Biblical Atonement is not Substitutionary Punishment
Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds
July 2021
ABSTRACT
The errors of the tradition deriving from Anselm’s Cur
Deus Homo changed the early church’s understanding of the atonement from models of Christus Victor (expiation through supplication and sacrificial blood) or Ransom
to the Devil (propitiation of Satan by the extension of God’s divine grace—it is
Satan who ever requires a transaction) (on these early models of atonement, see esp. Aulén 1930).The 11th C Anselmic tradition
of atonement makes foundational its transactional feudalism: the satisfaction of God’s consistent and
primary righteous honor opposed against sin, a consistent righteousness that
needs an outlet to appease (propitiate) is the necessary prelude to an
ancillary revelation of grace.
Moreover, the substitutionary nature of appeasement is
evident as the plan of Caiaphas to appease the Roman occupiers: John 11:50. The substitutionary, punitive
atonement is thus a symbolic parallel of Caiaphas’s strategy to provide a sacrificial scapegoat and Pilate's as the proxy for
the crucifying hegemonic power of brutality to align with Caiaphas's strategy to maintain control and coerce stability from the perspective of elites.
Extrapolating these errors--of transactional religion of substitutionary
appeasement is an atonement that may only neutralize the overhang of wrath--brings forth religious tribalism making grace and power part of parochial politics and limited purviews, leading contemporary reactionary, culturally violent christians to increasinglty drift toward a role in the thymic, raging politics of retribution and exclusionary
“purification” of collectives looking to the Cross. Such centering of retributive justice before grace betrays our Christian vocation as virtuous agents of Golden Rule
deontology that reconciles estrangement and repairs from God’s good creative
intent.
Read the Lord’s Prayer: Grace leads and grace crowns,
while economic justice of Jubilee is an interlude.
A developmental, ever sanctifying Christology of open immanence [a term from Charles Taylor],
while giving sufficient weight to the goodness of liberty, values earthly existence as
intrinsically sacred and possible rather than deficient or doomed. It embraces diversity and aligns
with grace by integration of the finite [for the how of this techne
of heart—deontological virtue--see http://t.ly/PvMl]
rather than sustaining a hierarchical, recurrent, or detached and defended
boundary of a parochialized infinite.
By contrast, Platonic, ontic rootedness in an esse of
eternal archetypes and individual participation by mind--epistemic noesis--does not provide a
metaphysical foundation for universal or transformative unity, a conative will
that involves both the goodness of human freedom set in concert and harmony
with a comprehensive and integrating telos guiding human history toward unity of
purpose and essence. An achieved and perfecting human essence that bridges the renewing earth and the divine. Neoplatonism’s
transcendent church of closed absolutes grounded in knowing the mind of the Father exists to confirm all the priors of nostalgic orders.
The Cross of
Christ reveals the divine actively and inclusively present within creation, its
supplication and incarnated condescension of sin-expiating blood removing the need for
appeasement to cross divine boundaries. Ethically, this revealed closeness of divine
accompaniment as the divine essence (ousia) promotes deontological virtues
centered on relational wholeness, healing, and cosmic repair rather than
retributive justice. This encounters every aspect of creation as flowing from
grace and human attendance to divine companionship and access rather than
quaking in hierarchical and transactional tensions ("under wrath") with the divine. Or seeing others as intrinsically flawed with a limited horizon with that God. True unity in freedom is not found by sacrificial “participation”(cf. Hebrews 10:1-18 "once for all" sacrifice), noetic contemplation, chronic foreboding and fear, or instrumental virtues of rigid and transactional archetypes
but in an inclusive journey guided by the Spirit, generating wholeness by the Shema’s
receptive, whole-souled wisdom that reorders the will from the strategic noesis of reciprocal arrangements to the grounded absolute intention to love God by the Golden Rule.
Ideologies of atonement reveal a dialectic range—the Biblical primacy of expiation of judgement by the apotropaic dissolving of sin and the secondary condescension to immature human psychological needs for escaping the putative punitive wrath sin merits by instead propitiating an angry God by scapegoat substitution. The Christus Victor model of atonement primarily imaged as swallowing up sin by his blood and expiating death’s judgement by his supplication on the Cross. The bearing of violence upon Jesus' scapegoated person originates from secondary and deluded--not divine--causes.
---
Lambert (2016, 136): “Hebrews 2:17 says, ‘Therefore
he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a
merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation
for the sins of the people.’ Propitiation [sic: ἱλάσκεσθαι
] means that Jesus bore the weight of God’s wrath and paid the penalty for all
sin.”
“Propitiation” is a tendentious
translation of the Greek word “hilasterion” word group. The translation
“propitiation” directs us to the looming overhang of positive law’s punishment
and the way human (ritual) acts can influence or turn away anger. When located
in the initiative of humans, propitiation is a religious word that makes God’s
acts contingent in some way on human actions or appeasement. Note how religious
contingency is contrasted by Jesus (in Mark 2.27) with true worship: human sabbath
observance is not a means of grace, but rather the sabbath is the grace
delivered to humans on God’s free initiative. Moreover, natural law is
admonitory while human positive law imposes violent consequences
The alternative translation “expiation” focuses
on God’s free initiative regarding judgment (Ex. 33.19) from the petitions of a
worthy penitent. Expiation
is the cosmic effect of Christ’s supplication that finds favor with God based
on close relationship and which removes those favored from impending judgment. The
initiative in the case of the atonement is God’s free dispensation of grace that
is both subjective and objectively merited by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
The substitutionary sacrifice is rather
Christ’s voluntary solidarity with humanity draws off the judgment of sin
as prefigured by God’s instructions to send the goat into the wilderness in
Lev. 16.22. This
goat is not “punished” nor is it a propitiation of God--a human act intended to
turn aside wrath. It may be propitiatory in a pagan religious sense—an animal sent
out to “propitiate” the desert spirit (the goat “for Azazel”
[Lev. 16:8]). It is more likely that this ritual conceptualizes sin as a
physical infection where the sacrificial animal receives the contagion through ritual
transfer and is then dispatched to the wilderness to apotropaically draw off
and purge into the void the sin of the Israelites, a mystery that assuages
their consciences by the grace of God’s ordained ritual of abandonment (see
discussion of wrath, above). The substitutionary (solidarity) character
of this sacrifice has parallels with the Aqeda—the binding and
contemplated sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham which finds its substitute in a ram
located in the thicket nearby. The goat in Lev. 16.22 (in expiation that purges
the holy place); the ram in the Aqeda (in familial substitution);
Judah’s sacrificial pledge of redemption for Benjamin (Gen. 44.32-4); and the
Passover lamb (in Ex. 13.11-16)
that substitutes for the first-born of the people of God and commemorates redemption
from slavery, taken together, provide the ritual and family contexts of (redeeming
substitutionary expiatory) sacrifice in the OT.
The way of the Cross—Christ’s expiation of
judgment (John 12.31-33ff; prefigured by the High Priest in Num. 16.46-48) is
terrible to contemplate. By the Cross, Jesus crosses over the void to make the
costly entry into the eschatological temple (Ezekiel 40-48), and by his
resurrection returns to lead his followers into its places (John 14.3) of
refuge in God’s gracious presence. His expiation of judgement through sacrifice
and solidarity has ongoing, hypostatic union efficacy even now,
assuming we continue to confess and repent.
Sacrifice transfers a gift offered to God
from common space to God's sacred place but which first passes through the
liminal space of death, purifying it by shaking off or dispersing what is impure.
Sacrifice thus has a "direction" and a mechanism prefigured in the OT
(see below). Jesus' sacrifice culminates in God's sacred place, heaven. This
direction of sacrifice is not a mechanism for punishment, rather it serves for
purification and expiation of judgement.
Psalm 51:19 speaks of “right sacrifices.”
It is my belief that reading Jesus’s substitutionary sacrifice dialectically—primarily
as expiatory and secondarily as psychologically propitiatory--is the proper
religious understanding from the dual natures of Christ. The human Son propitiates
the Father as only a sinless one could, and as divine and sinless he can expiate
(the judgment of) sin by his perfect blood.
On the Cross, Jesus expresses simultaneously and efficaciously the ultimate
loyalty to God and love of neighbor. By contrast, “religion” of the human
propitiatory type is part of what some contemporaries of Jesus taught--that by
their rigor and elaborate rituals of purity (e.g. Mk. 2.16) they could induce
God to act contingently and reciprocally toward them. However, righteous
religion involves those observances that demonstrate not self-actualized or
-initiated worthiness, but rather is the revealed vehicle of God’s mercy (Luke
18:9-14) that allows us—as redeemed people--to draw near to him in fellowship
through prayer, virtue, and right sacrifice (including acts of confession, love,
mercy, and praise).
Jesus’ forsakenness on the Cross seems to
me better interpreted as the desolating experience (begun in the agony at
Gethsemane) of the expiation of judgement (judgement’s eclipse)
in a temporary, isolated and God-voided desert than by how Lambert (2016, 145)
proposes, as Jesus’ “payment of penalty” of God’s wrathful physical violence against
Jesus’ body. In OT times, it is the Adversary who has the initiative and prerogative
to inflict bodily suffering (Job 2.4-7. Cf. the unrighteous witness of Zophar
the Naamathite in Job 20 positing God’s putative punishment of his creatures). Is
a penalty of the kind luridly depicted in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of
the Christ how God treats his creatures or his Son after the Son’s Sermon
on the Mount? If we agree that the anointed servant in Isaiah 42 is the divine
Son, we see in v. 3 his divine agency that is radically non-violent and gentle
in the ministry of justice that sets the world aright: A bruised reed he will not break, and a
dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.
How then is God the Father any different
in the era(s) of his messiah?
While wrath is attested by various
Biblical texts to loom over the unrighteous (Rom. 2.8),
none of the texts picture or propose physical violence and battery against
the body with God as the source. Jesus’s parables discuss exclusion, outer
darkness, fire that never is extinguished, and the worm that will never die,
but no text pictures wrath acted on the body of creatures by means of Imperial brutality
except that of piercing. Empires may be God’s agents, but Isaiah notes how they
exceed and transgress their warrant in punishing rebellious Israel excessively
and brutally (Isa. 47.6).
“Propitiation” may have a secondary function
in the “hilasterion” texts as a way of attributing the primary cause of Jesus’s
suffering—God (per Lambert 2016, 239)--but that the main meaning in Salvation
history is “expiation.” By this mystery, God’s judgment is held in abeyance at
the Cross by the supreme faithfulness of Christ’s expiatory sacrifice and in
the words of forgiveness on the Cross to comfort humanity--and by the purgative
exchange of his blood—an exchange from our life’s contagion into his blood’s
purity. By taking on humanity’s sin, Christ has turned aside divine judgement by
mitigating sin’s contagion. He bore our infirmities away from us to purge them in
emptiness (what Genesis and Isaiah term “tohu”) by the holiness and
purity of his blood (Col. 1.20). To the extent he was scourged and suffered the
crown of thorns and the suffering of Crucifixion, God is the primary—ultimate--cause,
while the temple-imperial complex was the efficient cause (per Acts 4:27–28).
Based on the analogy with the Assyrian emperor’s assault on Israel and Satan’s
torment of Job’s body, the primary cause is God (Job 42.11b) directing these
secondary agents who tragically exceed their warrant in bodily affliction. The atoning
sacrificial mechanism is expiation of sin by blood and death’s judgement by
victorious, perfect life. Atonement involves the paramount secondary victim revealing
himself the primary victor. Its substitutions are organic and transformative, manifesting
the ontology and processes of Creation, not passive or violent. Imagining the
atonement as punitively violent matters to the (lack of) temporal success in
imaging and bringing about shalom in church-directed spheres and mission.
Atonement in the comprehensive biblical witness does not prioritize punitive
substitution.
A key text supporting the dialectic of the
divine and popular interpretations of atonement is Isa. 53.4: “Surely he took
up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.” Note that it is “we” (Israel’s people) who
consider him punished, while the prophet contrasts how the servant of God bears
our pain and suffering (Ex. 34.7) with that of a popular, but erroneous, attribution
of “punishment.” Isa. 53.4 does not support the doctrine of punitive
substitutionary atonement,
and the concept of “propitiation” as turning away wrath may derive from v. 10’s
link of the servant’s affliction with God’s will to make him a “reparation
offering” prefigured in Leviticus 1-7.
Contrary to Lambert (2016, 139) finding
punitive penalty in 1 Peter 2:24, that verse needs to be read in this context
of Isa. 53.4 and the earlier 1 Pe 1.19., neither of which mention punishment or
penalty but are focused, as I am emphasizing, on Christ’s bearing our
infirmities and the substitutionary sacrificial atonement in the effective
mechanism of his blood. The finding of penalty in 1 Peter seems to me eisegesis
from previous doctrinal commitments or psychological need. The English word
“punishment” in Isa. 53.5 for the Hebrew מוּסָר (mûsār)
may not be the most apt. The LXX most often translates this Hebrew word as “paduein”
(discipline or correction), and when מוּסָר (mûsār)
does carry the connotation of “punishment,” its semantic field reveals it is
“Instruction through punishment, which is intended to be remedial.”
God’s justice is remedial NOT punitive.
However, the atonement points to the
penalty for transgressions of the OT law codes that called for death:
intentional homicide, sexual crimes, and religious crimes against God. While other
crimes in the OT did not involve a bodily punishment, such as property crimes
that warranted financial penalty as well as other sins that were not to subject
to literal punishment except by the lex talionis (Schnittjer 2017,
Session 14) that Jesus’ gospel ministry at the Sermon on the Mount had annulled
(Matt. 5:38-42). If Jesus by his Word had annulled the lex talionis, how
was it in effect at the Cross? The punishment inflicted on Jesus’s body must be
seen as the result of injustice by humanity under the influence of the false
impersonating of the primary cause, namely the devil and its injustice. While
the sacrificial death of Jesus is part of God’s plan for advancing Salvation
history, I am not convinced that suffering divine violence as “penalty” is the
best descriptor of Jesus’ atoning work.
That some prefer “propitiation of
punishment” versus “expiation of judgment” through Christ’s sacrifice may reflect
the differences in psychological makeups regarding the need for a
substitutionary stand in for the violent penalty that our sin merits in Torah
codes.
A care seeker who holds to the need for propitiation could be redirected from
fear of supernatural agents which hold humanity in bondage (by anxiety at the
prospect of physical brutality against the body) to the liberating power of Christ’s
atonement that brings spiritual peace and bodily security.
The atonement (which is Christ’s
work on the Cross, the becoming “at one” with humanity in the mission of God) culminates
with a substitutionary sacrifice in that Jesus offers himself in our
place—to draw off our sin (by righteously taking on [becoming] humanity’s sin
[2 Cor. 5.21]) which we are unable to do--and it is atoning by this process of
expiation. It is not punitive substitutionary atonement.
Christ as the spotless Lamb is necessary for the solution to the chronic
problem of human sin (which eschatologically merits punishment), but the Cross
is an expiation interval that not only dissolves the sin—into the void of
death--of those who trust in Christ as their Lord and Savior, but also redeems
us from the power of sin and enslavement to elemental spirits (Gal. 4.3,8; Col.
2.8, 20), our participation in sinful structural systems that inhibit the
realization of the Kingdom of God. The “lutron” Greek word complex (e.g.
Mt. 20.28) and its cognates supports the “ransom” (functional cf. 4 Macc.
17.21-22) versus a “payment of penalty” aspect of Christ’s work. We are
liberated from sin by Christ’s redemptive work (cf. Isa. 44.22-3). The punitive
violence that Jesus suffered, like that of the first Christian martyr Stephen
(Acts 7.54-60), came at human hands—not directly of God, but from the enmeshed temple
and imperial establishments enslaved to violent elements and so indeed from the
complicit agency of all humanity born into the same slavery and sinful systems
(Ps. 51:5).
Finally, punishment is excluded from the
agency of God, which is fear-negating love, in 1 John 4.18. A word study of κόλασις
[punishment] demonstrates that it is primarily encompassed in non-canonical texts,
and specifically is a feature of intertestamental literature (BDAG 2000, 555).
The other NT use of this cognate is Mt. 25.46. Such eternal punishment is not
propitiation as it is delivered as a final judgement. Such a fate is expiated by Jesus’s sacrifice for
those who trust in its merits and efficacious purity, and there is no religious
venue or temporal perspective for punishment’s eternal aspect. Punishment is
therefore not propitiated in the Biblical witness.
Exploration of a care seeker’s sense of guilt for
sin (and perhaps even against Christ) follows on these considerations, and the
sacrificial atonement’s assuaging messages may restore functional vocation and
family life through wise and companionable counseling that brings forth the Gospel
message of forgiveness and redemption, freeing us from our recurrent anxieties.
Anselm. Therefore to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due.
Boso. What is the debt which we owe to God?
Anselm. Every wish of a rational creature should be subject to the will of God.
Boso. Nothing is more true.
Anselm. This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin; but every one who does not pay it sins. This is justice, or uprightness of will, which makes a being just or upright in heart, that is, in will; and this is the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God, and which God requires of us. For it is such a will only, when it can be exercised, that does works pleasing to God; and when this will cannot be exercised, it is pleasing of itself alone, since without it no work is acceptable. He who does not render this honor which is due to God, robs God of his own and dishonors him; and this is sin. Moreover, so long as he does not restore what he has taken away, he remains in fault; and it will not suffice merely to restore what has been taken away, but, considering the contempt offered, he ought to restore more than he took away. For as one who imperils another’s safety does not enough by merely restoring his safety, without making some compensation for the anguish incurred; so he who violates another’s honor does not enough by merely rendering honor again, but must, according to the extent of the injury done, make restoration in some way satisfactory to the person whom he has dishonored. We must also observe that when any one pays what he has unjustly taken away, he ought to give something which could not have been p. 200 demanded of him, had he not stolen what belonged to another. So then, every one who sins ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God.
Works of St. Anselm, tr. by Sidney Norton Deane, [1903, XI, 199], at sacred-texts.com
Aulén, Gustaf, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main
Types of the Idea of Atonement (1930).
Botterweck,
G. J. & H. Ringgren (Eds.), D. E. Green (Trans.). Theological Dictionary
of the Old Testament Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1977, 1986,
1990.
Goldingay,
J., & Payne, D. (2006). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah
40–55. (G. I. Davies & G. N. Stanton, Eds.). London; New York: T&T
Clark.
Lambert,
Heath. A Theology of Biblical Counseling: The Doctrinal Foundations of
Counseling Ministry. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2016.
n.b.:
The cited page numbers from this source were derived from an electronic pdf and
may vary from the published book by a 1-2 pages.
___“Guilt
and Repentance.” Presented at the Northcreek Counseling Training Conference,
Walnut Creek, CA, September 18, 2021.
Schnittjer,
Gary E. The Torah Story Video Lectures: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch.
MasterLectures. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017.