Transcription
Let's go to a question though, first of all, from Galen in Cambridgeshire, who asks, "My question is about your views on penal substitution and salvation. When you've raised criticism on this topic, are you a) simply trying to bring balance to the discussion about our calling here on earth and where we go when we die, or b) saying that the traditional understanding of penal substitution is not correct and God did not actually require Jesus to die as a sacrifice for sins?" Let's start there, and there's a follow-up question.
Sure. Um, I think there is a sense in which I'm trying to do both of the things that Galen mentions, but I would want to say my primary task is to expound what the New Testament says about the meaning of the death of Jesus. And as I do that, speaking as a first-century historian, I'm trying to understand what Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, etc., etc., thought they were talking about. And as I do that, I find that different ways of talking about Jesus' death in the last 2,000 years have sometimes got hold of some bits of what's in the New Testament, but then missed out other bits, and then produced distortions by emphasizing some things in one way and not rather than another. So I'm not simply starting out there in the tradition and trying to correct things. I'm trying to take a run at it from the New Testament again, which actually has been my life's work, to say, "Let's just read the Bible and see where we go with that."
But, um, clearly there have been distortions within what has been called penal substitution. For me, quite a breakthrough in thinking about this some years ago was realizing that the phrase "penal substitution" can mean quite different things to different people, according to which story you put it in. If you have an element of a story and you frame it within one narrative, it means something quite different. You know, exposing, you see somebody walking down the street and carrying a briefcase. It's a very different sort of thing if, actually, this is the briefcase that that Russian spy was carrying two minutes ago and they just passed in the street, from if it's a man who left his briefcase at home and his wife has kindly brought it to him. So the same thing can mean something different in a different narrative.
So penal substitution can be expressed in very damaging ways, and even when preachers don't intend to do this, it is quite clearly the case that this is how many, many people think. Young people here, the idea being that there is this big, bullying, angry God who's very cross with us all, and he's got a big stick and he's about to lash out. Unfortunately, somebody gets in the way, happens to be his own son, so that somehow makes it alright, and here we get off. Now, last year, or the year before, I forget, I had a public discussion on this with some, some colleagues in America, and one angry theologian got up from the floor and said, "Nobody believes that. Nobody teaches that these days." And one of the colleagues on the panel stood up and answered it for me. He said, "I teach first-year undergrads at a certain college," at our own name. He said, "What Tom has said is precisely what they all think the gospel is, and they're struggling to know whether to believe it or not."
So now, if that is what people have heard in our hearing, then we've got some serious work to do, because we have taken John 3:16, "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son," and what people have heard is, "God so hated the world that he killed his only Son." And then when you say that in a world where there is child abuse and domestic violence and so on, people think, "I know that bully of a God, and I hate him." And then the whole thing goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Okay, just give us, if, if you were to, as it were, look at it in its most sympathetic light, that particular way of understanding this. What would you say is a better way of understanding?
Well, from that point of view, obviously the thing to emphasize is that what happens on the cross is the sovereign act of love on behalf of the Father himself. That the death of Jesus reveals the love of God. Paul says in Romans 5, "God commends his love to us in that while we were still sinners, the Messiah died for us." And for that, of course, you need a very tight nexus between God and Jesus, because it makes no sense to say, "I love you so much, I'm sending somebody else to do the dirty work." "I love you so much, I'm coming to do it myself." So that there is a strong Trinitarian theology built into the New Testament at that very point. I've always felt that that sometimes where the missing link is, is simply the fact that it's God himself on the... yes, yes, then yes. Which then, of course, causes other problems when Jesus says, "My God, why did you abandon me?" etc. And that that's a real problem, which can only be dealt with by a very careful investigation of, if you like, what it meant to be Jesus, what it meant to be the one in whom the living presence of Israel's God came to dwell in our midst. And that's, that's the heart of all the mystery of the gospel, and it's a source of endless wonder.
But so, what I've tried to do is then to say, "Well, hang on, in the New Testament, the results of the death of Jesus isn't simply, 'Well, I was very sinful, now fortunately somebody's taken my punishment, so I get to go to heaven.' That is actually to moralize our vision of what it means to be human more." Now, let me be understood. Morals matters. Sin is important. I'm not saying it doesn't. But sin is a failure rather than simply the breaking of rules. It's, it's, it's the failure to be genuinely human. The Greek word *hamartia*, sin, means missing the mark, shooting an arrow at a target and missing. What is the target? The target is genuine humaneness. What is genuine humaneness? It's reflecting God's image. And and whenever we are tempted to sin, what is actually going on is that there is something we are supposed to be doing and being to honor God in the world, in our family, in our own lives, whatever. And sin draws us away from that, presents us with a cheap alternative, or whatever. So that then we collude with forces of destruction and chaos and darkness. And then we, we basically say to the principalities and powers, which, by the way, I don't have good language for, the powers of darkness, and they didn't have good language in the first century for the powers of darkness, but you have to acknowledge, and if after the 20th century you can't acknowledge this, how stupid are we, that there is a superhuman power of darkness which still is active. But then how does that work through us giving our human authority to idols, to things that we worship? The result of that is sin, which means we are bound in a tight grip. Jesus dying for our sin releases the grip of the powers. That's, that's the central thing.
Now, a number of different people have emailed in essentially the same question, but what do we mean when we say a phrase that has come so easily to the tongue, "Jesus died for our sins"? Yes, they're half. Yes. What I mean is, what are we actually saying in saying a phrase like that? When Paul says that, he adds the phrase, "according to the scriptures." Now, that doesn't mean I can find three proof texts, e.g., Isaiah 53. What it means is there is an entire scriptural narrative which is about how the Creator God is rescuing the world. And that scriptural narrative is shaped by the Exodus, particularly, and then by all the things that follow from the Exodus, but then coming through the whole story of Israel in exile, where the people who are supposed to be bearing the solution for the world are themselves suffering the result of the problem. And the Messiah, Israel's Messiah, comes to the point where that story has reached rock bottom in order to take its weight upon himself and so to begin new creation. Though its creation, covenant, exile. And when you speak of taking the weight of that upon himself again, we're speaking in pictures and metaphors and so on. But, but what I suppose the question a lot of people have is, what, what does that literally mean in the cells? What, what happens on the cross? I want to know, release the weight. That Jesus died for our sin. I want to know what literally means. Literally.
And I think that sense, which is often a problem. But the, the clearest passage I think in Paul about this is Romans 8:3 and 4. When having said, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life in Messiah Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death, because God has done what the law couldn't do, since it was weak through the flesh, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin-offering." Here's the thing: "He condemned sin in the flesh." There is no condemnation for us because God passed sentence of condemnation on sin. Interesting. Paul doesn't say God condemned Jesus. He says God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus. He has one way of looking at him, which is a reading of Romans 7 and 8, that God gave the law, extraordinarily in Romans 7 is a very difficult passage, in order to draw sin onto one place, in order to lure sin to the place where it could be condemned, namely to Israel's representative, who is therefore the world's representative. So Jesus dies as the representative substitute, taking the condemnation on himself, so that having condemned sin, sin is now itself condemned, and new creation can begin. And that's the energy of the Spirit taking it forward.
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