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. 

Go and do likewise

Old Testament Ethics for the People of God does a lot of things in its desire that we learn from all the Old Testament, not only the obviously applicable bits. While each take is solid and stimulating, it's not clear to me that each section's conclusions inform his working in the next, or even exactly how this might be possible. Still, it's a fine book.

One thing Wright advocates is the concept of 'paradigm' rather than 'principle'. He does acknowledge that “To use a paradigm you do have to look for and articulate the principles the paradigm embodies and then see how they can be reconcretized in some other context”.1 However, the problem with the 'principle' approach as Wright sees it is that “it can lead to the eventual discarding of the specific realities of the Old Testament text, the concrete, earthy history of Israel, the good, the bad and the ugly. Once you have a principle in your pocket, why keep the wrapping?”2 In contrast, when you're thinking 'paradigm', the original story matters – for it is the very example that you are seeking to reapply. And that is what the Bible is – not a handbook of rules and principles, but a collection of stories and literary genres. And making sure that we never divorce ourselves from all this particularity also prevents us from smoothing over all the “hard edges, all the jarring tensions and all the awkward corners of earthy reality”.3

Wright provides a few examples of people in the Bible using Scripture in a paradigmatic way4 – God graciousness to Israel in slavery as a call to be merciful to slaves (eg Dt 15:14-15), Nathan's parable about the sheep stealer to expose King David's wife-stealing sin (2 Sam 12:1-10), the parable of the Good Samaritan as a call to love any and all people as 'neighbour' (Lk 10:30-39), the fair provision of manna in the desert as a call to share (2 Cor 8:13-15), the provision for the working ox as a call to provide for ministers of the Gospel (1 Cor 9:8-12) - and, finally, Christians are called to imitate Christ, not in the details of his life, but in things such as love, humility, and suffering (Eph 5:2; Phil 2:5; 1 Pet 2:21).

Now this idea of paradigm could make some think that telling a story is all that is needed, that there is something coldly analytical and bludgeonly didactic about spelling out principles. But I would like to point out that, in all but one of the examples above, the teachers (Moses, Nathan, Jesus, Paul, Peter) tell the paradigmatic story and then spell out the principle. For example, “Give to him [the slave] as the Lord has blessed you. Remember you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you”, “Live a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us”, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who . . . humbled himself . . .”, “If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps”, “Our desire is . . . that there might be equality . . . . as it is written: 'He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little'”, “For it is written in the Law of Moses: 'Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.' Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? . . . . If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you?” And while Nathan's parable doesn't explicitly spell out the principle, it goes to such great lengths to identify David as "the man" in the parable and to show that what he has done mirrors the parable's story, that he pretty much did. The only exception to this pattern is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus concludes simply by saying “Go and do likewise”. So it is clearly okay to sometimes leave the principle implicit, perhaps when it is especially obvious - and yet this is not the usual pattern.

Tell Bible stories. Say what they mean for us. Tell people to go do that.

1 C J H Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2004), 70.

2 Ibid, 70.

3 Ibid, 71.

4 Ibid, 71-73.

Warning

I'm about to post three lengthy book reviews/reflections. Ugh. Hopefully they are stimulating! I certainly enjoyed reading the books, as well as feeling relieved I'd finally got to them. Hoo roo.

Blind faith?

Here are a couple of my favourite Bible passages. I'm taking these prints with me to Chile.

 

 By themselves, these passages might smack of blind trust, even fatalism. But this next grounds them and grants them beauty and maturity.

The same person

My own sin used to confuse me. A huge question mark was cast over everything I once thought I was and I felt as though I had been masquerading as a good, kind person and to continue to act that way would be a lie. Nowadays I still hate myself for what I've done, but my identity doesn't crumble. I know that I'm a child of God and growing in him. While my godliness is genuine, it's mixed with sin and I do still stuff up. Yet even in my sin I can still act righteously by grieving over it and by humbling myself, apologising and taking steps to change.

'Walk up'

Across this month my church has been running The Endless Summer of Love, a chance for us to get together and enjoy the summer as a Christian community. There's been something on most days - fun things like watching the cricket at someone's house or a grassroots bike race up a steep hill, as well as good deeds like clearing a property of thistles or praying for working class suburbs.

We've also been heading out to the mall each Wednesday and Friday lunchtime to talk to people about our faith. Not something I would normally do, but I can make myself rise to the occasion. I've tried to keep it pretty contained, for my sanity's sake, and it's proved a real winner. I aim to have two decent conversations each day. I only talk to women who are sitting down and by themselves, because they're more likely to be happy to talk. I don't like to take up too much of their time, so the whole thing usually goes for no more than 10 minutes. The last five times I went out there were only two people who didn't want to talk. Today I got knocked back by four people in a row, so I just called it a day before I got discouraged.

Overall it's been an encouraging experience. I'm not always happy with what I've said, but I do trust that some of it has hit the spot. I've given away a few Bibles and treated people with gentleness and respect. The people I've spoken to have been very polite and have shared sincerely, even when the conversation hasn't gone too deep. And the whole thing has gone some way to assuaging my fear of strangers - who have turned out to be perfectly nice, ordinary people not so very different to me.

Humble yourself that he may lift you up

After my recent-ish post about self esteem, one of my friends explained that when he gets to work he feels constrained to work within the prevailing worldview, as if to challenge the notion that we are good and improved self esteem is all we need to overcome would kill rapport and leave him looking uncaring. This was my reply:

I think part of the trick is to yourself remember that increasing someone's self-esteem isn't actually the most helpful thing you can do for them - it would actually be more helpful to get them to see that they have some responsibility for how things have turned out and to encourage them to sort things out/seek forgiveness/change themselves.* I think it may be possible to do this with gentleness and without ruining rapport. And this approach also demonstrates a greater respect for them than pretending they are better than they are - and hopefully they will sense this.

You can do all this while 100% affirming their value as a person (even if you're not affirming their goodness). This is the sort of self-esteem that we are totally for.

What do you think? Is this workable in actual day-to-day practice?


* Of course even this is of limited usefulness, as we know that no-one will never really be able to sort things out or change themselves (though they may be forgiven by another). But it is still a step in the right direction - in acknowledging a) your sin and b) your inability to fix yourself and c) turning to God for forgiveness and change.