The Upper Register

The story that frames the atonement, part 2

Now a question may arise in  your mind, Why did God bother to go through the whole "first level" or typological fulfillment in the first place? If the "real" narrative is the Adam narrative of creation, fall, redemption, consummation, why Israel? I believe the reason is pedagogical. The Adam narrative happened too long ago and with so few witnesses. So God re-enacted the Adam narrative on the grand stage of world history in order to set the context for the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Meredith Kline put it this way:

A variety of purposes can be discovered to explain the insertion of the old covenant order and its typal kingdom into the course of redemptive history. Of central importance was the creation of the proper historical setting for the advent of the Son of God and his earthly mission (cf. Rom 9:5). In accordance with the terms of his covenant of works with the Father he was to come as the second Adam in order to undergo a representative probation and by his obedient and triumphant accomplishment thereof to establish the legal ground for God’s covenanted bestowal of the eternal kingdom of salvation on his people. It was therefore expedient, if not necessary, that Christ appear within a covenant order which, like the covenant with the first Adam, was governed by the works principle (cf. Gal 4:4). The typal kingdom of the old covenant was precisely that. Within the limitations of the fallen world and with modifications peculiar to the redemptive process, the old theocratic kingdom was a reproduction of the original covenantal order. Israel as the theocratic nation was mankind stationed once again in a paradise-sanctuary, under probation in a covenant of works. In the context of that situation, the Incarnation event was legible; apart from it the meaning of the appearing and ministry of the Son of Man would hardly have been perspicuous. Because of the congruence between Jesus’ particular historical identity as the true Israel, born under the law, and his universally relevant role as the second Adam, the significance of his mission as the accomplishing of a probationary assignment in a works covenant in behalf of the elect of all ages was lucidly expressed and readily readable.

Much more than the works-probation aspect of Jesus’ task was included in the revelatory design of the typal kingdom. It prepared a public context in world history in which the meaning of Jesus’ mission as a whole might be communicated effectively.

[Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 352-3.]

Note the statement highlighted in bold:  "the congruence between Jesus' particular historical identity as the true Israel under the law, and his universally relevant role as the second Adam." That is the heart of the matter. 

I would argue that the role of the Davidic king is what most clearly points backward to Adam and forward to Christ as the second Adam. It was the king who was responsible to lead the people of God in faithful obedience to the Law. As the king goes, so go the people. If he is obedient, the people are generally faithful and their tenure in the land continues. If he is an idolater, the nation as a whole is filled with idolaters and is (eventually) cut off from the land.

God said to King Solomon after he finished building the temple: "If you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight" (1 Kings 9:6-7 ESV). 

The king's disobedience or obedience, then, in a typological and imperfect way, is what determines whether God's people continue to dwell in God's holy land. In the same way, Christ's obedience (as God's anointed King) is the meritorious ground that secures the eternal inheritance. Therefore, to call Jesus "the Messiah" is to call him "the second Adam" using the idiom of the typal kingdom.

The cross fits in as follows. The obedience of the Messiah or second Adam included a mission of not only fulfilling the precepts of the Law but of enduring the Law's curse on behalf of those who had violated the Law. This of course would not have been necessary for the pre-fall Adam nor was it envisioned as part of the Davidic king's ordinary role. But now that the covenant of works (whether in its Adamic or Mosaic form) has been broken, the only way the blessings of the covenant can be enjoyed by sinners is if they are judged under the penal curse of the covenant and emerge on the other side through union with a representative Substitute in his death and resurrection. The kingly office of Christ is then conjoined with the priestly.

The story that frames the atonement, part 1

Andrew Perriman raises a good question for those of us who cherish the penal substitution view of the atonement as primary and central. He asks: "What is the story that frames and makes sense of this understanding of Jesus' death?"

At the outset, I want to say that I fully sympathize with N. T. Wright's concern to place the mission and work of Jesus within the narrative framework of Israel's story, a concern articulated well in Jesus and the Victory of God. However, I believe he makes the mistake of failing to place the Israel narrative within the larger Adam narrative. Modern theology since Barth has been fond of the particularism of biblical theology, but we must also see that the particularism of biblical theology is in the service of an ultimate universalism. (I'm using the word "universalism" here not in the sense of universal salvation, but a soteriology that overcomes the Jew-Gentile distinction by addressing the plight of all sinners in Adam.)

So what is the larger Adam narrative, and how does the Israel narrative fit in with it? The Adam narrative, of course, is the story of creation, Adam's rebellion and fall, and God's promise concerning the S/seed (both in the singular and in the collective sense) of the woman. The Seed (singular) will crush the serpent by means of his own suffering, a foreshadow of the death of Christ (Gen 3:15). Genesis 1-3 is foundational to the whole Bible. Everything that comes after it must be read in light of it. The book of Genesis itself subordinates the Israel narrative to the Adam narrative.

Now the Seed promise of Gen 3:15 -- so brief that it is almost an enigma -- is fleshed out and expanded in the Abrahamic promise. The Abrahamic promise reiterates the essence of the Seed promise of Gen 3:15, but it places greater emphasis on the collective dimension of the seed (Israel) together with the promised land for the seed to dwell in. The promised land is clearly to be understood as the restored paradise that was lost in Gen 3 (see Gen 13:10 which describes the land as "well watered everywhere like the garden of the LORD").

The promise then unfolds in two stages:  (a) a first-level fulfillment on the typological layer of Israel's inheritance in the land and (b) a second-level fulfillment in Christ as the individual Seed and those who belong to him as the corporate seed. Of course, the two stages do not unfold in a smooth evolution, for there is a rupture dividing the two:  Israel was a corporate reenactment of Adam's failure in the garden, leading to the rupture of the exile. Nevertheless, because of God's irrevocable promises to Abraham, the exile is not the end of the story. After the exile is the return and rebuilding of the temple in the post-exilic period. But this was but a small foretaste of the eschatological glories of the second-level fulfillment. The post-exilic community and its rebuilt temple were so small and insignificant, we come to the end of the Old Testament crying out for a greater fulfillment. 

Now the first-level fulfillment creates a world of types that become a new promise finding its fulfillment in Christ. Israel as God's holy people dwelling in God's holy land is a type of the elect dwelling in the new heavens and the new earth. When the reality to which the types pointed comes, the reality is described using typological language. Thus the elect (both Jew and Gentile) are called "the Israel of God" and heaven is called "the eternal inheritance." Jesus himself assumes the three-fold office of prophet, priest, and king -- offices first established with living examples in the old covenant economy (e.g., Moses, Aaron, David). With regard to the priestly office in particular, Christ's atoning death is described as the fulfillment of the Levitical system of sacrifice, the final purification for sin when the true High Priest entered the true holy place once for all. The Levitical system was put in place so that a holy God could dwell in the midst of a sinful and impure people.

Israel's conditional tenure in the land (conditional on faithful obedience to the Law) was a corporate re-enactment of Adam's probation in the garden. And just as Adam sinned and was expelled, so Israel was sent into exile for her violation of the Law. This then sets the stage for Jesus to be described as the true, obedient Israelite, the faithful king who kept God's Law and gave rest to his people in the land. This is merely the typological way of saying that Jesus is the second Adam. Christ is the second Adam and true Israel in whom the exile is reversed and a greater paradise is attained.

So there are actually two narrative frameworks (Adam and Israel) with the Israel narrative nesting within the broader Adam narrative (creation, fall, redemption, consummation). The mission and work of Jesus must be seen through the mutually interpreting lens of both narratives. In the order of understanding, we start with the Israel narrative since that forms the most immediate historical context for the life and ministry of Jesus the Messiah. But since the Israel narrative is itself a reproduction in type and shadow of the broader Adam narrative, the interpretive framework provided by the Israel narrative was intended by God to point beyond its own particularity to the universalism of the Adam narrative. In Israel's covenant breaking and exile, we see the covenant breaking and expulsion of Adam from the garden. And since we are all in Adam, we see ourselves in Israel's story too. Yet, just as Jesus takes Israel's story to the cross and beyond to the resurrection, so he completes Adam's story at the same time, so that through his accursed death we have passed through judgment and have emerged on the other side having won, by his merit, the right to eat of the tree of life and live forever with him in the heavenly inheritance.

For more on "two level fulfillment" see this selection from Meredith G. Kline's magnum opus, Kingdom Prologue.

To be continued ...

Where does N. T. Wright stand on the Atonement?

This is a response to Steve Rives's comment on an earlier post of mine.

N. T. Wright is unclear at best on this whole cluster of issues at the heart of the gospel (the nature of sin, the wrath of God, substitutionary atonement). It is true that you can find statements that sound traditional and use some traditional words, but the thrust of his overall vision and cast of thought is in a different direction. 

Wright uses traditional terms with non-traditional meanings.

For example, he will often speak of "substitution" and "substitutionary atonement." But he does not (normally) use the term "penal substitution" when describing his view. He will say that Jesus was substituted in place of Israel, or that he was identified with sinful Israel. But he does not say that God inflicted the penal wrath on Jesus that we deserved for our sins.

Or take the statement that Steve Rives quotes: "God the creator would bring people back into bodily life, to face the consequences of their evil deeds." Notice that he does not say, "God the creator would bring people back into bodily life, to punish them for their evil deeds." Instead he uses the ambiguous phrase, "to face the consequences of their evil deeds." Such language could be intended in an orthodox sense, but it could also be taken in a watered-down sense in which sin brings certain negative "consequences" in its wake by the impersonal laws of moral cause and effect.

Here are some pieces of evidence which suggest that there is something wrong with Wright's view of the atonement.

First, in his commentary on Romans in The New Interpreter's Bible (2002), Wright has this to say about Romans 8:3 ("he condemned sin in the flesh"):

God, says Paul, condemned sin. Paul does not, unlike some, say that God condemned Jesus. True, God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus; but this is some way from saying, as many have, that God desired to punish someone and decided to punish Jesus on everyone's behalf. Paul's statement is more subtle than that. It is not merely about a judicial exchange, the justice of which might then be questioned (and indeed has been questioned). It is about sentence of death being passed on "sin" itself, sin as a force or power capable of deceiving human beings, taking up residence within them, and so causing their death (7:7-25) ... For Paul, what was at stake was not simply God's judicial honor, in some Anselmic sense, but the mysterious power called sin, at large and destructive within God's world, needing to be brough to book, to have sentence passed and executed upon it, so that, with its power broken, God could then give the life sin would otherwise prevent (p. 578). 

Note that sin is here viewed as an impersonal force or power that blocks humans from enjoying life. On the cross, God condemned this impersonal force so that he could then give us life.

Second, Wright endorsed The Lost Message of Jesus (2003) by Steve Chalke and Alan Mann in which they said that the traditional presentation of the atonement is a barrier to faith for many people because it seems to portray the cross as "cosmic child abuse -- a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed." (See quote in context here).  Wright continues to stand by his endorsement, even after this passage became controversial.

Third, Wright's book Simply Christian (2006) is supposed to be his presentation of the essence of the Christian faith. Here, if anywhere, you would expect a clear, simple statement of the gospel. But it is not there. The book has many good things to say, but it doesn't explain the basic gospel -- "Christ died for our sins." Forget about imputed righteousness. We'll set that debate aside. He didn't even explain the basic concept that (a) God is holy and hates sin, (b) we are sinners deserving his just wrath, and (c) the only way we can be right with God is through the death of Christ which satisfied God's justice and gives us forgiveness and acceptance before God. Instead, we find statements like this:

God's plan to rescue the world from evil would be put into effect by evil doing its worst to the Servant--that is, to Jesus himself--and thereby exhausting its power (p. 108) ... It was time for the evil which had dogged Jesus's footsteps throughout his career--the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul--to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over his head. So he spoke of the  Passover bread as his own body that would be given on behalf of his friends, as he went out to take on himself the weight of evil so that they wouldn't have to bear it themselves (p. 110).

This is all very consistent with his earlier formulations in chapter 12 of Jesus and the Victory of God (1996). You can see how, on Wright's theory, he can say with a clear conscience that Jesus' death was substitutionary, since Jesus let evil do its worst on himself so that it would not have to do so on us. But it is much harder to see how it is penal, i.e., relating to divine punishment. "Evil doing its worst on Jesus" is not the same thing as "Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood ... so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom 3:24-26 ESV). 

Fourth, Wright wrote a piece in 2007 titled The Cross and the Caricatures defending his endorsement of the Chalke book and attacking the solid defense of substitutionary atonement titled Pierced for our Transgressions (2007) by Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach as "deeply, profoundly, and disturbingly unbiblical." For his part, Wright affirms "a version" of the penal substitutionary theory, as long as it is subordinated to the Christus Victor theory. The "version" that he holds is that Christ bore the brunt of human evil, not that he bore the wrath of God that we deserved. In other words, his "version" of substitutionary atonement is not what you and I are thinking of when we use those words. It is true that in the first half of "The Cross and the Caricatures," Wright makes some comforting sounding statements, but in the second half you start to see the cracks in the subtle way he uses terms. As far as I know, this essay is the one of the rare places in his writings where he does use "penal substitution" to describe his own view, but he makes clear the sense in which he means the term. Commenting on the infamous Chalke "cosmic child abuse" quote, he writes:

You could take the paragraph to mean (a) on the cross, as an expression of God’s love, Jesus took into and upon himself the full force of all the evil around him, in the knowledge that if he bore it we would not have to; but this, which amounts to a form of penal substitution, is quite different from other forms of penal substitution, such as the mediaeval model of a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son. In other words, there are many models of penal substitution, and the vengeful-father-and-innocent-son story is at best a caricature of the true one.

There you have it. Wright thinks his theory of Jesus exhausting the full force of evil is "a form of penal substitution." Meanwhile, the other form (the orthodox view) is caricatured as  "a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son."

Fifth, see this 2007 interview with Trevin Wax where he goes over the Chalke controversy once more and then adds his own sloppy caricature alongside Chalke's:

So we have to understand the doctrine of penal substitution within the Scriptural framework, within which it makes sense, rather than within this very low grade thing that I’ve been a naughty boy, God wants to punish me, and for some reason, he punishes someone else, so phew! I’m alright. OK. For a five-year-old, that’s fine. That’ll maybe do it. But, actually let’s grow up! We’re not talking about five-year-olds here; we’re talking about grown men and women who ought to know better, to be honest.

Finally, John Piper has a section in The Future of Justification (2007) where he points out Wright's mixed signals on substitutionary atonement and respectfully asks him to clarify his position ("A Regrettable Endorsement: Steve Chalke's The Lost Message of Jesus," pp. 47-52). Unfortunately, Wright did not respond to Piper's specific query in Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision (2009).

So where does N. T. Wright stand on the atonement? I have a hard time being as charitable as Piper, who tries to believe the best and merely asks for clarification. To me, it looks more like a case of using orthodox labels to refer to a position that is not orthodox. At the end of the day, for Bishop Wright, sin is an impersonal evil force, not personal rebellion against God; sin has bad consequences, but does not elicit God's punitive wrath against the sinner; and the cross is to be understood as some version of the Christus Victor theory in which Christ defeats evil by letting it do its worst to him, not as a penal satisfaction of divine justice.

The danger of de-personalizing God's wrath

D. A. Carson makes an excellent point here in his critique of N. T. Wright -- but it applies to many emergent and emergent-friendly authors as well, e.g., Scot McKnight. Carson writes:

At the end of the day, the central notion of sin in Wright’s thought is that it is somehow anarchic rebellion against shalom, and the triumph at the end is the restoration of shalom. What is lost is the intensely personal dimension of sin: it is rebellion against God, and he is regularly portrayed as the most offended party (cf. Ps 51!).

Of course, a low view of human sin and God's wrath goes hand-in-glove with a low view of Christ's atonement. N. T. Wright almost never speaks of "sin" and instead speaks of "evil." Scot McKnight speaks of "cracked eikons" (humans as images of God). In this view, the cross was God's way of dealing with "evil" in the world, or of restoring the image of God, but rarely is it described as the quenching of God's wrath directed against sin or the satisfaction of divine justice.

Read D. A. Carson's RBL review of Evil and the Justice of God by N. T. Wright.