My goodness, straight into theology! I'm not a theology wonk myself, but I gather what Piper is arguing here is called 'the penal substitution' theory of the atonement. My own testimony is that when God started to move dramatically in my life and that of my family in 2007, and I found He wanted to speak to me about everything at any time we settled down together to do so, then two important themes keep recurring which the Spirit has been urgent to teach me about. One of those has been: who God is. And He has changed my mind about what He was doing through the Cross. I have repented, and He has healed me, from thinking of my Father as a distant, exacting figure who is determined to punish me for my sins - and from thinking of Jesus as more loving and Who protects me from getting punished by God. Later, after I had written down in my journal what God was teaching me instead, my better-theologically-read son Daniel explained the various theories of the atonement to me; and God arranged for me to 'chance upon' the repudiation of the 'the penal substitution' theory in one Christian teacher after another, from all over the family of traditions. I certainly took heart to discover that Steve Chalke has 'come out' as an evangelical who no longer holds with this doctrine - occasioning a big debate in the Evangelical Alliance as to whether he could still be accepted as a sound evangelical!
The trouble with what Piper writes, is that it presumes to place conditions around God, to subject Him to his theological rules as to how God must act to be both loving and just. Piper - probably as a consequence - sees God with a mind deeply trained by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Piper has trapped himself, and he traps God, in zero-sum, reward-and-punishment, reasoning - what Paul calls "the law of sin and death". Remember, Paul experiences being free from that (Romans 8:2) and daringly teaches that without law, questions about sin don't arise (Romans 7:8).
The offence of the Cross is that God forgives, unconditionally. No 'ifs' and 'buts'. Man's reason and his hard-wiring to reward and punishment can't compute this. Therefore, theologians developed this big qualification around God's forgiveness: He was still actually doing the necessary punishing - to Jesus; and we get back into His favour with a kind of 'pass card' provided we are go under Jesus' protection. If you think for a moment, you will see that this isn't really forgiveness. This isn't 'remembering their sins no more', or casting them from Him 'as far as the east is from the west'. It isn't really divine love.
But what about the 'wrath of God'? I have woefully misunderstood that, confusing it with human emotions. Whatever His wrath means, we know that love is His abiding and defining attribute - they aren't opposites. God doesn't stop loving, to be wrathful. Clearly, like God's love itself, his wrath lies outside all categories of human experience. The analogy He has taught me comes from His natural order. If I am walking along a cliff and fall off, I will experience violent consequences because of gravity. Nature isn't angry with me, gravity isn't vengeful. But I am being punished for my action. If you're fortunate to have had the time to learn Hebrew, as I have, then going to some of the original words is very helpful. The word commonly used (eg Exodus 20:5) is p-q-d. Its wide range of meaning covers both positive and negative aspects, unlike the wholly negative meaning of 'punish'.
Piper makes a lot of the word: 'propitiation'. The Greek is ilasmos, which generally means some action to appease, reconcile, propitiate. It's a huge jump for Piper to say it means 'the removal of God's wrath by providing a substitute'. I promise you: the word simply doesn't! The underlying Hebrew is helpful, again. Jews picked ilasmos to translate kippur (as in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). That word described the cover of the ark - the 'mercy seat'.
To pull all this together, and it's already got too long, God isn't divided. He is One. He wasn't punishing Jesus - or Himself. He was moved only by love and mercy, like He always has been. What was unique about what He did on the Cross is that it 'draws all men to God' (John 12:32). Somehow, mysteriously, as all believers know, it works. I am face to face and unashamed with my Heavenly Father, and nothing now separates me from Him - not even my sins.
Surely the key thing is the unity of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christ the victim is one with the Father. With an understanding of the Trinity, then we don't need to worry so much about the word 'punishment', as God has in fact taken it upon himself. It's when Father and Son start to become divided that all the problems come in. And this is a common tendency among Christians who somehow see Christ as their 'pal': they lose the awe and reverence due to him as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. Then it's an easy step to lose the understanding of the Trinity itself. The Catechism states in paragraph 1992: 'Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ who offered himself on the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the instrument of atonement for the sins of all men.' and in paragraph 433: 'The name of the Saviour God was invoked only once in the year by the high priest in atonement for the sins of Israel, after he had sprinkled the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies with the sacrificial blood. The mercy seat was the place of God's presence. When St. Paul speaks of Jesus whom "God put forward as an expiation by his blood", he means that in Christ's humanity "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."'
ReplyDeleteUh..Oh.."Piper's soteriology is Calvinist and his ecclesiology is Baptist.He affirms the distinctively Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which includes "unconditional reprobation" or damnation as a corollary to the Augustinian doctrine of unconditional election, and he subscribes to the Leibnizian view that God decreed this universe to be the best of all possible universes".
ReplyDeleteThink I'll stick to Bart D Ehrmann thanks.....
I agree - we bandy about words like wrath and think of them in human terms which leads us into trouble.
ReplyDeleteRos Brown (at one time a member of our church and now a canon at Durham Cathedral) pointed out that a lot of our theology is derived subliminally from our Hymnody and Townend's 'In Christ Alone' talk of 'the wrath of God was satisfied' is propagating this falacy.