The Atonement - Propitiation

By Michael Blankenship and Aaron Orendorff

As we begin to explore the subject of Jesus’ atonement, it may be helpful to recap what was said by way of introduction a couple of weeks ago. Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, in the book Doctrine: What Every Christian Should Believe, open by offering the following definition:

Jesus’ work for us on the cross is called atonement (at-one-ment); Jesus our God became a man to restore [the] relationship between God and humanity. . . . Scripture repeatedly and clearly declares that Jesus died as our substitute paying our penalty “for” our sins (253).

Building off this excellent summary, our aim will be to unpack the reality that Jesus Christ—God’s incarnate Son—suffered on the cross in our place and on our behalf as the historical realization of three, interlocking theological truths: (1) the propitiation of God’s wrath, (2) the expiation of humanity’s sin, and (3) the reconciliation of both.

One quick side-note: We use the phrase “historical realization” intentionally in order to stress that the atonement is not an ahistorical abstraction—some sort of disembodied religious or philosophical truth, floating disconnected and unattached to real-life particularities, the dirt, nails, wood, sweat, taunts, blood, and pain, of a first-century Jew condemned to die on hill outside Jerusalem. The gospel is good news of something that has actually happened, a “historical reality” upon which all the beauty, wonder, hope, and theological truth of Christianity rests.^[1] Keeping that thought firmly in mind, let us turn to the first element in the above definition and our subject for this post: propitiation.

Propitiation is a word seldom used today, which means that to understand what “the propitiation of God’s wrath” means we must first understand the concept of propitiation itself. The simplest, English equivalent of propitiation is the word satisfaction. An everyday sort of example might go like this: say I’m thirsty and so, in an effort to quench (that is, satisfy) my thirst, I drink a nice, big bottle of ice-cold water. Now we all know that a person can’t live without water; it’s not something that we choose to thirst for. So, in this case, to talk about satisfaction isn’t so much about a superficial feeling of desire. Rather it’s about something that the biology of being human demands, without compromise and indiscriminately.

In a similar way, God, though not having physical needs, authentically “thirsts” for justice because the need for justice is one of his essential, nonnegotiable attributes. Simply put: God, by his very nature, is just. Justice is part of who he is. Therefore, whenever something violates his sense of justice, satisfaction (that is, propitiation) is demanded.

Exodus 34:6-7 illustrates this point well because it bring together both God’s love and grace with his (equally as real) need for justice:

The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

As difficult as it may be for us to swallow, justice (particularly, God’s justice), cannot exist without punishment. In God’s economy, justice is both restorative (when understood from the viewpoint of the victim) as well as retributive (when understood from the viewpoint of the perpetrator). This means that “righting the wrongs in the world” is good news to those who have been victimized while at the same time bad news to those who have been the victimizers. To this end, the Psalms are literally full of prayers asking God to act “in his righteousness” both to defend and vindicate the oppressed (restorative justice), as well as, to destroy and condemn the oppressors (retributive justice).

Imagine, for example, a person who has committed murder is found guilty but that the judge presiding over the case simply lets him go. Is this just? Of course not. Moreover, it would be impossible for us to respect (much less love and worship) a judge who so terribly violated the rules of justice. This is especially true if we ourselves have been affected by the crime in question. In the same way, when human beings “sin” against God—when they violate His law—the punishment must meet the crime. To avoid punishment is to avoid justice.

Romans 2:1-3 helps us understand this principle by relating our own, everyday acts of judgment with God’s perfect, once-for-all, ultimate act of judgment:

Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?

Much like Exodus 34:6-7, Romans 2:1-3 stresses not only that God is just but that his justice demands satisfaction; it needs propitiation.

Throughout the Bible, the demand God’s need for justice creates is called his “wrath.” Unlike our wrath, which is often self-serving, ignorant, and hardly ever aligned with what is truly “good,” God’s anger is never out-of-proportion, never out-of-control, and always upholds what is right. In fact, as strange as it may sound, God’s wrath is actually an expression of his love. Becky Pippert, in her book Hope Has Its Reasons, explains it like this:

Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. De we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it . . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with whole being.

This “cancer” is called sin and Scripture tells us that God’s wrath stands against any and all forms of it in the world (Rom. 1:18).

Sometimes people ask, “Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God just forgive us?” This question not only misunderstands what we’ve said so far about justice, it also misunderstands how forgiveness itself works. For example, imagine that your neighbor accidentally breaks your window in the middle of winter. Basically, you have one of two choices. On one hand, you can go the way of strict justice and demand that your neighbor pay for the broken window to be fixed (after all it’s winter and you can’t just live with a smashed-in window). Or, two, you can go the way of forgiveness and instead of making your neighbor pay for the window you can pay for it yourself. In this scenario, strict justice means that the perpetrator must pay while forgiveness means that you must pay. Either way the window must be fixed and this means that regardless of which way you choose someone has to pay. Through this simple example, it’s easy to see that nobody “just forgives.”

Applying this illustration to the cross, Tim Keller writes:

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 sin yourself. . . . 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. . . . It is crucial at this point to remember that the Christian faith has always understood that Jesus Christ is God. God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself. . . . [T]his is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destroy all evil without destroying us (192).

Think of it like this, when it comes to human sin and divine justice, God has a choice: he can either propitiate his wrath by punishing human beings themselves or he can make propitiation for human beings by absorbing the debt of sin himself. The wonder of the gospel is that God chose the latter and, in the person of Jesus Christ, suffered for the sins of humanity.

People often call attention to the physical suffering involved in Jesus’ crucifixion, but Scripture makes clear that this was not the worst of it. Jesus experienced a pain, which those who choose to believe in him, no longer have to experience. It was the pain of separation from God. Hence Jesus’ words upon the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a powerful statement that allows us to see into the true suffering of our savior. This was God’s wrath, being taken up by Jesus himself, for our iniquities. As Jesus uttered these words, he was experiencing, quite literally, hell.

You see, the tragedy of hell (where God’s wrath is ultimately assuaged) arises not because of physical flames but because it means being disconnected from God for all eternity. When a person goes to hell, they experience all the infinite horrors and spiritual disintegration of not having loved, served, and worshiped God. But now imagine one man experiencing hell, not on account of his own sins (for he himself was sinless), but for the sins of all those who would choose (past, present, and future) to put their faith and trust in him. Jesus Christ truly suffered beyond our imagination or comprehension. The atonement means that God’s just wrath has been satisfied, absorbed by God himself, and that most amazingly, as 1 John 4:10 says: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

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^[1] Nor should we say that the Jesus-event—i.e., his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension—is simply an “illustration” of who God is and what he does—that He is loving, gracious, sacrificial, and forgiving. Jesus, and in particular the cross, is more than a mere illustration; it is more than God’s ultimate word-become-flesh-picture. Rather, Jesus is an actual event, both in the life of God and in the life of the world, on the basis of which God is loving, gracious, sacrificial, and forgiving. The argument here is in some sense circular: God loves and so He sent Christ; God sent Christ and so He loves.

The Atonement - Introduction

I began “the drama of dogma” a little over two years ago as a simple way to organize and chronicle my life as a student, reader, pastor and amateur theologian. With that purpose still in mind, I’m very excited to announce that over the next nine weeks or so, I’m going to be sharing this platform with my nephew and fellow blogger, Michael Blankenship. A few months ago, Mike started blogging at “Our Simple Faith” and I’ve really enjoyed reading his posts on everything from hope, to good works, to the problem of evil.

What makes me so excited about this particular endeavor is the coming together of two very different life-stages around a central tenet of the Christian faith. Mike is a sixteen-year-old-high school student from rural Oregon considering a future in Christian ministry. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old seminary graduate in Portland entering my second year of full-time, pastoral ministry. While these worlds could certainly be further apart than they are (after all, we’re both white-American males) bridging them—both conceptually as well as stylistically—should be a lot of fun and (I hope) both challenging and encouraging to those of you following along.

Our plan for this series is to focus on the contested and often misunderstood doctrine of “limited atonement” (also referred to as “definite atonement” or “particular redemption”). In the simplest terms possible, the doctrine of limited atonement claims that Jesus’ death secured (in the past) and applies (in the present) all the redemptive blessings necessary to save God’s people. The atonement, in other words, does not simply make salvation possible; it actually and effectually saves.

In an effort, however, to make “first things first,” as well as to make sure that we don’t get ahead of ourselves, our first goal will be to explore what the atonement in and of itself is all about. (A quick side-note: Whenever debating the “finer” points of a doctrine, which is what limited atonement is, it’s important to keep in mind the “broader” points of agreement that orthodox Christianity has, more or less, maintained throughout its history. This helps us not only to concentrate on the “essentials” but to also approach the “finer” points, as we’ve called them, with humility, love, and a real sense of unity.)

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears offer the following definition in their book Doctrine: What Every Christian Should Believe:

Jesus’ work for us on the cross is called atonement (at-one-ment); Jesus our God became a man to restore [the] relationship between God and humanity. . . . Scripture repeatedly and clearly declares that Jesus died as our substitute paying our penalty “for” our sins (253).

Using that relatively simple summary as our starting point, it is possible to further define the atonement as the historical realization of three interlocking theological concepts: (1) propitiation, (2) expiation, and (3) reconciliation.

Because these words are new to most people, our aim in the next three posts will be to unpack each one in turn, examining them, defining them and rooting them in Scripture.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in doing some further reading on the subject, here are a few recommendations:

Death by Love by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears
Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray
Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die by John Piper
The Cross of Christ by John Stott

Lastly, you can read Mike’s introduction here.

N. T. (Tom) Wright and Penal Substitution

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have received a few questions regarding Tom (N. T.) Wright’s stance on the doctrine of penal substitution. The questions have gone something like this: since Wright is a prominent proponent of the New Perspective on Paul, which by-and-large rejects the imputation of Jesus’ so-called active righteousness, does Wright, in turn, also reject the imputation of Jesus passive righteousness (that is, our sin to him)? Put more simply: Does Wright believe that on the cross Jesus bore the legal punishment (i.e., the wrath of God) that our sins deserve?

Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey and Andrew Sach in their profoundly helpful book Pierced for Our Transgressions, define penal substitution as follows:

The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin (21).

So, where does Wright land on this doctrine?

N. T. Wright, The Letter to the Romans (NIB Vol. 10)

The idea of punishment as part of atonement is itself deeply controversial; horrified rejection of the mere suggestion has led on the part of some to an unwillingness to discern any reference to Isaiah 40-55 in Paul. But it is exactly that idea that Paul states, clearly and unambiguously, in [Romans] 8:3, when he says that God “condemned sin in the flesh”—i.e., the flesh of Jesus.

Dealing with wrath or punishment is propitiation; with sin, expiation. You propitiate a person who is angry; you expiate a sin, crime, or stain on your character. . . . [I]n [Romans] 1:18—3:20, Paul has declared that the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness and that despite God’s forbearance this will finally be meted out; that in 5:8, and in the whole promise of 8:1-30, those who are Christ’s are rescued from wrath; and that the passage in which the reason for the change is stated is 3:25-26, where we find that God, though in forbearance allowing sins to go unpunished for a while, has now reveled that righteousness, that saving justice, that causes people to be declared “righteous” even though they were sinners.

The lexical history of the word hilastērion is sufficiently flexible to admit of particular nuances in different contexts. Paul’s context here demands that the word not only retain its sacrificial overtones (the place and means of atonement), but that it carry the note of propitiation of divine wrath—with, of course, the corollary that sins are expiated (475-476).

N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God

Having said that [that “theories of atonement are all, in themselves, abstractions from the real events”], I find myself compelled toward one of the well-known theories of atonement, of how God deals with evil through the death of Jesus, not as a replacement for the events or the stories nor as a single theory to trump all others, but as a theme which carries me further than the others toward the heart of it all. I refer to the Christus Victor theme, the belief that on the cross Jesus has won the victory over the powers of evil. Once that is in place, the other theories come into play their respective parts. For Paul, Jesus’ death clearly involves (for example in Romans 8:3) a judicial or penal element, being God’s proper No to sin expressed on Jesus as Messiah, as Israel’s and therefore the world’s representative . . . the death of Jesus is ‘for me,’ in my place and on my behalf” (94).

All theories of atonement adequate to the task must include both a backward look (seeing the guilt, sin and shame of all previous generations heaped up on the cross) and a forward dimension, the promise that what God accomplished on Calvary will be fully and finally implemented (95).

The personal message of Good Friday, expressed in so many hymns and prayers which draw on the tradition of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) and its NT outworking, comes down to this: “See all your sins on Jesus laid”; “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me”; or, in the words which Jesus spoke at the Supper but which God spoke on Good Friday itself: “This is my body, given for you” (96).

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Part of the whole point of the cross is that there the weight of the world’s evil really did converge upon Jesus, blotting out the sunlight of God’s love as surely as the light of day was blotted out for three hours. . . . Jesus is “giving his life as a ransom for many” (20.28), and the sin of the “many,” which he is bearing, has for the first and only time in his experience caused a cloud to come between him and the father he loved and obeyed, the one who had been delighted in him. . . .

Jesus’ death—described by Matthew as “breathing his last” or “giving up his spirit”—is the point towards which the gospel has been moving all along. . . . [Jesus] takes with him, into the darkness of death, the sin of the world: my sin, your sin, the sin of countless millions, the weight that has hung around the world’s neck and dragged it down to destruction (190-2).

In response to Wright’s clear favoring of Christus Victor as the atonement’s organizing principle, Roger Nicole’s comments from the concluding essay of Hill and James’ edited work The Glory of the Atonement are particularly helpful. There Nicole describes substitution as “the major linchpin of the doctrine of the atonement”:

This central doctrine of the atonement has its own center in the substitutionary interposition of a sin-bearer who absorbs in himself the fearful burden of the divine wrath against our sin and secures a renewal of access to God and of the reception of his wonderful grace. . . . Substitutionary sacrifice is the fundamental basis of the whole process of salvation according to Scripture (446).

A linchpin in a mechanical contrivance makes possible the unified function of several other parts. If the linchpin is removed, the other parts no longer perform their own functions but float away in futility. This, I believe, is precisely what occurs in the doctrine of the atonement (446-7).

Thus penal substitution of Christ is the vital center of the atonement, the linchpin without which everything else loses its foundation and flies off the handle so to speak (451).

In other words, the fact the Jesus died “in our place” (that is, as our substitute) means that His victory is our victory. Without the principle of substitution, which then arrives at our personal doorsteps in the form of spiritual, by-faith union, Jesus’ victory remains abstracted from us. He suffered under the curse (both for individuals as well as for creation itself) in order to set free those for whom he suffered. He conquered in the place of those who could not conquer alone.