Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
I've recently written about some of the issues associated with penal substitutionary atonement. Again, you know the basic idea: Because of sin we stand under God's judgment and wrath. However, Jesus stands in our place, taking that judgment and wrath upon himself. Jesus substitutes himself and dies for you and I.
The main criticism of penal substitutionary atonement, as I and others have described, is the view of God that sits behind it. God's baseline stance is wrath, a default position that has to be changed. Consequently, the leading edge of the gospel proclamation is The Big Angry Guy in the Sky. Salvation is being rescued from That Guy.
This criticism is well known. And yet, there is a substitutionary logic in the New Testament regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And many of us feel queasy about those passages and tend to ignore them. So, how are we to read texts that have a substitutionary logic?
To start, we all can see the point that love often involves suffering for each other and for the sake of each other. Love often accepts suffering and pain intended for others. Love involves protecting and shielding others, even when those others might be "getting what they deserve." If something bad were going to happen to my children I'd rush to "substitute" myself. That's what love does. So it's not surprising that God does the same thing.
The sticking point has to do with where the suffering is coming from. That's where substitutionary logic gets weird. The "bad thing" coming down on us is God's wrath. God ends up saving us from God. That's the paradox introduced by the crime-and-punishment metaphor.
But as scholars like N.T. Wright and others have noted, the better frame here isn't penal but covenantal. YHWH and Israel form a covenant, with God's plan being to bless the world through Israel. But Israel cannot keep its end of deal, bringing upon itself all the punishments that befall those who break covenants in the ancient Semitic mind. Israel breaks its promise with the result, per the covenantal agreement, being exile. And at that point, God's plan to bless the world through Israel gets stuck.
So, God enters history in Jesus to be Israel's representative, Israel's Messiah. And as the faithful Israelite Jesus takes up the covenantal burden--both in fulfilling the Torah and in bearing Israel's punishment in breaking the covenant. In Jesus God does what Israel could not do, stepping in to help Israel fulfill its side of the covenant, which, per ancient Semitic covenantal logic, does include punishments for breaking promises. In all this Jesus substitutes himself for Israel. Jesus protects Israel from itself, carries a burden it cannot carry, and takes on its exile so that Israel can be set free.
The point in all this is that we can read the substitutionary logic of the New Testament through a covenantal rather than penal frame. In short, I've suggested that we speak of a "covenantal substitutionary atonement" rather than a "penal substitutionary atonement."
Of course, this raises other sorts questions, but these are different questions from those thrown up by penal substitutionary atonement. The substitution in this covenantal context has less to do with you and your particular relationship with God than with the narrative of God's relationship with Israel and God's overcoming the curse of the Law to push Israel's vocation forward, through the Messiah, to its universal objective where all can be saved.
Thank you Richard. I agree that the covenant frame is essential. But the Sinai covenant itself was a microcosm of God's larger vision of the original garden, wasn't it? Since the "death" and exile brought about within the Sinai covenant (2 Cor.3:7) was a microcosm of the death and exile of the original fall from the garden, don't we still have to say something about mortality itself? Why did God impose mortality upon us? Were God's actions towards Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other, motivated by retributive justice, after all? The retributive justice that undergirds penal substitution and satisfaction?
I think we can go further: The earliest Christians uniformly said that mortality served one positive and medicinal purpose: It stopped humans from eating from the tree of life while in a corrupted state; it stopped us from making our sinfulness immortal, immediately after the fall. While this was a severe mercy, it was a mercy nonetheless. And it looked forward to God coming in Jesus to restore human nature, and burn away the sin-sickness from within human nature, so we could share in his accomplishment by his Spirit. Thus, God’s justice is a restorative justice, all the way down. And the atonement is a healing atonement.
In place of a “penal substitution,” I like to call Jesus’ work a medical substitutionary atonement. For Jesus did what Israel and all humans could not: God called Israel to be a medical focus group, to receive the demanding health regimen so deeply that they “circumcised the heart” – cut away the sin-sickness from human nature (Dt.10:16). They made some progress but could not. But Jesus succeeded where they and we all failed. He substituted his human faithfulness for Israel’s, under the covenant. So he brought about the circumcised heart (Dt.30:6) that we need to reenter the garden land without dooming ourselves to eternal sin-sickness, evil, and injustice. Jesus’ person and work is still a substitution for us, but along the lines of his active, not passive, obedience. And Jesus is not the victim of the Father’s supposedly retributive justice, but rather the victorious agent of the Father’s restorative justice.