Disclaimer
This post is written for those who struggle with conflicting images of God. My entire web site, “Faith in Jesus,” offers sanctuary to those who struggle to iron out contradictions that Christianity has unfortunately maintained. Some of these contradictions are unavoidable, unfolding in history as a result of the necessary development of the Jewish people. Others arise as a result of institutionalized disbelief. These should be dismissed whenever possible. By keeping Jesus at the center of our thinking and our hearts, we can sail safely toward a life of grace that may irritate religious people but will continue to give faith, hope, and love to those who persevere.
Invisible Father and Visible Son
The conventional statement, like father, like son, is particularly true with Jesus. We could discover the Son by studying the Father. However, God exists outside of time and outside of our senses. The Old Testament prophets offered insights to God’s nature, but only incrementally. In order to know the Father well, we must know the Son. Once we do that, we discover that “God is love” (I John 4:8). The revelation is not that God has love, but that God is love. We are reminded that God desires mercy and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13). We hear that God loves his enemies, causing his sun to rise on the evil and the good, sending rain to the righteous and the unrighteous (Matthew 5:44-45). May we never forget these unqualified attributes. When the apostle James writes, “Mercy triumphs over judgement,” he expresses the very heart of God.
The title, “Like Son, Like Father,” reminds us that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Put differently, it assumes that “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). The perfect reliance of Jesus on his Father enables him to say, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Jesus does only what his Father does, and he says only what his Father tells him to say. To see Jesus is to have the clearest possible knowledge of what God is truly like.
A More Christlike God
In short, when we make Jesus our final authority on the nature of God, we discover a more Christlike God.[1] The advantage to giving the final say to the representation that Jesus provides is that we are forever set free from the illusory dichotomy between the judgmental Father and the merciful Son. On the contrary. We learn that the Son judges rightly and the Father pardons passionately—quite contrary to the common misunderstanding of the mission of the Son and the disposition of the Father.
Yes, Jesus came to judge—but not people. He says to his adversaries, the religious leaders of his day: “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set” (John 5:45). Jesus came to judge the true enemies of the Kingdom of heaven, not flesh and blood. He came to judge the “accuser of the brothers,” also known as Satan. In John he says, “Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out” (John 12:31). Later in John he says that he has judged and condemned the ruler of this world (again, referring to Satan, John 16:11).
Like Jesus, the Father has always been merciful and forgiving. The Psalms and Isaiah resound with examples. In one of David’s Psalms, written about 1,000 years before Jesus was born, we read,
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.(Psalm 103:11-13)
The distance between east and west expresses the complete forgiveness conferred on God’s people. In Isaiah, written about 500 years before Christ, we hear the glorious commitment that God forgives sins for his own sake:
“I, even I, am he who blots out
your transgressions, for my own sake,
and remembers your sins no more(Isaiah 43:25).
Note that nothing in these scriptures suggests that the forgiveness must wait until the Messiah appears.
The love and kindness ascribed to God in the Old Testament are made even more clear through the appearance of Jesus. We hear in Hebrews that God spoke in the past through the prophets but now “has spoken to us by his Son.” And then the scripture emphasizes just how closely Jesus represents his Father: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:1-3). Jesus, here, is the gold standard of a true knowledge of God’s character. His life and his teachings are the standard by which we measure every assertion about him or his Father. It is the standard that provides a more Christlike theology for us, helping us respectfully but deliberately discount attitudes that have been attributed to God that are truly not Christlike.
And what does that standard—that exact representation of the Father—express? Whatever was offered by the Father on a case-by-case basis in the Old Testament is now offered for all, unambiguously and undeniably through the Son: “But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6). The irony being that, whereas the Jewish leaders associated forgiveness with the Father but not with the Son, many Christians associate forgiveness with Jesus and not with the Father. Both groups underestimate both the will and the ability of the Godhead to offer forgiveness to all who would accept it.
The End of Penal Substitutionary Atonement
Anyone can apply the gold standard of Christ to his or her Bible readings, Christian books, and sermons. I offer only one application: as a correction to what is sometimes called the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement—the teaching that God was either so angry or so just (or both) that he had to punish someone before fully forgiving sinners.
Before proceeding, it’s helpful to remember C S Lewis’s comment on theories of atonement:
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. (Mere Christianity)
Not only does the comment place the most importance on the work of Christ instead of on the understanding of believers, but it also notes that there are other theories of atonement in addition to the one I’m compelled to hold up to the gold standard.
To many who are schooled in Evangelical settings, it may come as a surprise that the penal theory is not as self-evident as they may think. Such competing theories include seeing Jesus’ death as a ransom that purchased humanity back from Satanic enslavement.[2] Another theory sees Jesus’ death as a way of remaking (or recapitulating) the universe by re-experiencing the life of Adam but without sin.[3] Neither of these theories requires a Father who must punish someone. Both argue that it was important that Jesus die while his death had nothing to do with placating his Father’s anger and/or satisfying his Father’s justice.
What is called the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement or penal substitution is held by many Evangelicals and many other Protestants. I used to subscribe to it. I did so vigorously at times. For those trying to explain in a few sentences the importance of Jesus’ death, it is very convenient. It clinches the argument that people must believe in Jesus to be saved. After all, if he’s the one upon whom God poured all his wrath, it seems a foregone conclusion that he’s the only one who could save us. But there came a time when respecting God’s character struck me as far more important than convenience.
Later in life, I became convinced that primitive societies practiced human sacrifice under the delusion that they were pleasing a god while in reality they were creating a god that justified their scapegoating practice (Crucified: Who Sacrifices Jesus for Whom?). After several years of internal debates on the subject, the life and character Jesus won the day and became the way I understood the crucifixion.
The following definition of penal substitution is provided by a Protestant church but in no way is unique:
This is the belief that Christ paid the penalty (hence, penal) as a substitute (hence, substitutionary) for sinners. He died in our place. The penalty stems from God being angry with sin and sinners. His moral character demands that His anger be quenched in the punishment of sin. The substitutionary idea comes forward in the Old Testament sacrificial system where God’s people present animals as sacrifices to appease His wrath. The sacrifices finally find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Jesus was offered up to appease God. The result is that God’s wrath is fully satisfied in Jesus and turned away from those who believe.[4]
While this definition focuses on God’s anger, other definitions focus on God’s justice. Of course, we trust that God is both angry with those who deliberately injure others and is concerned with justice. The problem is not with such generalizations but with the dark turn they take. Anger becomes bloodthirsty and justice no longer justifies and rescues but instead accuses and punishes. Whether angry or extremely just, such a divinity requires some sort of sacrifice prior to extending forgiveness.
What concerns me is perhaps not with academics who might make many fine distinctions on the meaning of “God the Father’s wrath.”[5] Rather it is with how the character of God emerges in church sermons, Christian discussions about salvation, and, worse, attempts at evangelizing.I can (and do) say Jesus is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world without suggesting that God has found the perfect victim to punish. Others, though, quote the same verse and explain that God is so holy that he cannot be in the presence of sin. His justice, they argue, requires a death. That sacrificial interpretation means he cannot be in the presence of sinners. In order to save them, he must punish his perfect Son to expiate his holy wrath, making God able afterwards to be at peace with and forgiving toward sinners.
As I said, there are many nuances one could add to this penal theory. One stubborn element that cannot be nuanced away is that God must punish someone by death. Another element is that the truly horrible suffering caused by sin (think of the holocaust or other genocides) makes God so angry that the anger must destroy the sin. Unfortunately, it cannot destroy the sin without also destroying the sinner, unless it destroys the sin in God’s Son. In addition, it is not only the Hitlers, Stalins and other extremists who must be destroyed but the entire human race because everyone is to some extent soiled by sin. Finally, in one of its worse forms, penal substitution runs something like this: God loves us so much that he gets so angry when we hurt ourselves that he must do something drastic to separate us from our sin, leading to killing his Son. This is tantamount to me being so alarmed that my six-year old son has picked up a rattle snake that I inadvertently kill his brother while destroying the snake. As distorted as this sounds, the logic leaks through various statements Christians make, even while they may (and often do) add, “But of course, God is love.”[6]
When we look at Jesus—the exact representation of his Father—we find he had no problem whatsoever enjoying the company of sinners (outside of the ones who wanted to kill him). He freely forgave those who sought his mercy. He didn’t have to sacrifice anyone or anything to express this forgiveness. It was in his nature to forgive. He even forgave those who were killing him, even before they admitted they were wrong.
By allowing Jesus to define his Father for us, we know the too-holy-and-too-angry-to-forgive theory is wrong. If the Son of God, bound up in human flesh, never hesitated to seek out sinners, how much more does the purely spiritual and impervious Father seek them? From the beginning of scriptures, God has been close to the humble and the broken-hearted. He is just like his Son. He resists the proud and welcomes the humble, including the children. He says, with Jesus, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” How do we know he says it? Because Jesus explained to his disciples, “whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say” (John 12:50).
Why then did Jesus die and what did that death accomplish? Of course none of us knows the answer in full. We certainly are invited to speculate as long as we don’t demonize the Father. Instead of thinking that God is so holy he cannot be in the presence of sinners, it’s more likely that sinners cannot be at peace in the presence of God. It’s our fear, not his impatience or wrath, that separates us. This is what we see in Peter, writ small, when he encounters Jesus. No sooner than Jesus provides a miraculous catch of fish than Peter exclaims, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). So much more would a sinner shun the presence of the Father in all his power and glory. While Jesus is the lamb slain before the beginning of the world, he had to perform that sacrifice in space and time to make clear to all peoples, powers, and principalities the depth of the love and forgiveness of our Father.
We read in Isaiah 53 that the sufferings of Jesus addressed our sicknesses and our sins. One can read these passages in quite contrary ways. On one hand, as penal atonement would have it, the Father needed humans to suffer sickness and sin unless he could find another being to do the suffering. On the other hand, as non-punitive redemption would have it, Jesus took not God’s punishment but Satan’s punishment off the shoulders of the human race, bore sickness and sin to the point of death and thereby liberated from their grip all who believe in him. We read in Romans 6 and 2 Corinthians 5 that when Jesus died, we died with him. The problem was never with God’s ability to love us or to forgive us. The problem was that humanity was a poisoned race—ill by an instinctive absence of faith in God—and that race needed to be ended. Jesus was the only vehicle through which humanity could both be put to death and raised in him as a new race. He was the last Adam and a new man (1 Corinthians 15:45-48).
We don’t worship a God who designs a punishment that is worse than the crime, nor do we bow down to an angry being who needs to vent anger before showing us kindness. We worship the Lord Jesus who did the truly tough work that only he could do. A human, a divinely begotten Son, who followed his Father from the crib to the grave. He took Adam’s race to the cross in order to bequeath upon humanity a new identity. We do well to appreciate that achievement.
§ Footnotes §
[1] The heading is taken from Bradley Jersak’s book, A More Christlike God: a More Beautiful Gospel (2015, Plain Truth Ministries). This book focuses on the suffering of Christ as a key to understanding God as one who allows himself to suffer as a means of loving his creation back to himself, as my review of it states.
[2] See these two scriptures for starters: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45) and “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people” (1 Timothy 2:5-6). “Ransom theory of atonement” in Wikipedia provides a good summary of the theory and some objections lodged against it.
[3] “Recapitulation theory of atonement” in Wikipedia, again, provides a good summary of the theory, along with copious citations. Interestingly, both the ransom and the recapitulation theories came long before the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.
[4] The quotation is from a Canadian Trinity Bible Church.
For comparison, here’s a paragraph from the current Wikipedia article on the topic:
The penal substitution theory teaches that Jesus suffered the penalty due, according to God the Father's wrath for humanity's sins. The St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology states the definition as, “Jesus satisfies the righteousness of God by suffering the penalty for sin in our place, that we might participate in his righteousness”, while recognising that there is a wide range of views within that definition. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_substitution)
[5] For example, N.T. Wright’s version. It states that the problem is not with the penal-substitutionary aspect but with the narrative that assigns erroneous motivation to the Father. The link to the video is cued up to the beginning of his response:
It's not that the idea of penal substitution is wrong, it's that if you put it in the wrong narrative, you actually mess it up. You falsify it and the way I say it is that we have Platonized our eschatology—that is we've thought in terms of our souls going to heaven. Therefore, we have moralized our anthropology—instead of thinking in terms of the human vocation to be God's image bearers in his world, we've simply seen being human as God setting us a moral examination which we all fail. And therefore, we have paganized our soteriology, because it's in the ancient pagan world that you find gods who are cross with somebody and so demand that somebody else gets killed. . . . So what you've got in the New Testament instead is not about how does my soul get to heaven even though I'm sinful. It's about how will God come and dwell with us even though we are sinful. And that's the question to which the tabernacle in the wilderness and its whole attendant Levitical ceremonies in the book of Leviticus . . . they are the initial answer to that that God wants to come and dwell in the midst of his people even though they're sinful. And that the blood of the sacrifices is nothing to do with those animals being killed as a punishment in place of the worshippers. But it's the release of the blood which then acts as the cleansing agent because the blood is the life and God has given this life because what's keeping God and humans apart is death. (~21 in the talk, "Is Penal Substitution Biblical? NT Wright Responds")
One may have to read Wright’s book to follow all the lines of his argument, but it’s clear that, in stating, “we have paganized our soteriology,” he eschews the pagan imagination of a god who is so angry or so just that he demands that somebody get killed.
[6] Those interested in the debate may appreciate “Monster God Debate” between Brian Zahnd and Michael Brown. Zahnd rejects the penal substitutionary atonement theory, as do I. Brown celebrates the theory, leaning more heavily on Old Testament scriptures and a more fundamentalist hermeneutic.
The comments below the video exhibit the variety of attitudes and values that attend the support and renunciation of the penal theory. One popular comment states, “I grew up in a Christian home, went to Christian schools my whole life, I have a degree in Biblical Studies, and yet watching this I feel like I have only just heard the Gospel. What Brian Zahnd is saying about God is breaking my heart in the most awesome way.” A contrasting comment states, “God is Amazing in his vast ability to love us although he is also a God of wrath and justice (the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah). We have all wronged him by breaking his laws and Justly deserve his wrath. And yet he is merciful through the payment of Jesus on the cross to give us a way back to him. (If we receive it) And we show him love in return by our gratitude and obedience. God is Good! Amazing Grace! Amazing love!” Those two comments alone show the significant divide in atonement theories, suggesting once again the wisdom of Lewis’ statement that the one point of agreement is that the death of Jesus “does work”—something to always keep in mind.