Participation
not Substitution
Fr.
Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
April
2019
My second son David was very
precocious. He occasionally asked very hard questions. When he was about
nine, he said, “Why did God have to kill off his Son Jesus to pay for our sins?
Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been
bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we say we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he
expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice? Punishing someone
for another person’s wrongs is just unfair.”
He was reacting to how he had heard
the atonement explained in Church: God
is Holy and by his very nature must punish sin.
So he sent his only Son to bear the punishment deserved by others. The Evangelical “Alpha Course” asks “Why did
Jesus have to die?” and answers, “to pay for the sins of those who have faith
in him.”
This idea of substituted punishment
is portrayed as a biblical idea, and its supporters trot out plenty of proof
texts from the Bible that supposedly teach it.
But nowhere is it taught as such in the Bible. The closest the Bible gets to it are phrases
like “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor 15:3) and “he bore our sins in his body
on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24). But these
can simply mean Jesus suffered as a result of the sinful way we treated him, or
as a way to help us out of our sinful ways through his example and love,
without even a whiff of a bloodthirsty Deity demanding punishment inflicted on
someone, anyone.
Though the early Church defined an orthodox and
catholic doctrine of who Christ is (“Christology”), it never defined clearly
what exactly it is that Jesus did for us in his death and resurrection
(“soteriology.”)
St. Paul gives us more than a dozen
vivid images to describe what Christ did: he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased
us back out of slavery, he reconciled
us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of
Law, he transformed us like in the
Greek myth of metamorphosis. Paul is searching for the right image,
drawing them from a wide range of human life, but clearly is not completely
satisfied with any single one of them.
Over the ages, the Church has
explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five
centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a
victor: on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on
Easter beat them all. Once feudalism had become the main social
arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in
social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity
insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never
repay their debt of honor to such a superior. In the High Middle Ages,
secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example
Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the
more churchy ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view,
directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, the sacrifice
of the Mass as they understood it, directly transformative on those who not
only partook it, but merely gazed upon it in reverence. It was only
during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual, political
economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining
atonement as substitutionary punishment.
How Christ on the Cross frees us from and
heals us of sin is deep mystery, far more complex than this wrongheaded but
simple idea of a blood-thirsty Deity’s transactional evening of scores. Christ had to die because Christ was a human
being, and human beings die. We suffer
from unjust death all the time. The
cross is part of the incarnation, God taking on human flesh and becoming one of
us. The Collect for the First Sunday of
Christmas expresses it this way: “O God,
who wonderfully created us in your own image and yet more wonderfully restored
… the dignity of human nature… through your Son Jesus Christ: Grant that as he
came to share our humanity so may we share the life of his divinity…”
Paul
in the letter to Romans is pretty explicit:
Christ’s cross saves us through participation, not substitution. He teaches that when we have faith in Jesus,
we participate in his death on the cross
through baptism and turning aside from sin, and also participate in Christ’s
risen life. He expresses it thus in the
passage that provides much of the text for the great Easter Canticle “Christ
our Passover has been sacrificed for us”:
“How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in such a death as his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:2-11).
The
heart of the matter, I believe, is incarnation: God taking on human flesh in
Jesus, and becoming one of us. God made
flesh in Jesus had to die as all of us have to die. He had to suffer all the horrors that the
rest of us face, because he lived and died as one of us. The Romans dished out unjust torture and death
to many, as have all nations at various times.
And Jesus would not let the threat of this deter him from proclaiming
the Reign of God. And so he suffered and
died. And God on the Cross calls us too
to take up the Cross and follow him.
The
victory of Jesus over horror, suffering, and death opens the way for us to “newness
of life,” communion with God and each other.
It turns aside meaninglessness and despair. As we live in Jesus, we suffer with him, and
we are also raised with him.
As
we prepare for Holy Week and the Great Fifty Days of Easter, with all their
talk of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how this was for our sake, let us
remember to place these stories, texts, and doctrines in a broader context than
one that assumes wrongly that God demands violence and suffering to make things
right.
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