Biblical Atonement is not Substitutionary Punishment
Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds
July 2021
[N.B. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]
This essay has been expanded with more exegetical depth countering penal logic in sacrificial moments in Appendix III of my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care, linked through its press kit
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 tricking as an 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.
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.”[1]
“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[2]
The alternative translation “expiation” focuses
on God’s free initiative regarding judgment (Ex. 33.19) from the petitions of a
worthy penitent.[3] 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--his sacrificial supplication (Luke 23:34 [20]) draws off the judgment of sin
as prefigured by God’s instructions to send the goat into the wilderness in
Lev. 16.22.[4] 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”[5]
[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)[6]
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.[7]
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,[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
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).[11]
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)[12]
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),[13]
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.[14]
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,[15]
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.”[16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
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.
[1] A text pointing to wrath is Lam. 3.1. The
concluding prepositional phrase בְּשֵׁ֖בֶט עֶבְרָתֽוֹ contains some grammatical ambiguities
regarding agency or source. It can be read dialectically as an attribution of
source represented by the metonomy of God’s scepter (“rod”), which elsewhere
refers to a tribal group. God’s anger (noted in Lamentations 2) is in 3.1
executed by “his rod,” almost certainly by the secondary cause, human agents
among whom God exercises the sovereignty of the scepter. Moreover, it is likely
a mistake to read Lamentations 3 Christologically. The receiver of “his” (or
“its” [the scepter’s]) wrath in 3.1 is linked to a conscious object whose bones
are broken, a condition from which the Messiah is excluded (Psalm 34:20
prefigured in Exod. 12.36; Num. 9.12).
Lamentation
chs. 2 and 3 are, like Isaiah 38 (and Psalm 51?) referring to the human result
of localized violent conquest, not an application of divine violence onto the
person of the Messiah.
[2] Kreeft 2009, lecture 12.
[3]Mordecai’s instruction to Esther (4.8) to
make “supplication” to Xerxes in the face of Haman’s edict for Jewish eradication grammatically illustrates how
such supplication foreshadows Christ’s cosmic expiation. The hiṯpaʿʿēl infinitive לְהִֽתְחַנֶּן־ל֛וֹ highlights both the subject and the object
of the piel intensive form of the verbal root ḥnn, with a primary meaning “’be gracious,’ being used almost
exclusively in the derived sense, ‘show favor,’ … found in Gk. Cháris [grace],
the word most often used to translate ḥēn in the LXX… The hithpael means ‘seek
favor,’ mainly the favor of God… ḥnn is used of favor shown in personal
relationships; it can refer to ordinary acceptance or kindness, or else favor
of a special nature, such as pity, mercy, or generosity… In all cases ḥnn is a positive term. It is inconceivable that one can be
angry and at the same time show favor. Nor can one receive favor from someone
who is at the same time angry. Favor cannot coexist with judgment. It is given
or withdrawn according to whether one is positively disposed toward another” (Freedman,
D. N., Lundbom, J. R., & Fabry, H.-J. חָנַן. (TDOT V, 1986,
22-24 emph. added). “’Supplication’…is a God-given gift (1QH 9:11; 11:34). The
ability to ‘supplicate’ is itself a demonstration of God’s favor” (Ibid., 36),
hence Esther 4.8’s hithpael verb indicates a middle voice (a cooperation of primary
and secondary causations) and the piels’ intensification under conditions of
this middle aspect. The hithpael of ḥnn
indicates the divine source of grace that makes Esther’s supplication effective
by virtue of her own heart of grace. Through fasting and humiliation, Esther
exposed herself to social power and entreated God so God would deliver the
people. Christ’s supplication intensified beyond these by his divine essence in
grace, his relationship with the Father, and the atoning sacrificial mechanisms
discussed, bringing forth into history the expiation of judgment of sin-jeopardized
peoples.
While love can co-exist with judgment, favor ḥnn cannot. Thus, expiation
is the cosmic effect of Christ’s supplication.
[4] Cf. the purging of blood-guilt by
dispersion of the people in Ezek. 22.13-17. Also: the collection and physical
dispersion of the people’s wickedness by God’s agents for relocation in Shinar
[Babel/Babylonia] (Zech. 5-6-11).
[5] Azaz’el (עזזאל)
appends the name of the chief god El to the ‘Semitic root ע.ז.ז, meaning to be “enraged,” “fierce,” or
“strong,”’ an etiological attribution of divine wrath. --https://www.thetorah.com/article/is-azazel-a-goat-place-demon-or-deity
[6] By the principle of a fortiori,
Christ as sacrifice accomplishes far more in the NT than these OT acts. (See
John 1.29, 35; 1 Cor 5.7; Heb. 9.25-6; Rom. 3.25a). Christ’s sacrifice is a
cosmic atonement that includes expiation, purging, cleansing, propitiatory, and
reparation/redemption functions.
[7] The place of the Aqeda is stated
to be Mt. Moriah in 2 Chron. 3.1, the site of the Temple Mount nearby to
Golgotha (Schnittjer 2017), a geographical parallel that prefigures the
typology of sacrificial substitution--of the ram for the people embodied in the
hope of the promised child Isaac--and the sacrifice of the promised child Jesus
as a substitute for the people.
[8] “Jesus’s taking on sinful flesh (Rom 8:3)
and expediting the curse (Gal 3-4) is an act of solidarity and union (“cursed
solidarity” [by the hypostatic union] if you like). No substitution detected
[in these texts].” --Andrew Rillera @AndrewRillera 10/02/21. In experiencing the
curse, Jesus acts to expiate it by prayer, forgiveness, and the mechanism of
blood atonement that redeems the capital demands of Satan (see below).
[9] Whereas Jer. 26.16; Ezek. 29.4-5; Amos
4.2; Hab. 1.14-17 notes that people are caught like fish to face judgment, Mark
1.17 reverses this image in terms of the Gospel call, absent, at this point, of
atonement theology other than the allusion in prior verses to Gen. 22.2. The
messianic catch is not subject to condemnation.
[10] Expiation of the effects of sin is
strongly suggested by the organic idiom and dynamic analogy of Isa. 25.8
recapitulated in 1 Cor 15.54: that God “swallows up” (piel of בָּלַע ) sin and death.
[It] is etymologically certain that the original meaning of blʿ בָּלַע was “to
gulp down” or “to swallow,” lit. “to
snatch with the mouth and to gulp down through the esophagus”… The basic root means …to swallow food
rapidly in connection with certain miraculous events: seven thin ears
swallow seven fat ones (Gen. 41:7, 24), Aaron’s rod swallows the rods of the
Egyptian magicians (Ex. 7:12), Yahweh’s right hand swallows the earth (Ex.
15:12), a fish swallows the prophet Jonah (Jonah 2:1[1:17])… The company with Korah
is swallowed up by the ground (Nu. 16:30, 32, 34; 26:10; Dt. 11:6; Ps. 106:17),
Israel is swallowed up by her enemies (Hos. 8:8; Ps. 124:3), the inhabitants of
Jerusalem are swallowed up by Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. 51:34), and the godly are
swallowed up (alive) by sinners (Prov. 1:12).--Schüpphaus, J. (1977). בָּלַע. In Botterweck & Ringgren (TDOT Vol.
2, pp. 137–138, emph. added).
The
fulfillment of God’s promise in Isa. 25 and Psalm 20 is fulfilled by Christus
Victor on the Cross as an atoning miracle of taking on and metaphorically
digesting—as a blood process--the sin that deals death. This organic idiom is
more properly understood as exemplifying “expiation” of the causes and effects
of death rather than enduring a “propitiating” atonement of penal substitution.
[11] Jesus gives us the Eucharist in part to
express that religion is initiated in God’s gracious giving and not in human
petitions or gifts accompanying temple sacrifices.
[12] Announced by Jesus during his ministry in
Matt. 7.1. Cf. Rom. 2.1.
[13] Contrary to Lambert’s (2016; 2021) theory
of atonement that magnifies (in a negative sense) Anselm’s, God’s righteousness is not manifest in his punishments. Rom.
1.17, which Lambert (2021) cites as revealing the righteousness of God in
assessing “penalty”—and an “infinite penalty for sin” at that--rather links
God’s “revealed righteousness that is out of faith unto faith,” with faith equivalent
to trusting allegiance. According to Paul (and Ps. 116.5-6) and contrary to Lambert,
God’s righteousness is his grace and mercy that flow from protective
faithfulness to his creation and which proceed to imbue in us our faithfulness
and allegiance to him (cf. Ps. 143.11b). Lambert’s is an inverted reading. He
attributes to God a putative righteousness that reveals punitive “penalty” rather
than to processing and allegiant grace in Paul. Moreover, Lambert (2021) repeatedly
refers to Christ’s “payment” of satisfaction for sin, which appears a questionable
rendering of the redemption and ransom Greek cognates of “lutron.” In
contrast, the early Church understood that this ransom by Christ was rendered
NOT to God but rather to the demonic powers over sin which held humans in
bondage. In
this latter case, like that of Rom. 1.17, punitive satisfaction of a sin debt as
“propitiation” is NOT a feature of God’s righteousness but is occasioned by demonic
agents and associated psychological fixations of guilt-ridden human consciences.
“Payment of penalty” mistakes the primary cause of God’s grace by confusing it
with a secondary causation of human psychology infantilely fixed on “infinite punishment.”
Eisegeting “penalty” into texts that do not
refer to such inverts the message of God’s righteousness revealed in grace and faithfulness
to creation rather than in Anselmic conceptions of retributive satisfaction.
Rom. 1.17 is a text of revealed righteousness’s circulating grace which
sustains and manifests God’s allegiance to his creation (cf. Ps. 89: 8, 14).
[14] “The idea [derived from Anselm’s theory of atonement]
that God cannot show mercy without the satisfaction of his [punitive] justice,
and that he views yet an additional crime as constituting such satisfaction,
casts a most dubious picture of God.” — Robert Jenson.
[15] The faultiness of a “we” finding or
considering a punitive penalty applied to the infirmity bearer in this verse is
indicated by the Hebrew lexicography and sentence structure. As Goldingay
notes, “(ʾākēn)
with which the line begins advertises that vv. 4–6 testify to a new understanding …which the speakers have now come to.” (Goldingay and Payne 2006, Vol. 2, 304).
Thus, the
bicola structure of Isa. 53.4 is set up by this initial word as a contrast--to
contrast the new understanding with an old understanding of suffering, pain,
and infirmity. The mid-sentence conjunction “vav” is accordingly almost
certainly contrastive, so that “yet” is the warranted translation that opposes
what was introduced as the “sureness” of one coming to bear our infirmities.
This determination of contrastive ‘vav’ is supported by the semantic
sense in the following verb חָשַׁב ḥāšaḇ;, “the negative connotation [of
which] can also be seen in expressions of purpose” like that denoted in
this verse.--Seybold, K. חָשַׁב. (In Botterweck & Ringgren 1986, TDOT
Vol. 5, 234 emph. added).
My exegesis of Isa. 53.4ff suggests that linking the
bearer of infirmities to divinely-purposed penalty is not the view of the
prophet, or at a minimum subject to a new or reformed understanding of the
purpose and function of the one who bears infirmities, and thus of infirmities
themselves. In vv. 10 and 12, crushing pain accompanies the Servant’s
bearing of sin—as one would expect a holy God to experience of amassed sin--but
the chapter has this bearing of infirmities imaged apotropaically rather than
satisfying retributive justice. Neither of the verbs translated as “bear” in
vv. 10 and 12 connote the satisfaction of a penalty. Their sense in each case
is that of carrying a burden. The prophet, if he had intended to point
to the satisfaction of a penalty for sin, had two opportunities to make a
verbal choice to that end. Instead, he repeated the verbal sense noted, highly
marking it for his hearers’ (and our) instruction.
Correspondingly, Psalm 22, with its references to the
Crucifixion, notes that the infliction of suffering is delivered by human
enemies characterized metaphorically as wild and powerful animals. In this
profound picture of affliction, God is nowhere attributed its agent—as to
fulfill a plan(ned penalty). Likewise, John 19.37 quoting Zec. 12.10 attributes
common cause of those who looked on with those who “pierced” God’s servant. The
agency of piercing is explicitly attributed to humans, not with God. By
implication of this silence regarding divine participation, we may conclude
that the responsible agents of the Servant’s piercing are humans.
[16] Branson, R. D., & Botterweck, G. J. יָסַר. (In Botterweck and Ringgren 1990, TDOT Vol. 6, p. 130).
[17] This psychology marks and underlies
Jephthah’s sacrificial vow in Judg. 11.30ff. Jephthah links deliverance with
nepocidal sacrifice. This tragic agent was ignorant of his father and the
responsibility of fatherhood—elemental features of theology and shalom.
His psychological dysfunction and theological ignorance bring forth the death
of his child. Jephthah’s ultimate tragic flaw is to commend and follow through
with human sacrifice for the maintenance of his well-being. Is such a tragic,
willful psychology and piety behind human need to see Jesus’ sacrifice as an
offering to God that satisfies and delivers from punitive wrath? Debased
sacrificial psychology is a problem laid onto the flawed and unbelieving figure
of Jephthah whose actions figure as the reverse of the Passover (Bejon 2021: https://jamesbejon.substack.com/p/the-book-of-judges-and-its-anti-feasts).
Anti-type parallels with the death of Jesus include the unnamed daughter’s
virginity (her lack of progeny) and her weeping request for concessions
(prefiguring Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane). And yet, Jephthah tragically
recapitulates the agonistic ultimacy of pagan piety in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of
his daughter Iphigenia to appease Artemis. His appeasement is pagan sacrificial
atonement that deals death, in contrast with Jesus’ triumphant, atoning
expiatory sacrifice that gives life in and through his blood.
The shocking story of Jephthah reveals what happens when a
man of ambition and eloquence operates inside of God’s real and canonical
silence. Such a man creates an idol of his own solipsistic and violent persona
which he deems to demand appeasement. Jephthah encapsulates Israelite agonism:
he is a brutalizer of his jealous and haughty countrymen, a bargainer with his
idea of god, a manipulator and victimizer. The result is his offering his
daughter to gain glory, goals, and graces. Yet: Atonement is not appeasement.
Sacrificing for the appeasement of a silent god reveals the self-projecting
echo chambers of agonistic (not: agnostic) mind and unwise piety.
[18] Cf. the picture of the people’s
dispersion in Ezek. 22.13-17. Their blood-guilt is purged by the divine
sanction of their exile from the land, not by the infliction of violent wrath
upon their persons. Such violence as they may be subject is of a secondary
cause.
A substitutionary punitive atonement
obscures the transmission of primary cause becoming secondary causation by our
participation in Christ indicated in 2 Cor. 5.20-21 and emphatically
contextualized by v. 6.1. More work needs to be done on the processive
(“becoming”) nature of righteous causations in those verses without reverting
to a simplistic, miraculous emergence (instantaneous status) denoted by the
claim of “imputation.” Cf. http://www.jesuspeoples.org/uploads/2/5/9/5/25952673/wright_becoming_righteousness.pdf
[19]
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.
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
While Anselm's feudalism was contextually coherent, in no way does its context be made to cohere to Divine essence. That would be the fatal doctrine of organicism--creation substrate applied to the Creator. Even if the opening of Genesis points to chaotic flux (which I've written [Olds 2023, esp. 73-80), it does not apply to what can only be known of God's essence: its metaphysical conation (Ibid., Appendix I).
Again, contextual rationality is not historical "logic" or theological warrant. Feudal logic does not manifest covenant logic. A structural metaphysics of repair by ethical realization of human essence deconstructs analogical arguments of organicism applied to the divine. God is not to be known through historical structures (e.g., feudalism), and certainly not through fallen anthropologies of exchange. The logical fallacy of projecting creaturely obligation (debt logic) back onto divine ontology is not only unsound theologically but incoherent to even classical metaphysics.
Metaphysical conation is the only allowable human knowledge of the infinite divine essence by intentional, restorative motion—an ontic and telic, eschatological (alpha and omega) orientation toward relational and substrate mending, not juridical balance that puts God under compulsion to the substrate of violent justice--a Machiavellian, Schelling, Bohme, Heidegger peering behind ontology to find another substrate.
[20] Rillera (2024) does not cite or address this verse, among many omissions, in his intended exhaustive survey of canonical and non-canonical texts of atonement. Nor the doctrine of Caiaphas that is substitutionary (John 11:50) of a curse-assigned individual to stand for a favored class against a wrathful, violent power. Nor does Rillera address Hosea 11:9b, nor Psalm 18:26; 81:12 which feature in "double mirrorings" of idolatry, fleeing from accountability (fugue states), and moral psychosis--states negating salvifics of moment.
Substitutionary appeasement reflects the political theology of Caiaphas in John 11:50—a scapegoating logic engineered to preserve elite control under the guise of communal preservation. Its imperial counterpart appears in Pilate, whose proxy execution fuses religious anxiety with hegemonic brutality. While theologians may frame the crucifixion within a vast apocalyptic and dramaturgical register—arguing that substitution is not Caiaphas’s logic but God’s self-entering of judgment to undo its cosmic power— I have addressed and dispensed with Dramatik here, in the context of Status Confessionis.
Barth’s formulation—‘God the judge judging Godself’—though intended to preserve divine initiative and freedom, collapses under the weight of its paradox, Both paradox and the visionary substrate it implies are mooted: rendered theologically unnecessary and ethically compromised by Christus Victor ethics, which refuses to anchor divine revelation in metaphysical violence.
I do not deny divine judgment, sacrificial prolepsis, or even substitutionary events as pedagogical instruments—what may be symbolically rendered as karma or “double mirroring.” But I reject the metaphysical premise of penal substitution: namely, that what may be known of God is partially revealed through human-originated violence, stabilized by analogy, typology, or organic recurrence. Such a premise is incompatible with the Christic revelation of divine character.
Judgment, rightly understood, is not appeasement but covenantal rupture—calling for metanoia, for expiation, not transaction. The freedom of God is not arbitrary, but covenantal: it expresses divine character in Christ. That character is restorative, not retributive. It flows from metaphysical conation—intentional, restorative motion—extending the Incarnation beyond the cross, not arresting it there like a pendant crucifix.
It is through this eschatological conation that God heals, redeems, and judges—without recourse to the logic of sacrificial violence, and without allowing his creatures the forbidden temptation to peer behind the screen of ontology for a grounding substrate that would necessitate violence or authorize retributive power. To do so—whether through Duginist political theory, Bohmian dialectic, Schellingian recursion, or AI’s metaphysical simulacrum—is to blasphemously draft God into a war plan for the sake of favoring one nationhood.
Citations:
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.
