Thoughts on the atonement debate

I think I got banned for the 3rd time from Orthodox Bridge.  You can decide the outcome for yourself.  I was called a shrill critic of Orthodoxy, yet I merely pointed to the gentlemen their own commitment to basic metaphysics.  It was the original poster that said my view was the heresy of heresies.  Who's shrill now?  In fact, I was rather reserved.

The behavior of the Orthodox commenters was rather amusing.  At least the original poster had the integrity to admit he couldn't answer my points (more below).  He asked his friend for help.  that fellow, a Mr. M., basically told me, "A lot of non-Reformed scholarship has refuted you."  He didn't give examples.  In internet debate that translates to, "I can't answer you but I know people who are smarter than you."  And so on.  He really translates to an admission of defeat.

The real crux of the debate is whether Christ's sacrifice atoned for guilt and sin in an objective sense  The Orthodox had problems saying that Christ assuaged the wrath of God, because they really don't believe God has wrath.  When pressed they will say, "You are reading Western categories into it" or it really means that we don't love God.  Of course, and as one commenter, a Prometheus, himself no friend to the Reformed faith, pointed out this is philosophical nominalism and ultimately meaningless.  Even more basic:  no one said a) how I was reading Western categories into this; b) what these categories exactly are, and c) how your categories aren't themselves derived from neo-Platonism.

Of course, this does raise a problem that even Reformed must face:  no one believes God changes in his essence.  So how can Christ's death placate the wrath of God?  Well, we predicate wrath, not of God's essence, but of the relationship between us and God. It is a relationship of wrath.  The original poster even admitted the force of this rejoinder and asked another Orthodox commenter, "What do you make of this?"  I don't remember an answer.

Guilt and Goats

Whatever else "The atonement" may connote, we must all agree that Christ's death must fulfill the types and shadows of the Old Testament sacrifices.

If you can't do that, then your models of atonement (love, hugs, just cleaning me) fail.

Christ the priest was cut off

Some introductory notes on penal substitution, largely derived from the relevant sections of Horton's The Christian Faith.  Below might seem like basic Sunday School proof-texts.  In large part it is.  I am well aware of the nuanced discussions of this issue.  My point is that if you posit a God who isn't wrathful and a Savior who can't take the guilt of another to himself, then a lot of the Bible just won't make sense.  At least the guys at OB admit they can't deal with "wrath" or Isaiah 53.  

Rooted in the Covenant

Our understanding of penal substitution must first be rooted in the covenant.  Jesus is the Melchizidekian High Priest, and a change in priesthood requires a change in covenant (Hebr. 5:6, 10). This presupposes that we are already talking about the covenant.  If any discussion of the atonement doesn't have the covenant in mind, it's already deficient.

It is Bloody

Instead of shying away from criticisms that the Reformed model makes God look mean, let's throw the criticisms back at them.  Quick question (and for the moment we are assuming God's ordained power):  Can God forgive me without bloodshed?  See here for the answer.  Furthermore, in the Old Covenant our sins were transferred to the animal victim (Lev. 1:4).  

It Makes Peace

Christ's death secured our peace with God.  True, God did love us while we were yet sinners, but he could not fellowship with us.  If we were already in a relation-of-peace, then why did Christ need to die? Why would Paul bother to write Romans 5:1?

It is a United Action

This is to rebut the charge that an angry Father killed his Son.  People who parrot this charge are a) either ignorant of basic Reformed theology or b) willfully portraying something else.  The first is to be pitied.  The second is to be called to repentance.  

1. The Father gave his only Son out of divine love (John 3:16).
2. The Spirit vindicated the Son's death by raising him from the dead (Romans 4:25).
3. Jesus himself is a willing sacrifice (John 10:11).

Yet, it was a Judicial Punishment

The Greek words anti and huper are substitutionary.  There is no getting around it.  Pace Anselm, Jesus pays the price to God's justice (not his feudal dignity) and is able to buy back his people (1 Cor. 6:20).

And God's Simplicity

God's simplicity prevents us from exalting anyone attribute (e.g., "love") over another attribute.  God's wrath is not arbitrary or capricious, but is a judicious response to the violation of his law and covenant.  He is righteous and his law requires that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

Propitiation or Expiation?

Since the mid 19th century liberal theologians, embarrassed by passages that say God is wrathful, said hilasmos means expiation (clearing me from guilt or bringing me to a state of rectitude), not propitiation (placating a wrathful God).  Linguistically, the word can probably go either way (and in previous times the distinction between expiation and propitiation was not always sharply defined).  Truthfully, I think the word is best glossed as "mercy-firmament," but that's for another day.

If all it means is hilasmos then it is rather anti-climactic in Romans.  In Romans 1:18 Paul says the "wrath" of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness. In chapter 1 he lists how Pagans are guilty before God.  In chapter 2 he lists how Jews are guilty.  He draws it together in chapter 3.  With this background of "wrath" and guilt, which is the more probable translation, expiation or propitiation?  

Penal Substitution: Cutting and Judgment

A piece on Penal Substitution (hereafter PSA) is here.  The good thing about the piece is it is a) almost vitriolically anti-Western and b) shallow in analysis.   The guys at OB like it, but I think most honest seekers will come away disappointed.   

I do want to address a potential weakness in Reformed treatments of PSA, however.  Reformed theology on one level has always assumed a substance-metaphysics.  That was their received heritage from the medieval church.  I don't fault them for that.  However, Reformed thinkers also developed a robust idea of the covenant.   Throughout the centuries Covenant Theology was continually honed.  While I don't endorse his ethical system, Meredith Kline's work on Ancient Near Eastern treaties is the coup-etat.

It's not surprising that you don't really see a full PSA in the Fathers, given their commitment to a form of impassibility and substance-metaphysics.  If God is completely impassible and the divine essence is stasis, then there can't be any perturbations whatsoever.  This is why you really don't ever see the Orthodox talk about God's wrath as anything more than an anthropomorphism.  If God's substance is utterly impassible and beyond being, then it can't feel anything like wrath.  

Similarly, if the Son is of the same substance with the Father (and I believe he is), then how can the Father "cut" off the Son?  How can the Son experience God's wrath?  Some Reformed writers have opted for the Nestorian route. I don't think that is necessary.  Instead of a substance-ontology, we need a Covenantal Ontology.

A Covenantal Ontology

A covenantal ontology isn't worried about things like essences, beings, enses, however important they may be in their own rights.   Rather, a covenantal ontology sees speech-acts, cuttings, judgments, presence, and promise.  In other words, what you see in the Bible.  

A Covenantal Ontology also means an Eschatological Ontology

1. Words and signs create a covenant.  They do not “fuse” essences (101).
2. There is no nature-grace problem but a sin-grace problem.
3. Eschatology creates a tension:  we have a foretaste of the future feast now, which creates in us a painful longing for the Age to Come.   Eschatological presence intensifies Jesus’s ascended absence.  This actually helps us on the doctrine of assurance.  Assurance is mercilessly attacked by Anchoretic traditions (Trent even condemns to hell any who speak of it), since how can we, as finite humans, “infallibly” know something in the future?   Eschatology and a covenantal ontology can help.  Who are we to ridicule assurance when the King of heaven feeds us from his banquet and promises to strengthen our faith?  Any questioning of assurance is merely treason against the King.  Because of eschatology, assurance will remain in tension–but it is still real assurance because God says it is! (Speech-Act theory).

I am leaning on Michael Horton's discussion of a Covenantal Ontology in Covenant and Salvation (Westminster/John Knox)

The following are key points of a covenantal (or federal) ontology, taken from Horton:

1. Mediation is not a principle or process, but a person, Jesus (183).  This explicitly denies participationist ontologies, ladders, chain-of-being, etc.
2. The relationship which God guarantees to his people by means of Covenant is seen in the term echo, “having” (184).
3. For example, we have “eternal life” (John 5:24), the Spirit of Christ as the deposit of the consummation.
4. Our union with Christ is by the Spirit and not a fusion of essences.
5. Eschatology is the locus of a federal ontology.  It is an announcement of the good news from afar off (Isaiah 52:7ff).   Participation (realist?) ontologies, by contrast, struggle with the concept of good news. Horton writes, “It is unclear how the gospel as good news would figure into his [John Milbank, but also any Dionysian construction] account of redemption, since ‘news’ implies an extrinsic annoucnement of something new, something that does not simply derive from the nature of things (169).  What he means is that those who who hold to participationist ontologies–chain of being–see a continuum between God and man.  Any saving that happens to man happens within that continuum.   The announcement of good news, by contrast, comes from without.   To borrow Horton’s delightful phrase, a federal ontology is meeting a stranger, whereas a participationist ontology is overcoming estrangement.