2. A FULLER ACCOUNT- 3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
- 5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
- 6.1 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 1: HOW IS OUR EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE UNITED WITH THE SACRIFICE OF CHRIST?
- 6.2 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 2: WHAT IS IT FOR THE EUCHARIST TO BE A SACRIFICE? DO WE GIVE, OR MERELY RECEIVE?
- 6.3 DIFFICULT ISSUES – QUESTION 3: WHAT HAS RELIGIOUS WORSHIP TO DO WITH THE PRODUCTION OF HUMAN COMMUNITY?
- 7. SPEAKING TO THE WORLD
Strategy 1 for reformulating classic presentation: the plurality of models
My own misgivings regarding the classic presentation have been shared by reflective Christian believers, present and past. One important objection, as we have seen (see section 3), has to do with the way that presentation turns on the idea of a penalty paid by Christ/God on behalf of sinners – the idea known to theology as the doctrine of penal substitution.
Some believers who share my misgivings have rejected this doctrine outright. However, the greater number have responded by presenting penal substitution as just one among a number of possible understandings of the Gospel event that have been developed over the Church’s history. In effect, they demote penal substitution from its former status as the one true explanation of the Christ-event to the status of being one among a number of ‘metaphors’, ‘models’ or ‘theories’ used to describe it. This is the first of the two strategies that are commonly used in current reformulations of the classic presentation. I shall call it the multi-model strategy.
It is adopted in many studies on Christian Atonement by theologians. Most of these take the form of a succession of chapters, each devoted to one of the metaphors/models Christians sometimes have used to explain the Christ-event.(1) Versions of this strategy have even found their way into Evangelical presentations of the Christian faith (e.g. Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha Course).(2) I suspect, much Evangelical teaching makes some concession to it. One can easily enough allude to the possibility of other explanations, while focussing on penal substitution in a way that implies – without actually asserting or justifying – its apparently dominant status.
However, a strong, ‘post-modern,’ version of the strategy makes a virtue of the plurality of explanations by arguing that a multi-faceted approach is appropriate to the nature of what is being described. The Gospel event, it is claimed, is a religious mystery so far outstripping the expressive capacities of everyday speech as to force us to resort to metaphor.(3) A weak version of the strategy stops short of this post-modern apophaticism (i.e. the belief that a mystery transcends the power of human expression), nevertheless insisting, for some unspecified reason, on the necessarily ‘plural’ nature of our explanations.(4) What both forms have in common is the refusal to grant any single metaphor or model the kind of absolute (i.e. unique and comprehensive) truth status formerly accorded to penal substitution.
Comment on Strategy 1
I have a number of fundamental objections to any form of the multi-model strategy, strong or weak.
The first is pragmatic. Where the presentation of our faith is concerned, I seriously doubt the persuasive power of any strategy based on a multiplicity of ‘metaphors’, ‘models’ or ‘theories’. It is fine to speak of the hermeneutic value of such aids to understanding in contexts where the reality of the referent is undisputed – as, for example, in the much-cited instance of quantum physics. In such cases, empirical experiment points to physical realities that have to be explained somehow or other. But when it comes to explaining to non-believers a reality in which they are disinclined to believe, it won’t wash. Our insistence on the partial (or, at least, less than absolute) truth value of religious language will not impress them with the ineffable mysteries we fail to describe; it will simply cast further doubt on the actuality of what we are talking about!
The fumblings of Gumbel’s Alpha Course help explain the continued popularity that the traditional presentation seems to enjoy for all its deficiencies. How much more convincing it sounds when we try to tell people what the Gospel event actually is, rather than equivocating about what it is like. One can hardly avoid the suspicion that much of the atonement theology mentioned above was intended for internal consumption – not for true evangelists and ‘seekers’ desiring a more workable model than penal substitution. For Christian insiders, one can certainly appreciate the appeal of 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’).
Yet my problems with the multi-model strategy go beyond mere pragmatic considerations. The strategy presupposes that there is no one unique and comprehensive explanation available. No justification of this presupposition is generally given, other than an ill-defined theological apophaticism, and, in some cases, a post-modern distaste for ‘literalist’ discourse. There is, of course, a place for ‘mystery’ in the Christian faith. At the same time, there is surely also a genuine risk of recourse to that notion serving as an unlimited warrant for obfuscation and lazy thinking. We need to be careful not to abuse the term. Just because something is, in some sense, a ‘mystery’ doesn’t necessarily imply that there is nothing more to be said about it. Mathematics, for example, knows various concepts – say, infinity, or irrational numbers – that offer no purchase to common sense, yet perform an indispensable role in its arguments. With theology, things are still more complicated. Ideas like the love of God, or the sufferings of Christ, are not simply place-holders in its discourse; they are things, however ‘unthinkable’, that are good for us to think on. Hence, the theological predilection for ‘mysteries’. The Catholic theologian, Urs von Balthasar movingly comments:
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 hanging on the lips of God, whose word remains inseparably connected with his historic Cross and Resurrection, and keeping silence …
Needless to say, Balthasar does not ‘keep silence’, and the book from which these lines come offers eloquent testimony to what can cogently be said about the mystery of salvation. The writer makes no recourse to metaphors and models – but offers a unified and consistent account, largely consistent with the alternative presentation offered here. But the classic presentation is itself an attempt at a unified and consistent account. That is why – however much one may disagree with it – even the classic presentation remains more persuasive than an approach that offers us a ragbag of inconsistent models and metaphors, and, under the cloak of ‘mystery’, leaves us the task of reconciling the irreconcilable!
Ultimately, perhaps the most serious charge that can be brought against such an approach is that it misrepresents the very models and metaphors in which it deals.
To demonstrate this will require us to make a distinction between the claims that the Scriptural record itself makes about the Gospel event and those subsequently made by the models and metaphors. So far as Scripture itself is concerned, it would be hard to argue its claims are actually inconsistent; but it does not provide us with the comprehensive explanation of the Gospel event that we are seeking. That is why – at least from the time of St Anselm – Christians in need of an adequate account of their faith for the purposes of evangelism have been compelled to supply the deficiencies of the biblical record by developing doctrines in a manner that may be based on Scripture, but goes well beyond anything it asserts explicitly. Much the same occurs in the of the development by the early church of a Trinitarian theology. The difference is, that where its soteriology is concerned, the church never arrived at the kind of happy synthesis that we find in the Nicaean and Athanasian creeds. On the one hand, we have statements of the NT, which, though arguably not irreconcilable with each other, do not add up to a comprehensive account of the Gospel event. On the other, we have the accounts of the Gospel event that Christians have developed on the basis of those statements, which, while, in many cases satisfyingly comprehensive, are not mutually consistent.
This becomes evident, when examine with real attention the contents of our theological ragbag.
For a start, 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 when we read contemporary defences of penal substitution by its genuine advocates. (See, for example, Jeffrey, Ovey & Sachs, Pierced for our Transgressions.)
The same can be said of serious expositions of the moral influence theology in its various guises (sometimes dubiously accredited to Abelard). For its serious proponents, the whole point of moral influence – and its difference 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 a payment of moral debt. On this view, ‘moral debt’ has no existence outside our own sinful hearts – 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. 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 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 some degree, mutually compatible!
The other main category of theory I shall consider here is the one on which my alternative presentation is based, described in my previous section: sacrificial revisionism.(5)
From what has already been said about this approach and its relationship to ‘satisfaction’ theories, the answer will already be evident that such an understanding of the Gospel-event cannot be reconciled with that of penal substitution (or moral influence theory, for that matter). For, according to the sacrificial revisionist view, as I characterized in the previous section, those other theories (including penal substitution and moral influence) only came into existence at all because Christians, living in an age far removed from biblical times when the cultic practice of sacrifice had become obsolete, no longer retained much sense of what sacrifice originally meant for the writers of the NT, and consequently misunderstood it. It follows that sacrificial revisionism cannot logically be consistent with penal substitution. Yes, the NT language of cultic sacrifice on which sacrificial revisionist theology is based can, without inconsistency, be combined with the language of vicarious punishment or ‘taking up our cross’. But the sacrificial revisionist theories based on that language, such as I have represented them, maintain an understanding of sacrifice fundamentally at odds with that presupposed by penal substitution.
In view of these incompatibilities, should we just stick to the Scriptural language, and avoid ‘pressing metaphors by making them ‘walk on all fours’?(6)
That is, of course, one 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 NT. Given, however, that this cannot be done, the practice of theological extrapolation we find in atonement theology is not the expression of something unjustifiably wayward (as talk of ‘pressing’ of metaphors tends to suggest), but something more akin to the motivation for developing a Trinitarian theology. In fact, it arises out of 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 theology, with the Spirit’s leading, to arrive at an enduring consensus – even to the extent of what was achieved in regard to Trinitarian doctrine by the creedal formulation of early centuries.
As already argued, 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.
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
5. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: TOM WRIGHT
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1.Some examples are: Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross (2006); Colin Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement (2003); Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation (1988); Gerald O’Collins, Jesus Our Redeemer (2007).
2.Nicky Gumbel, Alpha Questions of Life (1993) pp. 41-42
3.Examples would be: Joel Green & Mark Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (2000); Hans Boersma (op.cit.); Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology (1983).
4.Examples: Colin Gunton (op.cit.); Paul Fiddes (op.cit.); Gerald O’Collins (op.cit.)
5.See: F.C.N. Hicks, The Fulness of Sacrifice (1930); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013); Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: its Nature and Purpose (1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (1995)
6.Gordon Fee, ‘Paul and the Metaphors for Salvation’, in Stephen Davis et al., The Redemption, p.65