GRACE FOR AN ANGRY WORLD

I’m back. Having spent much of the past couple of months traveling—more on that in subsequent posts—I’ve had the chance to return to the topic I’ve been considering off and on for some time: atonement. The subtext of this discussion is the way that theology often claims to be about one thing but is in fact about another. With that in mind. . .

What theology is about is not always obvious. Often, it seems that theological arguments are a parlor game played by those in the know—those who know how to talk theology. Theologies are in this sense languages (on this, see George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 1984). They have rules, grammars.  They even have grammar police who take it as their proper role to ensure that the rules are followed, that theological subject and verb agree, that theological commas and semicolons are in their proper place, and that no one ever says the theological equivalent of “ain’t.” 

The grammar of my own tradition requires above all that theologies be “biblical.” By “biblical” it doesn’t mean what the Bible says exactly. After all, the Bible, a book of books written over a long period of time, says many things. It means the Bible as read through the lens of theological tradition—a mixture of biblical vocabulary, as it were, and theological syntax. What this means, practically speaking, is that theological arguments in this tradition take the shape of arguments about the Bible, even when they are not actually about the Bible. In talking about the Bible, theologians are often talking about something else—something happening in the world in which they live. 

Take for example the discussion among evangelical churches about gender roles. A little background may be helpful here. The gender argument started because of my mother. Well, not only my mother but yours, too, or, if you are younger than me, your grandmothers. In its present form, the gender argument dates to World War II. With so many men fighting abroad, women were asked to take on roles that had not previously been open to them. My mother, a grade-school teacher, was asked to drive school bus. She turned out to be a competent and savvy bus driver. She knew not only how to manage a stick shift but how to manage kids. She took this role not because she was trying to start a gender revolution but to help where she could in war time. But by helping out in this way, she raised the obvious question: what makes driving a bus a male role? What about driving buses is marked for gender?

Nothing, as it turns out.  There is nothing about driving a bus that requires maleness. Nor, as it turned out, was there anything about other jobs that had been considered inherently the province of men: jobs like running a company. Or running a country. Or running a church. But wait, someone might say, isn’t that last different? Many in the church claimed it was. It’s okay, they said, for women to run General Motors but a woman should not run a church. To do so goes against the express command of God.

Was this just the latent patriarchy of the church expressing itself? No, said these church leaders. It’s not a matter of opinion. Nor a matter of competence. Women can do church leaderly things. They can preach. They can hold their own on the elder board. It’s not a matter of what they can do; it’s a matter of what they may do. And that we do not decide; that the Bible decides. The theological grammar kicks in. You argue about one thing by arguing about another.

Once the issue was raised, a long biblical-theological argument ensued. Study committee after study committee in my own denomination, and probably in others. Speeches on the floors of synods about what the Bible said and didn’t say. Lots and lots of talk about the Bible, but all this was not about the Bible. Not really. It was about patriarchy. It was a way for churches to push back against feminism. And—this is the point—to do so not by arguing for patriarchy or against feminism but about the Bible. The theological grammar served to mask the real argument.

This procedure gives the illusion of a certain disinterested objectivity: we are not trying to do anything to or for women; we are just the following the rules laid out for us by the Bible. We are simply being obedient to the Word of God. But the whole set-up, the procedure for deciding such things, the underlying way of using the Bible, all of these are constructed as ways to maintain control. They may claim to be about the Bible, but they are in fact about patriarchy. About hanging on to the status quo.

This is a rather elaborate way for me to return to the topic that I have been raising in this blog periodically over the past several months, penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). PSA, not to put too fine a point on it, is a reprehensible notion about how who God is and how God works. According to the dictates of PSA, God requires blood from sinners. And we are all sinners, all guilty. The PSA requirement that God punish sin is quite implacable. God cannot do otherwise. Which is odd, is it not? We can do otherwise and often do. We can decide not to punish someone who has done us wrong and often do, but according to PSA God cannot. Were God to pass over sin, God would not be God. Someone must pay for the sins of the world. That someone is Jesus. Well, not just Jesus, but Jesus and those sinners who don’t believe.

Like complementarianism in the gender debate, PSA claims to be biblical. You may not like PSA, its advocates say, but it’s in the Bible. It’s what the Bible teaches. Except it’s not. When its advocates go looking for PSA, they first look to the Old Testament sacrificial system. They assume that Old Testament sacrifice is transactional: the animal dies in the place of the person who offers the sacrifice. Only, that’s not how it works. Close readers of the Old Testament sacrificial system have come to the conclusion that Old Testament sacrifice is not substitutionary. On this, see the massive study of Jacob Milgrom on Leviticus in the Anchor Bible series (3 volumes, 1991, 2000, and 2000) and, recently and from a Reformed theological perspective, Andrew Rillera in his The Lamb of the Free (2024).

PSA advocates go next to the language of the New Testament: Jesus suffered for us, died for us, shed his blood for us. All true, but again, it doesn’t add up to penal substitutionary atonement. As Rillera is fond of saying, it’s not that Jesus died instead of us (substitution) but that Jesus died ahead of us (participation). In his death, we also die; in his rising, we also rise. None of this is new. Many have said it before me, beginning with Albert Schweitzer and including massively the contemporary conservative New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright. Once you stop reading the Bible in the PSA way, the Bible opens up a very different perspective on God and grace.

But if PSA is not really biblical, what’s it about? The answer quite evidently is justice—a particular view of justice. It’s justice as punishment. Justice as getting even. Balancing the scales. Pain for pain. An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth. If God demands this sort of justice, shouldn’t we also do so? It comes naturally to us. Left to ourselves, we believe in this sort of justice. We want our enemies to suffer. We want pay-back for what we have suffered. 

It’s the current thing. We now have a president who believes in this sort of justice. Since returning to office, he has been relentlessly pursuing those he perceives as his enemies. And not just to make them suffer, but to make them suffer more than he suffered. This is not accidental. This president is heavily supported by people who believe in PSA. 

We make God in our image. The PSA God demands justice. Justice regardless of the extent our own personal involvement in sinning against God’s commands. Just by being a member of a fallen race, we are liable to the fires of hell for all eternity. This is not actually justice in any proper sense; this is vengeance. This is rage. And if we are to get away from this vengeance, we do so only if God’s wrath can wear itself out on the back of someone else, that someone being Jesus. In PSA the cross of Jesus is put there not by the Romans but by the Father who demands justice.

These beliefs have consequences. If you believe that this sort of justice is of God, you will tend to believe that we too should practice this sort of justice. The passion in America for punishment for those who are different from us is rooted in the idea that ultimately God is not love—love is soft, weak—but God is wrath. God punishes. God stokes the fires of hell. And, thus, so should we.

It’s this I see in PSA. I have heard pastors lamenting out loud that we have gone soft on hell, as if more hell is theologically desirable. A subtext of the debate about same sex marriage is the notion that by laying down the law those taking a hard line on same sex marriage save people from God’s wrath. The soft liberal stance toward same sex marriage is the ultimate betrayal, I’ve heard said more than once. By accommodating sin now, people in these relationships were exposing themselves to the fires of hell. If you serve a God of wrath, you can never be too careful.

But the Bible, to the bewilderment of God’s own people, often steps in the opposite direction. Where we would expect PSA-style justice, punishment, we get instead grace and love. We have been taught to read the Bible in the PSA style, balancing God’s grace against God’s wrath. But when the Bible is read naively, God seems somehow unbalanced: grace and love where we would expect wrath. 

It’s for this reason I love Marilynne Robinson’s reading of Genesis (2024). Her reading, quite innocent of scholarship but savvy about how stories are told, notices what others do not notice: that God seems quite indulgent of his creatures. When Adam breaks the one commandment God gives him, God cannot bring himself to curse Adam. Instead, he curses the ground. And when Cain murders Abel, God does not punish Cain with death, as one might expect, but only exiles him and then reluctantly. And when Cain worries that he will be exposed to violence, God gives him a protective mark. The one time God does send death and destruction on the earth in the form of a flood, he comes to regret doing so and promises he will not do it again. This is a God who has gone soft on punishment.

When we turn from Genesis to the New Testament, to the only place in the New Testament that uses the Greek word for atonement, hilasmos, we meet the same God. The text, often dismissed by theologians (saying whatever the text means, it can’t mean that) is 1 John 2:2 (see also 1 John 4:10). It reads, leaving the crucial word untranslated: “He [Jesus] is hilasmos for the sake of our sins, and not for our sins alone but for sins of the whole world [Greek: cosmos].”

Long debates have ensued about the meaning of hilamos in this text. The debates often contrast abstract theological concepts like propitiation (appeasing God) and expiation (making satisfaction for sin). But hilamos, used only here in the New Testament (1 John 2:2 and 4:10), is not an abstraction in this case. It carries with it no “theory of atonement.” It presents a picture. The picture is based on the ritual of the Day of Atonement (in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, “the day of hilasmos,” Leviticus 25:9). 

In the high drama of the ritual described in Leviticus 16, the high priest enters the place where Yhwh, the God of Israel, is symbolically—no, not symbolically but spiritually and actually—is enthroned on the ark of the covenant. The high priest takes incense with him to obscure the sight of the divine holiness. He takes the blood of a bull as purification for himself and his house—the priests. This blood he sprinkles on the “place of hilasmos,” the hilastērion. He then takes the blood of a goat—one of two goats—and does the same. By doing so, he “rids the sanctuary of the impurities and transgressions—all the sins—of the people of Israel” (Leviticus 16:16). When the sanctuary has been thus cleansed, he takes the second goat—the live goat—and laying his hands on its head, he confesses over it the sins of the people. This goat is led into the wilderness, where laden with the sins of the people, it is set free.

It’s this entire picture that the writer of 1 John seems to have in mind. For the epistle writer, the high priest is Jesus. The blood is his blood. The sanctuary is no longer the tent of Leviticus 16 nor the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem but the heavenly realm itself. There Jesus stands before the Father—not Jesus on the cross but the risen and ascended Lord—to cleanse heaven itself of our sins and wrongs. This picture of Jesus as the heavenly high priest must have had a certain currency in the early church. We find the same picture in the letter to the Hebrews (see Hebrews 9).

The writer, drawing on two distinct metaphors, presents Jesus as first as our advocate (paraclete), the one who prays for us (1 John 2:1), and then as our high priest (1 John 2:2), the one who ritually purifies us. What’s more, the direction of love and grace in all this is the same as it is in Genesis. God cannot do otherwise, for as the epistle writer says, using hilasmos for the second time, 

. . . God is love; God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son a hilasmos for our sins.” (1 John 4:8b-10)

This stands PSA on its head. Instead of the death of Jesus functioning as an offering to satisfy the justice of God, in which case it’s God who must be satisfied, it’s God who offers Jesus to us as as our high priest, as our paraclete and hilasmos. In PSA, God cannot do otherwise because God requires by God’s own nature punishment for sin; in 1 John, God cannot do otherwise because God is love. 

This perhaps is enough—this picture that opens up on the grace of heaven—but astoundingly there is more. At the end of the sentence the epistle adds another clause, “Jesus is the hilasmos for our sins, but not just for ours alone but for the sins of the whole cosmos.” The writer throws off this last clause as it were nothing at all. But it’s not nothing. It’s everything. However you read the clause, it says that the divine intention is not just for those to whom he is writing, even if we include that company all of us who still read the New Testament and believe in Jesus. The divine intention extends to the whole world, the entire cosmos, as the writer has it. As the old hymn has it, “There is a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” 

Thus, as the New Testament draws towards a conclusion, it seems to want to say that the divine project is not saving just Israel or Israel and the church but everyone, and not just everyone but the cosmos itself. We in our theology should do no less.

And if we did in our theology follow the writer of 1 John rather than PSA, how might that change how we approach others in our world. If God’s justice bends towards love, might ours also? 

Clay