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“The Self-Emptying God” A Sermon on Philippians 2:1-13

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SCRIPTURE READING: Philippians 2:1-13

“1 If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy,  2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.  5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6  who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

7  but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

    And being found in appearance as a human,

8      he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.

9  Therefore God exalted him even more highly

    and gave him the name

    that is above every other name,

10  so that at the name given to Jesus

    every knee should bend,

    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11  and every tongue should confess

    that Jesus Christ is Lord,

    to the glory of God the Father.

12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling,  13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

It’s good to be with you. I always love to preach here. You know me, and I know you. You love me, and I love you. What could go wrong?

As many of you know, I had a very bad fall the day before Easter almost six months ago. I fractured my skull in three places, and broke my neck in a couple places, And I put a big scare into my family, didn’t I? Yeah. I want to thank you all for the care, for your prayers, for the meal train, and for your love that surrounded me and my family these past months. My late mother would have said that my guardian angel was working overtime. I figure my room wasn’t ready. Anyway, here I am, and here you are, so let’s hear some good news.

Would you pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

When Brent invited me to guest preach today, he told me what the reading was and I shared with him that Philippians 2:1-13 is a foundational reading for my Christian faith. 

Now, Brent is not on vacation; he’s at the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ Annual Meeting, with John and Janet Canning, our delegates. And right about now he’s listening to The Rev. Dr. Senator Raphael Warnock preach. And you get to hear me. But Jimmy Carter told us long ago that life isn’t fair, so, you know. 

But anyway, Brent said this is the reading. And I thought, oh, that’s right in my wheelhouse.

Let me share a little background on the text, and then I will tell you why it is important for me. The whole reading is a series of encouragements from Paul to the church in Philippi, and admonitions about how to live the Christian life. He had founded this church in Philippi and had this very warm relationship with them. And the letter reflects this warmth and this sort of intimacy and love. He is writing to them from a Roman prison, but you wouldn’t know it from the tone of the letter. You’d think he’d just won the lottery. The church in Philippi had sent him a gift of money in prison by way of his friend Epaphroditus, who got there and gave him the money. And Paul sent this letter back to the church in Philippi with Epaphroditis. There was no postal system to speak of. (There actually was a postal system in the Roman Empire, but that’s neither here nor there.) But Epaphroditus brings this letter back, and we have the letter.

Embedded in the center of our passage is a poem, a beautiful poem about Christ, which most likely was a hymn that the Philippians would have known. Paul most likely did not write this hymn, but he’s quoting this hymn that they would have known.

You know how the words to hymns are sticky. You know what I’m talking about? You remember the words to hymns, but you don’t remember just texts from the Bible as well. Hymn texts are sticky. A good deal of what I know about the Christian faith I acquired from hymns, singing hymns in junior choir and senior choir. For example, there is more good Christology in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” than in many a theological book. 

So this is a hymn. It’s a hymn about Christ’s humility, that though he was in human form he shared Divinity with God the Father. He did not consider it something to be exploited, or held on to, or grasped or gripped. But he gave it up. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, even dying a slave’s death on the cross. And it has this form where it kind of goes down to his death on a cross, and then there’s a “therefore.” Therefore his name is highly exalted. It’s a wonderful, wonderful hymn. I know it by heart (not in this translation).

I’ll tell you why that hymn is salient for me. I grew up in the church. I sang in the Junior and then in the Senior Choir. My Sunday School faith was a pretty simple moralistic dualism. If you’re good God is happy, and if you are not good God is displeased. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”

When I was 15 my mother became ill with colon cancer, and when I was 18, after many years of suffering, she died, two weeks into my first semester of college. To say I was lost would be an understatement, but my Sunday School faith didn’t have much to offer really, and I really didn’t want to have too much to do with this god who took my mom, or at least allowed her to be taken. I know she didn’t abandon me, but you feel abandoned when you’re a kid and your parent dies.

It’s a long story from there to here, and I will spare you the details, but when I ended up in seminary and started to really think deeply about who this God was, I was drawn to Jesus as the crucified and forsaken one. God incarnate in his human form who has solidarity with all of us humans in all our suffering, our sense of abandonment, our sense of forsakenness, all the marginal people, the last, the least, and the lost. That was a God I could embrace. I went to seminary looking for answers, and when someone asks me if I found them, I say, “Not really, but I got better questions.”

And so, the cross and all it means became a theological preoccupation of mine through most of my ministry. I’m kind of a “Johnny one note.” It’s a good note, an important note. And I had three academic sabbaticals in Britain with my family, in 1989 at Oxford University, in 1995 at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and 2001 at Cambridge University in England. And I studied the subject of the cross and what it means, and I wrote a book about it. The title of my book is “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement.” That title comes from the Isaac Watts hymn we will sing after the sermon.

Isaac Watts, by the way, was a Congregationalist. I don’t know if you knew that. When I was a kid, I thought he was an Episcopalian, because it always said Isaac Watts in the Episcopal hymnbook. But no, he was one of us. His English Puritan church sang only the psalms in meter. They were good Calvinists, and were kind of suspicious of music and things like that, dangerous stuff like music. And one day as a teenager, he came out of worship and complained to his father that the music was boring. That music was really boring. His father, as fathers would do, said, “Well, do you think you can do better?” And 756 hymns later, the answer is “yes,” he could and he did! Some of our favorite hymns: “Joy to the World,”“ When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,”“ Our God Our Help in Ages Past, ”“I Sing the Mighty Power of God,”“ My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, ”just to name a few.

So the cross, for me, is the symbol of God in his human form in Jesus Christ, being God with us. God With Us, in the whole smear of human existence, the whole struggle of being a human being in this life. He shared our humanity in all its fullness.

I was born at the very end of the middle of the Twentieth Century, which was the bloodiest and most brutal century in human history, though, sadly, we are on pace to set a new record. I came of age during the time of the assassinations in our country of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the war in Vietnam. It was the cross that led me back to the Christian faith as a young adult. Only Christian faith with a cross at its center was adequate to make sense of these tragedies of my early adulthood, and the brokenness and brutality of life in this world.

While I was in seminary a very important book came out: Jurgen Moltmann’s “The Crucified God.” Jurgen Moltmann was a German Reformed theologian. I still remember a question from the Introduction, “What does it mean to recall the God who was crucified in a society whose official creed is optimism, and which is knee deep in blood?” Pretty good question, huh?

In 1990, I was honored to meet Moltmann, and to be on a panel with him in Princeton, at the Center of Theological Inquiry. He told his story of being a German teenager at the end of World War 2 when the Germans were running out of troops, and they started enlisting old men and young boys to fight what was left of the war. I think he was 16 when he was enlisted to man an anti-aircraft battery, and he told of watching his other young teenage boy comrades being maimed and dying around him. And then when the war was over, the Allies took him prisoner and he went to a prisoner of war camp in England, where some good Christian gave him a King James Bible, which he read from cover to cover, and had a conversion experience, which I guess that’s one way to call it. He concluded that only a crucified God could help him make sense of what his country had been involved in, make sense of the manifold brutalities of the war and the European Holocaust. He became a Christian and one of the finest theologians of his time.

Now, the theme of Paul’s letter to the Philippians is humility.  I just read an article in the Atlantic about how there have been 3 or 4 recent books assaulting humility and compassion. “We’ve got to get rid of that. We’ve got to stop taking care of people. You know, it’s the welfare state.” Popular books. No compassion, no empathy, no humility.

But for Paul, his model was Christ, the self-emptying of God in Christ. The Greek word for self-emptying is kenosis. It means “relinquishing,” “giving up”, “handing over,” “letting go.” Opening your hands. It is contrasted with “grasping,” “clinging,” “holding on,” “gripping.”

There is a wonderful contrast hidden in plain sight in this little hymn in Philippians: Adam — did you know Adam is not a proper name, it means “human” in Hebrew. Adam, the first human – any grasping in that story? What did Adam grasp? The fruit. It wasn’t an apple. Apples don’t grow in the Middle East. It could have been a date or pomegranate. But it was a fruit, and he grasped it. Christ in the New Testament is often contrasted with Adam. Adam, the first human, and then Christ is the new human. So Adam, humans in our natural state are grasping, whereas Christ, the new Adam, the new human, isn’t grasping, but relinquishing, emptying, humble.

So, Paul’s admonitions to the Philippians are based on Christ’s humility. I need to say a word about humility in the ancient world. There are many lists of virtues in the New Testament that echo similar lists of virtues in pagan writings of the time. They are what we might expect: courage, honesty, strength, and the like. But notable in its absence is humility. It is hard for us to realize how radical the Gospel message of humility was at the time. A crucified messiah was on nobody’s bingo card. That Jesus chose humility, taking the form of a slave, even dying a slave’s death on a cross, was a scandal then, and it’s still a scandal.

Humility was not a virtue. The word virtue derives from the Latin “vir,” which means male. To be virtuous was to be manly. Humility was not considered a manly virtue. We men have a lot to answer for, really. But Jesus freely chose to humble himself and be an atoning sacrifice for the whole world. Somebody should tell hyper-Christian Pete Hegseth to have a closer reading of the Gospels as he touts his manly warrior-ethic version of Christianity. Perhaps he should start with the Letter to the Philippians. Or the Sermon on the Mount. Or the “Golden Rule.”

As some of you know, I am part of a wonderful Zoom Bible study that meets every Wednesday at 1:00. You are welcome to join us! The link is on our church website. Our group this week was a great help to me on Wednesday when I asked them what might this passage means for us as Christians today.

One person said that what Paul is describing here is exactly the opposite of the world we live in. Humility is still radical and still a scandal. Grasping, on the other hand, is widely accepted as the way to get ahead in our society. Rugged individualism is the American way, whereas Paul believes that faith is a team sport and takes place in community. Does anybody know where the Bible says, “God helps those who help themselves?” No. It’s not in the Bible. Who knows where that came from? How about ambition, competition, anything goes, dog eat dog. None of that is here. Paul, rather, admonishes them: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” Do we see a lot of that in our leaders and “successful” people? Do we see it in celebrities and famous people? Maybe Dolly Parton… Does the world we live in reflect the humility that Paul describes?

The late writer David Foster Wallace gave a now famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. He told this story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”” Fish don’t see the water they swim in and we don’t see the socially-constructed world we take for granted, with all its assumptions about the way things are, and who’s in and who’s out, and who’s worthy and who’s not worthy, and who’s cool and who’s not cool. 

The people in Jesus’s day didn’t see the water they swam in either, which was the occupation of the Roman Empire, the most powerful empire in the history of the world at that time, which they kept in power in collaboration with the religious authorities in power. Power was maintained by violence and the threat of violence. Crucifixion was a slave’s death, reserved for those who threatened the power of Rome. One of the reasons the four Gospels are reticent about talking about Jesus’s crucifixion — this wasn’t Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” which goes into agonizing ongoing details of the death of Jesus. They were reticent about any details. And why do you think that is? Because everyone had seen a crucifixion. They knew what it was like. They didn’t need to be told. When there was a slave revolt the Romans would line the streets with dead and dying men hanging on crosses, sometimes thousands of them. It was a warning. It was “See that? You mess with Rome’s power and that’s what you end up with.”

Jesus’s death was a state execution. Does that happen today in our world? Sadly, it does. The extra- judicial killings of people in the Caribbean in small boats who may or may not be drug dealers, but we’ll never know because they don’t get due process, they don’t get their day in court. The administration decides they don’t like them, so they kill them. Or what we saw on TV, the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti  by ICE authorities in Minneapolis. Which we saw. We saw the video.

The alternative realm that Jesus proclaimed and embodied, that he called the kingdom of God, was a threat to those in power, and so they murdered him. And that was that.

Except it wasn’t! Because he didn’t stay dead, and his followers turned the world upside down by seeking a new world, seeking a better way, living a better way, a way of compassion, of empathy, of love, kindness and humility.

So, here’s Paul, moldering in a Roman prison writing to the church in Philippi, admonishing them to be loving as Jesus loved, and humble as Jesus was humble. Was this new way easy? No, it was not easy. Philippi was the capitol of Greek Macedonia and many Roman soldiers retired there. It was like the Berkshires, you know? So, the church was surrounded by fellow citizens who had sworn an oath to Caesar as Lord. The Greek is “kyrios,” the same word that Christians used to talk about Jesus. Jesus is Lord. So, there’s a conflict in values and culture. There was social tension and occasionally outbreaks of persecution for these Christians.

Still, Paul encourages them. He says, “Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

Now, I have always been a bit intimidated by the phrase “work on your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but Paul softens it a little bit by saying “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” I really like how the Message paraphrases these two verses: “What I’m getting at, friends, is that you should simply keep on doing what you’ve done from the beginning. When I was living among you, you lived in responsive obedience. Now that I’m separated from you, keep it up. Better yet, redouble your efforts. Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure.” I like that energy, that vitality.

So imitating Christ should not scare us, it should not frighten us. It’s not the same as impersonating him. There is only one Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. Only one. His humility is the model for Christian humility. But we can imitate his humility. The way of Christ does not mean pulling yourself up by your spiritual bootstraps. It means walking together in community into the new and better way that Christ has begun among us. It means recognizing the water we swim in. It may mean changing the water we swim in. It means rejecting the fear that divides us and warns us off challenging unjust power and evil.

And the best Good News for today is that you are already in Christ by virtue of your baptism, and by your participation in the church, which is Christ’s body. You’re already in. Here you are, God’s beloved, worshipping and being the church by your very presence. So, just be who you already are! Love God, love your neighbor. And as Paul wrote to the little flock in Philippi, so long ago, “Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure.” Amen.

“I preached this sermon on September 27, 2026 at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge (UCC), Massachusetts. For the YouTube video go here: https://stockbridgeucc.org/sermons/the-self-emptying-god/?fbclid=IwY2xjawU0oZRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7PxH_0Nswq_aI-7G2Pz34PJl3HAFU7kyzWvpCmBErhTRuvR9bz1Q9MPdjpoQ_aem_9lV7HZDh2WsRXvhYPzuEZQ)

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“How then shall we speak of the atonement?” A Reflection for Good Friday

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(This essay was first written in 1995 for my study of the atonement with Professor Richard Bauckham at St Andrews University in Scotland. It later appeared as a chapter in my book When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Some of the references, therefore, are dated.)

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” The death of Jesus Christ was understood by the earliest church, not least by Paul himself, as a divine act of reconciliation between God and humanity. Which is to say that Christ’s death on the cross was understood from the beginning as an atoning death. Continue reading →

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“On Our Side!” A Devotional on the Atonement

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Atonement“But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”
—1 John 2:1-2

When I was a child my siblings and I worshipped with our parents and went to Sunday school before worship. I don’t remember much about Sunday school, but I have many powerful recollections of worship.

We were Episcopalians and so worship was out of the old Book of Common Prayer, with its grand 16th century language, a good bit of which I didn’t understand. Nonetheless, my faith was shaped and formed by those words that washed over me from Sunday to Sunday.

The passage above from 1 John was often read in the service. I wasn’t exactly sure what the passage meant, but somehow I knew it meant Jesus was on my side, even amidst whatever sins might befall my little life. It was a comforting thought. Continue reading →

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My Book on the Atonement

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CoverThe Christian doctrine of Atonement has long been a theological preoccupation of mine, which may seem strange since I didn’t come out of an Evangelical background, where this is a central concern.

I was blessed to have sabbaticals from the pastorate at three iconic British universities, Oxford, St Andrews, and Cambridge, where I read and wrote about this subject.

Out of those experiences came a number of journal articles and this book of essays. I have been heavily influenced by the thought of the British theologian P.T. Forsyth, and many of the chapters in this book focus on his theology.

The book was published in 2000 by Pickwick Press, which later became part of Wipf and Stock Publishers, who re-issued the book in 201o, for which I am grateful.  It is a humble little book that traces my attempt to come to grips with this vexing doctrine. It has an extraordinary foreword  by the estimable Gabriel Fackre, which I think alone makes the book worth having.

Wipf and Stock is currently having a 40% off sale until May 1, so if you are interested in obtaining this book, now is the time. You can go to the link here.

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“The Cross and the Church: The Soteriology and Ecclesiology of P. T. Forsyth”

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Forsyth(Note: This article first appeared in the Andover Newton Review in 1992 (Vol 3, No. 1). It is the fruit of essays I wrote for my tutor the Revd. Donald Norwood during my 1989 sabbatical at Mansfield College, Oxford. I want to thank Professor Max Stackhouse for inviting me to submit it. This is the first time it is available on the Internet. RLF)

Part 1 The Church and Our Redemption

 The British Congregationalist P. T. Forsyth, 1848-1921, is above all a theologian of the cross, and it is this soteriological focus that dominates his understanding of the church. The church was created by the saving work of Christ, and, therefore, for Forsyth, it has no other principle or foundation. Everything in, of and about the church is informed by the work of Christ; questions of polity, ecumenism, church and state, ethics, the ministry, the sacraments, all these are seen through the lens of Christ’s atonement. Since Forsyth’s view of the atonement is profoundly corporate and universal, so too his understanding of the church is corporate and universal. This understanding of a corporate and universal church created by a divine act in the atoning cross of Christ gives Forsyth’s theology a truly catholic and truly evangelical character and accounts for his continued appeal to several branches of the church as a significant ecumenical theologian for our time. Continue reading →

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“The Message of the Cross” A Sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:23-25

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Iona crossA minister friend and mentor of mine, Herb Davis, once told me that every preacher has only one sermon in him, or her. According to Herb, every Sunday the preacher serves up that one sermon in a variety of ways. It may look like a different sermon, but at the heart of it, there’s just the one!

When I was growing up my family always had some sort of a roast at Sunday dinner, which was usually served in the middle of the day after we came home from church. Then the remains of that roast would reappear in various guises throughout the week. For example, let’s say it was a pork roast. The roast might reappear on Monday night in a soup, and on Tuesday night as my Dad’s signature roast pork chop suey and so on. So is that really the way it is? Do the people of God get fed leftovers every Sunday?

I hope not. I think what Herb was saying is that every preacher’s one basic sermon provides the core convictions out of which that preacher delivers the Gospel. And if Herb is right about the one-sermon theory, than I suppose today’s epistle lesson would have to be the text for my one sermon. Let’s hear it again: Paul writes, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger that human strength.” (I Corinthians 1: 23-25)

This is what Paul calls the message of the cross. Paul believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and that God raised him from the dead. The cross on which Jesus had died became for him the symbol of that Good News of God’s vast unconditional love for all humankind. Paul believed that in Christ’s dying and rising two important new things had occurred. First, there was now a new age of God’ activity, and, secondly, there was now a new community, the church, made up of both Jews and Gentiles. Continue reading →

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Problems Facing the Idea of Substitutionary Atonement

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Anselm(On St Anselm of Canterbury’s feast day I thought I would honor him by addressing some of the issues that have troubled people about various “theories” of substitutionary atonement. Anselm himself is often blamed for views he never held. This article is excerpted from an essay which was later included, in an edited form, in my book on atonement, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement. Wipf and Stock, 2010}

Even if one accepts that the interpretation of Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement is thoroughly biblical, there remain any number of problems and objections to understanding it this way, especially if one is putting forth a view that claims for the cross both objective divine activity and universal implications for human salvation. I turn to the following works which lay out some of the criticisms of substitutionary atonement theories:  Vernon White, Atonement and Incarnation: An Essay in Universalism and Particularity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Gerald O’Collins, The Calvary Christ (London:  SCM Press, 1977), especially Chapter VI, Atonement for All, and Richard Bauckham, “Criticisms of Penal Substitution”(unpublished paper, no date).

A theology that claims that universal reconciliation came about through an historically particular event  or person faces many difficulties from outside as well as from within the Christian faith.  The expanded view of the universe in the Twentieth Century makes the universal claims of the Christ event incredible to many people. Widespread travel and world-wide communications make religious pluralism a fact of modern life and put a human face on the previously abstract “unsaved heathen” (now our neighbors) of former centuries.  In addition, the conceptual difficulties of ideas like atonement and incarnation puts pressure from within theology to abandon its traditional claims. The tendency in much recent theology is to solve these problems and objections by giving ground on both objectivity and universality. These theologies counter the outside pressures facing atonement by proposing that atonement is merely illustrative of rather than constitutive for salvation, and that salvation is particular and limited rather than universal in scope.  White summarizes from Maurice Wiles The Remaking of Christian Doctrine to give a typical example of a theology that has  responded to these pressures:

 (Wiles) proposes that there need be no more to the meaning of the passion of Christ than the following: first, a revelation of the character of God; secondly, an historical phenomenon effective in the transformation of people’s lives.  Thus he has no wish to deny that it concerns only the comparatively small proportion of mankind which has heard of and responded to the preaching of the cross; to claim anything more would be “chasing a will o’the whisp”. (White, p 3)

White himself offers an atonement theory that attempts to preserve objectivity  on God’s part and the universal implications of God’s act by using the language of recreation  rather than retribution. White wants to answer the modern objection to a theology that claims universal implications from a particular event.  He phrases the question he wants to answer thus:  “What is it about any particular act that could constitute possibilities for the effectiveness of every other act the agent untertakes in relation to other agents throughout time and space?” He rightly notes that such a form safeguards both the universality of divine action and the uniqueness of the particular event.  (p 52)  As White’s title implies, it is an incarnational Christology that provides the locus for divine activity with universal human implications. To support his view he points to Paul’s soteriology, expressed in terms such as “one , in “one spirit”, “Christ’s” and “in Christ”, referring to E.P. Sanders recent work on participation in Pauline atonement theory. (p 58)

White draws attention also to C.F.D. Moule’s writings on corporate personality  and to the Patristic idea of recapitulation as articulated by Irenaeus, where Christ is understood to be the representative of the whole human race. (p  `59) White’s soteriology here hangs on his Christology: “It requires that the man Jesus and the eternal God share a common personal identity, as subject of the same incarnational experiences.” He sees that “the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ constitute a particular experience for God which is then offered throughout all time and space with the potential to “save” all peoples. (p 87) The cross then, as here construed,  is primarily an event in God’s “life” and only secondarily an act in history. That lack of historical grounding shows elsewhere in White’s essay, as for example, in the implications of his theory for personal faith and for the church, which seem strangely irrelevant. Since his position needs no human agency (such as the church) to witness to the Christ event, which seems to have accomplished all that is necessary  in eternity, he avoids any charge of religious imperialism in the face of the world religions. To his credit he holds fast to the two elements that one wants in an atonement  doctrine, objectivity and universalism, and tries to deal with the pressures facing atonement from the modern world.

But these more general pressures on theology from the corrosive effects of the “acids of modernity” are not the only  objections faced by an atonement doctrine. There are objections from within theology as well.  There are any number of ways to organize these.  Gerald O’Collins, for example, summarizes these objections in three categories:  (1) God misrepresented,  (2) Christ misrepresented, (3) mankind misrepresented.  Let us look at each in turn: (1)  O’Collins wants to distance himself from atonement views in which God’s character or nature is misrepresented. For example, some articulations of the atonement  can too easily  speak of God as a vindictive punisher. For O’Collins, Christ death on the cross is better understood as retributive suffering freely undertaken for others rather than punishment imposed by God as a substitute for guilty humanity. (2)  Similarly, O’Collins thinks Christ is misrepresented by substitution language which inclines toward the impersonal and lacks the intentionality of the language of “representation.”

Representation implies conscious acceptance by free moral agents on both sides. He also wants to carefully limit the way we talk of sacrifice, avoiding talk of an expiatory sacrifice that propitiates the anger of God and wins forgiveness for humankind. He admits that Paul uses sacrificial language (as in 1 Cor. 5:7;11:25; Romans 3:24f) but  claims that Paul doesn’t make much of it as either an expiatory sacrifice or as a sacrifice that brings a new covenant with God. The reason for this reluctance is because Paul see God as the initiator of the Christ event. It was God who “put forward” his Son to expiate human sins and usher in the “new covenant.” Once we see the crucifixion as an act of God toward mankind, we can hardly turn round and speak of God sacrificing to himself.  Likewise, any stress on Calvary’s consequences “for us” tends to exclude the theme if its consequences “for God” and hence its sacrificial quality.  Paul knows the cross to be an effect of God’s saving will,  not  its cause.  And that belief restrains the apostle’s readiness to proclaim Good Friday as an atoning sacrifice which establishes a new relationship between God and Man.. (O’Collins, p 108) Paul’s understanding of Christ’s role in the crucifixion  includes both obedience to the Father and suffering undertaken for humankind.  In two senses, then, he acted as our representative, becoming obedient unto death (Philippians 2:8) and dying for us (Galatians 3:13). (p 108-109) (3) Finally, O’Collins wants to avoid articulations of the atonement  in which mankind is misrepresented in regard to human involvement.  He asks, “Does belief in atonement (i) fail to produce a sense of commitment and (ii) suggest a world that smells of masochism?” (p 109)  These are in fact opposite problems. In the first, believers in atonement reverently refer to amends made in the past by Christ and become complacent about the world around them, and in the second case, a neurotic preoccupation with self-inflicted suffering is fostered.  This latter is similar to the criticisms of the cross offered by some feminists, that it fosters a victim mentality among those already prone to victimization.  While admitting that atonement theories can go wildly astray, O’Collins concludes that

. . . a healthy atonement theology invites well-founded action and acceptance.  Just as the reconciliation and liberation brought by Christ impels believers to act in genuinely reconciling and liberating ways, so the atonement he made on our behalf should alert us to our responsibility for the good state of the moral order.  (p 109)

While O’Collins’ caveat about the language of substitution is a good one in the light of the many impersonal and mechanical atonement theories that have been proposed, and his highlighting of the language of representation reminds us of important and often neglected dimensions of Christ’s solidarity and identification with us and his freely-chosen way of obedience, I am not persuaded that we can dispense with substitution language altogether. Christ’s death is a death for us and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That is substitution. Representation adds some important notes, but it cannot carry the whole melody.

Likewise, O’Collins’ warnings about expiation are helpful in protecting against a notion that Jesus was sacrificed to the Father in some way , yet again I think expiation language is biblical and retains a place in any doctrine of atonement as  long as we keep in view O’Collins’ reminder that God is the initiator and not the vindictive punisher whose anger gets assuaged by the act. I wonder too about O’Collins’ statement, “Paul knows the cross to be an effect of God’s saving will and not its cause.” On one hand, that is right, that the cross can be seen in retrospect to be entirely consistent with God’s nature and character as seen throughout the biblical narrative to that point. On the other hand, to speak of the cross as an “effect” of God’s saving will could be construed to support an illustrative soteriology rather than one in which the cross is understood as constitutive for salvation. Richard Bauckham’s paper outlines the four classical criticisms of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as put forward by Socinus (Fausto Sozzini, 1539-1604), who was criticising the logic of the Reformers. The four criticisms are (1) Satisfaction and forgiveness are incompatible, (2)  Substitution is unjust, (3) Christ’s sufferings are not equivalent to the punishment that sinners deserve, (4) Substitution fosters antinomianism.

Bauckham notes that Socinus makes his criticisms apart from the context of the Reformer’s theologies and that he neglects two significant aspects of the Reformers views of the atonement, (a) that the work of Christ is not the activity of a third party, but rather the divine Son of God become man, who has come into the world to do the Father’s will for human salvation, and (b) that the purpose of the atonement was not merely to save sinners, but to reconcile them to God.  He then discusses each criticism in reverse order. (4)  Substitution ought to lead to antinomianism.

Bauckham notes that this charge ignores (b) above, that the atonement puts sinners into relationship with God, thereby not leaving them unchanged. Such criticisms stem from a moralistic misunderstanding of Christianity. We do not first need to be good, we need first to be in a right relationship with God. (3) Christ’s sufferings are not equivalent to the punishment required.  Bauckham concedes that this charge is unanswerable, that attempts to answer it have failed in the past, and that if anything like penal substitution is to be retained it must be shown that this quantifying of amounts of punishment is unnecessary. (2)  Substitution is unjust. Socinus says that substitution is doubly unjust in that the guilty party goes unpunished, and an innocent party is punished undeservedly. Socinus did not believe in the incarnation, but according to it, it is not that God spares sinners and inflicts their penalty on an innocent third party, but rather in Christ, God himself takes on the suffering instead of inflicting it on sinful humanity. This answers Socinus’ charge about punishing the innocent, but leaves the charge that the guilty go unpunished. Some sort of articulation of Christ’s identification or solidarity with the sinner goes part way to meeting this objection and most atonement theories have elements of this in them, but by the standards of human law courts to which Socinus refers, these motifs of identification cannot be strong enough to fully overcome his criticism.

Bauckham refers to  Wolfhart Pannenburg’s defence of this criticism where he charges Socinus with excessive ethical individualism. Bauckham goes on to illustrate this point by drawing an analogy from human courts of law. We can see in the criminal justice system, for example, how the punishment of an individual in some very real way punishes their family. In some cases this shared suffering, through active sympathy, might even be considered a kind of vicarious suffering of punishment that we could consider to not be unjust. This is outside the competence of the courts, of course, where “each person must bear the penalty he deserves” is the proper ideal for administering justice. But in real life the interdependence of humanity is such that the innocent do as a matter of fact suffer for the crimes of others. Though sometimes we see this as evil and seek to prevent it as far as possible, in other cases we applaud it. The cases in which we applaud it are those of voluntary fellow-suffering in love. We recognise at this point that love goes beyond the ethical individualism in which the courts must largely deal, and that the vicarious suffering of love may and can go beyond the ethical individualism of the courts because it corresponds more fully to the reality of human life and relationships than the justice of the courts is able to do. (p 8) To speak of Christ bearing our punishment is only possible because God in Christ goes beyond the justice of human law courts. Since Socinus’ criticism stays within the analogy of human courts, those theories of atonement that have accepted that framework are most vulnerable to his criticism. But if God’s justice in the cross transcends the justice of human law courts than the criticism is avoided.

Bauckham says that he has hinted at how this happens by his description of what he has called “the voluntary fellow-suffering of love.” “God’s love in Christ enables him to accomplish what, as a judge in a human law court, he could not accomplish.” (p 10)  To do this means going beyond the merely retributive understanding of justice which both Socinus and his opponents shared. (1)  Satisfaction and forgiveness are incompatible. Socinus uses the analogy of a debt, where if the debt is paid, the creditor is obliged to renounce any claim on the debtor. Neither mercy nor forgiveness come into play. Again, Socinus takes no account of the incarnation. Since it is not a third party but God himself who pays the debt, he balances the books, so to speak, by paying himself off, at a cost to himself. For Socinus, God is free to do as he wills in response to human sin: justice and mercy are seen as alternatives. Penal substitutionary theory, however, makes two points against this view of God’s freedom:  (a) God is not free without cost to himself, and (b) The cost is necessary because God does not set aside justice when he exercises mercy; rather he forgives in such a way as to satisfy justice. Justice and mercy are not alternatives, and in the cross, God administers both without contradiction.

To sum up, the problems and objections to a substitutionary atonement theory come from both  the outside world of modernity, and from within the theological circle. The former seem either to be conceptual, such as how the particular can impact the universal, or socio-political, such as the “imperialism ” of universal religious claims or the negative impact of such views on victims or on people’s mental health. These outside pressures need to be addressed in formulating an adequate atonement theory, but, in my view, they are not decicisive and must not be allowed to pre-empt the discussion. The modern theologies that have  responded to these external pressures by giving ground on important features of traditional soteriology are uniformly unsatisfactory  and in the end raise as many questions as they answer.

More  challenging, I think, are the criticisms from within the theological circle.  An attempt to make a credible case for an atonement theory that does justice to both the nuances of the biblical narrative and the experience of real people is difficult at best.  Some of the pitfalls we have reviewed are as follows: views of God which are morally offensive, that see him as a vindictive punisher (or, on the other hand, failing to deal with sin and evil, which we did not mention); views which emphasize retributive justice at the expense of other elements; views which emphasize sacrifice so as to imply that  Christ died to propitiate God’s anger;  views which separate God’s justice from God’s mercy; views that are moralistic or legalistic; views in which substitution language is used mechanically and impersonally, neglecting the intentionality of the cross and the dimensions of Christ’s obedience; views which either emphasize the finished nature of atonement so strongly that they invite human moral complacency, or, conversely, views which develop a morbid preoccupation with self-inflicted suffering.   To read this list is to quickly realize that there are partial truths imbedded within all these various misconceptions and distortions.  The complexity of the biblical materials insures that no one theory will be comprehensive.  But  awareness of the problems prepares us for the important task of asking which elements are profitable for a credible atonement theory and which should be avoided.

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Atonement: P.T. Forsyth on the Finished Work of Christ

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Among all the historic disagreements and discussions on the meaning of Jesus Christ’s atoning death, a pivotal issue is whether the “work of Christ” is a finished work, or whether some level of human participation is necessary to complete it.  One of the theological sins of certain brands of evangelicalism is more of an emphasis on what we do (a conversion, a decision, being born again, etc.) than on what God has already done for us (and for all.)

I ran across this passage in P.T. Forsyth’s Work of Christ in which he parses the issue quite clearly and cleverly, making no mistake that the “work” is finished, but also referencing the role of the Holy Spirit in the church.

“You are afraid of God,” you hear easy people say; “it is a great mistake to be afraid of God. There is nothing to be afraid of. God is love.” But there is everything in the love of God to be afraid of. Love is not holy without judgment. It is the love of holy God that is the consuming fire. It was not simply a case of changing our method, or thought, our prejudices, or the moral direction of our soul. It was not a case of giving us courage when we were cast down, showing us how groundless our depression was. It was not that. If that were all it would be a comparatively light matter.

If that were all, Paul could only have spoken about the reconciliation of single souls, not about reconciliation of the whole world as a unity. He could not have spoken about a finished reconciliation to which every age of the future was to look back as its glorious and fontal past. In the words of that verse which I am constantly pressing, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” Observe, first, “the world” is the unity which corresponds to the reconciled unity of “Himself”; and second, that He was not trying, not taking steps to provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not labouring toward reconciliation, not (according to the unhappy phrase) waiting to be gracious, but “God was in Christ reconciling,” actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair (Romans xi. 15).

Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work. He did not preach a gradual reconciliation which was to become the reconciliation of the world only piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or were affected by the gospel. He preached something done once for all–a reconciliation which is the base of every souls reconcilement, not an invitation only. What the Church has to do is to appropriate the thing that has been finally and universally done. We have to enter upon the reconciled position, on the new creation. Individual men have to enter upon that reconciled position, that new covenant, that new relation, which already, in virtue of Christ’s Cross, belonged to the race as a whole . . . The first thing reconciliation does is to change man’s corporate relation to God. Then when it is taken home individually it changes our present attitude. Christ, as it were, put us into the eternal Church; the Holy Spirit teaches us how to behave properly in the Church.  (P.T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, p 86-87.)

I am struck by the last line.  Would that more people would learn how to behave properly in the Church! I always thought it was a behavioral issue, but apparently it is a theological one as well.