Unless you’ve had your theological ‘head in the sand’ for the last few years, you’ll know that Steve Chalke stirred up a high degree of controversy a few years ago with his comments on what happened at the cross. The ensuing debate has at times generated more heat than light, but nevertheless it is a critical doctrine for the church to consider deeply.

The Salt & Light Theological Forum talked about this and we asked them to help the rest of us understand properly what the debate is all about and give us some pointers. The Theological Forum is a group of teachers and thinkers from UK churches that meets biannually to explore and debate specific topics.

This article is not intended to answer all of the questions the debate has raised; nor even to put forward a specific Salt & Light position (although the members of the Forum were agreed on the substitutionary nature of the atonement as one essential Biblical view). Rather, it hopes to give you and your leadership teams the tools to understand what the debate is about and to engage intelligently with it in your interactions with other churches; and to keep our preaching of the gospel ‘on track’.

THE ATONEMENT AND PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT (PSA)
The atonement is the doctrine that seeks to address how God has dealt with sin and its effects throughout creation, and brought creation back to His original intention. If you like, it means “at-one-ment”, bringing everything back into right relationship, not least with Himself. Theories regarding how exactly that worked have been relatively fixed within evangelical circles since the Reformation, but attempts to challenge the popular understanding have come to the fore in recent years through a number of authors, as well as Steve Chalke.

The dominant understanding of the atonement since the Reformation has been Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). The PSA theory of the atonement is based on this idea: Jesus satisfies the wrath of God by enduring the punishment we deserve on account of our sin. Its formulation as it is usually understood today is attributed to Calvin. Calvin was trained as a lawyer and saw very clearly the legal aspects of the atonement in terms of justice and punishment.

CHALLENGES TO PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT
A significant challenge to the dominance of this view came way before Steve Chalke, back in 1930. Gustaf Aulén wrote a book called “Christus Victor”. His aim was to track how atonement theories have developed throughout church history, and to track the threads of thinking that run through them. He broadly saw three strands of theories, which related to how sacrifice affects God’s position towards humanity [“objective”]; how God’s love expressed in Christ creates a response in people’s hearts [“subjective”]; and finally how Jesus was victorious over evil [“dramatic”]. This final one was Aulén’s focus as he sought to trace it all through history and the Biblical record [see for example Hebrews 2:14-15]. As you would imagine, the book has been widely critiqued and adjusted over the last 80 years, but it remains a landmark work that provides some very helpful pointers for clarification for all of our theories.

In particular, Aulén’s book offers a critique of the “objective” theories of the atonement. His comments, made back in 1930, are very similar to some of the critiques heard today of PSA. Mark Norridge and Dave Perry comment that some of the critiques are helpful correctives, even for those who would hold fast to PSA as a Biblical theory:

1. The primary action is always God’s (2 Cor 5:19). It is His initiative and His saving work. He is not so much responding to a need of mankind’s, as initiating His work to restore creation to Himself.
2. In attempting to get a ‘tidy theory’ of the atonement it is possible to end up diminishing and squeezing the amazing action of God in Christ into a neat little package. The great drama of the story often comfortably embraces multiple aspects. For example, it is quite comfortable with the dual aspects of the sacrifice of Christ being both God’s own act of sacrifice and a sacrifice offered to God (Eph 5:2).
3. Sometimes our theories make it seem that it would have been sufficient for Jesus to have arrived on earth at 33 years old and died on the cross to complete all his work. Jesus’ life and ministry, and also his resurrection are all parts of inaugurating the kingdom of God and effecting His victory. Our theory of the atonement needs to include all aspects of the ‘Christ Event’ (Mat 1:21). The Bible is also quite clear that Christ is starting a whole new humanity of those who are “in Christ” as opposed to those who are “in Adam”. Theologically this atonement image is known as “recapitulation”.
4. The whole of the Godhead was complicit in the Atonement. The Father was not reluctant and the Son keen; the Father was not the angry one and the Son the loving one. It was not the Father against the Son. The Trinity, including the Spirit (Heb 9:14), worked together; embracing the pain of the world in order to effect reconciliation.
5. God is not emotionally ‘conflicted’! God being ‘loving’ and God being ‘just’ are not conflicting attributes of God. Scott McKnight says: “this act of God’s forensic judgment is the mercy of God in action, not the twisting and fighting of one of God’s attributes against another, nor is the Father’s new judgment because his Son has somehow stepped in and changed His mind.
6. Our understandings of justice are often confined to the Western courtroom. In our minds the judge is the implementer of a force outside or above himself – the law. God however is not obliged by some external force; God will, rather, be true to himself. In that sense righteousness and justice are primarily relational concepts, with respect to God.
7. The scope of the atonement is often limited in our understanding. Often it is portrayed as the way in which an individual gets happier, avoids hell, gets into heaven or has a relationship with God. The full drama of God’s intent for the world and for a family must be caught up in our atonement language.

TEACHING THE ATONEMENT
Jonathan Wilson (professor at Westford College in California; see reading list) delineates three broad ‘images’ of the atonement (similarly to Aulén) according to how God, humanity, sin and salvation are portrayed in each theory. He helpfully showed them in a table, reproduced below, to bring clarity to our thinking and language. They also make it clear that a good understanding of these three images, and others, is required for a fuller understanding of the atonement, since each appear in the narrative framework of the Bible. Each theory, Wilson says, must be evaluated in relation to the gospel of the kingdom.

	GOD	HUMANITY	SIN	SALVATION
CHRIST AS VICTOR	WARRIOR CONQUEROR LIBERATOR	VICTIMS CAPTIVES HOSTAGES	ENEMY PRISON	TRIUMPH LIBERATION HOMECOMING
CHRIST AS SACRIFICE	JUDGE JUDGED	PERPETRATORS CRIMINALS REBELS COLLABORATORS	REBELLION	FORGIVENESS PARDON INNOCENCE RIGHTEOUSNESS PEACE
CHRIST AS EXAMPLE	TEACHER ENABLER LOVER	IGNORANT FEEBLE ALIENATED	IGNORANCE WEAKNESS SEPARATION	KNOWLEDGE POWER LOVE

IN CONCLUSION…
“No doctrine of this central mystery can exhaustively and precisely grasp and express the extent to which God has intervened for us here. Do not confuse my theory of the reconciliation with the thing itself. All theories of reconciliation can be but pointers. But do also pay attention to this ‘for us’: nothing must be deducted from it! Whatever a doctrine of reconciliation tries to express, it must say this.” (Karl Barth, 1886-1968)

Looking at the Bible, the members of the Forum were clear that penal substitution was one picture of the atonement, but not the only picture, and God’s saving act in Christ was far bigger than one picture can properly encompass. We need to include the full value of the incarnation, the full weight of the gift of God’s Kingdom breaking in on earth, the glory of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the power of the resurrection in inaugurating a whole new way of life. Substitution, sacrifice, redemption, justification, new creation, a new humanity, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and God’s final act to usher in the new heavens and the new earth when Christ comes again in glory, we need the lot!