in the Epistle to the Romans.  The point of the cross, according to Paul, is that by it God can be both just and the one who justifies those who trust in Jesus.  The crucifixion of Jesus upholds God's justice, and if that doesn't look like justice as Mr Parris imagines it, I suspect that the Almighty's notions will outlast his.

The third part of the argument returns to the question of meaning.  How does the ransom metaphor apply?  Is ransom paid to the devil?  What about propitiation?  Who is propitiated and why?  These are old questions, much kicked around in the history of Christian theology; but there are quite clear answers for anyone who wants to hear them.  Yes, ransom is a metaphor, and therefore of course it doesn't carry over to the reality one-to-one; it represents liberation at cost, and carried thus far is a powerful image.  No need to bring the devil into it; nobody owes him anything.  The logic of propitiation - of turning away wrath through substitution - makes perfect sense if one grasps both the doctrine of the Trinity and the holiness of God.  The holiness of God demands judgement for sin (that Parris thinks that "The God we've fashioned over the millennia is not like that" demonstrates that part of his difficulty is that he's trying to make sense of the atonement on the presuppositions of a very liberal theology, which is of course rather difficult; suppose we stick to the God who has revealed himself rather than the idol that we've spent millennia fashioning, everything will be clearer).  And once we grasp the nature of the Trinity, we can see the wonder of the cross: that God propitiates himself, the Son willingly taking on our nature and our guilt so that the wrath of God might be borne away in his Person.

Contra Matthew Parris, it all makes a lot of sense.  It is in fact our sinful notions of God, justice, and the nature of the human condition which constitute a hopeless muddle.  But certainly neither Jesus nor Paul can be blamed for that.

The death of the sinner

As we approach the end of Holy Week, I've been thinking again about the significance of the death of Jesus Christ.  I've noted before that a central element of the New Testament presentation of this significance which I think is often missed in contemporary reflections is the death of the sinner in the death of Christ.  That is to say, when Jesus died on the cross, sinful humanity died a warranted, judicial death in him.  To unpack that a little:

-A real thing happened when Christ gave up his spirit and died.  It is not 'as if' we sinful people died there; we actually really did.  In God's sight, we died in his death.  The reality of this is, so to speak, crucial.  The foundation of the believer's response to the death of Jesus is faith expressed in baptism, and in baptism we are said to be buried with Christ.  But this can only be the case if antecedent to our recognising and entering into this being dead in Christ we had actually died with him.  In Christ, we really died.  (That might mean we need to rethink what death actually means!)

-The death of Christ was the death of sinful humanity per se.  The Lord Jesus took on our nature (not, note, an individual human being, but human nature).  He carried that nature through temptation and cross, and ultimately to the point of death.  Though he was not a sinner, it was the nature - the flesh - of those who were sinners which he had vicariously assumed.  There is no future, then, in sinful humanity.

-The death which was carried out in Christ was a death sentence, a warranted judicial death.  It was, in fact, the execution of God's just sentence on sinners.  I've been thinking a little, provoked by this post from Ian Paul, about the extent to which we can say, with the hymn, that in Christ's death 'the wrath of God was satisfied'.  This sits at the heart of the understanding of the cross as penal substitution - the idea that Christ bore the punishment merited by sinful humanity.  I think we can and should say, and sing, that God's wrath is satisfied, but amongst other qualifiers I would add that this only makes sense if we understand that God's wrath was satisfied by the removal of the object of his wrath.  It is not that there is a conflict in God - he really loves humanity, but he is wrathful against sin - and so to resolve the conflict he exhausts his wrath on Jesus, like a child punching a pillow until they've let out all their anger.  No, God's holy love and holy wrath are one and the same, and in his holy love for sinners he pours out his holy wrath on them (in the person of Christ) until sinful humanity is done away with.

-The heart of the gospel is that all this happened in him.  That he voluntarily assumed our place, identified with sinners, and carried their case through to death - this is amazing.  When we recognise who he is - the very God against whom we had offended, the God whose holy wrath burns with all the heat of his infinite holy love - well, then it is simply breathtaking.  That my death took place in him, that the death which awaits me is merely the shadow of death with nothing of judgement in it, this is the wonderful significance of the cross.  The key question, I think, which it provokes is: if all this happened to me in him, what then is to happen in me?  And the answer to that is essentially that being dead in him to sin, I ought to (and must) die in me to sin; that by the Spirit I am to be enabled to make real in my life and experience what is already real in my very being, because real in him.

The ransom

Reading John Owen's Death of Death and Karl Barth's treatment of the atonement in Church Dogmatics IV/1 somewhat concurrently is interesting.  The theological modes in which these two thoroughly Christ-centred theologians operate are very different, and that show in their conclusions.  I am particularly struck that Owen relies very heavily in his work on ransom imagery.  His book is polemical, aimed at promoting a theology of limited or definite atonement; his particular target is those who teach a 'general ransom'.  Owen's argument is long and detailed, but at the heart of it is the apparently inescapable conclusion that for whomever a ransom is paid, that person must in justice be set free; therefore, if a general ransom - a ransom for all - has been paid in the death of Christ, all must be saved.  Since he (rightly) regards universalism as obviously contrary to the witness of Holy Scripture, he considers that the general ransom is to be rejected by all who bow to Scripture's authority.

Barth frames his teaching entirely differently, focusing on legal imagery - "the Judge judged in our place".  He works this through thoroughly, and only at the very end of his treatment looks to other images.  He discusses priestly and cultic imagery at greatest length, corresponding to the more prominent place these images have in the NT - the book of Hebrews, for example, revolves entirely around this way of viewing the atonement.  Indeed, Barth suggests that this would have been just as good a way of structuring the whole of his treatment, except that it is more obscure to us than the legal imagery.  (He speculates that it may have been the primary mode of understanding the atonement in the earliest Christian communities).  He deals very briefly (in a single short paragraph) with military imagery and the concept of victory, but is unconvinced it would be helpful to develop this systematically even though a place must be preserved for it in our understanding of the atonement.  (So much for the suggestion, which I have regularly seen, that Barth prefers Christus Victor as a model of the atonement rather than penal substitution; this is simply unsustainable on any straightforward reading of the Dogmatics.)  And financial imagery - the ransom - gets a similarly brief review.  Barth acknowledges that the NT does "strangely enough" contain this image, but thinks that "this strand is relatively slender".  He considers that it would be difficult and unprofitable to use this as a framework for the whole doctrine of atonement.

Different approaches, very different conclusions.  I'm not going to dive into the rights and wrongs of either here (except to say the only way to begin to do that dive would be an overview of the relative strengths of the different images used in the NT, with their OT background, and not primarily a detailed exegesis of particular passages).  It just interests me that so much can rest on which set of NT images becomes the main interpretive lens of your engagement with doctrine.

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'."

Dead with Christ

I've written about this briefly before, but over the past week or so as we've particularly remembered the atoning sacrifice of Christ it has struck me again: we (evangelicals, I guess) are pretty good at talking about the glorious truth of Christ's substiutionary sacrifice, with its happy consequence that we no longer face the wrath of God.  We are less good at talking about the glorious truth of Christ's representative sacrifice, with its happy consequence that we are no longer the sinners we were.

To unpack that a bit, we say quite clearly that Jesus bore the penalty for sin that we deserved, thus taking it from us.  He, the righteous one, stands over against us and takes from us the burden of our guilt, suffering in our place.  We say that, and let's be clear: we can't say it enough.  This is glorious, it is Scriptural, it is beautiful.  Bless the Lord.

But we don't say, or at least we don't say nearly so much, that when Jesus died as our representative on the cross he really brought about our deaths.  But that is a big part of the New Testament message.  "One has died for all, therefore all have died."  "We have been united with him in a death like his...  our old self was crucified with him."  "I have been crucified with Christ."

These verses, and many others - I would argue that this is the dominant theme of the NT presentation of the atonement - are saying something different from substitution.  They follow the way of Christ into the presence of sinners, accepting solidarity with sinners at his baptism, maintaining that solidarity throughout his ministry ("a friend of tax collectors and sinners") - not resisting or avoiding the appearance of guilt, crucified between two obvious malefactors.  Born in scandal, living with sinners, dying with criminals; he, the sinless one, with us sinners, really with us.  And in his death, therefore, us with him, really with him.  And therefore dead, died, executed.

This has hugely important consequences. 

Why is God satisfied in the atonement which Christ makes?  For sure the penalty is paid, but there is more: the sinner who stood opposed to God is taken away, crucified and dead in and with Christ his sinless representative. 

Why should we do mission, taking the gospel out?  For sure because of the good news of substitution, but even more because in Christ the death sentence on sinful humanity has been pronounced and carried out (2 Cor 5!); the situation for all people, each individual person, has changed, and they need to know.

Why should I live a distinctive and holy life?  For sure the sacrificial death of my substitute is a powerful motive to love, but the standard New Testament appeal is not to gratitude but to simple reality: you, the sinful old you, died; how can you continue to live as if that old self was still around?

Maybe I've just missed it, but I don't think this theme is big enough in our preaching and teaching.

With us and for us

Today I am pondering the deep significance of the fact that everything Jesus did for us he did as one of us.

I think it would be fair to say that the emphasis of much contemporary evangelical theology and preaching falls on what Christ has done and accomplished.  In essence, that means the cross and resurrection (with a wee bit of teaching and miracle working in the background).  If anything about the person (as opposed to the work) of Christ is stressed, it is his deity - this is God intervening in our history for our good.  This is not in itself a bad thing.  It can't hurt us to talk more and think more about what Jesus has done for us, and without a doubt the Scriptures support the idea that the death and resurrection of Christ on our behalf are the central and most significant things that he has done.  And the emphasis on the deity of Christ makes a certain amount of sense in a culture which takes humanity for granted but denies divinity - not to mention that of course none of the achievements of Christ can have ultimate significance unless they are genuinely the acts of God.

Still, I do think it's important to take on board that in Jesus the eternal Son and Word of God came as one of us.

Of course no orthodox theologian or preacher would deny this.  But some of the staggering implications are not always brought out as clearly as they might be.  If the Son of God has united himself to our nature, then what he does in his death and resurrection is really for us.  It is genuinely humanity that dies on the cross - his death is our death, in so far as we are sinners and rebels against God.  It is genuinely humanity that rises on the third day - his resurrection is our resurrection, in so far as we hope in him.  Because the Son of God came as one of us, uniting us to himself, what he has done genuinely affects us.  The atonement doesn't happen somewhere apart from us - it is not something God accomplishes remotely from us, and then perhaps 'offers' to us.  It is something done in humanity, even as it is something that could only be done by God.

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

The cross from two vantage points

Sometimes I stand at a distance and look at the cross, and see that Jesus suffers there alone. He is there, and I am not. He is dying, and I am not. He is enduring the wrath of God, and I am not. All of which is amazing, because everything that he is going through is everything that I deserve but will now never face.

That is the glorious gospel truth that Christ is my substitute.

Sometimes I look down from the cross, and realise that Jesus' suffering there includes me. I died with him. I am there. My old, sinful self died as he died. My old identity as a sinner died as he died. My old way of living and looking at the world died completely as he died. Which is equally amazing, because it means that I can be a new person now - I can change.

This is the glorious gospel truth that Christ is my representative.

The cross from two angles

The Bible gives us two perspectives on the crucifixion of Christ, and the two perspectives teach us two very different lessons.

From one perspective, the cross of Christ represents a divine transaction. The Son of God, in full agreement with his Father and out of love for his people, goes to the cross willingly, bearing human sin on his shoulders. He endures the just consequences of that sin, is punished in the place of those who will trust in him. He willingly surrenders his life, tasting death for others so that those others might live.

From this angle, I learn this: Christ bore the cross for me, so that I need never bear it. My sin is paid for, and there can be no wrath for me.

From another perspective, the cross of Christ represents a human injustice. The innocent Christ is flogged and tortured, accused falsely and strung up by sinful people. He suffers because of the envy and fear of the priestly caste, the pride of the civic leaders, and the cowardice of the Roman governor. He is hated because of what he represents: the righteousness of God in a world full of unrighteousness. And he is killed, ultimately, because people living in the darkness hate the light.

From this angle, I learn this: Christ bore the cross for me, so that I might understand that I also have to bear it. In this world, the Christian will look foolish and weak. The Christian will represent something that the world finds repellent. If we try to get away from that, we refuse to take up the cross, and thus we refuse to follow Christ.