I read this article online, about what is evidently the moment's current hot controversy in theological circles (there always is one, after all), and I liked it very much. I wrote to the author, Pastor Gilbert, in reply. My letter follows the link. To best "get" my letter, you should read his article first.
Here is the link: https://www.9marks.org/article/a-response-to-scot-mcknight-and-matthew-bates/
DISCLAIMER: I never asked Pastor Gilbert's permission to link his article here (such permission isn't necessary since the article is publicly available), nor have I heard back from him, positively or negatively, regarding my letter to him, nor does my linking his article in any way imply that he would endorse my views or even that I understood him correctly!
All I will posit about the pastor's well-written article (much better written than my response) is that he stimulated me to think further about these things and connect his concerns with some of my own which could well have no relation whatsoever to his.
CAVEAT: I have Calvinist friends whom I truly love and respect. But I'm not a Calvinist. A couple of things I say here about the "-ism" are perhaps a tad rough. Nothing personal is intended, and I trust in my friends' "bigness."
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Dear Pastor Gilbert,
Like you, I harbor certain sympathies for those who evince this yen to bring into bold relief the "kingly arrival" of Jesus. I am convinced at the deepest levels--intellectual and "felt"--that this is certainly central to everything...just as many other sides and dimensions of the matter are "central to everything."
In God there is infinite room for a whole lot of things to be "central to everything."
Like you I reject, dare I say brutally and ruthlessly (I need hard terms because the rejection is fierce), all notion of allowing Christ's royal advent to elbow out Christ's propitiation of our sins in His death.
Why do they insist on this fragmentation and, following right upon it, this incredibly clumsy, hamfisted cherry-picking (like, as you pointed out so well, baldly deleting from the very apostolic assertion any reference to His death for our sins)?
Several reasons come to my mind (and "gut").
One is, metaphorically speaking, "white guilt." Only in this case call it "Christian guilt," an overly solicitous, bordering on obsequious desperation to apologize for everything ever done wrong by "Christianity," by pinning the whole problem on, as it were, the lowest hanging fruit, i.e., the most uncomfortable, objectionable, embarrassing doctrine. It's a knee-jerk reaction emanating from a disastrous theological and historical confusion (on which, see Reason #3!). "Oh if the Church historically had only known it wasn't about wrath and punishment and divine revenge wrought upon the Innocent One, the Church Herself wouldn't have acted out these unworthy sentiments in her turn, converting at the point of the sword, burning heretics, cozying up to corrupt power structures; instead, She'd have striven uncompromisingly to advance the justice and mercy of God's Kingdom."
If there's anything more myopic than futuristic utopian dreams, it's retrospective utopian regrets.
One might put it that they are trying to atone for Christianity by making the Atonement its scapegoat.
(And what god is being propitiated in that process?)
Another is boredom with same-old-same-old theology and a hankering after novelty, perhaps to make their mark on history's theological stage. (But, come on, is there anything new?) Thus they artifically blow up their notional angle into The Whole Thing. Even if it means pretending verses that are there, aren't. It's sophomoric. Somewhat tolerable in the very young who always think their latest brain flash is The Theory of Everything, but horribly distasteful coming from anyone old enough to know better.
Reason #3--and my gut feeling is very strong about this--is, I suspect, a theologically catastrophic blindness to the centrality of Christ's deity, the reality of the Holy Trinity. I haven't read their works, but I would bet half the farm they downplay the deity of Christ and inflate, over against it, His Messiahship in a squarely Davidic-royal-human sense. I don' t imagine they have done anything so blatant as to outright deny His deity (yet), but I'd bet the notion was kept comfortably peripheral.
When you start losing sight of the deity of Christ, sooner or later His vicarious Passion, the propitiation of our sins, is cognitively launched on a trajectory to final, appalling intolerability. It may not happen all at once, and you may not realize it's happening, or why, but you will finally get there.
(I'm convinced this goes to the heart of the tragic falling away by the Law-Gospel faction in the Jerusalem church; they just could not, finally, tolerate the supremacy of Jesus even though they "believed" in Him--but pray to Him like God, the way everybody around them was doing? And pretend to be happy about the demotion of the Law to "optional"? NO. I think the Epistle to the Hebrews was the last-ditch, heartbroken effort to keep them in, and it appears, historically, that it failed.)
When all you've got left is the man Jesus (somehow, inexplicably, sinless, or at least very very good), you cannot possibly entertain the notion of a just God pouring out upon, into, Him the fathomless wrath (whatever that could be and whatever that would feel like, and we know it means more than just dying on a cross)--the fathomless wrath of infinite holiness unleashed on infinitely rejected (the British "blasted" fits well here) sin. In the man Jesus: "My God, my God...!!!"
The deity of Christ is inextricable from the Atonement. Because He is God, He freely, as the Forgiver, absorbed the impenetrable brunt, pain, punishment, devastation of the world's sin. Embraced His own "blasting." Which isn't at all difficult to understand in principle if not in magnitude. We all suffer, after all, when we forgive, abandoning all hope of a just, healing compensation. When we see that "it's never going to happen, so only I can settle this, in myself." And thus free ourselves.
Only the Forgiver can take over the debt and pay it. Only the Wronged One can swallow the wrong and, if you'll forgive my pursuing the digestive metaphor, digest and eliminate it.
Not only can He, but He's entitled to if He wants to. (Happily for us, God wanted to.)
That point is vital, crucial, monumental in its significance.
I once had a conversation with a Jewish professor in Israel on this very point. I won't tell the story here but I think you would appreciate it. I included it in a paper I delivered once in York, England, at the annual convention of a literary society I belong to. If you'd be interested, I'll send the paper to you. I'll even highlight the pertinent part so you don't have to hunt through it. It's on Forgiveness and the "miniature Golgotha" every act of forgiveness must be if it is to be real.
God was entitled, as the One wronged, to come and "swallow" it, right to death. He evidently considered it that important.
(This does not in the least diminish the central significance of the Man's innocence as Man making Him the spotless Lamb. Why indeed would it? How can anything in Him diminish or exclude anything else of His fullness that all "goes into it"? Still, even as Man Jesus could only die for our sins as the One sinned against, Who is, inescapably, God. Only God could do it. Only Man could do it. So He did.)
The current inclination in some theological, apologetical circles to diminish, shrink in embarrassment from, mealy-mouth and vacillate over Christ's propitiary death amounts to an arrogant denial of the divine prerogative--something, indeed, akin to the arrogance of the Watchtower Society in dictating to God that He can't become Man ("even if He wanted to," as a JW once told me). There is nothing in the least surprising about this, since I see the two streams, i.e., the Atonement-deniers and the modern Arianism, as issuing from the same impulses.
There is much freedom and scope for reflection, speculation, extrapolation, etc., in Christian theology. But only because there are divine givens. Just as there is much scope for freedom in playing the violin, but only when you've learned the rules. Otherwise you have no authentic freedom at all. Once you start jettisoning the divine givens, there is no more freedom left in Christian theology because there is no Christian theology left.
For instance, I feel fairly well convinced (in my "gut") that, had there been no Fall, God would have incarnated as Man anyway because that was always the "end game."
Yes, I do realize how ridiculous that sounds, in particular to anyone of a Calvinistic bent (disclaimer: I don't know, plowing into the following, what your bent is; I might offend you--sorry!).
But I don't apologize for the weakness of human language (or quake before Calvinistic prejudices). Sure, there was a Fall, and there never will be an Incarnation in isolation from the One that was in direct relationship to Man's sin and the mission to atone for it. So it's all hypothetical and I'd never insist on it as a point of doctrine (the "rules").
I still feel sure of it, though, and, moreover, sure that it matters. In the impenetrable, unfathomable workings of the Divine Intention there is room for "what might have been," not simply as an abstraction but as an everlastingly meaningful quality in that Intention. (God Himself certainly pours out His broken heart to the Israelite nation sufficiently often--"If only you had..., I would have..."--to suggest that aborted realities mean something to Him, and forever, unless one wants to argue He's play-acting His grief. He would never pass the strict Calvinist bar with such talk.)
In other words, even if, both in point of fact and according to, if you wish, God's fore-ordination, there never was any other possibility but the Fall and the Atonement--EVEN THAT cannot void the meaning inherent in God's becoming Man because He wanted to do that. Its meaning stands for itself and all its implications without being, as it were, wholly indebted to its soteriological exigency. (Or is God not big enough for such complexity?)
And if one is of a less Calvinistic, imagination-eviscerating, bent, then the force of the proposition mounts exponentially: the Creator made us in order, ultimately, to join us on the created plane in the Person of His Beloved Son. Sin made that "visitation" a matter of urgent rescue, on a cataclysmic scale, at the ultimate cost to Himself. Yet that doesn't void the overriding intention or the breathtaking glory of love in Him that this desire, entirely in its own right, discloses to us.
So my answer to the question what point there could possibly be in such wild speculations (I think, not so wild actually, and I do find glimmers of biblical support for them, but we'll leave that for now), since "Nobody can know, so why even posit it?", is this:
"There is nothing in the divine revelation forbidding the idea. Moreover, there are places that can be adduced as suggesting it. Moreover again, the whole of God's revelation, of His character and ultimate desires for His people, is in harmony with it. And for another moreover, I see it as affectively, instinctively consistent with the God we know Him to be. And finally, just 'knowing'--as much as we could be said to 'know'--such a thing about God brings me deeper into love with Him. I think about this desire of God's to be one of us, not just because of the sin problem but to be with us, and I say to myself, 'Yes, it would be just like God to do something like that. That's what the God I have come to know would want, no matter what.'"
Nor (and this is why I have brought all this up here) does such speculative theologizing elbow any of the divine givens off the stage, least of all the Atonement! Any more than it would be denigrating somebody's heroism after they'd pulled someone out of a burning house if you happened to note that they were on their way to that house anyway in response to a dinner invitation and they "only" ran into the house and saved their friend once they arrived and realized the place was on fire. But...they really came for dinner.
Well, yes, it would be denigrating the person's heroism if you said it that way but the point is, the denigration itself is moronic. Not worth an ounce of respect or credence.
The "anyway" makes all of it, in my book, all the more transcendently glorious: this is the friend who came in love, ideally for joyful reunion (God's timeless, core ideal, pace anyone's overreaching orthodoxies on predestination), who sacrificed not only the expectation of that joy but himself out of khesed for the beloved, because that's what the crisis called for. But the crisis doesn't define who the friend existentially IS or ultimately PURSUES. (Am I talking about God here or the figure in my analogy? Well, yes.)
I'd be going horribly astray were I to push my feeling about "the Incarnation that would have happened anyway," and make it The Whole Thing, saying something like: "The Incarnation is the Gospel. All that counts is 'the Word became flesh.' Simply by being here He effectively 'disinfected' our sin-diseased world. That was sacrifice (and humiliation) enough. It insults the Divine beneficence resplendent in the Incarnation to demote it to second place after some barbaric, primitive notion of a vengeful deity out for blood."
I think Jesus' "king-makers" (as if He needed them for that) are similarly going horribly astray.
Yes, there is room, so much room, so much freedom, so much to be penetrated (forever and ever), but it is it, not something else. When you've abandoned it, then whatever it is you're penetrating, it's not it. "There are many rooms in my Father's house," but there's only one house. And the lintels of the door are marked with blood.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Sears
Zaporozhye, Ukraine
PS My "take" on the Atonement has been accused by the "other side," as it were, of reducing the righteous punishment of sin to a kind of divine self-therapy, where the key thing wasn't so much the world's sin as much as God's need for a catharsis, to "get over it," purge it from His memory and deliver Himself from bitterness. If you are interested, I will write again to demonstrate why that is so wrongheaded. It, too, is in its way a kind of tunnel-vision fragmentation, though of a different stripe than that of the "king-makers." Both sides, in a supreme irony, seem to leave "God" out of it--I mean the God Who Jesus was, immutably, always, even on the cross--the one side in a thinly veiled Arianism, the other side in a bizarre flirtation with Nestorianism.
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Well, that was my letter to Pastor Gilbert. I sent it to him via his church's website. Whether he'll ever read or respond to it, I don't know. But for you reading this here now, I'll add the mentioned excerpt from the paper I delivered at that literary society convention. The paper is also here on this blog, by the way, at https://kentexts.blogspot.com/2015/02/dorothy-l-sayers-on-forgiveness.html. Here is the excerpt:
I made the same point once to a shop lady in Jerusalem, saying that if I were to maliciously destroy her merchandise, but she chose to forgive me, it wouldn't end there. There's still the cost of the merchandise. By forgiving me, she'd have chosen to absorb the loss herself.
I made that point, too, also in Jerusalem, to a university professor. In a lecture he had made the not-so-subtle hint to us Christians in the audience that God’s telling Abraham to spare Isaac showed God wouldn’t allow an innocent person to be sacrificed for others (get it?). I went up to him after the lecture and said, “That’s why the Incarnation is intrinsic to the Atonement.” He stared at me blankly and said, “Why?” “Because”, I said, “only the one who’s been sinned against can absorb the full brunt of the offense – that’s what it means to forgive. If God asked someone else to do it – you’re right, it would be unfair.” The professor grew very still and said, “I never thought of it that way before.” I couldn’t help but think, “You are a teacher of the Jews and you don’t know these things?” God is the shop owner who eats the loss, the Lord who is also Lamb.
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And finally, if you're curious what my allusion to Nestorianism was all about, I meant that demanding Christ's death on the cross: 1) be entirely and exclusively about Man (the perfect Man) receiving the full, exhaustive blast of righteous wrath earned by Adam's race, and, 2) that Christ's own deity be, in a manner of speaking, not around at the moment, not doing anything except somehow suppressing itself, to the point of virtually not existing, and, 3) that His deity certainly not be seen as in any way on the "receiving end," the "swallowing" end, of this infinitely punishing ordeal, is to betray simply every bit of orthodoxy you have ever mouthed about Christ being 100% Man and 100% God in His Person. In Who He is.
As if his "God-part" were something He could turn off with a switch. As if the Person on that cross is only 100% Man. As if what Jesus is going through, God-in-the-flesh is not going through.
No, Jesus's humanity is God's humanity. Jesus' deity is the deity of a human being--the Human Being Who, alone, is God. He is entirely and always the Person Who is God and Man. Jesus is only one Person.
Nestorianism was one of the ancient "heresies" (I prefer to think of them as early, flawed but well-meaning, stabs at figuring all this out) that can sound awfully close to what we believe, so you have to listen very closely to catch the difference.
We believe that Christ's "two natures" (a dangerous, risky phrase), God and Man, are both Him, together, all the time.
A poor analogy is, I am an American and a man, all the time. I never stop being either. Or a brother and a son. I don't have to think about, decide to be one or the other, and can't "turn off" one or the other. Nor do any of these aspects make me more than one person. They are what I am, not what I do or anything I "have." No, they are me. (Even if I gave up my citizenship, I would always be the me who was born an American; I can't delete reality.)
In this sense the Person of Jesus Christ is entirely God and entirely Man. There is no third "person," a hypothetical core, central, Jesus who "has" these two natures but is therefore also separate from them. To think of Jesus that way would be Nestorianism.
The problem with Nestorianism is that it makes these "two natures" out to be something more like your limbs; i.e., you have two arms. But your arms aren't your "person." You HAVE two arms, but you AREN'T two arms. Even if you lost one, you'd still be you. Even if you lost both. They are a couple of "things."
But Jesus' humanity and deity weren't a couple of "things" that he "had."
It seems clear to me that the adamant insistence that "God Himself" can't be said to be "going through anything" (in His own consummate act of forgiveness, mind you!; as if you and I aren't supposed to "go through anything" when we forgive, as if any notion of a correlation is inadmissible--strange, since we're commanded to do it "like" God has done it "in Christ"), and certainly can't be going through it on the "receiving end" (as if Christ on the cross isn't God in Person experiencing anything!), is about as close to Nestorianism as a modern Christian can get away with.
No, I reject that entirely. What Christ is experiencing, God is experiencing. What it means to God, it means to Christ. What Christ is receiving, God is receiving. What God is consummating, Christ is consummating. Jesus on the Cross never stops being both the Holy God sinned against and the Holy Man taking the sin's punishment.
Are there differences, all the same, between the "position" of the Father and that of the Son in this terrible dynamic?
Of course there are!
I'm a firm, uncompromising Trinitarian. God the Father is not God the Man on the cross. God the Son is not God the Father executing the sentence (a sentence unseen and unknowable to us, infinitely transcending the horror of crucifixion). God the Father could not be the Lamb of God--only sinless Man could be that. God the Son could not pour out the wrath--He emptied Himself of such prerogative and made Himself a servant, even to death on the cross.
Yet with all that, in the ineffable Unity....
In the Unity of God, God Himself is, in the Passion, expiating the burden, eliminating the weight of wrath, consummating the exigency of holy justice. One God did all this, only One: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God "lives through" all this, and One God "comes through it" the Conqueror.
It is, after all, a Passion--a passing through, a Passover, actualized within the Unity of God for us.
And then, God Himself can (as He plainly has) "move on from there" with us on new ground: "the old has passed, all has become new!" My supposition--with, I think, convincing biblical support--is that He is, to put it mildly, glad about that. You might deride that as my reducing the Cross to an anthropomorphized God's self-therapy program, but I'd say your contention then is not with me but with His revelation and the onus on you to prove it.
