Atonement is the term that has come to be widely used to denote the substitutionary work of Christ which culminated in the sacrifice of Calvary. The term occurs frequently in the A.V. of the Old Testament as the rendering of the Hebrew root kaphar but only once in the New Testament (Rom. 5:11) where it refers to the reconciliation. The term itself is not adequate to express what is involved in Christ's vicarious work. In fact, no one term can express the manifold aspects from which, according to Scripture, this work of Christ must be viewed. Atonement, however, when understood in the way that usage has determined, is sufficiently inclusive to serve as a general designation.
I. The Source. Any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected from the outset if it does not take account of the fact that the atonement is the provision of God's love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for oar sins" (I John 4:10; cf. Rom. 5:8; 8:32; Eph. 2:4, 5; I John 4:9). The title "God" in these texts refers specifically to God the Father. So it is to the initiative of the Father's love that our attention is drawn when we think of the fountain from which the atonement emanates. And all that has been achieved by Christ's vicarious undertaking must always be subordinated to the design and purpose of the Father's love. This is the orientation which the classic exponents of Reformed doctrine have always recognized, and it is a caricature of their position to suppose that they represented the love and compassion of the Father as constrained by the sacrifice of Christ.
In this fact that the love of God is the spring from which the atonement flows we encounter an ultimate of revelation and of human thought. It is the marvel that evokes wonder, adoration, and praise. It is a love that arises from the unsearchable riches of God's goodness. But though an ultimate of revelation, the Scripture not only permits but requires further characterization of this love. The love of God is differentiating in respect of its objects. It is the love of God the Father that Paul has in view when he speaks of Him who "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32). But it is within the orbit defined by Romans 8:29 that this love must be understood, and the latter text speaks of distinguishing love that predestinates to a determinate end — conformity to the image of his Son. Ephesians 1:4, 5 is to the same effect. God chose a people in Christ and in love predestinated them unto adoption through Jesus Christ. It would annul the witness of Scripture if we ignored the differentiation which the love of God institutes and failed to construe the atonement as the provision of this distinguishing love and as that which secures the design of God's electing grace.
II. The Necessity. The love of God is the cause of the atonement. But why did the love of God take this way of realizing its end? This is the question of the reason as distinguished from the cause. Notable theologians in the history of the church have taken the position that there was no absolute reason, that God could have saved men by other means than by the blood-shedding of His own Son, that, since God is omnipotent and sovereign, other ways of forgiving sin were available to Him. But God was pleased to adopt this method because the greatest number of advantages and blessings accrued from it. God could have redeemed men without the shedding of blood, but He freely chose not to and thereby He magnifies the glory of His grace and enhances the precise character of the salvation bestowed (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas Goodwin, John Ball, Thomas Blake).
It might appear that this view does honor to the omnipotence, sovereignty, and grace of God and, also, that to posit more would be presumptuous on our part and beyond the warrant of Scripture. Is it not the limit of our thought to say that "without the shedding of blood" (Heb. 9:22) there is actually no remission and be satisfied with that datum? There are, however, certain things God cannot do. "He cannot deny himself" (II Tim. 2:13) and it is "impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18). The only question is: are there exigencies arising from the character and perfections of God which make it intrinsically necessary that redemption should be accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God? It should be understood that it was not necessary for God to redeem men. The purpose to redeem is of the free and sovereign exercise of His love. But having purposed to redeem, was the only alternative the blood-shedding of His own Son as the way of securing that redemption? There appear to be good reasons for an affirmative answer.
1. Salvation requires not only the forgiveness of sin but also justification. And justification, adequate to the situation in which lost mankind is, demands a righteousness such as belongs to no other than the incarnate Son of God, a righteousness undefiled and undefilable, a righteousness with divine property and quality (cf. Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 22; 10:3; II Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9). It is the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19). But only the Son of God. incarnate, fulfilling to the full extent the commitments of the Father's will, could have provided such a righteousness. A concept of salvation bereft of the justification which this righteousness imparts is an abstraction of which Scripture knows nothing.
2. Sin is the contradiction of God and he must react against it with holy wrath. Wherever sin is, the wrath of God rests upon it (cf. Rom. 1:18). Otherwise God would be denying Himself, particularly His holiness, justice, and truth. But wrath must be removed if we are to enjoy the favor of God which salvation implies. And the only provision for the removal of wrath is propitiation. This is surely the import of Romans 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ a propitiation to declare His righteousness, that He might he just and the justifier of the ungodly.
3. The cross of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God (cf. Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9, 10). But would it be a supreme demonstration of love if the end secured by it could have been achieved without it? Would it be love to secure the end by such expenditure as the agony of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Calvary for God's own well-beloved and only-begotten Son if the result could have been attained by less costly means? In that event would it not have been love without wisdom? In this we cannot suppress the significance of our Lord's prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). If it had been possible for the cup to pass from him, his prayer would surely have been answered. It is when the indispensable exigencies fulfilled by Jesus' suffering unto death are properly assessed that we can see the marvel of God's love in the ordeal of Calvary. So great was the Father's love to lost men that He decreed their redemption even though the cost was nought less than the accursed tree. When Calvary is viewed in this light. then the love manifested not only takes on meaning but fills us with adoring amazement. Truly this is love.
Those who think that in pursuance of God's saving purpose the cross was not intrinsically necessary are, in reality, not dealing with the hypothetical necessity of the atonement but with a hypothetical salvation. For, on their own admission, they are not saying that the actual salvation designed and bestowed could have been enjoyed without Christ but only salvation of lesser character and glory. But of such salvation the Scripture knows nothing and no good purpose can be served by an imaginary hypothesis.
III. Nature. The nature of the atonement is concerned with the ways in which the Scripture characterizes Christ's vicarious undertakings and accomplishments. The most basic and inclusive of these categories is obedience. And there are four categories that are more specific — sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption.
A. Obedience. Obedience does not define for us the specific character of the other categories but it does point us to the capacity in which Christ discharges all phases of his atoning work. No passage in Scripture provides more instruction on our topic than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is in the capacity of Servant that the person in view is introduced and it is in the same capacity he executes His expiatory function (Isa. 52:13, 15; 53:11). The title "Servant" derives its meaning from the fact that He is the Lord's Servant, not the Servant of men (cf. Isa. 42:1, 19; 52:13). He is the Father's Servant and this implies subjection to and fulfillment of the Father's will. Servant defines His commitment, and obedience the execution. Psalm 40:7, 8 points in the same direction. Our Lord Himself confirms what the Old Testament foretold. "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 6:38; cf. 4:34; 10:17, 18). The pivotal events of redemptive accomplishment He performed in pursuance of the Father's commandment and in the exercise of messianic authority. Paul's witness is to the same effect as that of the Old Testament and of Jesus Himself. Most important is Philippians 2:7, 8. For this text in respect of the capacity in which Jesus acted attaches itself to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and represents the climactic event of Jesus' commitment, the death of the cross, as an act of obedience. And Romans 5:19 expresses that it is by the obedience of Christ that many are constituted righteous. This evidence shows that our thought respecting the nature of the atonement is not biblically conditioned unless it is governed by the concept of the obedience of Christ in His capacity as the Servant fulfilling the Father's commission.
We must not view this obedience mechanically or quantitatively. It did not consist simply in the sum-total of formal acts of obedience. Obedience springs from the dispositional complex of motive, intention, direction, and purpose. And since our Lord was truly human and fulfilled the Father's will in human nature, we must appreciate the progression in knowledge, understanding, resolution, and will which was necessary to and came to expression in the discharge of the Father's will in its increasing demands upon Him until these demands reached their climax in the death upon the cross. This explains the word in Hebrews 5:8 that "he learned obedience from the things which he suffered." At no point was He disobedient. But the demands of obedience were so expansive and progressively exacting that he had to learn in the furnace of trial, temptation, and suffering. Since His obedience thus attained to the perfection and completeness required for the discharge of His commitments to the fullest extent of their demands, He was made perfect as the captain of salvation (Heb. 2:10) and "being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). This is but saying that it was by obedience that he accomplished the salvation of the many sons who are to be brought to glory, and we see how integral to salvation secured is the obedience of Christ.
B. Sacrifice. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament to show that Christ's giving of Himself is to be construed in terms of sacrificial offering (I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 23, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14, 26). And it is not only these express statements which support the thesis but also references which can only be interpreted in terms of the altar of sacrifice (cf., e.g., Heb. 13: 1-l3). The notion of sacrifice entertained by these New Testament writers is that derived from the Old Testament, for the allusions to the sacrificial ritual of the levitical economy make it apparent that the latter provided the type in terms of which the sacrifice of Christ was to be interpreted. The Old Testament sacrifices were expiatory of guilt. This is particulary true of the sin-offerings, and these are specifically in view in some of the New Testament passages (cf. Heb. 9:6-15, 23, 24; l3:1-13). The idea of expiation is the removal of the liability accruing from sin. Sacrifice is the provision whereby this liability is removed — it is the substitutive endurance of penalty and transference of liability from the offerer to the sacrifice.
The Old Testament sacrifices were truly typological of the sacrifice of Christ. Isaiah 53:10 expressly applies to the self-sacrifice of the Servant what was figuratively represented by the trespass-offering, and in New Testament passages, as indicated above, the levitical offerings provide the analogy after which Christ's sacrifice is to be understood. But of more significance is the fact that the sacrifice of Christ is the archetype after which they were patterned — they were patterns of the things in the heavens and only figures of the true (Heb. 9:23, 24). Christ's offering is the heavenly exemplar. This is additional confirmation that what was signified in shadow by the ritual offerings, namely expiation, was transcendently and really true in the sacrifice of Christ. The shadow portrays the outline of the reality. It is, however, this truth, that the sacrifice of Christ is the heavenly reality, that insures the efficacy and finality and perfection of His sacrifice in contrast with the obvious shortcomings of the levitical offerings (cf. Heb. 9:9-14, 24-28). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).
It is the work of Christ, viewed in terms of sacrifice, that thrusts into the foreground the high priestly office of our Redeemer. It is the prerogative of the priest to offer sacrifice and only in the exercise of His prerogative as the great high priest of our profession did Jesus offer Himself. He was "called of Cod an high priest after the order of Melchizedek" (Heb. 5:10). Here the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice is further demonstrated. He offered Himself, and the sacrifice He offered was Himself. He acted as both priest and offering (cf. Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 25; 10:59) and thus purged our sins. The transcendent perfection, efficacy, and finality of His sacrifice reside in the transcendent character of the offering and the dignity of His priesthood.
C. Propitiation. The language of propitiation is clearly applied to the work of Christ in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; I John 2:2; 4:10). Plausible attempts have been made to interpret propitiation in terms of expiation and thus avoid the prima facie import of propitiation. The fallacy of these attempts has been successfully demonstrated by scholarly and painstaking study of the biblical data (see bibliography). The reason for the attempt to relieve the work of Christ of its strictly propitiatory character is obvious. To propitiate means to pacify, to conciliate, to make propitious. It presupposes that the person propitiated is angry and needs to be pacified. If Christ propitiates, it must be God whom he propitiates. And surely, it is alleged, we cannot think of God as needing to be pacified or made propitious by the blood of Christ. If the atonement springs from the love of the Father and is the provision of His love, as has been shown above, is it not contradiction to maintain that He is conciliated by that which is the expression of His love? If invincible love is antecedent, then no place remains for the pacifying of wrath!
There is deplorable confusion in this line of reasoning. To love and to be propitious are not convertible terms. Even in the human sphere the unique object of love may at the same time be the unique object of holy wrath and displeasure. It is the denial of God's holiness in relation to Sin, as the contradiction of what He is and demands, not to recognize that sin must evoke His wrath. And just as sin belongs to persons, so the wrath rests upon the persons who are the agents of sin. Those whom God loved with invincible love were the children of wrath, as Paul expressly says (Eph. 2:3). It is to this fact that the propitiation made by Christ is directed. Those whom God loved were the children of His wrath. It is this truth that enhances the marvel of His love, and if we deny it or tone it down we have eviscerated the greatness of His love. The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath. It was Christ's to deal with the wrath so that those loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure. It is a cabined perspective that can dispense with the necessity and glory of propitiation.
The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father's will in the extremities of Gethsemane's agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father's commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father's love and of the Son's love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. "Herein is love," John wrote, "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.
D. Reconciliation. Just as sacrifice has in view the exigency created by our guilt and propitiation the exigency arising from the wrath of God, so reconciliation is concerned with our alienation from God and the need of having that alienation removed. In the Scripture the actual terms used with reference to the reconciliation wrought by Christ are to the effect that we are reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10) and that God reconciles us to Himself (II Cor. 5:18, 19; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1 :2-22). Never is it expressly stated that God is reconciled to us. It has often been stated, therefore, that the cross of Christ, insofar as it contemplated reconciliation, did not terminate upon God to the removal of His alienation from us but simply and solely upon us to the removal of our alienation from Him. In other words, it is not that which God has against us that is dealt with in the reconciliation but only our enmity against Him. It is strange that this contention should be so persistent, that scholars should be content with what is, to say the least, so superficial an interpretation of the usage of Scripture in reference to the term in question.
It is not to be denied that the reconciliation is concerned with our enmity against God. Reconciliation, like all the other categories deals with sin and the liability proceeding from it. And sin is enmity against God. But, when the teaching of Scripture is properly analyzed, it will be seen that reconciliation involves much more than that which might appear at first sight to be the case.
When in Matthew 5:24 we read, "Be reconciled to thy brother," we have an example of the use of the word "reconcile" that should caution us against a common inference. In this instance the person bringing his gift to the altar is reminded that his brother has something against him. It is this grievance on the part of the other that is the reason for interrupting his act of worship. It is the grievance and, in that sense, the against of the other that the worshipper must take into account, and it is the removal of that grievance, of that alienation, of that against," that the reconciliation which he is required to effect contemplates. He is to do all that is necessary to remove the alienation in the mind and attitude of the other. It is plain, therefore, that the situation requiring reconciliation is the frame of mind or the attitude of the other and what the reconciliation must effect is the change of mind on the part of the other, namely, the person called the brother. Thus we are pointed in a very different direction from that which we might have expected from the mere formula "be reconciled." And although it is the "against" of the brother that is in view as requiring a change, the exhortation is in terms of "be reconciled to thy brother" and not at all "Let thy brother be reconciled to thee." By this analysis it can easily be seen that the formula "reconciled to God" can well mean that what the reconciliation has in view is God's alienation from us and the removal of that alienation. Matthew 5:23, 24 shows how indefensible is an interpretation that rests its case upon what, at best, is mere appearance.
Another example points in the same direction. It is Romans 11:15. "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" The "casting away" is that of Israel and the "reconciling" (reconciliation) is that of the Gentile nations. The "casting away" is contrasted with the "reconciliation" and the meaning of the latter is to be discovered from this contrast. The "casting away" is also contrasted with the "receiving," that is, the receiving of them back again. The "casting away" can be nothing other than the rejection of them from the divine favor and blessing they once enjoyed and the "receiving" is the restoration of them again to the divine favor and blessing from which for a time they had been excluded. It is apparent that in both words the thought is focused upon the relation of Israel to God's favor and saving blessing. Reconciliation, being in contrast with casting away, must, therefore, mean the reception of the Gentiles into the favor of God and the blessing of the gospel; it is the relation to God's favor that is expressed. Hence it is upon the change in the disposition of God and the change in the resulting relationship of God to the Gentiles that thought is focused in the word "reconciliation." This demonstrates that the term can be used with reference to a change that takes place in God's mind and relation with reference to men. And we are thus prepared for the appreciation of the teaching of Scripture on the reconciliation accomplished by Christ in His death.
Any proper assessment of the nature and liabilities of sin shows that sin separated us from the favor and fellowship of God (cf. Isa. 59:2). Sin elicits not only the wrath of God but also its complement, alienation from Him. This alienation is the result of our estrangement from Him. The latter is sinful and constitutes our sin but the former is holy as is God's wrath. It is that holy alienation that reconciliation contemplates and it is directed to its removal. This is the gospel of the reconciliation, and what a hiatus there would be in the atonement if it did not provide for this exigency of our sinful state!
If reconciliation consists merely in the change that takes place in the heart of man, the change from enmity to penitence and love, then the reconciliation itself is something inward; it is a change in the subjective disposition and attitude of man. It becomes impossible to adjust the teaching of the two most relevant passages to this conception. These passages are Romans 5:8-11; II Corinthians 5:18-21.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Murray on the atonement-1
Atonement is the term that has come to be widely used to denote the substitutionary work of Christ which culminated in the sacrifice of Calvary. The term occurs frequently in the A.V. of the Old Testament as the rendering of the Hebrew root kaphar but only once in the New Testament (Rom. 5:11) where it refers to the reconciliation. The term itself is not adequate to express what is involved in Christ's vicarious work. In fact, no one term can express the manifold aspects from which, according to Scripture, this work of Christ must be viewed. Atonement, however, when understood in the way that usage has determined, is sufficiently inclusive to serve as a general designation.
I. The Source. Any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected from the outset if it does not take account of the fact that the atonement is the provision of God's love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for oar sins" (I John 4:10; cf. Rom. 5:8; 8:32; Eph. 2:4, 5; I John 4:9). The title "God" in these texts refers specifically to God the Father. So it is to the initiative of the Father's love that our attention is drawn when we think of the fountain from which the atonement emanates. And all that has been achieved by Christ's vicarious undertaking must always be subordinated to the design and purpose of the Father's love. This is the orientation which the classic exponents of Reformed doctrine have always recognized, and it is a caricature of their position to suppose that they represented the love and compassion of the Father as constrained by the sacrifice of Christ.
In this fact that the love of God is the spring from which the atonement flows we encounter an ultimate of revelation and of human thought. It is the marvel that evokes wonder, adoration, and praise. It is a love that arises from the unsearchable riches of God's goodness. But though an ultimate of revelation, the Scripture not only permits but requires further characterization of this love. The love of God is differentiating in respect of its objects. It is the love of God the Father that Paul has in view when he speaks of Him who "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32). But it is within the orbit defined by Romans 8:29 that this love must be understood, and the latter text speaks of distinguishing love that predestinates to a determinate end — conformity to the image of his Son. Ephesians 1:4, 5 is to the same effect. God chose a people in Christ and in love predestinated them unto adoption through Jesus Christ. It would annul the witness of Scripture if we ignored the differentiation which the love of God institutes and failed to construe the atonement as the provision of this distinguishing love and as that which secures the design of God's electing grace.
II. The Necessity. The love of God is the cause of the atonement. But why did the love of God take this way of realizing its end? This is the question of the reason as distinguished from the cause. Notable theologians in the history of the church have taken the position that there was no absolute reason, that God could have saved men by other means than by the blood-shedding of His own Son, that, since God is omnipotent and sovereign, other ways of forgiving sin were available to Him. But God was pleased to adopt this method because the greatest number of advantages and blessings accrued from it. God could have redeemed men without the shedding of blood, but He freely chose not to and thereby He magnifies the glory of His grace and enhances the precise character of the salvation bestowed (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas Goodwin, John Ball, Thomas Blake).
It might appear that this view does honor to the omnipotence, sovereignty, and grace of God and, also, that to posit more would be presumptuous on our part and beyond the warrant of Scripture. Is it not the limit of our thought to say that "without the shedding of blood" (Heb. 9:22) there is actually no remission and be satisfied with that datum? There are, however, certain things God cannot do. "He cannot deny himself" (II Tim. 2:13) and it is "impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18). The only question is: are there exigencies arising from the character and perfections of God which make it intrinsically necessary that redemption should be accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God? It should be understood that it was not necessary for God to redeem men. The purpose to redeem is of the free and sovereign exercise of His love. But having purposed to redeem, was the only alternative the blood-shedding of His own Son as the way of securing that redemption? There appear to be good reasons for an affirmative answer.
1. Salvation requires not only the forgiveness of sin but also justification. And justification, adequate to the situation in which lost mankind is, demands a righteousness such as belongs to no other than the incarnate Son of God, a righteousness undefiled and undefilable, a righteousness with divine property and quality (cf. Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 22; 10:3; II Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9). It is the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19). But only the Son of God. incarnate, fulfilling to the full extent the commitments of the Father's will, could have provided such a righteousness. A concept of salvation bereft of the justification which this righteousness imparts is an abstraction of which Scripture knows nothing.
2. Sin is the contradiction of God and he must react against it with holy wrath. Wherever sin is, the wrath of God rests upon it (cf. Rom. 1:18). Otherwise God would be denying Himself, particularly His holiness, justice, and truth. But wrath must be removed if we are to enjoy the favor of God which salvation implies. And the only provision for the removal of wrath is propitiation. This is surely the import of Romans 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ a propitiation to declare His righteousness, that He might he just and the justifier of the ungodly.
3. The cross of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God (cf. Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9, 10). But would it be a supreme demonstration of love if the end secured by it could have been achieved without it? Would it be love to secure the end by such expenditure as the agony of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Calvary for God's own well-beloved and only-begotten Son if the result could have been attained by less costly means? In that event would it not have been love without wisdom? In this we cannot suppress the significance of our Lord's prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). If it had been possible for the cup to pass from him, his prayer would surely have been answered. It is when the indispensable exigencies fulfilled by Jesus' suffering unto death are properly assessed that we can see the marvel of God's love in the ordeal of Calvary. So great was the Father's love to lost men that He decreed their redemption even though the cost was nought less than the accursed tree. When Calvary is viewed in this light. then the love manifested not only takes on meaning but fills us with adoring amazement. Truly this is love.
Those who think that in pursuance of God's saving purpose the cross was not intrinsically necessary are, in reality, not dealing with the hypothetical necessity of the atonement but with a hypothetical salvation. For, on their own admission, they are not saying that the actual salvation designed and bestowed could have been enjoyed without Christ but only salvation of lesser character and glory. But of such salvation the Scripture knows nothing and no good purpose can be served by an imaginary hypothesis.
III. Nature. The nature of the atonement is concerned with the ways in which the Scripture characterizes Christ's vicarious undertakings and accomplishments. The most basic and inclusive of these categories is obedience. And there are four categories that are more specific — sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption.
A. Obedience. Obedience does not define for us the specific character of the other categories but it does point us to the capacity in which Christ discharges all phases of his atoning work. No passage in Scripture provides more instruction on our topic than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is in the capacity of Servant that the person in view is introduced and it is in the same capacity he executes His expiatory function (Isa. 52:13, 15; 53:11). The title "Servant" derives its meaning from the fact that He is the Lord's Servant, not the Servant of men (cf. Isa. 42:1, 19; 52:13). He is the Father's Servant and this implies subjection to and fulfillment of the Father's will. Servant defines His commitment, and obedience the execution. Psalm 40:7, 8 points in the same direction. Our Lord Himself confirms what the Old Testament foretold. "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 6:38; cf. 4:34; 10:17, 18). The pivotal events of redemptive accomplishment He performed in pursuance of the Father's commandment and in the exercise of messianic authority. Paul's witness is to the same effect as that of the Old Testament and of Jesus Himself. Most important is Philippians 2:7, 8. For this text in respect of the capacity in which Jesus acted attaches itself to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and represents the climactic event of Jesus' commitment, the death of the cross, as an act of obedience. And Romans 5:19 expresses that it is by the obedience of Christ that many are constituted righteous. This evidence shows that our thought respecting the nature of the atonement is not biblically conditioned unless it is governed by the concept of the obedience of Christ in His capacity as the Servant fulfilling the Father's commission.
We must not view this obedience mechanically or quantitatively. It did not consist simply in the sum-total of formal acts of obedience. Obedience springs from the dispositional complex of motive, intention, direction, and purpose. And since our Lord was truly human and fulfilled the Father's will in human nature, we must appreciate the progression in knowledge, understanding, resolution, and will which was necessary to and came to expression in the discharge of the Father's will in its increasing demands upon Him until these demands reached their climax in the death upon the cross. This explains the word in Hebrews 5:8 that "he learned obedience from the things which he suffered." At no point was He disobedient. But the demands of obedience were so expansive and progressively exacting that he had to learn in the furnace of trial, temptation, and suffering. Since His obedience thus attained to the perfection and completeness required for the discharge of His commitments to the fullest extent of their demands, He was made perfect as the captain of salvation (Heb. 2:10) and "being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). This is but saying that it was by obedience that he accomplished the salvation of the many sons who are to be brought to glory, and we see how integral to salvation secured is the obedience of Christ.
B. Sacrifice. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament to show that Christ's giving of Himself is to be construed in terms of sacrificial offering (I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 23, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14, 26). And it is not only these express statements which support the thesis but also references which can only be interpreted in terms of the altar of sacrifice (cf., e.g., Heb. 13: 1-l3). The notion of sacrifice entertained by these New Testament writers is that derived from the Old Testament, for the allusions to the sacrificial ritual of the levitical economy make it apparent that the latter provided the type in terms of which the sacrifice of Christ was to be interpreted. The Old Testament sacrifices were expiatory of guilt. This is particulary true of the sin-offerings, and these are specifically in view in some of the New Testament passages (cf. Heb. 9:6-15, 23, 24; l3:1-13). The idea of expiation is the removal of the liability accruing from sin. Sacrifice is the provision whereby this liability is removed — it is the substitutive endurance of penalty and transference of liability from the offerer to the sacrifice.
The Old Testament sacrifices were truly typological of the sacrifice of Christ. Isaiah 53:10 expressly applies to the self-sacrifice of the Servant what was figuratively represented by the trespass-offering, and in New Testament passages, as indicated above, the levitical offerings provide the analogy after which Christ's sacrifice is to be understood. But of more significance is the fact that the sacrifice of Christ is the archetype after which they were patterned — they were patterns of the things in the heavens and only figures of the true (Heb. 9:23, 24). Christ's offering is the heavenly exemplar. This is additional confirmation that what was signified in shadow by the ritual offerings, namely expiation, was transcendently and really true in the sacrifice of Christ. The shadow portrays the outline of the reality. It is, however, this truth, that the sacrifice of Christ is the heavenly reality, that insures the efficacy and finality and perfection of His sacrifice in contrast with the obvious shortcomings of the levitical offerings (cf. Heb. 9:9-14, 24-28). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).
It is the work of Christ, viewed in terms of sacrifice, that thrusts into the foreground the high priestly office of our Redeemer. It is the prerogative of the priest to offer sacrifice and only in the exercise of His prerogative as the great high priest of our profession did Jesus offer Himself. He was "called of Cod an high priest after the order of Melchizedek" (Heb. 5:10). Here the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice is further demonstrated. He offered Himself, and the sacrifice He offered was Himself. He acted as both priest and offering (cf. Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 25; 10:59) and thus purged our sins. The transcendent perfection, efficacy, and finality of His sacrifice reside in the transcendent character of the offering and the dignity of His priesthood.
C. Propitiation. The language of propitiation is clearly applied to the work of Christ in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; I John 2:2; 4:10). Plausible attempts have been made to interpret propitiation in terms of expiation and thus avoid the prima facie import of propitiation. The fallacy of these attempts has been successfully demonstrated by scholarly and painstaking study of the biblical data (see bibliography). The reason for the attempt to relieve the work of Christ of its strictly propitiatory character is obvious. To propitiate means to pacify, to conciliate, to make propitious. It presupposes that the person propitiated is angry and needs to be pacified. If Christ propitiates, it must be God whom he propitiates. And surely, it is alleged, we cannot think of God as needing to be pacified or made propitious by the blood of Christ. If the atonement springs from the love of the Father and is the provision of His love, as has been shown above, is it not contradiction to maintain that He is conciliated by that which is the expression of His love? If invincible love is antecedent, then no place remains for the pacifying of wrath!
There is deplorable confusion in this line of reasoning. To love and to be propitious are not convertible terms. Even in the human sphere the unique object of love may at the same time be the unique object of holy wrath and displeasure. It is the denial of God's holiness in relation to Sin, as the contradiction of what He is and demands, not to recognize that sin must evoke His wrath. And just as sin belongs to persons, so the wrath rests upon the persons who are the agents of sin. Those whom God loved with invincible love were the children of wrath, as Paul expressly says (Eph. 2:3). It is to this fact that the propitiation made by Christ is directed. Those whom God loved were the children of His wrath. It is this truth that enhances the marvel of His love, and if we deny it or tone it down we have eviscerated the greatness of His love. The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath. It was Christ's to deal with the wrath so that those loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure. It is a cabined perspective that can dispense with the necessity and glory of propitiation.
The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father's will in the extremities of Gethsemane's agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father's commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father's love and of the Son's love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. "Herein is love," John wrote, "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.
D. Reconciliation. Just as sacrifice has in view the exigency created by our guilt and propitiation the exigency arising from the wrath of God, so reconciliation is concerned with our alienation from God and the need of having that alienation removed. In the Scripture the actual terms used with reference to the reconciliation wrought by Christ are to the effect that we are reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10) and that God reconciles us to Himself (II Cor. 5:18, 19; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1 :2-22). Never is it expressly stated that God is reconciled to us. It has often been stated, therefore, that the cross of Christ, insofar as it contemplated reconciliation, did not terminate upon God to the removal of His alienation from us but simply and solely upon us to the removal of our alienation from Him. In other words, it is not that which God has against us that is dealt with in the reconciliation but only our enmity against Him. It is strange that this contention should be so persistent, that scholars should be content with what is, to say the least, so superficial an interpretation of the usage of Scripture in reference to the term in question.
It is not to be denied that the reconciliation is concerned with our enmity against God. Reconciliation, like all the other categories deals with sin and the liability proceeding from it. And sin is enmity against God. But, when the teaching of Scripture is properly analyzed, it will be seen that reconciliation involves much more than that which might appear at first sight to be the case.
When in Matthew 5:24 we read, "Be reconciled to thy brother," we have an example of the use of the word "reconcile" that should caution us against a common inference. In this instance the person bringing his gift to the altar is reminded that his brother has something against him. It is this grievance on the part of the other that is the reason for interrupting his act of worship. It is the grievance and, in that sense, the against of the other that the worshipper must take into account, and it is the removal of that grievance, of that alienation, of that against," that the reconciliation which he is required to effect contemplates. He is to do all that is necessary to remove the alienation in the mind and attitude of the other. It is plain, therefore, that the situation requiring reconciliation is the frame of mind or the attitude of the other and what the reconciliation must effect is the change of mind on the part of the other, namely, the person called the brother. Thus we are pointed in a very different direction from that which we might have expected from the mere formula "be reconciled." And although it is the "against" of the brother that is in view as requiring a change, the exhortation is in terms of "be reconciled to thy brother" and not at all "Let thy brother be reconciled to thee." By this analysis it can easily be seen that the formula "reconciled to God" can well mean that what the reconciliation has in view is God's alienation from us and the removal of that alienation. Matthew 5:23, 24 shows how indefensible is an interpretation that rests its case upon what, at best, is mere appearance.
Another example points in the same direction. It is Romans 11:15. "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" The "casting away" is that of Israel and the "reconciling" (reconciliation) is that of the Gentile nations. The "casting away" is contrasted with the "reconciliation" and the meaning of the latter is to be discovered from this contrast. The "casting away" is also contrasted with the "receiving," that is, the receiving of them back again. The "casting away" can be nothing other than the rejection of them from the divine favor and blessing they once enjoyed and the "receiving" is the restoration of them again to the divine favor and blessing from which for a time they had been excluded. It is apparent that in both words the thought is focused upon the relation of Israel to God's favor and saving blessing. Reconciliation, being in contrast with casting away, must, therefore, mean the reception of the Gentiles into the favor of God and the blessing of the gospel; it is the relation to God's favor that is expressed. Hence it is upon the change in the disposition of God and the change in the resulting relationship of God to the Gentiles that thought is focused in the word "reconciliation." This demonstrates that the term can be used with reference to a change that takes place in God's mind and relation with reference to men. And we are thus prepared for the appreciation of the teaching of Scripture on the reconciliation accomplished by Christ in His death.
Any proper assessment of the nature and liabilities of sin shows that sin separated us from the favor and fellowship of God (cf. Isa. 59:2). Sin elicits not only the wrath of God but also its complement, alienation from Him. This alienation is the result of our estrangement from Him. The latter is sinful and constitutes our sin but the former is holy as is God's wrath. It is that holy alienation that reconciliation contemplates and it is directed to its removal. This is the gospel of the reconciliation, and what a hiatus there would be in the atonement if it did not provide for this exigency of our sinful state!
If reconciliation consists merely in the change that takes place in the heart of man, the change from enmity to penitence and love, then the reconciliation itself is something inward; it is a change in the subjective disposition and attitude of man. It becomes impossible to adjust the teaching of the two most relevant passages to this conception. These passages are Romans 5:8-11; II Corinthians 5:18-21.
I. The Source. Any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected from the outset if it does not take account of the fact that the atonement is the provision of God's love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for oar sins" (I John 4:10; cf. Rom. 5:8; 8:32; Eph. 2:4, 5; I John 4:9). The title "God" in these texts refers specifically to God the Father. So it is to the initiative of the Father's love that our attention is drawn when we think of the fountain from which the atonement emanates. And all that has been achieved by Christ's vicarious undertaking must always be subordinated to the design and purpose of the Father's love. This is the orientation which the classic exponents of Reformed doctrine have always recognized, and it is a caricature of their position to suppose that they represented the love and compassion of the Father as constrained by the sacrifice of Christ.
In this fact that the love of God is the spring from which the atonement flows we encounter an ultimate of revelation and of human thought. It is the marvel that evokes wonder, adoration, and praise. It is a love that arises from the unsearchable riches of God's goodness. But though an ultimate of revelation, the Scripture not only permits but requires further characterization of this love. The love of God is differentiating in respect of its objects. It is the love of God the Father that Paul has in view when he speaks of Him who "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32). But it is within the orbit defined by Romans 8:29 that this love must be understood, and the latter text speaks of distinguishing love that predestinates to a determinate end — conformity to the image of his Son. Ephesians 1:4, 5 is to the same effect. God chose a people in Christ and in love predestinated them unto adoption through Jesus Christ. It would annul the witness of Scripture if we ignored the differentiation which the love of God institutes and failed to construe the atonement as the provision of this distinguishing love and as that which secures the design of God's electing grace.
II. The Necessity. The love of God is the cause of the atonement. But why did the love of God take this way of realizing its end? This is the question of the reason as distinguished from the cause. Notable theologians in the history of the church have taken the position that there was no absolute reason, that God could have saved men by other means than by the blood-shedding of His own Son, that, since God is omnipotent and sovereign, other ways of forgiving sin were available to Him. But God was pleased to adopt this method because the greatest number of advantages and blessings accrued from it. God could have redeemed men without the shedding of blood, but He freely chose not to and thereby He magnifies the glory of His grace and enhances the precise character of the salvation bestowed (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas Goodwin, John Ball, Thomas Blake).
It might appear that this view does honor to the omnipotence, sovereignty, and grace of God and, also, that to posit more would be presumptuous on our part and beyond the warrant of Scripture. Is it not the limit of our thought to say that "without the shedding of blood" (Heb. 9:22) there is actually no remission and be satisfied with that datum? There are, however, certain things God cannot do. "He cannot deny himself" (II Tim. 2:13) and it is "impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18). The only question is: are there exigencies arising from the character and perfections of God which make it intrinsically necessary that redemption should be accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God? It should be understood that it was not necessary for God to redeem men. The purpose to redeem is of the free and sovereign exercise of His love. But having purposed to redeem, was the only alternative the blood-shedding of His own Son as the way of securing that redemption? There appear to be good reasons for an affirmative answer.
1. Salvation requires not only the forgiveness of sin but also justification. And justification, adequate to the situation in which lost mankind is, demands a righteousness such as belongs to no other than the incarnate Son of God, a righteousness undefiled and undefilable, a righteousness with divine property and quality (cf. Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 22; 10:3; II Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9). It is the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19). But only the Son of God. incarnate, fulfilling to the full extent the commitments of the Father's will, could have provided such a righteousness. A concept of salvation bereft of the justification which this righteousness imparts is an abstraction of which Scripture knows nothing.
2. Sin is the contradiction of God and he must react against it with holy wrath. Wherever sin is, the wrath of God rests upon it (cf. Rom. 1:18). Otherwise God would be denying Himself, particularly His holiness, justice, and truth. But wrath must be removed if we are to enjoy the favor of God which salvation implies. And the only provision for the removal of wrath is propitiation. This is surely the import of Romans 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ a propitiation to declare His righteousness, that He might he just and the justifier of the ungodly.
3. The cross of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God (cf. Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9, 10). But would it be a supreme demonstration of love if the end secured by it could have been achieved without it? Would it be love to secure the end by such expenditure as the agony of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Calvary for God's own well-beloved and only-begotten Son if the result could have been attained by less costly means? In that event would it not have been love without wisdom? In this we cannot suppress the significance of our Lord's prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). If it had been possible for the cup to pass from him, his prayer would surely have been answered. It is when the indispensable exigencies fulfilled by Jesus' suffering unto death are properly assessed that we can see the marvel of God's love in the ordeal of Calvary. So great was the Father's love to lost men that He decreed their redemption even though the cost was nought less than the accursed tree. When Calvary is viewed in this light. then the love manifested not only takes on meaning but fills us with adoring amazement. Truly this is love.
Those who think that in pursuance of God's saving purpose the cross was not intrinsically necessary are, in reality, not dealing with the hypothetical necessity of the atonement but with a hypothetical salvation. For, on their own admission, they are not saying that the actual salvation designed and bestowed could have been enjoyed without Christ but only salvation of lesser character and glory. But of such salvation the Scripture knows nothing and no good purpose can be served by an imaginary hypothesis.
III. Nature. The nature of the atonement is concerned with the ways in which the Scripture characterizes Christ's vicarious undertakings and accomplishments. The most basic and inclusive of these categories is obedience. And there are four categories that are more specific — sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption.
A. Obedience. Obedience does not define for us the specific character of the other categories but it does point us to the capacity in which Christ discharges all phases of his atoning work. No passage in Scripture provides more instruction on our topic than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is in the capacity of Servant that the person in view is introduced and it is in the same capacity he executes His expiatory function (Isa. 52:13, 15; 53:11). The title "Servant" derives its meaning from the fact that He is the Lord's Servant, not the Servant of men (cf. Isa. 42:1, 19; 52:13). He is the Father's Servant and this implies subjection to and fulfillment of the Father's will. Servant defines His commitment, and obedience the execution. Psalm 40:7, 8 points in the same direction. Our Lord Himself confirms what the Old Testament foretold. "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 6:38; cf. 4:34; 10:17, 18). The pivotal events of redemptive accomplishment He performed in pursuance of the Father's commandment and in the exercise of messianic authority. Paul's witness is to the same effect as that of the Old Testament and of Jesus Himself. Most important is Philippians 2:7, 8. For this text in respect of the capacity in which Jesus acted attaches itself to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and represents the climactic event of Jesus' commitment, the death of the cross, as an act of obedience. And Romans 5:19 expresses that it is by the obedience of Christ that many are constituted righteous. This evidence shows that our thought respecting the nature of the atonement is not biblically conditioned unless it is governed by the concept of the obedience of Christ in His capacity as the Servant fulfilling the Father's commission.
We must not view this obedience mechanically or quantitatively. It did not consist simply in the sum-total of formal acts of obedience. Obedience springs from the dispositional complex of motive, intention, direction, and purpose. And since our Lord was truly human and fulfilled the Father's will in human nature, we must appreciate the progression in knowledge, understanding, resolution, and will which was necessary to and came to expression in the discharge of the Father's will in its increasing demands upon Him until these demands reached their climax in the death upon the cross. This explains the word in Hebrews 5:8 that "he learned obedience from the things which he suffered." At no point was He disobedient. But the demands of obedience were so expansive and progressively exacting that he had to learn in the furnace of trial, temptation, and suffering. Since His obedience thus attained to the perfection and completeness required for the discharge of His commitments to the fullest extent of their demands, He was made perfect as the captain of salvation (Heb. 2:10) and "being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). This is but saying that it was by obedience that he accomplished the salvation of the many sons who are to be brought to glory, and we see how integral to salvation secured is the obedience of Christ.
B. Sacrifice. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament to show that Christ's giving of Himself is to be construed in terms of sacrificial offering (I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 23, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14, 26). And it is not only these express statements which support the thesis but also references which can only be interpreted in terms of the altar of sacrifice (cf., e.g., Heb. 13: 1-l3). The notion of sacrifice entertained by these New Testament writers is that derived from the Old Testament, for the allusions to the sacrificial ritual of the levitical economy make it apparent that the latter provided the type in terms of which the sacrifice of Christ was to be interpreted. The Old Testament sacrifices were expiatory of guilt. This is particulary true of the sin-offerings, and these are specifically in view in some of the New Testament passages (cf. Heb. 9:6-15, 23, 24; l3:1-13). The idea of expiation is the removal of the liability accruing from sin. Sacrifice is the provision whereby this liability is removed — it is the substitutive endurance of penalty and transference of liability from the offerer to the sacrifice.
The Old Testament sacrifices were truly typological of the sacrifice of Christ. Isaiah 53:10 expressly applies to the self-sacrifice of the Servant what was figuratively represented by the trespass-offering, and in New Testament passages, as indicated above, the levitical offerings provide the analogy after which Christ's sacrifice is to be understood. But of more significance is the fact that the sacrifice of Christ is the archetype after which they were patterned — they were patterns of the things in the heavens and only figures of the true (Heb. 9:23, 24). Christ's offering is the heavenly exemplar. This is additional confirmation that what was signified in shadow by the ritual offerings, namely expiation, was transcendently and really true in the sacrifice of Christ. The shadow portrays the outline of the reality. It is, however, this truth, that the sacrifice of Christ is the heavenly reality, that insures the efficacy and finality and perfection of His sacrifice in contrast with the obvious shortcomings of the levitical offerings (cf. Heb. 9:9-14, 24-28). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).
It is the work of Christ, viewed in terms of sacrifice, that thrusts into the foreground the high priestly office of our Redeemer. It is the prerogative of the priest to offer sacrifice and only in the exercise of His prerogative as the great high priest of our profession did Jesus offer Himself. He was "called of Cod an high priest after the order of Melchizedek" (Heb. 5:10). Here the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice is further demonstrated. He offered Himself, and the sacrifice He offered was Himself. He acted as both priest and offering (cf. Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 25; 10:59) and thus purged our sins. The transcendent perfection, efficacy, and finality of His sacrifice reside in the transcendent character of the offering and the dignity of His priesthood.
C. Propitiation. The language of propitiation is clearly applied to the work of Christ in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; I John 2:2; 4:10). Plausible attempts have been made to interpret propitiation in terms of expiation and thus avoid the prima facie import of propitiation. The fallacy of these attempts has been successfully demonstrated by scholarly and painstaking study of the biblical data (see bibliography). The reason for the attempt to relieve the work of Christ of its strictly propitiatory character is obvious. To propitiate means to pacify, to conciliate, to make propitious. It presupposes that the person propitiated is angry and needs to be pacified. If Christ propitiates, it must be God whom he propitiates. And surely, it is alleged, we cannot think of God as needing to be pacified or made propitious by the blood of Christ. If the atonement springs from the love of the Father and is the provision of His love, as has been shown above, is it not contradiction to maintain that He is conciliated by that which is the expression of His love? If invincible love is antecedent, then no place remains for the pacifying of wrath!
There is deplorable confusion in this line of reasoning. To love and to be propitious are not convertible terms. Even in the human sphere the unique object of love may at the same time be the unique object of holy wrath and displeasure. It is the denial of God's holiness in relation to Sin, as the contradiction of what He is and demands, not to recognize that sin must evoke His wrath. And just as sin belongs to persons, so the wrath rests upon the persons who are the agents of sin. Those whom God loved with invincible love were the children of wrath, as Paul expressly says (Eph. 2:3). It is to this fact that the propitiation made by Christ is directed. Those whom God loved were the children of His wrath. It is this truth that enhances the marvel of His love, and if we deny it or tone it down we have eviscerated the greatness of His love. The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath. It was Christ's to deal with the wrath so that those loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure. It is a cabined perspective that can dispense with the necessity and glory of propitiation.
The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father's will in the extremities of Gethsemane's agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father's commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father's love and of the Son's love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. "Herein is love," John wrote, "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.
D. Reconciliation. Just as sacrifice has in view the exigency created by our guilt and propitiation the exigency arising from the wrath of God, so reconciliation is concerned with our alienation from God and the need of having that alienation removed. In the Scripture the actual terms used with reference to the reconciliation wrought by Christ are to the effect that we are reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10) and that God reconciles us to Himself (II Cor. 5:18, 19; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1 :2-22). Never is it expressly stated that God is reconciled to us. It has often been stated, therefore, that the cross of Christ, insofar as it contemplated reconciliation, did not terminate upon God to the removal of His alienation from us but simply and solely upon us to the removal of our alienation from Him. In other words, it is not that which God has against us that is dealt with in the reconciliation but only our enmity against Him. It is strange that this contention should be so persistent, that scholars should be content with what is, to say the least, so superficial an interpretation of the usage of Scripture in reference to the term in question.
It is not to be denied that the reconciliation is concerned with our enmity against God. Reconciliation, like all the other categories deals with sin and the liability proceeding from it. And sin is enmity against God. But, when the teaching of Scripture is properly analyzed, it will be seen that reconciliation involves much more than that which might appear at first sight to be the case.
When in Matthew 5:24 we read, "Be reconciled to thy brother," we have an example of the use of the word "reconcile" that should caution us against a common inference. In this instance the person bringing his gift to the altar is reminded that his brother has something against him. It is this grievance on the part of the other that is the reason for interrupting his act of worship. It is the grievance and, in that sense, the against of the other that the worshipper must take into account, and it is the removal of that grievance, of that alienation, of that against," that the reconciliation which he is required to effect contemplates. He is to do all that is necessary to remove the alienation in the mind and attitude of the other. It is plain, therefore, that the situation requiring reconciliation is the frame of mind or the attitude of the other and what the reconciliation must effect is the change of mind on the part of the other, namely, the person called the brother. Thus we are pointed in a very different direction from that which we might have expected from the mere formula "be reconciled." And although it is the "against" of the brother that is in view as requiring a change, the exhortation is in terms of "be reconciled to thy brother" and not at all "Let thy brother be reconciled to thee." By this analysis it can easily be seen that the formula "reconciled to God" can well mean that what the reconciliation has in view is God's alienation from us and the removal of that alienation. Matthew 5:23, 24 shows how indefensible is an interpretation that rests its case upon what, at best, is mere appearance.
Another example points in the same direction. It is Romans 11:15. "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" The "casting away" is that of Israel and the "reconciling" (reconciliation) is that of the Gentile nations. The "casting away" is contrasted with the "reconciliation" and the meaning of the latter is to be discovered from this contrast. The "casting away" is also contrasted with the "receiving," that is, the receiving of them back again. The "casting away" can be nothing other than the rejection of them from the divine favor and blessing they once enjoyed and the "receiving" is the restoration of them again to the divine favor and blessing from which for a time they had been excluded. It is apparent that in both words the thought is focused upon the relation of Israel to God's favor and saving blessing. Reconciliation, being in contrast with casting away, must, therefore, mean the reception of the Gentiles into the favor of God and the blessing of the gospel; it is the relation to God's favor that is expressed. Hence it is upon the change in the disposition of God and the change in the resulting relationship of God to the Gentiles that thought is focused in the word "reconciliation." This demonstrates that the term can be used with reference to a change that takes place in God's mind and relation with reference to men. And we are thus prepared for the appreciation of the teaching of Scripture on the reconciliation accomplished by Christ in His death.
Any proper assessment of the nature and liabilities of sin shows that sin separated us from the favor and fellowship of God (cf. Isa. 59:2). Sin elicits not only the wrath of God but also its complement, alienation from Him. This alienation is the result of our estrangement from Him. The latter is sinful and constitutes our sin but the former is holy as is God's wrath. It is that holy alienation that reconciliation contemplates and it is directed to its removal. This is the gospel of the reconciliation, and what a hiatus there would be in the atonement if it did not provide for this exigency of our sinful state!
If reconciliation consists merely in the change that takes place in the heart of man, the change from enmity to penitence and love, then the reconciliation itself is something inward; it is a change in the subjective disposition and attitude of man. It becomes impossible to adjust the teaching of the two most relevant passages to this conception. These passages are Romans 5:8-11; II Corinthians 5:18-21.
Murray on the atonement-1
Atonement is the term that has come to be widely used to denote the substitutionary work of Christ which culminated in the sacrifice of Calvary. The term occurs frequently in the A.V. of the Old Testament as the rendering of the Hebrew root kaphar but only once in the New Testament (Rom. 5:11) where it refers to the reconciliation. The term itself is not adequate to express what is involved in Christ's vicarious work. In fact, no one term can express the manifold aspects from which, according to Scripture, this work of Christ must be viewed. Atonement, however, when understood in the way that usage has determined, is sufficiently inclusive to serve as a general designation.
I. The Source. Any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected from the outset if it does not take account of the fact that the atonement is the provision of God's love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for oar sins" (I John 4:10; cf. Rom. 5:8; 8:32; Eph. 2:4, 5; I John 4:9). The title "God" in these texts refers specifically to God the Father. So it is to the initiative of the Father's love that our attention is drawn when we think of the fountain from which the atonement emanates. And all that has been achieved by Christ's vicarious undertaking must always be subordinated to the design and purpose of the Father's love. This is the orientation which the classic exponents of Reformed doctrine have always recognized, and it is a caricature of their position to suppose that they represented the love and compassion of the Father as constrained by the sacrifice of Christ.
In this fact that the love of God is the spring from which the atonement flows we encounter an ultimate of revelation and of human thought. It is the marvel that evokes wonder, adoration, and praise. It is a love that arises from the unsearchable riches of God's goodness. But though an ultimate of revelation, the Scripture not only permits but requires further characterization of this love. The love of God is differentiating in respect of its objects. It is the love of God the Father that Paul has in view when he speaks of Him who "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32). But it is within the orbit defined by Romans 8:29 that this love must be understood, and the latter text speaks of distinguishing love that predestinates to a determinate end — conformity to the image of his Son. Ephesians 1:4, 5 is to the same effect. God chose a people in Christ and in love predestinated them unto adoption through Jesus Christ. It would annul the witness of Scripture if we ignored the differentiation which the love of God institutes and failed to construe the atonement as the provision of this distinguishing love and as that which secures the design of God's electing grace.
II. The Necessity. The love of God is the cause of the atonement. But why did the love of God take this way of realizing its end? This is the question of the reason as distinguished from the cause. Notable theologians in the history of the church have taken the position that there was no absolute reason, that God could have saved men by other means than by the blood-shedding of His own Son, that, since God is omnipotent and sovereign, other ways of forgiving sin were available to Him. But God was pleased to adopt this method because the greatest number of advantages and blessings accrued from it. God could have redeemed men without the shedding of blood, but He freely chose not to and thereby He magnifies the glory of His grace and enhances the precise character of the salvation bestowed (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas Goodwin, John Ball, Thomas Blake).
It might appear that this view does honor to the omnipotence, sovereignty, and grace of God and, also, that to posit more would be presumptuous on our part and beyond the warrant of Scripture. Is it not the limit of our thought to say that "without the shedding of blood" (Heb. 9:22) there is actually no remission and be satisfied with that datum? There are, however, certain things God cannot do. "He cannot deny himself" (II Tim. 2:13) and it is "impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18). The only question is: are there exigencies arising from the character and perfections of God which make it intrinsically necessary that redemption should be accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God? It should be understood that it was not necessary for God to redeem men. The purpose to redeem is of the free and sovereign exercise of His love. But having purposed to redeem, was the only alternative the blood-shedding of His own Son as the way of securing that redemption? There appear to be good reasons for an affirmative answer.
1. Salvation requires not only the forgiveness of sin but also justification. And justification, adequate to the situation in which lost mankind is, demands a righteousness such as belongs to no other than the incarnate Son of God, a righteousness undefiled and undefilable, a righteousness with divine property and quality (cf. Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 22; 10:3; II Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9). It is the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19). But only the Son of God. incarnate, fulfilling to the full extent the commitments of the Father's will, could have provided such a righteousness. A concept of salvation bereft of the justification which this righteousness imparts is an abstraction of which Scripture knows nothing.
2. Sin is the contradiction of God and he must react against it with holy wrath. Wherever sin is, the wrath of God rests upon it (cf. Rom. 1:18). Otherwise God would be denying Himself, particularly His holiness, justice, and truth. But wrath must be removed if we are to enjoy the favor of God which salvation implies. And the only provision for the removal of wrath is propitiation. This is surely the import of Romans 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ a propitiation to declare His righteousness, that He might he just and the justifier of the ungodly.
3. The cross of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God (cf. Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9, 10). But would it be a supreme demonstration of love if the end secured by it could have been achieved without it? Would it be love to secure the end by such expenditure as the agony of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Calvary for God's own well-beloved and only-begotten Son if the result could have been attained by less costly means? In that event would it not have been love without wisdom? In this we cannot suppress the significance of our Lord's prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). If it had been possible for the cup to pass from him, his prayer would surely have been answered. It is when the indispensable exigencies fulfilled by Jesus' suffering unto death are properly assessed that we can see the marvel of God's love in the ordeal of Calvary. So great was the Father's love to lost men that He decreed their redemption even though the cost was nought less than the accursed tree. When Calvary is viewed in this light. then the love manifested not only takes on meaning but fills us with adoring amazement. Truly this is love.
Those who think that in pursuance of God's saving purpose the cross was not intrinsically necessary are, in reality, not dealing with the hypothetical necessity of the atonement but with a hypothetical salvation. For, on their own admission, they are not saying that the actual salvation designed and bestowed could have been enjoyed without Christ but only salvation of lesser character and glory. But of such salvation the Scripture knows nothing and no good purpose can be served by an imaginary hypothesis.
III. Nature. The nature of the atonement is concerned with the ways in which the Scripture characterizes Christ's vicarious undertakings and accomplishments. The most basic and inclusive of these categories is obedience. And there are four categories that are more specific — sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption.
A. Obedience. Obedience does not define for us the specific character of the other categories but it does point us to the capacity in which Christ discharges all phases of his atoning work. No passage in Scripture provides more instruction on our topic than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is in the capacity of Servant that the person in view is introduced and it is in the same capacity he executes His expiatory function (Isa. 52:13, 15; 53:11). The title "Servant" derives its meaning from the fact that He is the Lord's Servant, not the Servant of men (cf. Isa. 42:1, 19; 52:13). He is the Father's Servant and this implies subjection to and fulfillment of the Father's will. Servant defines His commitment, and obedience the execution. Psalm 40:7, 8 points in the same direction. Our Lord Himself confirms what the Old Testament foretold. "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 6:38; cf. 4:34; 10:17, 18). The pivotal events of redemptive accomplishment He performed in pursuance of the Father's commandment and in the exercise of messianic authority. Paul's witness is to the same effect as that of the Old Testament and of Jesus Himself. Most important is Philippians 2:7, 8. For this text in respect of the capacity in which Jesus acted attaches itself to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and represents the climactic event of Jesus' commitment, the death of the cross, as an act of obedience. And Romans 5:19 expresses that it is by the obedience of Christ that many are constituted righteous. This evidence shows that our thought respecting the nature of the atonement is not biblically conditioned unless it is governed by the concept of the obedience of Christ in His capacity as the Servant fulfilling the Father's commission.
We must not view this obedience mechanically or quantitatively. It did not consist simply in the sum-total of formal acts of obedience. Obedience springs from the dispositional complex of motive, intention, direction, and purpose. And since our Lord was truly human and fulfilled the Father's will in human nature, we must appreciate the progression in knowledge, understanding, resolution, and will which was necessary to and came to expression in the discharge of the Father's will in its increasing demands upon Him until these demands reached their climax in the death upon the cross. This explains the word in Hebrews 5:8 that "he learned obedience from the things which he suffered." At no point was He disobedient. But the demands of obedience were so expansive and progressively exacting that he had to learn in the furnace of trial, temptation, and suffering. Since His obedience thus attained to the perfection and completeness required for the discharge of His commitments to the fullest extent of their demands, He was made perfect as the captain of salvation (Heb. 2:10) and "being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). This is but saying that it was by obedience that he accomplished the salvation of the many sons who are to be brought to glory, and we see how integral to salvation secured is the obedience of Christ.
B. Sacrifice. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament to show that Christ's giving of Himself is to be construed in terms of sacrificial offering (I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 23, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14, 26). And it is not only these express statements which support the thesis but also references which can only be interpreted in terms of the altar of sacrifice (cf., e.g., Heb. 13: 1-l3). The notion of sacrifice entertained by these New Testament writers is that derived from the Old Testament, for the allusions to the sacrificial ritual of the levitical economy make it apparent that the latter provided the type in terms of which the sacrifice of Christ was to be interpreted. The Old Testament sacrifices were expiatory of guilt. This is particulary true of the sin-offerings, and these are specifically in view in some of the New Testament passages (cf. Heb. 9:6-15, 23, 24; l3:1-13). The idea of expiation is the removal of the liability accruing from sin. Sacrifice is the provision whereby this liability is removed — it is the substitutive endurance of penalty and transference of liability from the offerer to the sacrifice.
The Old Testament sacrifices were truly typological of the sacrifice of Christ. Isaiah 53:10 expressly applies to the self-sacrifice of the Servant what was figuratively represented by the trespass-offering, and in New Testament passages, as indicated above, the levitical offerings provide the analogy after which Christ's sacrifice is to be understood. But of more significance is the fact that the sacrifice of Christ is the archetype after which they were patterned — they were patterns of the things in the heavens and only figures of the true (Heb. 9:23, 24). Christ's offering is the heavenly exemplar. This is additional confirmation that what was signified in shadow by the ritual offerings, namely expiation, was transcendently and really true in the sacrifice of Christ. The shadow portrays the outline of the reality. It is, however, this truth, that the sacrifice of Christ is the heavenly reality, that insures the efficacy and finality and perfection of His sacrifice in contrast with the obvious shortcomings of the levitical offerings (cf. Heb. 9:9-14, 24-28). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).
It is the work of Christ, viewed in terms of sacrifice, that thrusts into the foreground the high priestly office of our Redeemer. It is the prerogative of the priest to offer sacrifice and only in the exercise of His prerogative as the great high priest of our profession did Jesus offer Himself. He was "called of Cod an high priest after the order of Melchizedek" (Heb. 5:10). Here the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice is further demonstrated. He offered Himself, and the sacrifice He offered was Himself. He acted as both priest and offering (cf. Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 25; 10:59) and thus purged our sins. The transcendent perfection, efficacy, and finality of His sacrifice reside in the transcendent character of the offering and the dignity of His priesthood.
C. Propitiation. The language of propitiation is clearly applied to the work of Christ in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; I John 2:2; 4:10). Plausible attempts have been made to interpret propitiation in terms of expiation and thus avoid the prima facie import of propitiation. The fallacy of these attempts has been successfully demonstrated by scholarly and painstaking study of the biblical data (see bibliography). The reason for the attempt to relieve the work of Christ of its strictly propitiatory character is obvious. To propitiate means to pacify, to conciliate, to make propitious. It presupposes that the person propitiated is angry and needs to be pacified. If Christ propitiates, it must be God whom he propitiates. And surely, it is alleged, we cannot think of God as needing to be pacified or made propitious by the blood of Christ. If the atonement springs from the love of the Father and is the provision of His love, as has been shown above, is it not contradiction to maintain that He is conciliated by that which is the expression of His love? If invincible love is antecedent, then no place remains for the pacifying of wrath!
There is deplorable confusion in this line of reasoning. To love and to be propitious are not convertible terms. Even in the human sphere the unique object of love may at the same time be the unique object of holy wrath and displeasure. It is the denial of God's holiness in relation to Sin, as the contradiction of what He is and demands, not to recognize that sin must evoke His wrath. And just as sin belongs to persons, so the wrath rests upon the persons who are the agents of sin. Those whom God loved with invincible love were the children of wrath, as Paul expressly says (Eph. 2:3). It is to this fact that the propitiation made by Christ is directed. Those whom God loved were the children of His wrath. It is this truth that enhances the marvel of His love, and if we deny it or tone it down we have eviscerated the greatness of His love. The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath. It was Christ's to deal with the wrath so that those loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure. It is a cabined perspective that can dispense with the necessity and glory of propitiation.
The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father's will in the extremities of Gethsemane's agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father's commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father's love and of the Son's love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. "Herein is love," John wrote, "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.
D. Reconciliation. Just as sacrifice has in view the exigency created by our guilt and propitiation the exigency arising from the wrath of God, so reconciliation is concerned with our alienation from God and the need of having that alienation removed. In the Scripture the actual terms used with reference to the reconciliation wrought by Christ are to the effect that we are reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10) and that God reconciles us to Himself (II Cor. 5:18, 19; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1 :2-22). Never is it expressly stated that God is reconciled to us. It has often been stated, therefore, that the cross of Christ, insofar as it contemplated reconciliation, did not terminate upon God to the removal of His alienation from us but simply and solely upon us to the removal of our alienation from Him. In other words, it is not that which God has against us that is dealt with in the reconciliation but only our enmity against Him. It is strange that this contention should be so persistent, that scholars should be content with what is, to say the least, so superficial an interpretation of the usage of Scripture in reference to the term in question.
It is not to be denied that the reconciliation is concerned with our enmity against God. Reconciliation, like all the other categories deals with sin and the liability proceeding from it. And sin is enmity against God. But, when the teaching of Scripture is properly analyzed, it will be seen that reconciliation involves much more than that which might appear at first sight to be the case.
When in Matthew 5:24 we read, "Be reconciled to thy brother," we have an example of the use of the word "reconcile" that should caution us against a common inference. In this instance the person bringing his gift to the altar is reminded that his brother has something against him. It is this grievance on the part of the other that is the reason for interrupting his act of worship. It is the grievance and, in that sense, the against of the other that the worshipper must take into account, and it is the removal of that grievance, of that alienation, of that against," that the reconciliation which he is required to effect contemplates. He is to do all that is necessary to remove the alienation in the mind and attitude of the other. It is plain, therefore, that the situation requiring reconciliation is the frame of mind or the attitude of the other and what the reconciliation must effect is the change of mind on the part of the other, namely, the person called the brother. Thus we are pointed in a very different direction from that which we might have expected from the mere formula "be reconciled." And although it is the "against" of the brother that is in view as requiring a change, the exhortation is in terms of "be reconciled to thy brother" and not at all "Let thy brother be reconciled to thee." By this analysis it can easily be seen that the formula "reconciled to God" can well mean that what the reconciliation has in view is God's alienation from us and the removal of that alienation. Matthew 5:23, 24 shows how indefensible is an interpretation that rests its case upon what, at best, is mere appearance.
Another example points in the same direction. It is Romans 11:15. "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" The "casting away" is that of Israel and the "reconciling" (reconciliation) is that of the Gentile nations. The "casting away" is contrasted with the "reconciliation" and the meaning of the latter is to be discovered from this contrast. The "casting away" is also contrasted with the "receiving," that is, the receiving of them back again. The "casting away" can be nothing other than the rejection of them from the divine favor and blessing they once enjoyed and the "receiving" is the restoration of them again to the divine favor and blessing from which for a time they had been excluded. It is apparent that in both words the thought is focused upon the relation of Israel to God's favor and saving blessing. Reconciliation, being in contrast with casting away, must, therefore, mean the reception of the Gentiles into the favor of God and the blessing of the gospel; it is the relation to God's favor that is expressed. Hence it is upon the change in the disposition of God and the change in the resulting relationship of God to the Gentiles that thought is focused in the word "reconciliation." This demonstrates that the term can be used with reference to a change that takes place in God's mind and relation with reference to men. And we are thus prepared for the appreciation of the teaching of Scripture on the reconciliation accomplished by Christ in His death.
Any proper assessment of the nature and liabilities of sin shows that sin separated us from the favor and fellowship of God (cf. Isa. 59:2). Sin elicits not only the wrath of God but also its complement, alienation from Him. This alienation is the result of our estrangement from Him. The latter is sinful and constitutes our sin but the former is holy as is God's wrath. It is that holy alienation that reconciliation contemplates and it is directed to its removal. This is the gospel of the reconciliation, and what a hiatus there would be in the atonement if it did not provide for this exigency of our sinful state!
If reconciliation consists merely in the change that takes place in the heart of man, the change from enmity to penitence and love, then the reconciliation itself is something inward; it is a change in the subjective disposition and attitude of man. It becomes impossible to adjust the teaching of the two most relevant passages to this conception. These passages are Romans 5:8-11; II Corinthians 5:18-21.
I. The Source. Any doctrine of the atonement is misdirected from the outset if it does not take account of the fact that the atonement is the provision of God's love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for oar sins" (I John 4:10; cf. Rom. 5:8; 8:32; Eph. 2:4, 5; I John 4:9). The title "God" in these texts refers specifically to God the Father. So it is to the initiative of the Father's love that our attention is drawn when we think of the fountain from which the atonement emanates. And all that has been achieved by Christ's vicarious undertaking must always be subordinated to the design and purpose of the Father's love. This is the orientation which the classic exponents of Reformed doctrine have always recognized, and it is a caricature of their position to suppose that they represented the love and compassion of the Father as constrained by the sacrifice of Christ.
In this fact that the love of God is the spring from which the atonement flows we encounter an ultimate of revelation and of human thought. It is the marvel that evokes wonder, adoration, and praise. It is a love that arises from the unsearchable riches of God's goodness. But though an ultimate of revelation, the Scripture not only permits but requires further characterization of this love. The love of God is differentiating in respect of its objects. It is the love of God the Father that Paul has in view when he speaks of Him who "spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" (Rom. 8:32). But it is within the orbit defined by Romans 8:29 that this love must be understood, and the latter text speaks of distinguishing love that predestinates to a determinate end — conformity to the image of his Son. Ephesians 1:4, 5 is to the same effect. God chose a people in Christ and in love predestinated them unto adoption through Jesus Christ. It would annul the witness of Scripture if we ignored the differentiation which the love of God institutes and failed to construe the atonement as the provision of this distinguishing love and as that which secures the design of God's electing grace.
II. The Necessity. The love of God is the cause of the atonement. But why did the love of God take this way of realizing its end? This is the question of the reason as distinguished from the cause. Notable theologians in the history of the church have taken the position that there was no absolute reason, that God could have saved men by other means than by the blood-shedding of His own Son, that, since God is omnipotent and sovereign, other ways of forgiving sin were available to Him. But God was pleased to adopt this method because the greatest number of advantages and blessings accrued from it. God could have redeemed men without the shedding of blood, but He freely chose not to and thereby He magnifies the glory of His grace and enhances the precise character of the salvation bestowed (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas Goodwin, John Ball, Thomas Blake).
It might appear that this view does honor to the omnipotence, sovereignty, and grace of God and, also, that to posit more would be presumptuous on our part and beyond the warrant of Scripture. Is it not the limit of our thought to say that "without the shedding of blood" (Heb. 9:22) there is actually no remission and be satisfied with that datum? There are, however, certain things God cannot do. "He cannot deny himself" (II Tim. 2:13) and it is "impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18). The only question is: are there exigencies arising from the character and perfections of God which make it intrinsically necessary that redemption should be accomplished by the sacrifice of the Son of God? It should be understood that it was not necessary for God to redeem men. The purpose to redeem is of the free and sovereign exercise of His love. But having purposed to redeem, was the only alternative the blood-shedding of His own Son as the way of securing that redemption? There appear to be good reasons for an affirmative answer.
1. Salvation requires not only the forgiveness of sin but also justification. And justification, adequate to the situation in which lost mankind is, demands a righteousness such as belongs to no other than the incarnate Son of God, a righteousness undefiled and undefilable, a righteousness with divine property and quality (cf. Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 22; 10:3; II Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9). It is the righteousness of the obedience of Christ (Rom. 5:19). But only the Son of God. incarnate, fulfilling to the full extent the commitments of the Father's will, could have provided such a righteousness. A concept of salvation bereft of the justification which this righteousness imparts is an abstraction of which Scripture knows nothing.
2. Sin is the contradiction of God and he must react against it with holy wrath. Wherever sin is, the wrath of God rests upon it (cf. Rom. 1:18). Otherwise God would be denying Himself, particularly His holiness, justice, and truth. But wrath must be removed if we are to enjoy the favor of God which salvation implies. And the only provision for the removal of wrath is propitiation. This is surely the import of Romans 3:25, 26, that God set forth Christ a propitiation to declare His righteousness, that He might he just and the justifier of the ungodly.
3. The cross of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God (cf. Rom. 5:8; I John 4:9, 10). But would it be a supreme demonstration of love if the end secured by it could have been achieved without it? Would it be love to secure the end by such expenditure as the agony of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Calvary for God's own well-beloved and only-begotten Son if the result could have been attained by less costly means? In that event would it not have been love without wisdom? In this we cannot suppress the significance of our Lord's prayer in Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). If it had been possible for the cup to pass from him, his prayer would surely have been answered. It is when the indispensable exigencies fulfilled by Jesus' suffering unto death are properly assessed that we can see the marvel of God's love in the ordeal of Calvary. So great was the Father's love to lost men that He decreed their redemption even though the cost was nought less than the accursed tree. When Calvary is viewed in this light. then the love manifested not only takes on meaning but fills us with adoring amazement. Truly this is love.
Those who think that in pursuance of God's saving purpose the cross was not intrinsically necessary are, in reality, not dealing with the hypothetical necessity of the atonement but with a hypothetical salvation. For, on their own admission, they are not saying that the actual salvation designed and bestowed could have been enjoyed without Christ but only salvation of lesser character and glory. But of such salvation the Scripture knows nothing and no good purpose can be served by an imaginary hypothesis.
III. Nature. The nature of the atonement is concerned with the ways in which the Scripture characterizes Christ's vicarious undertakings and accomplishments. The most basic and inclusive of these categories is obedience. And there are four categories that are more specific — sacrifice, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption.
A. Obedience. Obedience does not define for us the specific character of the other categories but it does point us to the capacity in which Christ discharges all phases of his atoning work. No passage in Scripture provides more instruction on our topic than Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is in the capacity of Servant that the person in view is introduced and it is in the same capacity he executes His expiatory function (Isa. 52:13, 15; 53:11). The title "Servant" derives its meaning from the fact that He is the Lord's Servant, not the Servant of men (cf. Isa. 42:1, 19; 52:13). He is the Father's Servant and this implies subjection to and fulfillment of the Father's will. Servant defines His commitment, and obedience the execution. Psalm 40:7, 8 points in the same direction. Our Lord Himself confirms what the Old Testament foretold. "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me' (John 6:38; cf. 4:34; 10:17, 18). The pivotal events of redemptive accomplishment He performed in pursuance of the Father's commandment and in the exercise of messianic authority. Paul's witness is to the same effect as that of the Old Testament and of Jesus Himself. Most important is Philippians 2:7, 8. For this text in respect of the capacity in which Jesus acted attaches itself to Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and represents the climactic event of Jesus' commitment, the death of the cross, as an act of obedience. And Romans 5:19 expresses that it is by the obedience of Christ that many are constituted righteous. This evidence shows that our thought respecting the nature of the atonement is not biblically conditioned unless it is governed by the concept of the obedience of Christ in His capacity as the Servant fulfilling the Father's commission.
We must not view this obedience mechanically or quantitatively. It did not consist simply in the sum-total of formal acts of obedience. Obedience springs from the dispositional complex of motive, intention, direction, and purpose. And since our Lord was truly human and fulfilled the Father's will in human nature, we must appreciate the progression in knowledge, understanding, resolution, and will which was necessary to and came to expression in the discharge of the Father's will in its increasing demands upon Him until these demands reached their climax in the death upon the cross. This explains the word in Hebrews 5:8 that "he learned obedience from the things which he suffered." At no point was He disobedient. But the demands of obedience were so expansive and progressively exacting that he had to learn in the furnace of trial, temptation, and suffering. Since His obedience thus attained to the perfection and completeness required for the discharge of His commitments to the fullest extent of their demands, He was made perfect as the captain of salvation (Heb. 2:10) and "being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him" (Heb. 5:9). This is but saying that it was by obedience that he accomplished the salvation of the many sons who are to be brought to glory, and we see how integral to salvation secured is the obedience of Christ.
B. Sacrifice. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament to show that Christ's giving of Himself is to be construed in terms of sacrificial offering (I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 23, 25, 26, 28; 10:10, 12, 14, 26). And it is not only these express statements which support the thesis but also references which can only be interpreted in terms of the altar of sacrifice (cf., e.g., Heb. 13: 1-l3). The notion of sacrifice entertained by these New Testament writers is that derived from the Old Testament, for the allusions to the sacrificial ritual of the levitical economy make it apparent that the latter provided the type in terms of which the sacrifice of Christ was to be interpreted. The Old Testament sacrifices were expiatory of guilt. This is particulary true of the sin-offerings, and these are specifically in view in some of the New Testament passages (cf. Heb. 9:6-15, 23, 24; l3:1-13). The idea of expiation is the removal of the liability accruing from sin. Sacrifice is the provision whereby this liability is removed — it is the substitutive endurance of penalty and transference of liability from the offerer to the sacrifice.
The Old Testament sacrifices were truly typological of the sacrifice of Christ. Isaiah 53:10 expressly applies to the self-sacrifice of the Servant what was figuratively represented by the trespass-offering, and in New Testament passages, as indicated above, the levitical offerings provide the analogy after which Christ's sacrifice is to be understood. But of more significance is the fact that the sacrifice of Christ is the archetype after which they were patterned — they were patterns of the things in the heavens and only figures of the true (Heb. 9:23, 24). Christ's offering is the heavenly exemplar. This is additional confirmation that what was signified in shadow by the ritual offerings, namely expiation, was transcendently and really true in the sacrifice of Christ. The shadow portrays the outline of the reality. It is, however, this truth, that the sacrifice of Christ is the heavenly reality, that insures the efficacy and finality and perfection of His sacrifice in contrast with the obvious shortcomings of the levitical offerings (cf. Heb. 9:9-14, 24-28). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14).
It is the work of Christ, viewed in terms of sacrifice, that thrusts into the foreground the high priestly office of our Redeemer. It is the prerogative of the priest to offer sacrifice and only in the exercise of His prerogative as the great high priest of our profession did Jesus offer Himself. He was "called of Cod an high priest after the order of Melchizedek" (Heb. 5:10). Here the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice is further demonstrated. He offered Himself, and the sacrifice He offered was Himself. He acted as both priest and offering (cf. Heb. 7:27; 8:3; 9:14, 25; 10:59) and thus purged our sins. The transcendent perfection, efficacy, and finality of His sacrifice reside in the transcendent character of the offering and the dignity of His priesthood.
C. Propitiation. The language of propitiation is clearly applied to the work of Christ in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; I John 2:2; 4:10). Plausible attempts have been made to interpret propitiation in terms of expiation and thus avoid the prima facie import of propitiation. The fallacy of these attempts has been successfully demonstrated by scholarly and painstaking study of the biblical data (see bibliography). The reason for the attempt to relieve the work of Christ of its strictly propitiatory character is obvious. To propitiate means to pacify, to conciliate, to make propitious. It presupposes that the person propitiated is angry and needs to be pacified. If Christ propitiates, it must be God whom he propitiates. And surely, it is alleged, we cannot think of God as needing to be pacified or made propitious by the blood of Christ. If the atonement springs from the love of the Father and is the provision of His love, as has been shown above, is it not contradiction to maintain that He is conciliated by that which is the expression of His love? If invincible love is antecedent, then no place remains for the pacifying of wrath!
There is deplorable confusion in this line of reasoning. To love and to be propitious are not convertible terms. Even in the human sphere the unique object of love may at the same time be the unique object of holy wrath and displeasure. It is the denial of God's holiness in relation to Sin, as the contradiction of what He is and demands, not to recognize that sin must evoke His wrath. And just as sin belongs to persons, so the wrath rests upon the persons who are the agents of sin. Those whom God loved with invincible love were the children of wrath, as Paul expressly says (Eph. 2:3). It is to this fact that the propitiation made by Christ is directed. Those whom God loved were the children of His wrath. It is this truth that enhances the marvel of His love, and if we deny it or tone it down we have eviscerated the greatness of His love. The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of this wrath. It was Christ's to deal with the wrath so that those loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God's good pleasure. It is a cabined perspective that can dispense with the necessity and glory of propitiation.
The disposition to deny or even underrate the doctrine of propitiation betrays a bias that is prejudicial to the atonement as such. The atonement means that Christ bore our sins and in bearing sin bore its judgment (cf. Isa. 53:5). Death itself is the judgment of God upon sin (cf. Rom. 5:12; 6:23). And Christ died for no other reason than that death is the wages of sin. But the epitome of the judgment of God upon sin is His wrath. If Jesus in our place met the whole judgment of God upon our sin, He must have endured that which constitutes the essence of this judgment How superficial is the notion that the vicarious endurance of wrath is incompatible with the immutable love of the Father to Him! Of course, the Father loved the Son with unchangeable and infinite love. And the discharge of the Father's will in the extremities of Gethsemane's agony and the abandonment of Calvary elicited the supreme delight of the Father (cf. John 10:17). But love and wrath are not contradictory; love and hatred are. It is only because Jesus was the Son, loved immutably as such and loved increasingly in His messianic capacity as He progressively fulfilled the demands of the Father's commission, that He could bear the full stroke of judicial wrath. This is inscribed on the most mysterious utterance that ever ascended from earth to heaven, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34). God in our nature forsaken of God! Here is the wonder of the Father's love and of the Son's love, too. Eternity will not scale its heights or fathom its depths. How pitiable is the shortsightedness that blinds us to its grandeur and that fails to see the necessity and glory of the propitiation. "Herein is love," John wrote, "not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son a propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). Christ is truly the propitiation for our sins because He propitiated the wrath which was our damnation. The language of propitiation may not be diluted; it bespeaks the essence of Calvary.
D. Reconciliation. Just as sacrifice has in view the exigency created by our guilt and propitiation the exigency arising from the wrath of God, so reconciliation is concerned with our alienation from God and the need of having that alienation removed. In the Scripture the actual terms used with reference to the reconciliation wrought by Christ are to the effect that we are reconciled to God (Rom. 5:10) and that God reconciles us to Himself (II Cor. 5:18, 19; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1 :2-22). Never is it expressly stated that God is reconciled to us. It has often been stated, therefore, that the cross of Christ, insofar as it contemplated reconciliation, did not terminate upon God to the removal of His alienation from us but simply and solely upon us to the removal of our alienation from Him. In other words, it is not that which God has against us that is dealt with in the reconciliation but only our enmity against Him. It is strange that this contention should be so persistent, that scholars should be content with what is, to say the least, so superficial an interpretation of the usage of Scripture in reference to the term in question.
It is not to be denied that the reconciliation is concerned with our enmity against God. Reconciliation, like all the other categories deals with sin and the liability proceeding from it. And sin is enmity against God. But, when the teaching of Scripture is properly analyzed, it will be seen that reconciliation involves much more than that which might appear at first sight to be the case.
When in Matthew 5:24 we read, "Be reconciled to thy brother," we have an example of the use of the word "reconcile" that should caution us against a common inference. In this instance the person bringing his gift to the altar is reminded that his brother has something against him. It is this grievance on the part of the other that is the reason for interrupting his act of worship. It is the grievance and, in that sense, the against of the other that the worshipper must take into account, and it is the removal of that grievance, of that alienation, of that against," that the reconciliation which he is required to effect contemplates. He is to do all that is necessary to remove the alienation in the mind and attitude of the other. It is plain, therefore, that the situation requiring reconciliation is the frame of mind or the attitude of the other and what the reconciliation must effect is the change of mind on the part of the other, namely, the person called the brother. Thus we are pointed in a very different direction from that which we might have expected from the mere formula "be reconciled." And although it is the "against" of the brother that is in view as requiring a change, the exhortation is in terms of "be reconciled to thy brother" and not at all "Let thy brother be reconciled to thee." By this analysis it can easily be seen that the formula "reconciled to God" can well mean that what the reconciliation has in view is God's alienation from us and the removal of that alienation. Matthew 5:23, 24 shows how indefensible is an interpretation that rests its case upon what, at best, is mere appearance.
Another example points in the same direction. It is Romans 11:15. "For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" The "casting away" is that of Israel and the "reconciling" (reconciliation) is that of the Gentile nations. The "casting away" is contrasted with the "reconciliation" and the meaning of the latter is to be discovered from this contrast. The "casting away" is also contrasted with the "receiving," that is, the receiving of them back again. The "casting away" can be nothing other than the rejection of them from the divine favor and blessing they once enjoyed and the "receiving" is the restoration of them again to the divine favor and blessing from which for a time they had been excluded. It is apparent that in both words the thought is focused upon the relation of Israel to God's favor and saving blessing. Reconciliation, being in contrast with casting away, must, therefore, mean the reception of the Gentiles into the favor of God and the blessing of the gospel; it is the relation to God's favor that is expressed. Hence it is upon the change in the disposition of God and the change in the resulting relationship of God to the Gentiles that thought is focused in the word "reconciliation." This demonstrates that the term can be used with reference to a change that takes place in God's mind and relation with reference to men. And we are thus prepared for the appreciation of the teaching of Scripture on the reconciliation accomplished by Christ in His death.
Any proper assessment of the nature and liabilities of sin shows that sin separated us from the favor and fellowship of God (cf. Isa. 59:2). Sin elicits not only the wrath of God but also its complement, alienation from Him. This alienation is the result of our estrangement from Him. The latter is sinful and constitutes our sin but the former is holy as is God's wrath. It is that holy alienation that reconciliation contemplates and it is directed to its removal. This is the gospel of the reconciliation, and what a hiatus there would be in the atonement if it did not provide for this exigency of our sinful state!
If reconciliation consists merely in the change that takes place in the heart of man, the change from enmity to penitence and love, then the reconciliation itself is something inward; it is a change in the subjective disposition and attitude of man. It becomes impossible to adjust the teaching of the two most relevant passages to this conception. These passages are Romans 5:8-11; II Corinthians 5:18-21.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Calvin or Wesley?-2
Moving ahead, I think that your chapter (5) on Calvinism & consistency is the best chapter in the book. You mention a debate between Thomas Talbott and John Piper. Talbot says that a mother could not regard God as worthy of worship unless he saved her daughter from hell. Piper demurs.
I find it very curious that you introduce this debate, on more than one occasion (161-62, 219), in objection to Calvinism. How does the Arminian position present a point of contrast to Talbott's critique of Calvinism? In Arminian theology, no less than in Calvinism, the daughter may be damned. The only difference is that in Reformed theology, her fate is indexed to the will of God, whereas in Arminian theology, he fate is indexed to the will of man--her own.
And in what sense, moreover, is this a logical inconcinnity in Calvinism? Suppose the daughter murdered another mother's daughter? The mother of the murderer will feel differently about her own daughter than the mother of the murdered daughter. And the prosecutor will not feel the same way about the murderer as her own mother does.
Point being: the fact that in this life my attitude towards one of my own family members may not be identical with God's attitude towards the same is not logically inconsistent or morally relevant. It doesn't differentiate Calvinism from Arminianism. And it's just as much of a problem for universalism inasmuch as you will still have conflicting attitudes between the victim's family and the victimizer's.
All a Calvinist can say is that heaven has its compensations, and that there we will see things as God's sees them. What does the Arminian have to say?
You next attempt to drive a wedge between to different formulations of effectual calling in the WCF. Among other interpretive options, you explore the suggestion that 'it's not enough for God to make us willing to do right; he must also enable us to act rightly. For willingness doesn't imply ability any more than ability implies willingness' (167); 'the ability is still lacking and must be added once willingness is established' (167).
To me, the two different formulations are complementary, and their relation is pretty obvious. Enablement is a necessary, but insufficient condition. We cannot be willing to believe unless we are able to believe. Hence, we cannot be willing to believe unless we are enabled to believe. Willingness implies ability, but not vice versa. Why you either reverse the relation or outright deny any relation is quite counterintuitive.
Owing to the fall, the unregenerate suffer from spiritual inability: a moral and psychological indisposition to repent of their sins and believe the Gospel. Regeneration removes the spiritual impediment. But in order for the calling to be an 'effectual' calling, it must not merely enable our belief-forming mechanism, but effect the formation of evangelical faith and repentance. There is not the slightest degree of inconsistency in this dual formulation.
You need to keep in mind that the WCF is a Puritan document: the Puritans took great interest in schematizing the process of conversion. The Confession is simply breaking this down into logical stages for clarity and completeness of analysis. It doesn't even follow that these are distinct phases in real time.
The Confession is also attempting to coordinate Johannine and Pauline categories of conversion. Regeneration is a Johannine category, whereas effectual calling is a Pauline category. Calling is inclusive of regeneration. Regeneration is one-half of conversion (as it were). In regeneration, the human subject is passive, is acted upon. But the effect of regenerate is to activate or reactivate the human subject. A consequence of regeneration is that the human subject becomes a spiritual agent. The act of faith is the other half of conversion (as it were), the reflexive response to God's grace. The relation is one of cause-and-effect, the human reaction to a divine action. To be sure, Arminian theology has a different model of conversion, but you're critique was concerned with the coherence of the Reformed model.
In your next three sections you take on Packer, Piper, and Sproul. Here I think you drew blood. This is the most cogent part of the book. But the wounds are only flesh wounds.
You discuss Packer in relation to the offer of the Gospel. I think your criticisms hit home. But that is only because you've chosen Packer as your representative. If, instead, you had chosen, let us say, Roger Nicole, your objections would have missed the mark. Cf. R. Nicole, 'Covenant, Universal Call and Definite Atonement,' Standing Forth (CFP 2002), 331-43.
The only thing that makes an offer a bona fide offer is that if anyone meets the terms of the offer, he gets what was offered.
For you to stipulate, as an additional condition, that everyone must be able, or enabled, to meet the terms of the offer (171-73) is highly artificial. By that standard, a store cannot, in good faith, advertise any product unless it also provides free transportation or interest-free financing or removes any other obstacle that might otherwise impede a prospective customer from taking the store up on its offer.
In effect you are saying that an offer is only a genuine offer if the party making the offer supplies and satisfies all of the necessary conditions on behalf of and instead of the second-party. How is such a very vicarious model of responsibility consistent with the Arminian axiom of individual responsibility?
Does Asbury Seminary measure up to so lofty a standard? When Asbury offers a degree program, does it also take any and all measures necessary to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, regardless of his financial status, or his academic record, to study at Asbury? How can you, in all sincerity, teach at an institution which falls so far short of the mark?
In a footnote (172, n21), you say that a Calvinist could sidestep the dilemma by a more nuanced statement of the offer, but this would mislead the uninitiated. I don't know the point of this criticism. The duty of an evangelist is to offer the Gospel on the terms in which it is offered in Scripture, viz., repent of your sins and believe in Christ.
Both the Arminian and the Calvinist believe that there are certain background conditions which must be met if the terms of the offer are to be met. But precisely because these conditions lie in the background, lie outside the control of either the evangelist or the audience, it is quite unnecessary for a minister of the Gospel to introduce these ulterior conditions into the evangelistic message itself. He may, if he chooses to, but that is not a fundamental feature of the offer itself.
Once again, it is unclear how Arminian theology presents a superior alternative. If the Arminian can fault the Calvinist for making an offer, knowing that it can't be accepted in every case, a universalist can fault an Arminian for making an offer, knowing that it won't be accepted in every case. The one is just as sincere or insincere as the other.
Indeed, this presents yet another parallel between Reformed and Arminian theology. Reformed theology limits the efficacy of the offer to the will of God; Arminian theology limits the efficacy of the offer to the will of man.
Incidentally, it is deeply disingenuous for an Arminian to even be bringing up this subject. For an Arminian doesn't believe that faith in Christ is a prerequisite of salvation. Billions and billions of men and women live and die outside the pale of the Gospel. Arminians believe that general redemption can channel the knowledge of salvation. In principle, anyone and everyone could be saved even if absolutely no one ever believed in the Gospel. That's the Arminian bottom-line, is it not?
On the one hand, Arminians believe that God loves everyone equally, desires the salvation of all alike, and has, in fact, made provision for the potential salvation of everyone: Christ died for everyone, and the Holy Spirit equips everyone with sufficient/prevenient grace.
On the other hand, everyone does not have access to the Gospel. If faith in Christ were a condition of salvation, then this would mean that everyone does not have an opportunity to be saved.
As a consequence, God must make it possible for someone to be saved apart from faith in Christ. Otherwise, God would be unloving and unfair to condemn someone who never had a chance.
Hence, the Arminian will say that someone can be saved if he's faithful to the light he's been given--to general revelation. He is still saved by the atonement of Christ, but ignorant of his Savior. In principle, then, no one has to believe in Christ to be saved.
BTW, I puzzled by your claim that most Calvinists believe that God offers everyone a genuine opportunity to be saved (216). Whatever is this based on?
Next, you go after Piper's contention that God wants to save the reprobate. There are two things to be said on this score. To begin with, this is just Piper's private opinion. It is popular in modern-day Calvinism. However, I'm unaware of any historic Reformed confession that canonizes this particular position. So there is no received opinion on this issue. For example, the official position of the OPC and CRC side with Piper, whereas the official position of the PRC takes the opposing side.
Remember how you chose to frame this debate at the outset. You began with a definition of Calvinism, drawn from the five-points of Calvinism. In order to make good on your claim, what you need to show is not that Piper's version is internally inconsistent, but that the five-points are internally inconsistent. For there is a very simply way of relieving the tension in Piper's position, and that is to deny that God wants to save the reprobate.
And there are Reformed theologians who do, indeed, deny Piper's contention. To cinch your argument, you would need to demonstrate that their denial is inconsistent with Reformed tradition or with the inner logic of Calvinism.
Second, you say that 'unlike many Calvinist exegetes, Piper does not attempt to circumvent the straightforward meaning of the texts' (174).
But this move is problematic on a couple of grounds:
i) It confirms the very point I made above. You admit at the outset that there is a division of opinion within Reformed circles on this particular point. In order for you to mount a sound argument, you would have to take a two-pronged approach by exposing an inner tension (a) not only in Piper's position, (b) but in the opposing position as well. But you leave the job half-done. How does that refute Calvinism?
ii) For you to say, without benefit of any supporting argument, that the opposing position tries to 'circumvent the straightforward meaning' of Ezk 18:23; 1 Tim 2:4 & 2 Pet 3:9 is flagrantly tendentious. This is not a reasoned argument; rather, this is only the naked assertion of your Arminian prejudice. And you are welcome to your interpretation, but you need to make a case for it. Otherwise you only assume what you ought to prove.
And I would also take issue with your assumption. I've already dealt with the Pastorals. As to Ezk 18:23, what is the context? To whom was it addressed? This was addressed to Israel, to backslidden Israel, to the covenant community--by virtue of God's national election. By what 'straightforward' reasoning do you reapply this to 'all persons without qualification'? When you talk about Rom 9, you lay great stress on the Jewish context. Why does that consideration suddenly desert you when you come to Ezekiel?
As to 2 Pet 3:9, this, too, has its background in OT usage. You quote from one of Bauckham's books, but I notice that you don't go quoting from his commentary on 2 Peter 3:9, where he explains that in Jewish thought, divine judgement is ordinarily delayed for the sake of the covenant community. Cf. R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Word 1983), 312-13.
Finally, you accuse R. C. Sproul of oscillating between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Then you correlate the compatibilist/incompatibilist debate with the supra/infra debate. Then you contrast his position with Calvin's.
Now, suppose that everything you say against his position holds true. Where does that get you, exactly? At best, you've scored some points against Sproul and the infra position, but you've left Calvin and the supra view untouched. Indeed, you seem to imply that the view of Calvin and the supras is a coherent one.
If that is so, how does your critique constitute a critique of Calvinism, per se? I assume you view Calvin as an authentic exponent of Calvinism. In order to make your case you would have to eliminate each alternative in turn. Once more, you leave the job half-finished.
In addition, your analysis suffers from an equivocation over the nature of freedom. Calvinism doesn't deny that men make choices. It doesn't deny moral or rational deliberation. A man has many more abstract choices than an oyster, for a man has a faculty for abstract reasons--unlike a merely instinctual animal. We can imagine a wide variety of hypotheticals and their possible consequences.
But, as a practical matter, we can only act on one choice at a time, and by opting for one choice, we thereby eliminate opposing alternatives. I can either fold or call a bluff and play my hand. But I can't very well do both. If I place a bet or raise a bet, I cannot also fold. And I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
Calvinism does not deny, but delimits, human freedom. It denies that the unregenerate can believe the Gospel. And it denies that anyone can do otherwise than what God has decreed.
But the freedom to do otherwise is, itself, ambiguous. Does this mean the freedom to do otherwise if we want to do otherwise? Or the freedom to want to do otherwise?
Once more, there is a parallel between Reformed and Arminian theology. Both make way for the counterfactuals of freedom, but the difference is that Calvinism indexes future contingents to the will of God whereas Arminianism indexes future contingents to the will of man. And both these models entail a mutual adjustment. If you index counterfactual freedom to human agency, then a respective readjustment must be made in the sphere of divine agency; but if you index counterfactual freedom to divine agency, then a respective readjustment must be made in the sphere of human agency. Simply put, either we choose according to God's own choosing, or God chooses according to our own choosing.
Moving onto your chapter (6) on Calvinism & the Christian life, you raise four practical objections to Calvinism: evangelism, the fate of the unevangelized, Christian assurance, and the problem of evil.
Taking these in order, you say that 'On the surface, Calvinism appears to undermine motivation for evangelism. For if God has unconditionally chosen who will be saved and who will be left in their sins for eventual damnation, then surely the persons so chosen for salvation will in fact be saved. And if this is so, there is little reason for us to worry about evangelism--nothing we do or fail to do will in any way thwart God's sovereign purposes in election' (191).
I beg to differ. This only follows because you have offered a severely truncated statement of the Reformed position. God has chosen who will be saved, and he has chosen them to be saved by believing the Gospel. There is not even the appearance of inconsistency. Indeed, we could fill this out in ever more detailed. God has chosen who will believe. God has granted them the grace to believe. God has chosen the preachers who will bring the good news. All the moving parts conspire like clockwork. Would that undermine the incentive to wind my watch or consult a clock to tell the time?
Moving on to the second objection, you say that 'it remains practically difficult to both adore the purposes of God and let our hearts of compassion go out to persons he hasn't elect to save' (197).
And how does that follow? To begin with, these two things would only be in tension if we knew God's purposes in particular. Since Calvinism only maintains 'that' God has chosen who will and will not be saved, but has not revealed 'who' will and will not be saved, the abstract knowledge of the general proposition has no special bearing on how we treat anyone in particular--just as a Christian aid worker can have compassion on all the poor and needy even though he only has enough supplies to feed and medicate a fraction of the total.
In addition, how is this an argument for the Arminian alternative? It would be easy to imagine a universalist deploy the same objection to Arminian theology, viz., 'it remains practically difficult to both adore the purposes of God and let our hearts of compassion go out to those he will consign to the everlasting bonfire.'
Moving on to the third objection, you say that 'Calvinism denies those struggling with their faith of the single most important resource: the confidence that God loves all of us with every kind of love we need to enable and encourage our eternal flourishing and well-being' (201).
The insinuation here is that Arminian theology does supply this resource. But it does nothing of the kind. Arminian love is broad because Arminian love is shallow. The God of Calvin is a lifeguard who plunges into the rip currents to save a drowning swimmer and brings him ashore. The God of Wesley is a distraught girlfriend who stands on the beach, jumping up and down, shrieking and shouting, weeping and waiving her arms as her boyfriend sinks under the waves.
True, a Reformed pastor cannot assure every doubter that he is a child of God, any more than a Christian counselor can assure every desperate drunk or hopeless junkie or compulsive gambler that he will overcome his addiction, or assure every manic-depressive that he will never succumb to suicide. It would be nice if we could tell everyone that everything will come up roses, but that would be a lie. No, the Calvinist cannot say that, and neither, I daresay, can the Arminian. The only one who can pretend to offer such assurance is a universalist, but we both agree that his assurance is false assurance.
Is this general connection you also ask how we ought to counsel a young believer who fears her father has gone to hell (214). How is this pertinent to the present debate? Her father either is or is not in hell. Traditional Wesleyan theology affirms that possibility no less than Calvinism. Her daughter either has or has not good reasons for her fear. Would an Arminian counselor give her different advice than a Calvinist? Will he hold a séance?
Moving on to the fourth and final objection, you say: 'We believe that a brake failure and the resulting crash that causes paralysis need not be understood as sent by God. Rather, the brake failure can be seen as a tragedy resulting from the fact that we live in a world operating by God-ordained natural law and that sometimes things designed by human beings fail' (209).
Well, that may be what you believe, but how is that any answer to the problem of evil? Instead of answering the problem of evil you've merely canonized it in a disguised description. If a tragedy is the result of a natural law, and God is the lawmaker, then to justify the result by appeal to natural law begs the very question at issue: Why would a good God institute natural laws in the first place that result in natural evils?
You go to say that this is 'essentially involved in living as embodied beings in a physical world' (209). How is that essential? Is the universe a doomsday machine that once the engineer flips the on-switch, can brook no further interference? Have Arminians ceased believing in miracles?
If you knew that the breaks were going to go out, would you let your wife drive the car? And if the brakes did fail, leaving your wife an invalid, would you console her by saying that you didn't interfere since the accident was a natural consequence of embodied existence?'
You second example is that 'we don't believe the sexual abuse of the young girl was planned by God. Far from it! Rather, this tragedy results from our God-given libertarian freedom, and we often choose to use that freedom in terrible ways…The web of human choice is such that we are interdependent, our decisions can profoundly affect others, both for good and evil' (210).
For starters, it would be helpful if you began with the candid admission that there is no nice, ouchless, painless answer to this sort of question. The Calvinist has none, but neither has the Arminian, or even the universalist. The pain resides in the event, not in the explanation.
No doubt the average Christian will balk at the suggestion that God had planned some atrocity. But he should balk at the alternative as well. Once again, all you've done is to paraphrase the original problem: to say that evil is a result of our freedom is no justification whatsoever, for the question at issue is whether the freedom of the victimizer ought to outweigh the infringement of the victim's freedom.
Which brings us to the next point, for your answer is not even coherent. Whose libertarian freedom? The victim's? Or the victimizer's? What is libertarian freedom if not the freedom to do otherwise? But the victimizer deprives the victim of her freedom to do otherwise. So your dogma of libertarian freedom is just a paper theory--a paper theory stained in the blood of the unwilling victim.
And, for that matter, why do you think it's permissible for a human agent to deprive another human agent of freedom of opportunity, but impermissible for God to do so? Why do you confer more power on one human agent over the life and welfare of another than you ascribe to God? And how is this any sort of solution to the problem of evil?
Next, you say: 'nothing that happens to us, either from the natural world or from human treachery, can defeat God's ultimate purpose for us. Off course, we can reject God's purpose for our lives and choose self-destruction. But nothing else in the entire universe can keep us from reaching the ultimate good that God desires for all humans' (210).
I love the way you sneak in the exclamation: 'of course!' It is interesting how often people will say 'of course!' when they really mean just the opposite, when they know that they are assuming the very thing they need to prove, so they hope to hustle by the bone of contention by momentarily distracting our attention with this reassuring exclamation.
Well, the decoy didn't do the trick--not for this reader, at least. What you position amounts to is this: 'God can save me from everything and everyone except myself!'
Oh, is that all? This is what is so unspeakably shallow and uncomprehending about Arminian theology. The weak link in this chain is the sinner himself. To say to a sinner that God is able to save him from everything except his own worst self is like offering a cancer patient a down pillow and lollypop in lieu of a cure.
What is more, I don't see how an Arminian is in any position to even offer your concessive assurance. To adapt your own example, suppose an elder abuses his own daughter. As a result of this experience, the abuse victim turns away from the faith, for the church of Christ, and the God of Scripture, are associated in her mind with her sexual abuse. Now surely this is more than just a bare hypothetical. Surely this actually happens. How can you, the Arminian, guarantee that this searing experience will not invincibly bias her heart and mind against the Gospel? Indeed, isn't it fair to say that this sort of thing has happened on more than one occasion? The victim is so embittered, so enveloped in hatred for her abuser, that she is unreachable.
Next, you say that 'O felix culpa makes sense if the greater good resulting from the Fall is made freely available to all persons in such a way that they are truly able to take advantage of it…But if many are far worse off, indeed infinitely worse off, as a result of the Fall--that is, if they are never given the grace needed to escape their misery--it is difficult to see how the Fall can be seen as a fortunate crime' (213).
The reasoning here is somewhat opaque. What, exactly, are you trying to say? Fortunate for whom? Good for what? Obviously it is not a greater good for the damned, but the very nature of a greater good defense is that it entails a trade-off between a lesser good for a greater number and a greater good for a lesser number.
The Arminian believes that grace is toxic in large doses. It must be administered with an eyedropper. The purpose of grace in Arminian theology is not to save anyone at all, but rather to render everyone equally savable or damnable.
Actually, there is a direct Arminian parallel to the Reformed theodicy. An Arminian offers a lesser grace for a greater number whereas a Calvinist offers a greater grace to a lesser number.
And how does Arminian theology solve the problem as you have chosen to frame it? What value is there in freedom of opportunity without freedom of outcome? Even on an Arminian construction, many are worse off, infinitely worse off, for many still end up in hell. Every objection an Arminian can level against Calvinism, a universalist can level against Arminianism.
Next, you say that 'if is most difficult to see how God could be good in any ordinary sense of the term if he ordained or allowed the Fall knowing that it would have such consequences' (213).
I find this puzzling. I thought you were a representative of classic Arminian theology, which denies divine foreordination, but affirms divine foreknowledge. But now you seem to make the same move as the open theist. Are you saying that the logical and ethical alternative to Calvinism is not, in fact, Arminianism, but open theism?
If this is what you mean, then I fail to see how it improves on the Reformed alternative. If a mother leaves a toddler unattended in a kitchen, and the kid scalds himself by reaching for a pot of boiling water, does this absolve the mother of blame? Even if she didn't know that this would happen, she knew that this could happen. Is that not blameworthy?
But if this is not what you mean, then what do you mean? And what, really, is the material difference between foreknowledge and foreordination at this juncture? Even on an Arminian construction, it is not merely that God knows what will happen; rather, God chooses to make a world in which that will happen. If he never made the world, that future would never transpire. So not only does he know what will happen, but he must intend it to happen, since that is a direct result of his own action—an action from which he was free to refrain.
Finally, you say that 'it is worth asking whether we would be considered good if we arranged things in such a way that many persons suffered greatly, even though we could have relieved their suffering. I think most persons would readily agree that we would not be good' (213).
Once again, if this is a problem, how is Arminian theology a solution? Couldn't a universalist turn this self-same objection back on your own position? In traditional Arminian theology, God did, in fact, arrange things in just such a way that many men, women and children suffer greatly, even though God could intervene, more often than he does, to relieve their pain and suffering. You may say that this is a necessary evil, but the notion of a necessary evil figures in a Reformed theodicy as well.
Are you going to say that this would infringe on human freedom? But, again, whose freedom? The victim's or the victimizer's?
Moreover, your statement fails to draw the most elementary moral distinction between innocence and guilt. What obligation am I under to relieve the suffering of the wicked? I, for one, would much rather see Joseph Mengele suffer for his sins than sun himself on the beaches of Rio.
In Calvinism, however unjustly we may suffer at the hands of our fellow man, no one suffers unjustly at the hands of our God.
I find it very curious that you introduce this debate, on more than one occasion (161-62, 219), in objection to Calvinism. How does the Arminian position present a point of contrast to Talbott's critique of Calvinism? In Arminian theology, no less than in Calvinism, the daughter may be damned. The only difference is that in Reformed theology, her fate is indexed to the will of God, whereas in Arminian theology, he fate is indexed to the will of man--her own.
And in what sense, moreover, is this a logical inconcinnity in Calvinism? Suppose the daughter murdered another mother's daughter? The mother of the murderer will feel differently about her own daughter than the mother of the murdered daughter. And the prosecutor will not feel the same way about the murderer as her own mother does.
Point being: the fact that in this life my attitude towards one of my own family members may not be identical with God's attitude towards the same is not logically inconsistent or morally relevant. It doesn't differentiate Calvinism from Arminianism. And it's just as much of a problem for universalism inasmuch as you will still have conflicting attitudes between the victim's family and the victimizer's.
All a Calvinist can say is that heaven has its compensations, and that there we will see things as God's sees them. What does the Arminian have to say?
You next attempt to drive a wedge between to different formulations of effectual calling in the WCF. Among other interpretive options, you explore the suggestion that 'it's not enough for God to make us willing to do right; he must also enable us to act rightly. For willingness doesn't imply ability any more than ability implies willingness' (167); 'the ability is still lacking and must be added once willingness is established' (167).
To me, the two different formulations are complementary, and their relation is pretty obvious. Enablement is a necessary, but insufficient condition. We cannot be willing to believe unless we are able to believe. Hence, we cannot be willing to believe unless we are enabled to believe. Willingness implies ability, but not vice versa. Why you either reverse the relation or outright deny any relation is quite counterintuitive.
Owing to the fall, the unregenerate suffer from spiritual inability: a moral and psychological indisposition to repent of their sins and believe the Gospel. Regeneration removes the spiritual impediment. But in order for the calling to be an 'effectual' calling, it must not merely enable our belief-forming mechanism, but effect the formation of evangelical faith and repentance. There is not the slightest degree of inconsistency in this dual formulation.
You need to keep in mind that the WCF is a Puritan document: the Puritans took great interest in schematizing the process of conversion. The Confession is simply breaking this down into logical stages for clarity and completeness of analysis. It doesn't even follow that these are distinct phases in real time.
The Confession is also attempting to coordinate Johannine and Pauline categories of conversion. Regeneration is a Johannine category, whereas effectual calling is a Pauline category. Calling is inclusive of regeneration. Regeneration is one-half of conversion (as it were). In regeneration, the human subject is passive, is acted upon. But the effect of regenerate is to activate or reactivate the human subject. A consequence of regeneration is that the human subject becomes a spiritual agent. The act of faith is the other half of conversion (as it were), the reflexive response to God's grace. The relation is one of cause-and-effect, the human reaction to a divine action. To be sure, Arminian theology has a different model of conversion, but you're critique was concerned with the coherence of the Reformed model.
In your next three sections you take on Packer, Piper, and Sproul. Here I think you drew blood. This is the most cogent part of the book. But the wounds are only flesh wounds.
You discuss Packer in relation to the offer of the Gospel. I think your criticisms hit home. But that is only because you've chosen Packer as your representative. If, instead, you had chosen, let us say, Roger Nicole, your objections would have missed the mark. Cf. R. Nicole, 'Covenant, Universal Call and Definite Atonement,' Standing Forth (CFP 2002), 331-43.
The only thing that makes an offer a bona fide offer is that if anyone meets the terms of the offer, he gets what was offered.
For you to stipulate, as an additional condition, that everyone must be able, or enabled, to meet the terms of the offer (171-73) is highly artificial. By that standard, a store cannot, in good faith, advertise any product unless it also provides free transportation or interest-free financing or removes any other obstacle that might otherwise impede a prospective customer from taking the store up on its offer.
In effect you are saying that an offer is only a genuine offer if the party making the offer supplies and satisfies all of the necessary conditions on behalf of and instead of the second-party. How is such a very vicarious model of responsibility consistent with the Arminian axiom of individual responsibility?
Does Asbury Seminary measure up to so lofty a standard? When Asbury offers a degree program, does it also take any and all measures necessary to make it possible for anyone, anywhere, regardless of his financial status, or his academic record, to study at Asbury? How can you, in all sincerity, teach at an institution which falls so far short of the mark?
In a footnote (172, n21), you say that a Calvinist could sidestep the dilemma by a more nuanced statement of the offer, but this would mislead the uninitiated. I don't know the point of this criticism. The duty of an evangelist is to offer the Gospel on the terms in which it is offered in Scripture, viz., repent of your sins and believe in Christ.
Both the Arminian and the Calvinist believe that there are certain background conditions which must be met if the terms of the offer are to be met. But precisely because these conditions lie in the background, lie outside the control of either the evangelist or the audience, it is quite unnecessary for a minister of the Gospel to introduce these ulterior conditions into the evangelistic message itself. He may, if he chooses to, but that is not a fundamental feature of the offer itself.
Once again, it is unclear how Arminian theology presents a superior alternative. If the Arminian can fault the Calvinist for making an offer, knowing that it can't be accepted in every case, a universalist can fault an Arminian for making an offer, knowing that it won't be accepted in every case. The one is just as sincere or insincere as the other.
Indeed, this presents yet another parallel between Reformed and Arminian theology. Reformed theology limits the efficacy of the offer to the will of God; Arminian theology limits the efficacy of the offer to the will of man.
Incidentally, it is deeply disingenuous for an Arminian to even be bringing up this subject. For an Arminian doesn't believe that faith in Christ is a prerequisite of salvation. Billions and billions of men and women live and die outside the pale of the Gospel. Arminians believe that general redemption can channel the knowledge of salvation. In principle, anyone and everyone could be saved even if absolutely no one ever believed in the Gospel. That's the Arminian bottom-line, is it not?
On the one hand, Arminians believe that God loves everyone equally, desires the salvation of all alike, and has, in fact, made provision for the potential salvation of everyone: Christ died for everyone, and the Holy Spirit equips everyone with sufficient/prevenient grace.
On the other hand, everyone does not have access to the Gospel. If faith in Christ were a condition of salvation, then this would mean that everyone does not have an opportunity to be saved.
As a consequence, God must make it possible for someone to be saved apart from faith in Christ. Otherwise, God would be unloving and unfair to condemn someone who never had a chance.
Hence, the Arminian will say that someone can be saved if he's faithful to the light he's been given--to general revelation. He is still saved by the atonement of Christ, but ignorant of his Savior. In principle, then, no one has to believe in Christ to be saved.
BTW, I puzzled by your claim that most Calvinists believe that God offers everyone a genuine opportunity to be saved (216). Whatever is this based on?
Next, you go after Piper's contention that God wants to save the reprobate. There are two things to be said on this score. To begin with, this is just Piper's private opinion. It is popular in modern-day Calvinism. However, I'm unaware of any historic Reformed confession that canonizes this particular position. So there is no received opinion on this issue. For example, the official position of the OPC and CRC side with Piper, whereas the official position of the PRC takes the opposing side.
Remember how you chose to frame this debate at the outset. You began with a definition of Calvinism, drawn from the five-points of Calvinism. In order to make good on your claim, what you need to show is not that Piper's version is internally inconsistent, but that the five-points are internally inconsistent. For there is a very simply way of relieving the tension in Piper's position, and that is to deny that God wants to save the reprobate.
And there are Reformed theologians who do, indeed, deny Piper's contention. To cinch your argument, you would need to demonstrate that their denial is inconsistent with Reformed tradition or with the inner logic of Calvinism.
Second, you say that 'unlike many Calvinist exegetes, Piper does not attempt to circumvent the straightforward meaning of the texts' (174).
But this move is problematic on a couple of grounds:
i) It confirms the very point I made above. You admit at the outset that there is a division of opinion within Reformed circles on this particular point. In order for you to mount a sound argument, you would have to take a two-pronged approach by exposing an inner tension (a) not only in Piper's position, (b) but in the opposing position as well. But you leave the job half-done. How does that refute Calvinism?
ii) For you to say, without benefit of any supporting argument, that the opposing position tries to 'circumvent the straightforward meaning' of Ezk 18:23; 1 Tim 2:4 & 2 Pet 3:9 is flagrantly tendentious. This is not a reasoned argument; rather, this is only the naked assertion of your Arminian prejudice. And you are welcome to your interpretation, but you need to make a case for it. Otherwise you only assume what you ought to prove.
And I would also take issue with your assumption. I've already dealt with the Pastorals. As to Ezk 18:23, what is the context? To whom was it addressed? This was addressed to Israel, to backslidden Israel, to the covenant community--by virtue of God's national election. By what 'straightforward' reasoning do you reapply this to 'all persons without qualification'? When you talk about Rom 9, you lay great stress on the Jewish context. Why does that consideration suddenly desert you when you come to Ezekiel?
As to 2 Pet 3:9, this, too, has its background in OT usage. You quote from one of Bauckham's books, but I notice that you don't go quoting from his commentary on 2 Peter 3:9, where he explains that in Jewish thought, divine judgement is ordinarily delayed for the sake of the covenant community. Cf. R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (Word 1983), 312-13.
Finally, you accuse R. C. Sproul of oscillating between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Then you correlate the compatibilist/incompatibilist debate with the supra/infra debate. Then you contrast his position with Calvin's.
Now, suppose that everything you say against his position holds true. Where does that get you, exactly? At best, you've scored some points against Sproul and the infra position, but you've left Calvin and the supra view untouched. Indeed, you seem to imply that the view of Calvin and the supras is a coherent one.
If that is so, how does your critique constitute a critique of Calvinism, per se? I assume you view Calvin as an authentic exponent of Calvinism. In order to make your case you would have to eliminate each alternative in turn. Once more, you leave the job half-finished.
In addition, your analysis suffers from an equivocation over the nature of freedom. Calvinism doesn't deny that men make choices. It doesn't deny moral or rational deliberation. A man has many more abstract choices than an oyster, for a man has a faculty for abstract reasons--unlike a merely instinctual animal. We can imagine a wide variety of hypotheticals and their possible consequences.
But, as a practical matter, we can only act on one choice at a time, and by opting for one choice, we thereby eliminate opposing alternatives. I can either fold or call a bluff and play my hand. But I can't very well do both. If I place a bet or raise a bet, I cannot also fold. And I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
Calvinism does not deny, but delimits, human freedom. It denies that the unregenerate can believe the Gospel. And it denies that anyone can do otherwise than what God has decreed.
But the freedom to do otherwise is, itself, ambiguous. Does this mean the freedom to do otherwise if we want to do otherwise? Or the freedom to want to do otherwise?
Once more, there is a parallel between Reformed and Arminian theology. Both make way for the counterfactuals of freedom, but the difference is that Calvinism indexes future contingents to the will of God whereas Arminianism indexes future contingents to the will of man. And both these models entail a mutual adjustment. If you index counterfactual freedom to human agency, then a respective readjustment must be made in the sphere of divine agency; but if you index counterfactual freedom to divine agency, then a respective readjustment must be made in the sphere of human agency. Simply put, either we choose according to God's own choosing, or God chooses according to our own choosing.
Moving onto your chapter (6) on Calvinism & the Christian life, you raise four practical objections to Calvinism: evangelism, the fate of the unevangelized, Christian assurance, and the problem of evil.
Taking these in order, you say that 'On the surface, Calvinism appears to undermine motivation for evangelism. For if God has unconditionally chosen who will be saved and who will be left in their sins for eventual damnation, then surely the persons so chosen for salvation will in fact be saved. And if this is so, there is little reason for us to worry about evangelism--nothing we do or fail to do will in any way thwart God's sovereign purposes in election' (191).
I beg to differ. This only follows because you have offered a severely truncated statement of the Reformed position. God has chosen who will be saved, and he has chosen them to be saved by believing the Gospel. There is not even the appearance of inconsistency. Indeed, we could fill this out in ever more detailed. God has chosen who will believe. God has granted them the grace to believe. God has chosen the preachers who will bring the good news. All the moving parts conspire like clockwork. Would that undermine the incentive to wind my watch or consult a clock to tell the time?
Moving on to the second objection, you say that 'it remains practically difficult to both adore the purposes of God and let our hearts of compassion go out to persons he hasn't elect to save' (197).
And how does that follow? To begin with, these two things would only be in tension if we knew God's purposes in particular. Since Calvinism only maintains 'that' God has chosen who will and will not be saved, but has not revealed 'who' will and will not be saved, the abstract knowledge of the general proposition has no special bearing on how we treat anyone in particular--just as a Christian aid worker can have compassion on all the poor and needy even though he only has enough supplies to feed and medicate a fraction of the total.
In addition, how is this an argument for the Arminian alternative? It would be easy to imagine a universalist deploy the same objection to Arminian theology, viz., 'it remains practically difficult to both adore the purposes of God and let our hearts of compassion go out to those he will consign to the everlasting bonfire.'
Moving on to the third objection, you say that 'Calvinism denies those struggling with their faith of the single most important resource: the confidence that God loves all of us with every kind of love we need to enable and encourage our eternal flourishing and well-being' (201).
The insinuation here is that Arminian theology does supply this resource. But it does nothing of the kind. Arminian love is broad because Arminian love is shallow. The God of Calvin is a lifeguard who plunges into the rip currents to save a drowning swimmer and brings him ashore. The God of Wesley is a distraught girlfriend who stands on the beach, jumping up and down, shrieking and shouting, weeping and waiving her arms as her boyfriend sinks under the waves.
True, a Reformed pastor cannot assure every doubter that he is a child of God, any more than a Christian counselor can assure every desperate drunk or hopeless junkie or compulsive gambler that he will overcome his addiction, or assure every manic-depressive that he will never succumb to suicide. It would be nice if we could tell everyone that everything will come up roses, but that would be a lie. No, the Calvinist cannot say that, and neither, I daresay, can the Arminian. The only one who can pretend to offer such assurance is a universalist, but we both agree that his assurance is false assurance.
Is this general connection you also ask how we ought to counsel a young believer who fears her father has gone to hell (214). How is this pertinent to the present debate? Her father either is or is not in hell. Traditional Wesleyan theology affirms that possibility no less than Calvinism. Her daughter either has or has not good reasons for her fear. Would an Arminian counselor give her different advice than a Calvinist? Will he hold a séance?
Moving on to the fourth and final objection, you say: 'We believe that a brake failure and the resulting crash that causes paralysis need not be understood as sent by God. Rather, the brake failure can be seen as a tragedy resulting from the fact that we live in a world operating by God-ordained natural law and that sometimes things designed by human beings fail' (209).
Well, that may be what you believe, but how is that any answer to the problem of evil? Instead of answering the problem of evil you've merely canonized it in a disguised description. If a tragedy is the result of a natural law, and God is the lawmaker, then to justify the result by appeal to natural law begs the very question at issue: Why would a good God institute natural laws in the first place that result in natural evils?
You go to say that this is 'essentially involved in living as embodied beings in a physical world' (209). How is that essential? Is the universe a doomsday machine that once the engineer flips the on-switch, can brook no further interference? Have Arminians ceased believing in miracles?
If you knew that the breaks were going to go out, would you let your wife drive the car? And if the brakes did fail, leaving your wife an invalid, would you console her by saying that you didn't interfere since the accident was a natural consequence of embodied existence?'
You second example is that 'we don't believe the sexual abuse of the young girl was planned by God. Far from it! Rather, this tragedy results from our God-given libertarian freedom, and we often choose to use that freedom in terrible ways…The web of human choice is such that we are interdependent, our decisions can profoundly affect others, both for good and evil' (210).
For starters, it would be helpful if you began with the candid admission that there is no nice, ouchless, painless answer to this sort of question. The Calvinist has none, but neither has the Arminian, or even the universalist. The pain resides in the event, not in the explanation.
No doubt the average Christian will balk at the suggestion that God had planned some atrocity. But he should balk at the alternative as well. Once again, all you've done is to paraphrase the original problem: to say that evil is a result of our freedom is no justification whatsoever, for the question at issue is whether the freedom of the victimizer ought to outweigh the infringement of the victim's freedom.
Which brings us to the next point, for your answer is not even coherent. Whose libertarian freedom? The victim's? Or the victimizer's? What is libertarian freedom if not the freedom to do otherwise? But the victimizer deprives the victim of her freedom to do otherwise. So your dogma of libertarian freedom is just a paper theory--a paper theory stained in the blood of the unwilling victim.
And, for that matter, why do you think it's permissible for a human agent to deprive another human agent of freedom of opportunity, but impermissible for God to do so? Why do you confer more power on one human agent over the life and welfare of another than you ascribe to God? And how is this any sort of solution to the problem of evil?
Next, you say: 'nothing that happens to us, either from the natural world or from human treachery, can defeat God's ultimate purpose for us. Off course, we can reject God's purpose for our lives and choose self-destruction. But nothing else in the entire universe can keep us from reaching the ultimate good that God desires for all humans' (210).
I love the way you sneak in the exclamation: 'of course!' It is interesting how often people will say 'of course!' when they really mean just the opposite, when they know that they are assuming the very thing they need to prove, so they hope to hustle by the bone of contention by momentarily distracting our attention with this reassuring exclamation.
Well, the decoy didn't do the trick--not for this reader, at least. What you position amounts to is this: 'God can save me from everything and everyone except myself!'
Oh, is that all? This is what is so unspeakably shallow and uncomprehending about Arminian theology. The weak link in this chain is the sinner himself. To say to a sinner that God is able to save him from everything except his own worst self is like offering a cancer patient a down pillow and lollypop in lieu of a cure.
What is more, I don't see how an Arminian is in any position to even offer your concessive assurance. To adapt your own example, suppose an elder abuses his own daughter. As a result of this experience, the abuse victim turns away from the faith, for the church of Christ, and the God of Scripture, are associated in her mind with her sexual abuse. Now surely this is more than just a bare hypothetical. Surely this actually happens. How can you, the Arminian, guarantee that this searing experience will not invincibly bias her heart and mind against the Gospel? Indeed, isn't it fair to say that this sort of thing has happened on more than one occasion? The victim is so embittered, so enveloped in hatred for her abuser, that she is unreachable.
Next, you say that 'O felix culpa makes sense if the greater good resulting from the Fall is made freely available to all persons in such a way that they are truly able to take advantage of it…But if many are far worse off, indeed infinitely worse off, as a result of the Fall--that is, if they are never given the grace needed to escape their misery--it is difficult to see how the Fall can be seen as a fortunate crime' (213).
The reasoning here is somewhat opaque. What, exactly, are you trying to say? Fortunate for whom? Good for what? Obviously it is not a greater good for the damned, but the very nature of a greater good defense is that it entails a trade-off between a lesser good for a greater number and a greater good for a lesser number.
The Arminian believes that grace is toxic in large doses. It must be administered with an eyedropper. The purpose of grace in Arminian theology is not to save anyone at all, but rather to render everyone equally savable or damnable.
Actually, there is a direct Arminian parallel to the Reformed theodicy. An Arminian offers a lesser grace for a greater number whereas a Calvinist offers a greater grace to a lesser number.
And how does Arminian theology solve the problem as you have chosen to frame it? What value is there in freedom of opportunity without freedom of outcome? Even on an Arminian construction, many are worse off, infinitely worse off, for many still end up in hell. Every objection an Arminian can level against Calvinism, a universalist can level against Arminianism.
Next, you say that 'if is most difficult to see how God could be good in any ordinary sense of the term if he ordained or allowed the Fall knowing that it would have such consequences' (213).
I find this puzzling. I thought you were a representative of classic Arminian theology, which denies divine foreordination, but affirms divine foreknowledge. But now you seem to make the same move as the open theist. Are you saying that the logical and ethical alternative to Calvinism is not, in fact, Arminianism, but open theism?
If this is what you mean, then I fail to see how it improves on the Reformed alternative. If a mother leaves a toddler unattended in a kitchen, and the kid scalds himself by reaching for a pot of boiling water, does this absolve the mother of blame? Even if she didn't know that this would happen, she knew that this could happen. Is that not blameworthy?
But if this is not what you mean, then what do you mean? And what, really, is the material difference between foreknowledge and foreordination at this juncture? Even on an Arminian construction, it is not merely that God knows what will happen; rather, God chooses to make a world in which that will happen. If he never made the world, that future would never transpire. So not only does he know what will happen, but he must intend it to happen, since that is a direct result of his own action—an action from which he was free to refrain.
Finally, you say that 'it is worth asking whether we would be considered good if we arranged things in such a way that many persons suffered greatly, even though we could have relieved their suffering. I think most persons would readily agree that we would not be good' (213).
Once again, if this is a problem, how is Arminian theology a solution? Couldn't a universalist turn this self-same objection back on your own position? In traditional Arminian theology, God did, in fact, arrange things in just such a way that many men, women and children suffer greatly, even though God could intervene, more often than he does, to relieve their pain and suffering. You may say that this is a necessary evil, but the notion of a necessary evil figures in a Reformed theodicy as well.
Are you going to say that this would infringe on human freedom? But, again, whose freedom? The victim's or the victimizer's?
Moreover, your statement fails to draw the most elementary moral distinction between innocence and guilt. What obligation am I under to relieve the suffering of the wicked? I, for one, would much rather see Joseph Mengele suffer for his sins than sun himself on the beaches of Rio.
In Calvinism, however unjustly we may suffer at the hands of our fellow man, no one suffers unjustly at the hands of our God.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)