I think I may need to clarify what I do believe instead of just what I don't believe, because it seems that some assume that as soon as I question the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, that I have stripped the Cross of its meaning as paying for our sins, radically departed from evangelical teaching, and sided with the comfortable English liberal schools. Now I may be unfairly caricaturing the classic liberals (if there are any of you out there, feel free to correct my crass dismissals) but it seems to me that they regard the crucifixion as little more than an unfortunate side effect of Jesus' endeavours to teach us all how to be nice to each other, and salvation as little more than finding the will within ourselves to try to follow his teachings and make the world a nicer place.

I believe that it was for us and for our salvation that Jesus Christ came down from heaven, became truly human, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death, was buried, descended into hell, was raised again on the third day, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

All that I regard as fundamental. Attempts to explain how that works - how that achieves our salvation - I regard as interesting but secondary. Neither my salvation, nor the salvation of those who are passionately committed to the substitutionary atonement explanation, are in any way contingent on us being able to work out a correct explanation for how the life, death and resurrection of Jesus achieve our salvation. If we entrust ourselves to Christ, he will save us, whether we have got the foggiest idea how, or not.

Nevertheless, being the inquisitive, opinionated, and often belligerent character that I am, I have some opinions on what are and are not helpful, biblical and worthy explanations.

I believe that the death of Jesus was a sacrifice - the ultimate self-offering of the ultimate human to God - on behalf of and for the salvation of the world and its inhabitants.

I believe that the death of Jesus was essential to establishing the grounds for the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation between humanity and God.

I believe that the death of Jesus was the consequence of the worst that human and cosmic evil could do, but that Jesus took its full force in his own body, and rose triumphant, thus winning the decisive battle over evil and death in the conflict that will be concluded in his glorious return.

I believe that the death of Jesus is the ultimate demonstration of, and call to emulate, the uncompromising and unfailing love of God; a love that will willingly be tortured and cast into hell rather than allow even "the least of these" to remain excluded, victimised and without mercy, healing or hope.

My current best effort to give a helpful philosophical explanation of how that might work would go something like this (with due acknowledgment to James Alison, whose book "Knowing Jesus" is the best 100 pages on redemption I have ever read and the latest big influence on my thinking):

At the root of all human sin lie unbelief and pride, which exhibit themselves in fragmenting and a compulsion to fearfully divide ourselves off from one another and from all that God has created to be whole. We define ourselves over and against one another, and exclude and vicitimise those we have defined as "other". Those whose presence or influence threatens our selfish desires are always defined as other and excluded. In Jesus, God has come among us, as the perfect embodiment of God's love and grace - a love and grace which challenges all divisiveness and seeks to reconcile all people with one another and with God. Because such all-inclusive love always threatens our self-importance and selfish desires, it inevitably and always attracts hatred and hostility. Because he was completely unwilling to collude with the established powers and structures, and loudly challenged their definitions of who were insiders and who were outsiders, who was important and who was unimportant, and whose interests took priority over the interests of others, Jesus was vilified and persecuted. Knowing that to continue his defiance of the powers and his radical demonstration of the reconciling and healing grace of God would mean making the ultimate sacrifice, he nevertheless maintained his line, and sure enough, the need to exclude him became obsessive, violent, and unstoppable. The ultimate embodiment of God was cast out by the world and became the ultimate victim of the world's hatred, fear and hostility. But, just when it seemed that evil and death had triumphed again, God raised Jesus from the dead. The worst that evil and death could do could not defeat the love and life of God. They are forever defeated, and now all how would follow Jesus can follow him to freedom from their power. In the Christ's resurrection presence, we now encounter the ultimate victim of our own sin. And as the perfect victim, he is the one who has it within his power to forgive us, or to forever consign us to an eternal hell of guilt, bitterness and despair. In the risen Christ then, we encounter the perfect embodiment of all we have despised and victimised, but we find him utterly without resentment, offering us forgiveness that is completely gratuitous, as only the victim of our sin meaningfully could. The challenge for us is to accept this gratuitous forgiveness, because by its very nature it can only be accepted as a gift, and to accept it as a gift we have to become open to the ways of the same self-sacrificing extravagant grace that we shunned and killed. For me, I know I struggle with that every day. God asks of me that I be willing to celebrate a grace so inclusive that it will no more readily include me than include Jerry Falwell and Philip Ruddock. And I find myself wanting to again violently reject such a possibility and insist that I am more worthy of grace than they (insert your own despised "others"!). And as long as I am wanting to insist that I am more worthy than they, I am actually refusing to accept salvation as a gift; I am demanding the right to earn it, so that those my pride deems unworthy of it might be excluded from it. Only by allowing myself to be drawn into the gratuitous love of Christ and transformed by his outpoured Spirit is there any chance of me becoming able to welcome Jerry Falwell et.al. as my brothers and sisters and thus be freed from excluding myself from the seat I am offered next to his at the banqueting table of heaven. Thanks be to God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is able to free me from this body of death and bring about so astonishing a redemption!

Now, all of that is, of course, only one way of telling the story and one set of images and metaphors to try to make sense of the unfathomable mystery of salvation in the crucified and risen Christ. And because it is only one angle on it, it doesn't in itself rule out the validity of substitutionary atonement as an alternative explanation. However, I am going to stick to my guns here and continue to insist that, until some one can show us otherwise, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement requires us to believe unthinkable things about God the Father and is therefore unworthy of the God made known to us in Jesus. In response to such a suggestion, [one friend] wrote:

[First I would observe that God doesn't have to act in ways we find acceptable. We should base our theology on revelation not what we consider to be personally reasonable or culturally nice.]

Sure, our standard is not to be determined by what our culture says is nice. But if we are to adopt another standard as being the standard of God, then we are to emulate that standard ourselves, even if it puts us at odds with our society. During the Decian persecution of the church, there was a beloved bishop of Antioch known as St Acacius. Acacius was put on trial for his faithful refusal to worship the Roman gods, and the transcript of his defense speech has survived. The genius of Acacius' defense was to argue that he ws being tried for refusing to worship gods when the stories of those gods were such that if he sought to imitate them in his own behaviour, he would be put on trial for that! Worshipping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, on the other hand, ensured that the imitation of the God he worshipped would make him righteous rather than make him a criminal. Indeed, Jesus instructed us to model our mercifulness on the mercy of our Father in heaven (Luke 6:36). But the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is premised on a belief that God cannot or will not be merciful until someone has been made to pay for his offended honour, even if that someone be an innocent scapegoat. Although that attitude is not uncommon, the entire history of Christian ethics has regarded it as unworthy for Christians. How can we be asked to believe of God what we would regard as unethical or even criminal in anyone else.

What then of the list of scripture references which [our friend] has assembled in defense of this doctrine.

[There is a strong OT tradition linking atonement with substitutionary sacrifice eg. Lev.16.]

There is a strong OT tradition linking atonement with substitutionary sacrifice, that is quite true. There are several qualifications that need to be noted though. Firstly, there is not a very strong NT link between the crucifixion of Jesus and the OT sacrifices of atonement (most of the variety of OT sacrifices are not about atonement). The book of Hebrews does link them, and I'll come back to that, but most of the time the link is not to the sacrifices of the day of Atonement, but to the sacrifices of Passover. The crucifixion happened at Passover, and Jesus is figured as the Paschal lamb. The Paschal lamb is not a sacrifice of atonement, but of remembrance, thanksgiving and celebration of identity as God's people. Associating Jesus with the Paschal lamb links him not with satisfying a wrathful God, but with the Exodus stories. Our redemption is thus figured as a conflict with the powers that enslave us, in which we are broken free and led through the deep waters of death (baptism) and up into the promised land of new life.

Secondly, even in Leviticus 16, you don't get a strong sense of the sacrifice being needed by God, as much as it is needed by the people as a way of ritualising and making tangible the relinquishment of their sins to the mercy of God. The description of the scapegoat ritual in v.20-22, where the goat carries their sins off into the wilderness, reminds me of a ritual I have often seen in evangelical churches, where we are all invited to write our sins on pieces of paper which are then either nailed to a cross or burned. No one suggests that the performance of this ritual is a necessary prerequisite to God forgiving us, but that by its performance we are making the experience of repentance and receiving grace more accessible to our own perceptions and thereby more transforming of our own lives.

Thirdly, and perhaps flowing from that previous speculation, the critique of the substitutionary atonement paradigm already exists within the Old Testament itself. For example Psalm 51:16-17 says "you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." Now that is not saying that sacrifices are never helpful to the people who are offering them, and in fact the very next verses go on to speak about sacrifices in a positive light, but it does suggest that it is not the sacrifices which bring about a change in God's willingness to accept us. Micah 6:6-8 is another example of the Old Testament critique of a legal understanding of sacrifice, as is Psalm 40:6-8, which is actually quoted in Hebrews 10 when discussing the relationship between Jesus and the OT sacrifices. These passages are clearly offering an alternative to the view that God cannot forgive sins until someone is made to pay. We can also see evidence that these alternative views existed within the Hebrew tradition in the fact that Judaism managed to reconfigure itself as a religion without blood sacrifices after the destruction of the Temple.

[Friend: These sacrifices, while highlighting the reality and cost of sin, were ineffective in themselves in securing reconciliation to God (eg. Heb.9). Like other OT shadows they prepare the way for the revelation and work of Christ - our perfect and sufficient substitutionary sacrifice (Heb.9:14-15, 24-28; 10:12 etc).]

Although the book of Hebrews makes a great deal of use of the the imagery of the OT temple sacrificial system, including the Day of Atonement sacrifices, in explaining the work of Christ, I cannot find anything in it that says that the effect of the sacrifices is to placate the Father's wrath or satisfy the Father's offended honour. In fact 9:14-15 says that the effect of the blood of Christ is a change in us, not in the Father. It changes us so that we can then offer true worship to the living God. That is not substitutionary atonement. The following verses, 9:15-22 which ends with the statement that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins", the imagery is of blood being used to seal a covenant, and the example is the making of a will. This not atonement imagery at all, let alone substitutionary atonement. Instead it is about the costliness of establishing a covenant which will secure reconciliation. Again in 10:12 it says he "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins", and in 9:26 that the sacrifice of Christ "removes sin". There is no equating of "removing sin" with satisfying the offended honour of a wrathful God who cannot otherwise forgive. If we are already persuaded by the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, we can easily read it into these verses, but they do not teach it. If you didn't already have a concept of a wrathful God who demanded a death before being able to offer mercy, you would not arrive at one by reading the book of Hebrews.

[Friend, again: It appears to me that the idea of substitution is clearly expressed in the great Suffering Servant passage - Isa.53:4-6, 10-12. It doesn't say "He was pierced BY our transgressions", but FOR them. It was by HIS wounds that WE are healed. Maybe others want to read that differently, but it sounds like substitutionary atonement to me.]

Again I would argue that it only sounds like substitutionary atonement if you already hold that belief and read these verses through that lens. There is nothing in these verses that suggests a wrathful Father who demands that someone be made to suffer before he can forgive anyone. These verses certainly speak of vicarious suffering, but a belief in the vicarious suffering of Christ can stand alone without the other offensive elements of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The story of Maximilian Kolbe suffering vicariously to protect his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz can stand as an illustration of Christ's vicarious suffering without having to put God the Father in the role of the Concentration Camp Commandant. Like Kolbe, we can see Christ suffering vicariously to protect others from the full force of evil, rather than to satisfy God's need to take out his wrath on someone.

[Friend: NT references you could look at include: 1Pet.3:18 (the righteous dies for the unrighteous)]

Again there is no hint of his death being required to satisfy God. The context is quite explicitly about suffering being a consequence of doing good in an evil world. It says that Christ suffered for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, "in order to bring you to God." That is more like Exodus imagery. Through his suffering, Christ brings us from the place of slavery to sin, to the place of freedom in the presence of God. Indeed the immediately following verses go on to use the image of Noah and the flood (another saving through the water metaphor) and the whole letter is a sermon on baptism. V.21 links our salvation not to the death of Jesus, but to his resurrection. Substitutionary atonement could be read into this passage, but you would not otherwise conclude it from this passage.

[Friend: 2Cor.5:21 (the sinless one became sin for us)]

Again, this is anything but an image of a wrathful Father needing to make someone pay. This passage is working with a metaphor of incarnational reconciliation. Christ becomes like us so that we might become like him. He becomes sin so that we might become righteousness. There is no suggestion in this verse or its context that Christ had to be killed because he became sin, and there is certainly no suggestion that his death would placate an offended God. Again, you can read the doctrine into this passage, but it neither teaches it nor requires it.

[Friend: Heb.7:27 (our high priest offered himself as the once for all sacrifice for our sins)]

As already discussed above, these images from Hebrews speak of Christ's offering of himself as a sacrifice, but that doesn't imply that the need for a blood sacrifice is that without one the wrathful God can not get over his offended honour. The passage neither teaches such an understanding of the Father, nor requires such an understanding to make sense.

[Friend: Jn.1:29 (the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world)]

John's gospel is the one which most explicitly equates Jesus with the Paschal lamb. Unlike the other three, John reports that Jesus dies at the time when the paschal lamb would have been being slaughtered in the temple in preparation for the Passover meal. The sacrifice of the Paschal lamb is not the same thing as the sacrifices of Atonement. On the Day of Atonement, it is not even a lamb that is sacrificed, but a bull and two goats. If John was trying to link Jesus with the sacrifices of atonement, he would not be the lamb of God, but the bull of God or the goat of God. So yes, Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, but that in no way implies or requires the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

[Friend: Rom.3:25 (Christ the sin offering)]

This passage is the only one in the list over which I need to concede some ground. In this case the metaphor is clearly legal and the sacrificial image is almost certainly to the rites of the Day of Atonement. The word which is translated as "sacrifice of atonement" is the word hilasterion which is based on the same root as the word hilasmos on which I included the article from Kittel in my previous post in this discussion. The link to the Day of Atonement is that this same word is used in the LXX for the mercy seat on top of the Ark of the Covenant in Leviticus 16:2. It is the place where the blood of the sacrifice is sprinkled and therefore the place where God and humanity are reconciled. This could be useful for both sides of the debate, although less so for mine. It potentially makes Jesus the "place of reconciliation" rather than the "atoning sacrifice" but it would be stretching credibility somewhat to try to force such a distinction. I have to concede that in this passage Paul is using the image of an atoning sacrifice in a context which is specifically related to arguing that the wrath of God cannot go unsatisfied forever. If we are awarding points, this one can go to the substitutionary atonement camp. However, I want to add two qualifications to that concession (!). Firstly, it is one of the more difficult verses in the New Testament, and most commentators seem to be pretty cautious and nuanced in their claims for it. Although the image of turning away the wrath of God is probably present, it appears to be only one of at least three strands of thought that Paul brings together in the one statement. Secondly, the immediate context of the verse explicitly speaks of God's ability to patiently overlook sins, and so it does not help the doctrine of substitutionary atonement very much. The main thrust of the argument is to establish a way of understanding how God can declare the unrighteous to be justified without violating his own justice and righteousness, and so the imagery is more of a God who is trying to untangle an integrity dilemma than a God who needs to make someone pay before his offended honour can be satisfied.

[Friend: Rom.8:3 (Christ the sin offering)]

In this case, the reference to sacrifice in the NIV is not there in the Greek, as the footnote concedes. The Greek simply says that God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh "for sin". This could mean "to be a sin offering" as the NIV puts it, or simply "to deal with sin" as the NRSV puts it. Either way, it neither teaches nor requires the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Perhaps though, its time I quoted someone else to show that I'm not the only one questioning Anselm's interpretation of the death of Jesus in these verses. N Thomas Wright in his commentary on Romans in the New Interpeter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon 2002) says of this verse:

"God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus, so that the life the law offered could rightly be given to those led by the Spirit. The latter was the long term purpose of the former, the former the necessary precondition of the latter. Each half of this double statement must now be explored in detail. God, says Paul, condemned sin. Paul does not, unlike some, say that God condemned Jesus. True, God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus; but this is some way from saying, as many have, that God desired to punish someone and decided to punish Jesus on everyone else's behalf. Paul's statement is more subtle than that. It is not merely about a judicial exchange, the justice of which might then be questioned (and indeed has been questioned). It is about sentence of death being passed on "sin" itself, sin as a force or power capable of deceiving human beings, taking up residence within them, and so causing their death (7:7-25). To reduce Paul's thinking about the cross to terms of a law-court exchange is to diminish and distort it theologically and to truncate it exegetically. For Paul, what was at stake was not simply God's judicial honor, in some Anselmic sense, but the mysterious power called sin, at large and destructive within God's world, needing to be brought to book, to have sentence passed and executed upon it, so that, with its power broken, God could then give the life sin would otherwise prevent. That is what happened on the cross."

[Friend: Rom.8:32 (God did not spare his son but gave him up for us all)]

Another one into which you can read the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, but which neither teaches it nor requires it. In this case, it is God who is making the sacrifice. God gives the Son to us, rather than receiving the blood of the Son as a sacrifice to restore his offended honour or deflect his wrath.

[Friend: 2Cor.5:15 (he died for all)]

This one is vicarious suffering imagery, but in service of Exodus style imagery again. Rather than Christ dying to satisfy the wrath of God, Christ dies so that we might be gathered into his death and rise to new life with him. It neither teaches nor assumes the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

[Friend: Gal.3:13 (Christ became a curse for us)]

Again, it is vicarious suffering imagery, but not in a way which suggests or requires the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. They are not the same thing. This passage does not imply any punishment or rejection of Jesus by God. It probably fits better with my own description above (if anyone whose still reading can still remember that far back!) of Christ becoming the ultimate victim of our sin. There is no implication here of a God who needs to make someone pay.

[Friend: Heb.13:12 (Jesus makes people holy through offering his own blood)]

As with some of the previous verses from Hebrews, the verse explicitly says that the change wrought by the blood of Jesus is wrought in us, not in how God feels about us. It neither teaches nor assumes the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. And the next few verses illustrate how broad is the letter's (and the Bible's) concept of sacrifice. "Praising God", "doing good" and "sharing what you have" are described as sacrifices that please God. The concept of sacrifice cannot be narrowed down to making a victim pay with its life in order to restore the offended honour or satisfy the wrath of God. Even in the Old Testament, that was only a small part of the understanding of sacrifice.

Well that's [our friend's] list. Unless I have done violence to any of those verses (and I'm willing to be shown if I have) we have only one verse that gets close to supporting Anselm's doctrine of substitutionary atonement. That hardly seems to be a solid basis for the monopoly this doctrine has had on our understandings of the crucifixion for the last thousand years, or for the mantra like way it is repeated by so many of us within the evangelical churches.

I have not, and am not, suggesting that nothing like this doctrine ever appears in scripture. It does, but it is actually one of the most minor themes on the death of Christ. Biblically, the Passover and Exodus imagery is easily the most dominant, but we hear surprisingly little of it in evangelical exegesis of the cross (possibly because it is too sacramental for our comfort!).

For me, the bottom line on substitutionary atonement is that until someone can come up with some way in which it helps us to understand something important that none of the illustrations with stronger biblical foundations can make clear to us, then I don't think it is worth using because of the horrendous consequences for the integrity of God the Father. I do not want to be preaching stuff which risks creating the impression that God asks of us a level of graciousness which he can't even manage himself. And so far in this discussion, unless I've missed something, we've heard the doctrine restated and declared to be helpful, but other than Rowland's suggestion that it is necessary to keep all the images in the picture (http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9638.htm), I don't think anyone has made a suggestion as to what it is that is helpful about this doctrine that other explanations of the cross can't deliver. Can anyone fill us in on how it helps them in a way that the other biblical illustrations can't do?

Peace and hope,

Nathan Nettleton

Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church

Melbourne, Australia