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A few months back, Michael Gungor, a musician, got into a little bit of an argument on Twitter with some of his followers after he disparaged Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). It’s the theological conviction that says Jesus was sacrificed on the cross in order to atone for the sins of humanity as an act of God’s justice. A few days after this social media meltdown, a couple of bloggers took it upon themselves to take Gungor to task for his, “heretical theological opinion.” (You can find their posts here and here.) Needless to say, I’m sure that once this was all over, everyone went on their separate ways and thought little about what they said. Most assuredly, no one changed anyone’s mind.
The reason I’m writing this, however, is because of something Brandon Hines, of Pulpit and Pen, said. While posting screen grabs of Gungor’s tweets, he called PSA, “the Gospel.” His words imply that this theological position is the whole and entire Gospel, or Good News, to be communicated to humanity by God. The other writer, Owen Strachan (who has written some other stuff that gets under my skin, but that’s not for today) talks of “Blood Atonement” as if it is a dogma of good Christian faith; one that has been part of the life of Christianity for two thousand years. While there is a dissertation level amount of discussion to be had on this topic, I want to focus on the implications of what these two writers are saying. For both of them, a theological proposition, constructed in the sixteenth century, is the totality of the Gospel. That should be rather shocking. Of course,…it’s not shocking at all. Instead, it is a product of decades of theological malpractice.
As a brief rundown… Penal Substitutionary Atonement is first found in the writings of John Calvin, specifically his Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in the sixteenth century. In itself, this is a theological repackaging of the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement proposed by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. Since then, theologians have continually tinkered with the mechanics of PSA in reaction to the changes in human society. The Enlightenment, which sparked a period of political revolution in Europe and America that resulted in secular democracies brought about the most extensive refinements. The reason this should be noted is that PSA, like any theological writing, is a product of a time and a place. While the theological argument is derived from Scripture, like any good theology, it was still a product of a time and a place. And as time passed, and the place changed, it was refined and updated for new times in new places. PSA is not the only atonement theory that the Church endorsed over the centuries, and all of them were drawn from Scripture. So, to say that it is THE GOSPEL, handed down from the beginning of the Church is disingenuous, to say the least. (For a full discussion on atonement theory, there are a couple of great books to start from. Scot McKnight’s, “A Community Called Atonement,” and Tony Jones’, “Did God Kill Jesus.")
Another thing you might notice when you read their articles, which I would advise since that is the basis of this discussion, you will notice a glut of Biblical quotations, but one glaring hole stuck out to me. There is only one quotation from any of the Gospels. One thing that has been handed down throughout Christian history, at least in all the major ecumenical councils that produced creeds, is the Incarnation of Jesus. The idea that Jesus is the incarnated God that we worship. What I’m getting at is, Christianity has always said that the only way we know what God looks like is by looking at Jesus; that Jesus is God embodied on Earth. Therefore, it makes sense to me that we lean heavily on the books of the Bible where Jesus speaks about what he came to do. I mean, wouldn’t you want to get information straight from God? Well, it’s right there in the Gospels, if you believe what all those righteous Christians have been saying through the centuries.
When we look at the Gospel texts, the picture gets a little muddier. In John 17, Jesus implies that he has done everything he was sent to do. And this happens before the crucifixion. In Luke 4, Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah in saying what he has come to do. In Matthew 25, Jesus describes what true followers look like, and how to know if someone has fully grasped the Good News of Jesus. In Matthew 22 and Luke 14, Jesus uses the parable of a banquet where the invited guests snub the invitation and so the people from the streets are invited as an image of what the Kindom of God will look like. In The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, & 7) Jesus lays out his most in-depth teaching of what it means to be a follower of God. One thing that runs through all of those descriptions is a lack of sacrifice. The rich man throwing the banquet doesn’t have to sacrifice anyone to let those off the streets come to his banquet. The Sermon on the Mount carries no imagery of Old Testament sacrifice for people to be accepted by God. It’s curious that when the Incarnate God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus the Christ describes what he was sent to do on Earth, there is no indication of a necessary, cosmic sacrifice in order to redeem people from their sins.
I’m not trying to upset the apple cart. When I tell the story of my faith, it was a revival preacher using the framework of PSA that brought me to faith in Christ. I know many who I would call faithful followers of Jesus that still hold this view of the atonement. The reason I am writing, though, is that we are approaching Easter. This is our holiest day. And because of that, I just want to make sure that we recognize that it is our Scriptures that tell us what the Good News is, and not a theological writing made by a Frenchmen, four hundred years later. That should worry all of us.
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