4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Aims of sections 3, 4, and 5
- To explain the deficiencies of the classic presentation of the Christian faith. These may not be obvious to Evangelicals who have been brought up with that account. Over-familiarity can dull awareness of flaws that will be glaringly obvious to any educated non-believer approaching it for the first time.
- To explore some modified versions of that presentation that are, or have become, current in Evangelical circles. These represent, in some cases, a serious improvement on the presentation in its classic form, and they are a great deal more persuasive. Yet they have their problems, and still do not give an adequate account of the Gospel-event.
Needless to say, these aims are secondary – and, in fact inessential – to the primary aim of my tract as a whole. That is:
- To offer what I consider to be an accurate and persuasive alternative to the classic presentation.
Do you need to read this ?
If you are reading the tract from beginning to end, you already have my broad overview of the ‘alternative presentation’ which it is my primary goal to offer. Further discussion of specific questions that invariably arise in regard to it will be found in section 6. The aims of this, and the following two sections, are, as I have said, largely inessential to that primary goal. This raises the question whether you really need to read them.
The following chapters are for you, if you are intrigued by the alternative offered in earlier sections (1 and 2), but still puzzled or unconvinced by my rejection of the traditional presentation. Or, at any rate, feel that so radical a break with Evangelical tradition calls for some further justification, or that it is likely to be based on a distorted or inadequate formulation of traditional views. Alternatively, you may already have misgivings about the traditional presentation, but need them to be further corroborated before taking the step of modifying your approach to giving an account of your faith.
What I am NOT trying to do.
There are dangers in what I am attempting here. These should be admitted frankly before going any further.
First of all, I could be taken to be casting doubt on the authentically Christian nature of the Christian communities that have adopted something like the traditional presentation in their official preaching – or at least on the authentically Christian nature of their witness. Second, I could be accused of placing too heavy a stress on the role of intellectual understanding in the propagation of Christian faith. In response to both of these potential charges, let me freely admit the very relative importance of the intellectual defence of the Christian faith that we as individual believers may be tempted to offer our non-believer friends.
There’s a story frequently retold of a taxi-driver who once read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and was so impressed he walked into the nearest church and asked to be baptized. Let us admit, this is the exception, not the rule. Non-believers are rarely ‘argued’ into faith – and, equally, the effectiveness of our witnesses as Christians may have little to do with the cogency of our arguments. ‘Belonging does comes before believing’. Nor should this surprise us. What is the Christian faith, after all, if not a lived reality on both the personal and collective level? This reality may be communicated in many ways, not just through our verbal testimony.
So, granted that, at best, we could hardly expect the persuasiveness of our verbal witness to take our curious non-believer friends more than a first step of the way along the path to Christian faith, how much importance should be attached to a particular presentation we give of our faith? Ultimately, I guess, we would want to make a good enough showing to get our friends over the bar of their initial incredulity – maybe, ultimately, to tempt them over the threshold of our Christian community. At all events, we would not want to say anything to discredit our faith in their eyes. Once over the threshold of that community, it is to be hoped (if our Church communities are what they should be), our friends will soon begin to feel themselves in the presence of a larger and more complex reality than any we could reasonably have been expected to sum up in a few words.
In short, the criteria by which any verbal account of our faith – such as the traditional presentation briefly outlined above – are ultimately pragmatic. I mean: Have we given a ‘good enough’ account in the circumstances? Will it have stood any chance of making a favourable impact? Success by these criteria may have some limited connection with the theological validity of our account. That said, our non-believing friends will interpret it in the broader context of the whole of our verbal and non-verbal witness, as well as other impressions they will have received independently of us.
Now I can just about imagine that even the traditional presentation, delivered to the right audience by someone who really believed in it, might be reckoned a ‘good enough’ account. Certainly, I would not, for a moment, want to suggest that Christians using the traditional presentation have failed in their personal grasp of the Christian faith. Maybe changes in our culture have caused deficiencies in that presentation to stand out, in ways they would not have done in the eyes of earlier generations, and still do not, it seems, in the eyes of those who continue to advocate its use. For me, at all events, and for people like me (and I believe there are many of us nowadays), the traditional presentation, beloved of Evangelicalism, fails woefully even by my relatively modest criterion of being a ‘good enough’ account. We would not want to give our non-believing friends such an obviously disadvantageous – not to say distorted – impression of the living reality we hold so dear. Were we to try to frame our experience in that way, our words would simply not be our own!
Hence the need for an alternative presentation for those fortunate or unfortunate enough to require it.
And that is the only ambition of this tract. I have no doubts as to the authentically Christian nature of the religious reality I have encountered in the Evangelical church, nor even, for the most part, any quarrel with the kind of understanding that my fellow Evangelicals seem to have of it. And I have no wish to engage in theological debate for its own sake. My issue is uniquely with a particular way in which we are currently encouraged to present the propositional basis of our faith to the secular world. This is certainly not the be-all-and-end-all of our Christian faith, and, in many situations, may not even be all that important. It remains, in my view, an issue that needs addressing.
Who do I claim to speak for?
I would claim to speak as an Evangelical. It is important to add (for the benefit of readers from other national traditions) that I speak as an English Evangelical. My grounds for asserting this are that I have, practically the whole length of my adult Christian life, been a member of an English Evangelical church. Consequently, the experience on which I base my reflections will be that of an English Evangelical of the early twenty-first century. But I would like to believe it reflects an experience that has been widely shared by other Christians of my place and time.
That said, the presentation of the Christian faith that I propose is not one that has been much adopted by Evangelicals. In practice, that alternative presentation has more often been associated (in England, at least) with the middle ground of ‘cultural’ Christianity – that ‘in-between’ zone which is now fast disappearing, as the religious landscape becomes increasingly polarized between Evangelicalism and a newly vociferous atheism. You may choose, if you like, to conclude that, in proposing such an alternative to the classic presentation, I have effectively left my Evangelicalism behind. That will, of course, depend on whether or not you see the classic presentation as essential to Evangelical identity.
I would only plead that my recommendation of this alternative has nothing to do with any sympathy for ‘cultural’ Christianity, and everything to do with what I regard as its intrinsic merit. Evangelicalism may now have attained a position of numerical dominance over other wings of the Church – to the extent of becoming the bearer of whatever future hopes Christianity may still cherish in this country. It does not follow that Evangelicalism has nothing to learn from those other traditions.
If you were to ask me what distinguishes my version of Evangelicalism from ‘cultural’ Christianity, now that I have discarded the classic presentation …
Well, for a start, I do not feel any very pressing need to assert a distinctively Evangelical identity (having this in common with many of my friends in the pews). I am even somewhat apprehensive of the partisan Evangelicalism of our Evangelical leadership, because I fear it may bring about a narrowing of theological options, at the very time when we may most need access to the full breadth of our Christian heritage in order to respond to the challenge of secularism.
But if you were to press me on this question, I would place the emphasis elsewhere than on doctrine or ‘values’. What distinguishes Evangelicalism, as I understand it, is an understanding of the Church as a bounded community. That is to say, a community within the larger community of town or state. Let me explain. The cultural Christianity of earlier generations may have seen Christianity as the birth right of the nation and a source of values to people who could consider themselves Christian without any need to belong to a ‘sect-like’ organization. Evangelicals are Christians who see their church, and the Church as a whole, as – unlike the Church of England! – a community which you can place yourself on the outside of (which is what I mean by ‘bounded’). Hence, ‘a community within the community’. According to such a perspective, the Christian task becomes one of bringing outsiders in – of ‘conversion’, in other words.
If that is essentially what it is to be Evangelical, there is evidently no reason why it cannot remain itself, while learning from the Christianity of those, who, whatever lack of success in maintaining their congregations, may turn out to have a more persuasive and compelling account to offer of what their – and our – Christianity is all about.
3.2 THE CLASSIC PRESENTATION
The classic presentation in full
I promised a full account of the classic presentation. If I am to give you a sense of its inadequacies, it is important that we are clear, from the outset, what it is precisely we are talking about. The following is NOT intended as a parody – let alone a ‘straw man’. It is as full and accurate an account as I am capable of. There are aspects of it which seem to me entirely adequate to the reality described and in no need of correction. There are some aspects that strike me as unbalanced. And there are a few things I believe to be absolutely wrong. At all events, it is an exposition of the traditional account that even the advocates of such a presentation of the Christian faith would, I hope, find little to quarrel with.
The purpose of the Gospel-event to resolve the problem of sin and its penalty.
By sin, proponents of the classic presentation mean our individual moral short-comings. We know what is right and what is wrong, but we fail to do what is right pretty much all the time. The classic presentation often attributes this persistent failure to ‘selfishness’ – in other words, an ingrained tendency we seem to have as humans to put the satisfaction of our own individual needs and desires ahead of considerations of what we ought to do in a particular situation.
Since God, the creator and sustainer of our existence, is perfectly just and good, the price of sin is that we live ‘under judgement’. Some versions of the classic presentation develop this idea of judgment in terms of separation or estrangement from our creator and sustainer. Some also speak of this spoiled relationship in terms of wrath or anger. Such anthropomorphizing language is justified, they argue, not only by its use in Scripture, but by the fact that God is a ‘person’. Persons – divine and human alike – always feel indignation in the presence of injustice perpetrated by others. We all demand perfect justice, but guiltily seek to evade the claims it makes on ourselves!
Because, for Christians, death is not the end, but the gateway to an existence that continues beyond it, the problem of our estrangement and God’s wrath is also not limited to the present life. We are effectively condemned to an eternal separation from God – a state which has traditionally been described as ‘hell’.
So much for the problem. The remedy is that of the Gospel event – which, for the classic presentation, consists in our ‘justification’ through the ‘cross’.
Jesus of Nazareth was a perfect and sinless human being – the only one there has ever been. So, in his suffering and death (the cross) he pays the penalty, not for any sin of his own (since he has none), but for the sins of everyone else, including you and me. On the cross, he is estranged from God on our behalf. Some would say that he becomes subject to God’s wrath. This, rather than the physical pain of the nails, or the humiliation of the cross, constitutes the worst of the suffering he bears. The testimony to the reality of this withdrawal of divine favour are Jesus’ words on cross: ‘My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?’ Jesus, in the words of the creeds, descended into hell.
However, this is only half of the story. For Jesus is also, in some sense, God. It is therefore correct to say that, through Jesus’ sufferings on the cross, God Himself substitutes Himself for us; He Himself bears the penalty of our sin. That penalty, once borne by God Himself, is no longer owing. It is as if a judge in a human court were to pronounce the penalty, and then step into the dock in order to take the place of the accused, allowing the latter to enjoy a freedom he/she does not deserve. This is what the theologians have termed ‘justification’. In its traditional sense, this means that guilty humans are ‘accounted’ innocent in God’s sight, and are able to enjoy the benefits of that innocence.
Moreover, because, as already stated, death is not the end, those benefits are not limited to the present life, any more than the estrangement that would have been ours but for the Gospel event. The cross opens the path to an eternally restored relationship with God – a state that has traditionally been described as ‘heaven’.
It will be evident from the above that the Gospel event is a work that is essentially God’s. However, human beings were created free, and it is not the will of God to impose this ‘justification’ on us. So, in order for this Gospel event to take effect in our lives, we have to accept this ultimate divine gift for ourselves. Our sinful nature is not instantly transformed by this acceptance. But God offers forgiveness for such sins as we may subsequently commit, when we ask for it. And the glorious hope of an eternity with God which becomes ours, when we accept what God has done for us, so outshines any of the wrong things we might otherwise have desired that sin begins to lose its savour, and our sinful natures are transformed from within. In this way, we come, in the end, to acquire, in part, the sinless nature that was initially imputed to us by the Gospel event. This process of ‘sanctification’ is completed after we die.
Problems with the classic presentation
The issues that some Christians have had with the classic presentation over the years are many, and have inspired enough books to fill a library. I see no point in adding to the enormous literature on atonement by attempting yet one more comprehensive review of the arguments.
In the reflections below, I single out the issues that, in my own view, have indisputable validity and would pose serious problems for any Evangelical seeking to pass on his/her faith in today’s world. Christians seeking to pursue effective outreach to radical feminists, for example, or convinced pacifists, or those committed to a postmodernist worldview will have to go elsewhere. (Some suggestions are given in my recommendations for further reading).
The most serious problems with the classic presentation are three.
The first is its individualism. If sin is seen, primarily – if not exclusively – as ‘selfishness’, and salvation/sanctification as primarily – if not exclusively – as Goad’s response to that problem of selfishness, then the individual becomes the primary target of Christ’s redemptive action.
Now sin is – no one would deny – a problem of individual moral agency. The question is whether it doesn’t also have a collective dimension – a possibility that would seem to presuppose the existence of such a thing as a collective moral agency. My case, then, is not that the traditional presentation is altogether wrong in its characterization of sin and redemption, but that it is very unbalanced. An understanding of sin as personal selfishness is highly problematic, if it is thereby implied that everything that is seriously wrong with the world, and everything we would most like to see put right in heaven, can be explained as its consequences. Problematic, at any rate, if, for example, we wanted it to include such things as third-world poverty, environmental degradation and political conflict. In the face of problems that are historical and systemic (like climate change), our personal moral agency is very limited, and we are, for the most part, compelled to ‘do the wrong thing’ by social and political forces. What little positive contribution we can make on a personal level seems to pale into insignificance beside the far greater wrongs we will do, whether we want to or not, due to influences largely outside our control. What does it matter if we recycle the odd plastic bag, while we continue to drive cars fuelled by petrol? Why give a proportion of our income to Christian Aid if our pension funds and the international trade on which we collectively rely are effectively upholding a capitalist system that oppresses the world’s poor? We simply can’t dissociate ourselves as individuals from the ‘wrongs’ that we are collectively perpetrating. It follows that, if we maintain our identification of sin (i.e. what God redeems in Christ) with personal selfishness, either we will marginalize the public and socio-political dimension of life from our perception of what is ultimately of importance to God, or we will end up simplistically attributing the cause of our systemic and institutional ills to the personal sinfulness of individuals. Either way, we will fail to take account of the institutional nature of our collective life, and, with it, that web social and political relationships that severely constrain – even if they do not altogether determine – our moral choices.
But the problem of moral agency is only one, particularly salient aspect of a wider problem. If we confine what counts for the purposes of redemption to the sphere of our individual selves, then the collective and worldly environment in which those selves (for better or worse) find their expression here below become just so much dross to be purged away ‘at the last day’. On such a view our redeemed selves will be disembodied souls, with little or nothing to connect them with their previous experience – rather like the souls that some ancient classical authors imagined emerging reborn and blinking out of the waters of the River of Forgetfulness. If that is what we mean by the individual soul, it is a concept apparently so empty of content that we are prompted to wonder whether its redemption ought even to matter so very much in comparison with that intricate and potentially tragic web of social, political and environmental obligations that constitutes the real substance of our collective life on this planet. Do we even exist in a meaningful sense outside the nexus of real-world relationships in which we find ourselves caught up?
The second issue is that of the moral logic – or rather illogic – of ‘justification’. It simply makes no sense to speak of Christ – or God, for that matter – ‘paying the penalty’ for sins that were not his own, but ours. This is because a punishment is only ‘just’ – in fact, only, properly speaking, a punishment at all – where its sufferer is the perpetrator of the injustice for which the punishment is inflicted. It is nonsense to speak of the ‘requirement of justice’ as though it could somehow be dissociated from the experience of the perpetrator. One could, of course, imagine that an innocent third-party might suffer what was intended as a punishment for someone else’s crime. But this would not render the third party guilty of that crime (even if they willingly substituted themselves); whereas it would constitute an additional injustice, certainly on the part of inflictors of the punishment, and possibly also on the part of the third party. Two wrongs, as they say, do not make a right! How is it, then, that, according to the classic presentation, Christ could be seen as genuinely guilty of the sins he bears, even by his omniscient Father who turns His face away? And how is it that the result of this substitution is seen as the accomplishment of justice, not an aggravation of injustice?
In some versions of the classic presentation, there is a tendency to substitute the language of debt for that of penalty. It does, of course, make sense to speak of a third party paying a debt on someone else’s behalf; and such an action would result in the acquittal of the debtor. But this version of the presentation is hardly satisfactory, either. For, with the substitution of ‘debt’ for ‘penalty’ we lose the sense of human culpability which is so essential to the idea of Christ’s fulfilment of the requirements of justice. After all, we do not treat debtors as criminals, though they may well have been imprudent – unless, of course, fraud is involved. And where there is fraud, no generosity on the part of a third party can justly stand between the fraudulent debtor and the requirements of justice.
That is the full extent of my second objection to the traditional presentation.
I should add at this point that my concerns do not extend to certain other controversial aspects of atonement that have often been associated with penal substitution. There is the notion of God’s wrath, for example; the idea that Christ should have become subject to that wrath; also that he should have experienced deprivation of his Father’s ‘presence’. Evidently, some caution is required in defining what precisely we mean by God’s ‘wrath’. But, if it is understood as ‘God’s hatred of sin’, and the absolute refusal of his love to let sin take its course, then I think it makes sense to see exposure to that wrath as part of what it would have meant for the Son fully to enter the human condition. And the Bible does indeed speak in such terms. Moreover, if we understand the Son to have been incarnated not just as a representative human being, but as the ‘righteous Israel’, then there is every reason to suppose he would have experienced that deprivation in a manner that was quite unique. After all, it requires knowledge of God’s presence to experience what it is to be deprived of it. This was, in a lesser degree, the fate of Israel – the unrighteous Israel of the OT, and explains the particular anguish we find expressed in Psalms of lamentation, including those most frequently taken to prefigure the sufferings of Jesus himself. Thus, the idea that Christ experiences separation – even abandonment on the cross makes good intellectual sense to me – though I struggle (who wouldn’t?) properly to ‘comprehend’ it on an emotional or psychological level. But that in no way implies any support for the idea that Christ’s suffering was a ‘punishment’, ‘satisfaction’, or anything of that kind.
A third serious issue concerns the shakiness of the entire scriptural basis of the traditional presentation. Most of us will be familiar with the Evangelical way of supporting its theological propositions with biblical proof texts taken out of context. To an extent, such a practice may be unavoidable given the requirement to demonstrate in a short space that the message one has to deliver is, indeed, the message of Scripture. But where there is no such constraint – for example, in book-length presentations of the case for Christian belief – one would hope, given Evangelical focus on authority of Scripture, to see the exposition of the central doctrine of penal substitution developed on the basis of a balanced and literarily sensitive reading of scriptural texts considered in their entirety. Ancient books, of course, make particular demands on the reader; but Christian exegesis ought, at very least, to satisfy the highest requirements we would make in the case of the contemporary interpretation of non-religious texts. The traditional presentation – at least in those formulations of it I have personally encountered, both spoken and written – does not give the impression of having been arrived at in this way. On the other hand, intelligent exegesis of the key scriptural texts (as we shall see below in section 5) does not bear out the centrality that the traditional presentation accords to penal substitution – even if it is not strictly incompatible with it. As one would expect given the importance of the topic, examples of such intelligent exegesis are plentiful in contemporary biblical studies – and they do not, I believe, impose the kind of interpretation that advocates of the traditional presentation require in order to support their assertions.
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH