2. A FULLER ACCOUNT- 3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
- 4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
- 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 2 for reformulating classic presentation: drawing on Tom Wright
A second strategy remarkably influential in modifying certain Evangelical versions of the classic presentation comes out of the work of N.T. (Tom) Wright. I shall continue my earlier style of exposition, and illustrate the nature of these modifications through a short illustrative ‘account’, such as I earlier gave of the classic presentation itself. I should stress at this point that this is not quite the account of the Gospel-event that Wright himself gives (for reasons I shall explain below) but reflects in idealized fashion a genre of Evangelical presentation that draws heavily on his work.
As in the classic presentation itself, the problem addressed by the Gospel event, is sin; the answer to that problem the justification of the believer. But they are used in a greatly expanded sense. Both the terms, and the sense in which they are here applied go back to Wright. Sin, on this interpretation, includes, not only personal mess-ups, but the structural failings of our social and political communities – the injustice, materialism, loneliness and ugliness that threaten to overwhelm any impulse we might feel towards spiritual progress.(1) In fact, sin is not infrequently defined here as ‘brokenness’ – a term that can equally be applied to personal and collective relationships.
This broadening in the sense of sin and righteousness is a result of a fresh focus on the role of active demonic forces that transcend the individual. The traditional form of the classic presentation views sin largely in terms of selfish individuals prioritizing their own desires over what they know to be right (both in relation to God and other people).(2) Now, however, these desires are regarded as, in part, the product of wider forces at work in the world. Certainly, the real interests they foster are those of the demons rather than our own – though this in no way relieves us of all personal responsibility in the matter. We have always had free will, and can, in principle, resist the solicitations of the powers of this world. Yet, where we fail to do this, we give sustenance to those powers – ‘pouring out to them our libations of blood’. In this field of spiritual forces, we are both agents and victims. And salvation in this context involves liberation form evil, as much as it does repentance for sin.
There is nothing new about this ‘expanded’ notion of sin. The OT itself consistently gives pride of place amongst the sins to idolatry – i.e., the worship offered to all those ‘gods’ of the nations that are not the true and one God of the Israelites. By the time of the NT, those gods seem largely to have been swallowed up by the politico-religious order imposed by the Roman Empire, with the divinized emperor at its head. For the contemporaries of St Paul, the prizes of this world, the ‘pride of life and the lusts of the flesh’, required as the condition of their greater enjoyment, an accommodation with this latest manifestation of what NT Scripture calls, at different times and places, ‘the world’, ‘the flesh’ and ‘the devil’. Consequently, what, at one level, might be considered selfishness, would also, at a deeper level, be an act of idolatry. A citizen of some Graeco-Roman polity might, in his readiness to override moral constraints in order to achieve civic office, be acting out of greed or personal lust for power, but he would certainly also be colluding (from a Christian perspective) with a politico-religious order that fostered this ambition. Again, watching the Roman shows may have gratified some of those sinful urges for which people nowadays would go to the internet; but it also colluded with that whole system of non-Christian values that lay at the basis of the Roman politico-religious order.
This perspective translates easily enough to the present day. The ‘secular’ values of our ‘post-Christian’ politico-religious order may no longer be embodied in a pantheon of public deities; but, to the extent these values diverge from Christianity (as increasingly they do), they nevertheless constitute a moral order that is every bit as consistent – and one that will shape our desires as individuals, if we do not have some reason to resist. The claim of the individual to moral ‘autonomy’ is no more credible now than it was in the days of Roman antiquity.
It is the divergence of our order of values from anything God could have willed that explains the injustice, materialism, loneliness and ugliness of modern life. We are all of us, as individuals, complicit in this brokenness to the extent that, through not putting God at the centre of our lives, we yield to idolatrous desires that are shaped by the demonic ideology of this secular age. Wherever, for example, we overvalue some personal life goal (i.e. our security, personal relationships, health) by placing it where God should be. But we are also victims, since these idolatrous lifegoals are not simply ‘ours’, but shaped by forces that transcend us. The case of commercial advertising is the obvious example. We may gratify some perceived ‘need’; but whose interests are really being served through our collective subservience to such goals? We seek our happiness and our self-realization. But when that self-realization becomes an obligation, and our happiness a burden, something more ideological – indeed, something more demonic – is evidently at issue.
So much then for the problem. What sort of solution does the Gospel event offer? For the modified, as for the traditional, form of the presentation, the answer is justification. But, justification – like sin – has now come to mean something very different.(3) To understand this expanded sense of the term requires us to interpret the cross and resurrection as the culmination of the entire biblical narrative. This narrative has to be understood as the story of how God intervenes in human history to solve the problem of sin (i.e. human brokenness) by inaugurating a Kingdom community of human subjects on earth – the ‘righteous’ (dikaioi). The Kingdom community bears His name, and serves as a bastion against the demonic forces, the powers and principalities which shape our desires against His will.
In form, it is a story of victory snatched out of defeat. God’s Kingdom appears to be destroyed: first in the OT, through the weakness of its unfaithful subjects; then, climatically, in the NT, through the apparent defeat and death of its sole surviving representative and messianic King – Jesus Christ. But this destruction turns out to be only the means of the opening up of the Kingdom community to the Gentiles, and its ultimate realization as the Church. The turning point is when the Father vindicates the messianic King by raising him from the grave, and so allows his former followers the opportunity to respond to their master with a spiritual understanding that comes only after his death.
Throughout, the story is that of the Kingdom community, transformed, thanks to the coming of God Himself in the person of the messianic King, from the ethnically-based polity of the Old Israel into the Church or New Israel. Its subjects continue to describe themselves as the ‘righteous’ (dikaioi); but in the fully realized manifestation of the Church, they are ‘righteous’, not by ethnicity or religious practice, but only by faith in the messianic King.
If we may return now to the meaning of ‘justification’ – the term is derived from the verb ‘to justify’ or ‘to make righteous’ (dikaioun), which, in turn, is cognate with the adjective ‘righteous’ (dikaioi). Justification, then, is about integration into the new Kingdom community; it means becoming one of the righteous – something now achieved by our acceptance of Jesus Christ as our messianic king. In other words, it is about receiving a new politico-religious identity rather than just a legal status of quasi-innocence in the eyes of God. This identity overrides the claims of any existing obligations to the demonic powers of this world. It involves the transfer from a condition of subservience to demonic forces that shape our desires without regard to our interests to one of loving service within the community of those whom the Holy Spirit has also ‘justified’.
Of course, the acceptance of a new politico-religious identity does not, of itself, ensure the elimination of all solicitation on the part of the demonic forces of the world – any more than the imputation of righteousness in the classic presentation. But the ‘hope of glory’ becomes an even stronger counter-weight to those forces when it is no longer conceived as a kind of disembodied survival of a putative ‘soul’ after death, but as a participation in the ‘new heaven and new earth’, already partly evidenced in the here-and-now of the Kingdom community of believers, but destined to find full realization in the hereafter.
Comment on Strategy 2
To repeat, the above account of the Gospel event, though drawn from Wright’s work, does not fairly represent his own position – though it could, I believe, be fairly attributed to some influential Christian writers who have attempted to extract a cogent account of the Gospel event from his work.(4) Its most conspicuous feature is the abandonment of any dependency on penal substitution. Actually, Wright himself does not abandon penal substitution, despite developing a consistent basis for an account of the Gospel event that would, in principle allow us to take that step – as many of his followers do. In his apologetic writing Wright prefers to run penal substitution in tandem with the above account. As we will show presently, it is perfectly possible to do this without logical inconsistency. In fact, as we will shortly demonstrate, to do so confers a significant theological advantage, in addition to the obvious pragmatic goal of holding the different factions of Evangelicalism together.
Before explaining that advantage, let me begin by enumerating some of the points on which the above modified version represents an improvement on the classic presentation.
First, it resolves all the problems I identified in the traditionalist version of the classic presentation. Gone is the individualism of the traditionalist focus on salvation as ‘soul rescue’, and the emptiness and implausibility of its understanding of heaven as disembodied post mortem existence.(5) Instead, we find an emphasis on the Church as the ongoing fulfilment of God’s plan for a Kingdom community offering humanity a place of freedom and refuge from its idolatrous and demonic propensities. Gone, too, is the non-sense of justification as the ‘imputation’ to sinful man of a righteousness not his own. This is replaced by an intellectually and morally more intelligible – and more scripturally grounded – definition of the concept as integration into the Kingdom community of Christ. Finally, underlying this shift in our understanding of both sin and justification, is Wright’s intelligent and historically informed interpretation of the NT text – a welcome improvement on the traditional and unconvincing catena of proof-texts wrested from their context as evidence of penal substitution. In support of his reading, Wright deploys a critical acumen that, far from embarrassing our humanities educated friends, will hopefully impress them, and draw them into an honest engagement with the biblical text.
But now for the one difficulty. The above version, for all its basis in Wright’s reading of the NT texts, fails – as I believe Wright himself does – to give an adequate account of the language of sacrifice applied by those texts to the cross itself. This is possible because, as any reader of St Paul will have found (to his potential exasperation) the apostle’s arguments are not primarily directed to unfolding the mechanics of sacrifice (though the putatively Pauline Letter to the Hebrews might be considered an exception). Rather, as proponents of sacrificial revisionist theory have claimed, it feels almost as if that understanding of sacrifice were simply assumed – too familiar perhaps to require further elaboration. The arguments that St Paul develops relate to multiple issues affecting the early Church of which it paints a vivid picture – most importantly, perhaps, its defence against the Judaizing proponents of circumcision, which threatened to stifle it at birth. In a sense, St Paul never ceases to preach the cross the Christ, and develops its radical implications through his writings, but without – from a modern reader’s perspective – altogether ‘explaining’ it. Thus, it is possible for Wright to open up the meaning of these texts without dealing head-on with the issue of sacrificial language.
But this leaves us unclear what are we to make of such indisputably cultic language as Hebrews 9.22 (‘there is no atonement without the shedding of blood’). In the straight classic presentation, sacrifice is understood, very questionably I have argued, as an atoning transaction as a result of which a penalty is paid by the Son to the Father. But, in the reformulated version, given above, no such transaction is mentioned, and there is no properly sacrificial reference that would take us back to cultic rituals of the OT. One option – that of the above account – is simply to ignore that language. So far as concerns the need to offer a cogent and plausible presentation of the faith, this is no loss. Jesus’ suffering and death is perfectly explicable without resort to sacrificial language as the straightforward consequence of his determination to share our human lot and to persevere against all resistance in his Kingdom message until the point was reached where the politico-religious authorities were provoked into making an end of him. Such an end was no doubt inevitable, and, indeed, prophesied repeatedly by Jesus himself in the course of his ministry. His persistence to the end is thus a ‘sacrifice’ in the current common language understanding of a ‘loss’ freely conceded, though not in the properly religious sense.
What Wright himself does, however, quite different: he resorts to forms of the penal substitution argument. This is perfectly reasonable, when we reflect that the problem presented by the classic presentation for Wright, as a NT scholar, was its misrepresentation of St Paul’s understanding of justification. Now the letters of St Paul – Romans particularly – have always been absolutely central to the classic formulation of penal substitution. So, Wright’s alternative exegesis of these texts has sometimes not unreasonably been taken by traditionalists as an all-out assault on penal substitution and the classic presentation based upon it. Not so, says Wright. The recognition of sacrificial substitution in the ‘suffering servant’ texts of Isaiah, he argues, suffices to anchor that notion securely in their understanding of the cross, without the need for a contorted construal of the Pauline Epistles.
Hence, theologically, strategy 2 can draw us in one of two opposing directions. If we attempt to extract an alternative to penal substitution (option 1), we obtain an entirely cogent account of the Gospel event that will serve for most practical purposes. Its only downside: that it fails to do justice to the scriptural language of sacrifice. In short, we will have something that hangs well together and makes admirable sense, but leaves quite a lot out of the picture (both in Scripture and the Christian tradition). On the other hand, if we go all the way with Wright (option 2), we will end up with a version of the classic presentation not altogether unencumbered of penal substitution – though, on the positive side, it mitigates the excessive individualism of the classic presentation and replaces the old dependence on proof texts with an intelligent reading of the Bible.
Even seen from the perspective of a sacrificial revisionist position – as opposed to the perspective of biblical studies or of everyday evangelism (both well served by Wright’s approach), this gets us a whole lot further than the kind of theories I have categorized as penal substitution or moral influence. Both the latter have tended to view sacrifice as a purely personal transaction between God and the individual soul. Wright, by contrast, nudges us towards a re-discovery of a social and political aspect of the Gospel event. Given it was, in part, the loss of such awareness that, according to proponents of sacrificial revisionist positions, emptied the notion and practice of sacrifice of its proper meaning, Wright’s version of classic presentation could be seen as marking a degree of convergence with the sacrificial revisionist position proposed by this tract, even if it demonstrates no awareness of the fact.
Classic presentation reformulated by Wright vs. alternative presentation based on sacrificial revisionist theory
So, why, in conclusion, does my ‘alternative presentation’, based on sacrificial revisionist theology of the Gospel event, give a superior account of the Christian faith to the classic presentation, even as reshaped by Wright?
The deficits of the classic presentation, enumerated in section 3 can briefly be summed up as follows:
- its excessive individualism (1.)
- its dependence on penal substitution (2.)
- its inadequate basis in Scripture (3.)
On point 1., there is little to choose between these options. On point 2, my alternative presentation has a clear advantage. Based as it is on sacrificial revisionist theories, it places sacrifice at the heart of its theology – and, what is more, a sacrifice wholly disengaged from penal substitution or any other ‘satisfaction’ models.
But it isn’t just a question of not having to resort to illogical and ethically questionable notions of Atonement. Penal substitution is an essentially individualist interpretation of sacrifice. In failing to dispense with it altogether, Wright may not condemn himself to an individualist style of presentation of the Christian faith (in fact, he studiously avoids such a thing); but he does close himself off to a better understanding of sacrifice, and thereby fails fully to take advantage of the positive contribution that a better understanding of sacrifice could make to the ‘Kingdom’ theology which constitutes his primary legacy to anti-substitutionist theologians.
Wright wants to identify the coming of God’s Kingdom with the institution of the Church. Putting the Eucharistic sacrifice back at the heart of Gospel event (in the way the sacrificial revisionist position proposes) gives some substance to that identification. It’s one thing to claim the event of Pentecost as the fulfilment of the Kingdom promise and the birth of the early church community in some rather abstract sense. The average church-goer is left casting about for whatever mysterious ‘quiddity’ links the occasion of their Sunday devotions with the assembly of the Acts of the Apostles, thus guaranteeing its claim to be a manifestation of the same ‘Kingdom of God’. Apostolic succession? Personal experiences of the Holy Spirit? Yet if, as in sacrificial revisionism, we give due weight to the axiom that the ‘Church gives the Eucharist, and the Eucharist gives the church’, then we have not just a single foundational institution valid for all time (yet for whom?), but a regular and ongoing institution at every celebration of the Eucharist. Wright would doubtless agree in principle. But sacrificial revisionism prompts us to explore (see section 6.3) the socio-anthropology of sacrifice so as to understand just how it is that the practice of sacrifice has always been at the heart of every kingdom and community (so how not also for the Kingdom of God?) To the point, indeed, that it would simply make no sense to speak of a Kingdom of God, or a Messiah-King, without also talking about a commensurate sacrifice. In short, a Kingdom theology, far from being a reason to exclude sacrifice (McLaren, Chalke, Bell et al.) or to marginalize it (Wright) ought to be a reason to put it front and centre!
A similar case can be made in relation to point 3. Wright’s understanding of ‘justification’ is based on a reading that – by the criteria we might apply to other ancient texts – makes better sense of St Paul’s letters than the reading imposed on those texts by the kind interpretation needed in order to support the understanding of justification presupposed by the classic presentation. There is, though, a potential objection that the Spirit-inspired ecclesial tradition (as Catholics see it, ‘Tradition’) imposes its own hermeneutical canons of Scriptural interpretation, arising out of an authoritative sense of the Church’s own relationship to Scripture. Their importance, at an earlier phase in ecclesial history, is, on a practical level, demonstrated by particular modes of biblical interpretation that are not at all the kind we would associate with contemporary literary-critical exegesis – such as the discernment of typological relationships the place biblical events in a prefigurative relationship to one another. One might therefore ask how far literary-critical criteria such as the intelligibility of a scriptural text taken as a whole are the only appropriate ones by which to judge the superiority of Wright’s modified version of the classic presentation over the traditional version.(6.)
Needless to say, my alternative presentation with its foregrounding of Eucharist and Church, and its basis in scholarly exploration of early Eucharistic practice does not rely on any scriptural interpretation arrived independently of its ecclesial and liturgical use. Yet, it also seems to me perfectly in accord with an intelligent and open-minded Christian reading of biblical texts such as that of Balthasar (or of Wright himself for that matter). If there is a hermeneutic rule it could be claimed to breach, it would be that of the Protestant churches with their attachment to penal substitution and their reading of Scripture in the light of that doctrine. And that is a rule that Wright has also breached, though without the defence of loyalty to any non-secular hermeneutic rule save, perhaps, the Protestant principle of ‘perspicuity’.
3. WHAT’S WRONG WITH PENAL SUBSTITUTION
4. UPGRADING PENAL SUBSTITUTION: THE ‘MULTI-MODELS’ APPROACH
1.This is how the human predicament is described in N.T. Wright, Simply Christian (2006), Part 1 (‘Echoes of a Voice’), chapters 1-4
2.See, for example, John Stott, Basic Christianity (1958), Part 2 (‘Man’s Need’), pp. 77-102
3.Wright’s understanding of justification is set out fully in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (2009)
4.Accounts I have in mind, based on Wright but denying penal substitution: Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (2004); Steve Chalke, The Lost Message of Jesus (2003); Rob Bell, Love Wins (2012)
5.This theme is extensive developed in Wright, Surprised by Hope (2007)
6.One’s first reaction would be to question the likelihood of any such objection being made from the Evangelical quarter. A moment’s reflection suffices to recognize that the kind of critique to which Wright’s notions of justification have, in reality, been subjected (e.g by John Piper) is indeed motivated precisely by the manner in which Wright’s way of reading violates a certain ecclesial tradition of interpretation – albeit, of course, one established by the Reformers rather than the fathers of the Church. Against which, I take it, Wright might legitimately assert the equally Protestant Evangelical doctrine of the ‘perspicuity’ of Scripture. To the extent that the sense of an ecclesial tradition of Protestantism emerges in Wright’s opponents through their confrontation with a reading that claims to make sense in its own terms, Wright appears, as it were, too Protestant to be properly Protestant!