It is now time to turn to those alternatives to penal substitution most commonly proposed in the atonement literature – alternatives which I have suggested have sometimes impacted popular evangelistic presentations of the Christian fundamentals.
Broadly, these fall into two overall categories. The first we may term the multi-models approach. This is the kind of thing most frequently to be found in the atonement literature.[i] The second, we shall term the non-sacrificial approach, and will be discussed in our next chapter. Of these two approaches, let me say from the start that the first (multi-models) is, in my view, a theological blind alley. The second (non-sacrificial) comes closer, paradoxically, to the sacrificial approach I am proposing here.
Authors espousing multi-models do not, in general, reject the doctrine of penal substitution outright. Rather, they present penal substitution as just one among a number of possible ‘metaphors’. In effect, they demote penal substitution from its former status of the approved explanation to that of being just one among a number of equally valid options. Hence the form generally adopted by these studies of a succession of chapters, each devoted to one of the metaphors. The strategy has even brought nuance to presentations of the faith by some Evangelicals (e.g. Nicki Gumbel). There is also a strong, ‘post-modern,’ version of the strategy which makes a virtue of the plurality of metaphors, arguing that a multi-faceted approach is appropriate to the complexity of what is being described. The Gospel-event is a religious mystery, so it is claimed, that so far outstrips the power of literal speech as to necessitate recourse to literary and poetic forms of expression. Underlying both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms of the strategy is the refusal to grant any single metaphor or model the kind of claim to absolute (i.e. literal) truth formerly accorded to penal substitution.
Comment on this approach
I have a number of fundamental objections to any form of the multi-models approach, strong or weak.
The first is pragmatic. Where the presentation of our faith is concerned, I seriously doubt the persuasive power of any strategy that treats religious speech as the bearer a type of ‘non-literal’ meaning. The argument frequently made in favour of such an approach is that other disciplines – including scientific ones – employ metaphors and models to communicate things otherwise hard to grasp, or even obtain some imaginative grasp on them. The case is commonly cited of modern cosmology where we might, for example, be encouraged to ‘think of the expanding space-time universe as the surface of a balloon as it is inflated’.
Yet there is a crucial distinction between scientific theorizing and religious apologetic. In the former case, there is unlikely to be any doubt in the mind of the enquirer as to actuality of the scientific findings for which an explanation is sought. When it comes to explaining to non-believers a reality in which they are disinclined to believe, the talk of models fails to convince. The apologist’s insistence on the other than literal truth value of religious language will not impress non-believers with the ineffable mysteries that language fails to convey; it will simply cast further doubt on the actuality of what is being described.
The weakness of such apologetic goes some way to explaining the continued popularity enjoyed by the official account for all its deficiencies. How much more convincing when we seek to tell people what the Gospel event actually is than when we equivocate over what it is like.
My own suspicion is that the existence of the multi-models strategy may have more to do with smoothing over theological discrepancies within the community of faith than supplying the needs of enquirers and evangelists seeking a more intelligible understanding of atonement. There is an obvious appeal in a theological strategy aiming to keep die-hard traditionalists on board (‘yes, we do ascribe some value to penal substitution’), while not alienating everyone else (‘but there are plenty of other ways to think about the Christ-event if you prefer’).
The inconsistencies of the metaphors and models
However, my problems with multi-models go beyond concerns over its persuasiveness.
There is also the fundamental assumption of multi-models that there can be no one unique and comprehensive explanation of Christian sacrifice; that its mystery somehow outstrips our human capacity to comprehend. Now I do not deny a place for mysteries in the Christian faith. But the sacrifice of Christ does not seem to me to be one of them – or not, at least, in the way that is commonly supposed. Of course, we do not ‘understand’ it in the sense of being able to fathom the depth of its full significance – for Christ and for ourselves. But that is not to say that the manner of its operation – as sacrifice – is ungraspable at a conceptual level. The Catholic theologian, Urs von Balthasar, movingly comments:[ii]
For who would want to understand the love of God in its folly and weakness? Or who would wish to lay claim to any other course of action than … keeping silence?
Needless to say, Balthasar does not ‘keep silence’. In fact, the book from which these lines are drawn exemplifies what can be both cogently and usefully said – without metaphors and models – about these ultimately unfathomable things.
No, the claim to mystery here has, I suspect, more to do with concealing incomprehension of the theologians by appealing to fashionable post-modern distaste for ‘literalist’ discourses, and the cultural prestige of metaphor as somehow literary and poetic.
There is a more serious charge against multi-models, however: that it misrepresents the models and metaphors with which it deals.
To see this, we first need to be clear about the distinction between the claims that the Scriptural record itself makes about the Gospel event and the claims subsequently made by the models and metaphors. The claims of Scripture are not obviously inconsistent with each other; but they do not provide us with the comprehensive explanation of the Gospel-event that evangelists are seeking. Since the age of St Anselm, therefore, Christians in need of an adequate account of their faith for the purposes of evangelism have felt compelled to supply what was lacking by extrapolating on the explicit statements of the New Testament. One could say much the same about the development of trinitarian theology at an earlier stage of Church history. Sadly, however, in the case of its doctrine of salvation, the Church seems never to have arrived at the kind of official consensus it eventually reached, albeit after much strife, in the case of the trinitarian doctrine expressed in the Nicaean and Athanasian creeds. We are consequently left with: on the one hand, statements of the New Testament, that are arguably not irreconcilable with each other, but fail to add up to a comprehensive account of the Gospel event; on the other, explanations of the Gospel event developed by Christians on the basis of those statements, which are satisfyingly comprehensive but not mutually consistent.
This becomes evident, when we examine with real attention the contents of the ragbag that is atonement metaphors.
Most adherents of satisfaction doctrines, such as penal substitution, have never regarded their account of the Gospel event as just one among a number of models. This becomes obvious in the work of theologians who are its genuine advocates.[iii]
The same can be said of serious expositions of the moral influence approach. For its genuine proponents, the whole point of moral influence – and its divergence from penal substitution – lies in the fact that the transformation God works through Christ is a transformation in our hearts, not a transformation in the outward conditions of our relationship with God, such as the payment of a moral debt. On this view, moral debt has no existence outside the human heart – which is why no outward sacrifice is needed in order to remedy it. The crucial issue here concerns the epistemological status of the transformation – on whether it is wholly subjective (moral influence) or necessarily objective (penal substitution). Given that it cannot consistently be both, the views of moral influence and penal substitution are incompatible.
Now, of course, proponents of penal substitution will generally also believe that in the phenomenon (as opposed to the theory) of moral influence.[iv] They do not generally deny that the Gospel event works on a subjective level; they merely insist that it also works on an objective level (something that moral influence theory denies). So, they will find a place for scriptural texts such as Christ’s injunction ‘to take up our cross and follow me’, which are, from their perspective, perfectly compatible with other scriptural texts that speak of Christ ‘bearing the penalty of our sins’. However, the proponents of moral influence are not just claiming that the Gospel event works through moral influence; they are claiming that it works only through moral influence, and rejecting penal substitution on that basis. So, it is pure obfuscation to argue that just because the two theories claim some of the same things, and respect the same biblical texts, they are, in any degree, mutually compatible.
The other main category of theory I shall consider here is the one on which my alternative account is based. A list of authors and works has already been given. (See endnote 23). For want of a better description, let us call it the sacrificial approach.
From what true advocates of this approach have themselves said of its relation to other approaches, their understanding of the Gospel-event is no more likely to be consistent with satisfaction theories or moral influence than the latter two approaches are to be consistent with each other. For, according to proponents of the sacrificial approach, those other theories came about only because Christians, living in an age when the cultic practice of sacrifice had become obsolete, no longer retained much sense of what it had meant for the writers of the New Testament.[v] If, as the sacrificial approach claims, such recent models as penal substitution and moral influence are indeed a misunderstanding, it follows that the sacrificial approach will not be consistent with them. Yes, the NT language of cultic sacrifice on the sacrificial approach is based can, without inconsistency, be combined with the language of vicarious punishment or ‘taking up our cross’. But the sacrificial theories based on that language maintain an understanding of sacrifice fundamentally at odds with what these models presuppose.
In view of these incompatibilities, should we just stick to the scriptural language, and avoid, as one recent theologian has put it, ‘pressing metaphors by making them “walk on all fours”?’[vi]
That is, of course, an option. Indeed, there would be much to recommend this minimalist strategy of interpretation, if it were possible to deduce an adequate theology of the Gospel-event from the ipsissima verba of the New Testament. Given, however, that this cannot be done, the practice of theological extrapolation we find in atonement theology is not the expression of an unaccountable waywardness (as talk of ‘pressing’ of metaphors tends to suggest). It’s something more akin to the motivation that drove Christians of the earliest centuries to develop a trinitarian theology: in other words, an urgent and entirely comprehensible need on the part of Christian orthodoxy to give an account of itself to the world. The scandal – if scandal there is – lies not in the impulse to develop a comprehensive model, but in the failure of contemporary theology, with the Spirit’s leading, to arrive at an official consensus – even to the extent of what was achieved by the creedal formulations of earlier centuries in trinitarian doctrine.
Sadly, as we have already pointed out, the failure to agree a sense leads inevitably to the suspicion on the part of Christianity’s interlocutors that there is ultimately no sense to be made. The intellectual muddle of multi-models is, therefore, a theological blind alley any evangelist would do well to avoid.
[i] Joel B. Green & Mark D. Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, InterVarsity Press, 2000; Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, Baker Academic, 2006; Stephen Finlan, Problems with the Atonement, Liturgical Press, 1999; Options on the Atonement, Liturgical Press, 2007; Colin Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement, T&T Clarke, 2003 [1988]; Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989; Gerald Collins, Jesus, Our Redeemer, Oxford University Press, 2007
[ii] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, Ignatius Press, 2005 [1970], pp.82-83
[iii] Steve Jeffrey, Mike Ovey & Andrew Sachs, Pierced for our Transgressions, InterVarsity Press, 1994
[iv] This approach is alleged to have originated with Peter Abelard, was favoured by numerous ‘liberal’ theologians of the C18thand C19th (e.g. Friedrich Schleiermacher & Albrecht Ritschl), famously expounded in Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology [1919]. A more recent exponent is David Brondos, Paul on the Cross, Fortress, 2006
[v] Ashby, op.cit., pp.55. Where theology loses sight the understanding of sacrifice as a socio-symbolic mode of relations the result is: ‘the rise of models and theories, a very thin doctrine of the Atonement … and a legacy of unsettled eucharistic controversies.’
[vi] Gordon Fee, ‘Paul and the Metaphors for Salvation’, in Stephen Davis et al., The Redemption, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.65