At least one person (besides the people in the Vinebranch band) noticed with curiosity a change that I requested in the closing song on Sunday, “In Christ Alone.” The change related to this stanza:
‘Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live, I live
That’s almost perfectly good—a slightly prosaic but effective statement of the penal substitution theory of atonement. If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that I’m a fan of penal substitution—not to the exclusion of all other theories or images of atonement that are also found in the Bible.
But whatever else we mean by atonement—the means by which human beings are reconciled to God through the cross—let’s at least mean that God did something objective to take care of humanity’s problem with sin and evil once and for all. The predominant biblical idea is that Christ’s death on the cross—in continuity with the Old Testament’s motif of sacrifice—was “substitutionary”; Christ died in our place; God took upon himself the penalty that our sin deserved. Among many other Old Testament references, see Isaiah 53 for the motif of the righteous suffering on behalf of the unrighteous—in order to bring healing.
Sin offends God’s holiness, which is another way of saying that justice matters to God. It’s true that I personally don’t want God to hold me accountable for my share of evil and death-dealing in this world. But I can at least want other evildoers to be punished for their share—you know, at least the really bad people like Hitler or Osama bin Laden.
Of course, if justice has any meaning, God can’t be selective. My sin offends God’s holiness and needs to be accounted for, too. We human beings want a god who shrugs and says, “Your sins are no big deal. I forgive you,” but this is a god in our image, not the God of the Bible—not to mention the God revealed in Christ who pronounced harsh judgment against sin and constantly told sinners, “Go and sin no more.”
So this song’s verse describes the means by which God deals with our problem of sin. Lines 1, 3, and 4 I loudly affirm. Line 2 I can live with—if I could only footnote it with an asterisk! The problem is that it doesn’t begin to say enough for me. Moreover, the risk of misinterpretation is so great that it might not be worth singing.
The problem is that when we speak of “wrath,” popularly understood as anger, we tend toward thinking of the caricature of penal substitution that is already out there for mass consumption. It’s the caricature that every New Atheist, for example, criticizes us Christians for endorsing: that an angry God sent his innocent Son to die on the cross.
This isn’t right at all. God is Triune. What God the Father willed, God the Son also willed. The cross is God’s giving of God’s self as the solution for our sin problem. John’s gospel necessarily rounds out the picture of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (“…but not my will but thine be done”) by Jesus’ telling his disciples, “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—’Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour” (John 12:27).
The cross, therefore, must be understood first (middle, and last) as an act of God’s love. What God does on the cross, God does out of love. Everything else, including satisfaction for sin, proceeds from love—it’s shaped by it, constrained by it, and is consistent with it. Otherwise, it’s not from God.
Therefore, God’s wrath—a fine biblical word that attempts to measure the distance between God’s holiness and our sinfulness—is not one of God’s attributes among others, including love. Wrath is subsumed under God’s love—i.e., whatever wrath is, it necessarily proceeds from God’s love. It’s not hard to imagine how this is the case: A loving God must also be just. A just God must punish sin. A perfectly loving and perfectly just God offers God’s self to bear the penalty on behalf of the world that he loves.
Regardless, my point is that “wrath” is not primarily what the cross is about. Not even close. To emphasize God’s wrath in relation to the cross is very nearly missing the point: It’s like seeing the movie The Social Network and saying, “Wasn’t that a great movie about Harvard University?” Well, yes but…
All that to say that I changed the line to “The love of God was satisfied,” which in my view gets at the heart of the meaning of the cross. It wasn’t even my idea. My man N.T. Wright came up with it, in this excellent essay defending penal substitution from its (many) critics. In this section, he writes appreciatively about “In Christ Alone”:
We must of course acknowledge that many, alas, have since then offered more caricatures of the biblical doctrine. It is all too possible to take elements from the biblical witness and present them within a controlling narrative gleaned from somewhere else, like a child doing a follow-the-dots puzzle without paying attention to the numbers and producing a dog instead of a rabbit.
This is what happens when people present over-simple stories with an angry God and a loving Jesus, with a God who demands blood and doesn’t much mind whose it is as long as it’s innocent. You’d have thought people would notice that this flies in the face of John’s and Paul’s deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God: not ‘God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son’ but ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his son’. That’s why, when I sing that interesting recent song ‘In Christ alone my hope is found’, and we come to the line, ‘And on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’, I believe it’s more deeply true to sing ‘the love of God was satisfied’. I commend that alteration to those who sing that song, which is in other respects one of the very few really solid recent additions to our repertoire. So we must readily acknowledge that of course there are caricatures of the biblical doctrine all around, within easy reach – just as there are of other doctrines, of course, such as that of God’s grace.