Couldn't God just forgive?

I have been meaning to write this post for a long, long time. A few years I think. I wanted to critique The Reason for God (which I otherwise adore) for its chapter on the cross. I think it's a dangerously misleading chapter because it seems to suggest that what really happened on the cross was something other than 'penal substitution' – that is, the innocent Lord Jesus suffering the Father's wrath in our place so that we might not have to. But as I thought about beginning to write, I realised that I needed to be more sure that penal substitution was really at the heart of what happened on the cross.

Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution was just what I was looking for and I commend it to y'all. It's an intimidatingly fat book, but structured in such a way that you can dip in and out. So far I've read chapter two – the exegesis section, and some of the answers to objections in part two. Chapter two takes you through Exodus (12), Leviticus (16), Isaiah (52:13-53:12), Mark (10:33-45; 15:33-34), John (1:29; 3:14-18; 6:51; 10:11; 11:47-52), Romans (3:21-26; 4:25; 5:8-10; 8:1-3), Galatians (3:10-13), and 1 Peter (2:21-25; 3:18). This list alone hints at the centrality – or at least the ubiquity – of this teaching. You will have to read the book (and the Bible!) to see if you are convinced by its exploration of penal substitution. Personally, while there were no points I actively disagreed with, I was not convinced by every argument – but this hardly took away from the force of the authors' conclusions, which drew on a number of arguments for each passage/book. Overall and on most points, I gave a hearty 'Amen'.

Having established the validity of penal substitution, the authors explain its centrality by making use of a 'jigsaw puzzle analogy': “Pieces at the centre of a jigsaw are in direct contact with a greater number of other pieces than those at the corners. Removing a central piece will therefore disrupt more elements of the picture than omitting one of the corners.”1 They follow:

We have seen that the doctrine of penal substitution is necessary to safeguard the justice and holiness of God, for to deny it is to suggest that God is content simply to overlook evil whenever he forgives someone. To discard penal substitution would also jeopardize God's truthfulness, for he has promised that sin will lead to death. Moreover, other aspects of the atonement cease to make sense if penal substitution is denied. We argued in chapter 3 that penal substitution is essential to Christ's victory over evil powers . . . to his restoration of the relationships between sinners and God (reconciliation) and to the liberation he brings from captivity to sin and Satan (redemption or ransom). Far from being viable alternatives to penal substitution, they are outworkings of it. As the hub from which all of these other doctrines fan out, penal substitution is surely central.2

With this in mind, I return to The Reason for God. The chapter I take issue with is chapter twelve, 'The (True) Story of the Cross'. I love all the other chapters and if only chapter twelve were different, I would be buying many copies of the book and giving them to all my friends. But because I think this chapter is climatic – and misleading – I cannot.

In this 'problem chapter' Keller's line of argument begins well: “'Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn't God just forgive us?' This is what many ask, but now we can see that no one 'just' forgives, if the evil is serious. Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy's renewal and change. Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself.”3 Where I think Keller goes wrong is in trying too hard to make what happened on the cross comprehensible to his pagan readers. This desire drives him to work from human experience of forgiveness to God's forgiveness, when he should be going the other way round. “As Bonhoeffer says, everyone who forgives someone bears the other's sins. On the cross we see God doing visibly and cosmically what every human being must do to forgive someone, though on an infinitely greater scale.”4 Now while he does go on to say some thoroughly biblical things (eg “on the cross [God] absorbed the pain, violence and evil of the world into himself”5, “There was a debt to be paid – God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be borne – God himself bore it.”6), I rather think these comments will be glossed over by readers who have just read a detailed description of what human forgiveness entails -

Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.7

So when Keller speaks of God absorbing our debt, it doesn't bring to mind a just punishment meted out on Jesus to spare us from hell, but the emotional pain of the process of forgiveness itself. If this were true, Jesus would have died and justice would still be waiting to be served. And that is not the good news which the Bible everywhere proclaims.

1 S Jeffery, M Ovey, A Sach, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2007), 210.

2 Ibid, 211. (underline mine)

3 T Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Scepticism (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), 192.

4 Ibid, 192. 

5 Ibid, 192.

6  Ibid,193.

7 Ibid, 188-89.