The Atonement: Installment two - Wayne Grudem: Bible Doctrine, Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith

Installment one.

Installment three.
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This is a continuation of our analysis of a chapter from this book. 

The author continues his explanation based on reformist doctrines, particularly Penal Substitutionary Atonement. This doctrine postulates that Jesus took our place to be punished by the Father for our sins.

This, in our view, is a false and pernicious doctrine.

The author seems to be aware of the objectionable nature of this doctrine, but appears to think there are only a couple of viewpoints representative of the opposition. These are the only alternatives he thinks are worth mentioning.  

Ultimately, the author is simply wrong. And because he is acclaimed as a magnificent Bible teacher, we must deem this Bad Bible Teaching.

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pg. 253

John the Baptist calls Jesus "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29. Paul declares that God made Christ "to be sin" (2 Cor. 5:21) and that Christ became "a curse for us" Gal. 3:13. The author of Hebrews says that Christ was "offered once to bear the sins of many" (Heb. 9:28). And Peter says, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1Peter 2:24).

The passage from 2 Corinthians quoted above, together with the verses from Isaiah, indicate that it was God the Father who put our sins on Christ. How could that be? In the same way in which Adam's sins were imputed to us, (The author term-switches from "put" to "impute," but they do not mean the same thing. As we mentioned in installment one, Jesus indeed had our sins "put" on Him as a burden to carry to the cross. He nailed our condemnation there [Col. 2:14]. But "impute" means that He was regarded or viewed as having sin, which is an entirely different [and false] idea.)

so God imputed our sins to Christ - that is, he thought of them as belonging to Christ, (This is the reason  for the term-switching, to pivot to the author's preferred doctrinal view. Notice the author does not provide a Bible reference for this claim, because of course there isn't one. We discuss how Jesus was "made sin" here.)

and since God is the ultimate judge and definer of what really is in the universe, when God thought of our sins as belonging to Christ then in fact they actually did belong to Christ. (Except that the Father did not impute our sins to Christ. Jesus took upon Himself the burden that was our sin and carried it away.)

This does not mean that God thought that Christ had himself committed the sins, or that Christ himself actually had a sinful nature, but rather that the guilt for our sins, (That is, the liability to punishment) was thought of by God as belonging to Christ rather than to us. (There is no verse in the Bible that says such a thing. The Father never punished Jesus.)

Some have objected that it was not fair for God to transfer the guilt of sin from us to an innocent person, Christ. (Unfairness is the first alternative viewpoint, and it certainly isn't the best one.)

Yet we must remember that Christ voluntarily took on himself the guilt for our sins, (He did not take our guilt upon Himself.)

so this objection loses much of its force. Moreover, God himself (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the ultimate standard of what is just and fair in the universe, and he decreed that the atonement would take place in this way and that it did in fact satisfy the demands of his own righteousness and justice. (Where does the Bible say this? The author is a Bible teacher. Show us where these things are written, sir.)

3) Abandonment.

(...)

But far worse than the desertion by even the closest of human friends was the fact that Jesus was deprived of the closeness to the Father that had been the deepest joy of his heart for all his earthly life. (No! The Father never abandoned Jesus. Never. The author will go on to quote Matt. 27:46 [My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?], which is the go-to verse for those who advocate for Jesus' abandonment. This is the sole verse that might be construed as supporting the idea that Jesus was abandoned by the Father.

But the Father never abandoned Jesus. This did not happen!

Jesus quoted the first verse of Psalm 22. He did not quote this verse because he was abandoned, but rather to point to the Psalm. Since there were no chapters or verse numbers back then, quoting the first line is they way someone would identify the passage. 

So, why did Jesus quote Psalm 22:1? Specifically because the Psalm contains several messianic prophecies about His crucifixion:

• Ps. 22:8 “He trusts in the LORD; let the LORD rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.”
• Ps. 22:13 Roaring lions tearing their prey open their mouths wide against me.
• Ps. 22:14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me.
• Ps. 22:15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.
• Ps. 22:16 Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet.
• Ps. 22:17 I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me.
• Ps. 22:18 They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.

Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1 because what was written in this psalm was being fulfilled right at that moment! 

Interestingly, Psalm 22 also pointedly refutes the author: 

Ps. 22:24 For he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

The Father never abandoned or deserted Jesus. This false doctrine infects the Church and must be jettisoned.)

When Jesus cried out, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?", that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46), he showed that he was finally cut off from the sweet fellowship with his heavenly Father that had been the unfailing source of his inward strength and the element of greatest joy in a life filled with sorrow. As Jesus bore our sins on the cross, he was abandoned by his heavenly Father, who is "of purer eyes than to behold evil" (Hab. 1:13). He faced the weight of the guilt of millions of sins alone. (This evil doctrine suggests that The Father is so faint of heart that He cannot bear up in the face of sin.

This is a lie, perpetrated by these Bible teachers in an attempt to explain something that is already explained in Scripture.)

pg. 254

4) Bearing the wrath of God. Yet more difficult than these three previous aspects of Jesus' pain was the pain of bearing the wrath of God upon himself. (Jesus did not bear the wrath of God, as we have noted.)

As Jesus bore the guilt of our sins alone, God the Father, the mighty Creator, the Lord of the universe, poured out on Jesus the fury of his wrath: Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin that God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the world. (Another undocumented claim.

God is not storing up His wrath, as if the cumulative sin of the world was a heaping big pile for which God has been waiting for ages to torch with His righteous anger.

This is not the way God's justice works. His anger isn't directed against a quantity of sin that finally becomes unbearable for God. God's wrath is directly toward those who have been and are sinning right now. Past generations of sinners have already died and have met their eternal doom, which is the satisfaction of God's justice towards them. 

Any wrath that God has is because there are sinners sinning right now:

Ro. 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness...

Ep. 5:6 Let no-one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient.

God's wrath is not general, it is specific to each sinner.)

Romans 3:25 tells us that God put forward Christ as a "propitiation" (NASB), a word than means "a sacrifice that bears God's wrath to the end and in so doing changes God's wrath toward us into favor." (The author does not provide a source for this very odd definition, but it certainly sounds like a reformist providing it. 

Biblehub tells us this: the place of propitiation; the lid of the golden ark (the mercy-seat) where the blood of a vicarious lamb appeased God's wrath on sin. No mention of Jesus bearing God's wrath. Nothing about favor. We think the author's supplied definition is more an opinion based on a particular doctrinal stance.)

Paul tells us that "this was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:25-26). God has not simply forgiven sin and forgotten about the punishment in generations past. He had forgiven sins and stored up his righteous anger against those sins. But at the cross the fury of all that stored-up wrath against sin was unleashed against God's own son. (Wow. How does the author know that God stored up His wrath rather than punish previous people who sinned? It doesn't say this in this verse.

There are two Greek words in operation here:

paresis: from 3844 /pará, "from close-beside" and hiēmi, "let go") – properly, to release something closely felt, i.e. an " 'overlooking, suspension, remission' of punishment for" (Souter). 

anoché: From anechomai; self-restraint, i.e. Tolerance -- forbearance.

We need to go to the KJV to place these words properly: 

Whom God hath set forth (to be) a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins [paresis] that are past, through the forbearance [anoché] of God...

Let's paraphrase: 

Jesus was set forth by God to turn away HIs wrath for our sins through our faith in His blood, for the purpose of demonstrating God's righteousness, by means of Him letting go the of sins committed in the past, because of His tolerance and self-restraint.

There is no hint of God's accumulating wrath or His supposed continuing need to punish sin in this verse.)

Many theologians outside the evangelical world have strongly objected to the idea that Jesus bore the wrath of God against sin. Their basic assumption is that since God is a God of love, it would be inconsistent with his character to show wrath against the human beings he has created and for whom he is a loving Father.  (So another objection, not based on unfairness this time, but on God's character. Again, these are hardly the best alternative arguments.)

But evangelical scholars have convincingly argued that the idea of the wrath of God is solidly rooted in both the Old and New Testaments: " The whole of the argument of the opening part of Romans is that all men, Gentiles and Jews alike, are sinners, and that they come under the wrath and the condemnation of God."4 (We do not have a quibble with God's wrath. We object to the idea of God pouring out His wrath on His Son.)

Three other crucial passages in the New Testament refer to Jesus' death as a "propitiation": Hebrews 2:17, 1 John 2:2 and 4:10. The Greek terms (the verb hilaskomai, "to make propitiation" and the noun hilasmos, "a sacrifice of propitiation") used in these passages have the sense of "a sacrifice that turns away the wrath of God - and thereby makes God propitious (or favorable) toward us." (This unreferenced quote is quite correct and we're glad the author quoted it. So if God's wrath was turned away, how could it be poured out on Jesus?)

This is the consistent meaning of these words outside the Bible where they were well understood in reference to pagan Greek religions. these verses simply mean that Jesus bore the wrath of God against sin. (Sigh. How does a seemingly smart man, in the space of two sentences, completely mess up in the second sentence what he understood in the first sentence?)

It is important to insist on this fact, because it is the heart of the doctrine of the atonement. It means that there is an eternal, unchangeable requirement in the holiness and just of God that sin be paid for. (Whoa. Where does the Bible say this? Well, it doesn't. there is no verse that tells us sin must be paid for like it's some sort of debt.)

Furthermore, before before the atonement ever could have an effect on our subjective consciousness, it first had an effect on God and his relation to the sinners he planned to redeem. (This statement makes no sense.)

Apart from this central truth, the death of Christ really cannot be adequately understood (see discussion of other views of the atonement below). 

The view of Christ's death presented here has frequently been called the theory of "penal substitution." Christ's death was "penal" in that he bore a penalty when he died. His death was also a "substitution" in that he was a substitute for us when he died. (Thus Penal Substitutionary Atonement. 

We have now discovered that none of these three elements is accurate. The Father didn't punish Jesus, Jesus did not substitute for us, and His death on the cross wasn't atonement, it was propitiation.)

This has been the orthodox understanding of the atonement held by evangelical theologians, (Actually, by reformist theologians. And by the way, this is an Appeal To Authority, not the Bible. And we say without hesitation that the authority is wrong.)

in contrast to other views that attempt to explain the atonement apart from the idea of the wrath of God or payment of the penalty for sin (see below).

4Leon Morris, "Propitiation," EDT, p. 888 (included a brief bibliography). Morris' own work has represented the best of evangelical scholarship on this question. See his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 3rd ed (London: Tyndale Press, 1965), pp. 144-213. See also the discussion of the wrath of God in ch. 5, pp. 94095.

 pg. 255

This view of the atonement is sometimes called the theory of vicarious atonement. A "vicar" is someone who stands in the place of another or who represents another. Christ's death was therefore "vicarious" because he stood in our place and represented us. As our representative, he took the penalty that we deserve. (None of this is true. Jesus did not stand in our place, He is the lamb of God whose spilled blood washed away our sin [Ep. 1:7]; He does not represent us, He intercedes for us [He. 7:25]; He did not take our penalty, He carried our sin to the cross [Col. 2:14-15].)

c. New Testament terms describing different aspects of the atonement. The atoning work of Christ is a complex event that has several effects on us. (No, it's not particularly complex. Theologians love to parse, systematize, and create categories, but such things are not needed or desired. Let's see what the author has to say, and we'll respond.)

It can therefore be viewed from several different aspects. The New Testament uses different words to describe these; we shall examine four of the more important terms.

1. We deserve to die as the penalty for sin. (We are already dead due to sin [Ro. 5:12])
2. We deserve to bear God's wrath against sin. (True.)
3. We are separated from God by our sins. (True.)
4. We are in bondage to sin and to the kingdom of Satan (True.)

These four needs are met by Christ's death in the following ways:

• Sacrifice. To pay the penalty of death that we deserved because of our sins, Christ dies as a sacrifice for us. (Jesus did not die to pay the penalty of death, He died to pay for us [Mt. 20:28, Re. 5:9].)

He has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself (He. 9:26).

• Propitiation. To remove from us the wrath of God we deserved, Christ died as a propitiation for our sins. "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10 NASB).

• Reconciliation. To overcome our separation from God, we needed someone to provide reconciliation and thereby bring us back into fellowship with God. Paul says that God "through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:18-19).

• Redemption. Because we as sinners are in bondage to sin and to Satan, we need someone to provide redemption and thereby "redeem" us out of that bondage. When we speak of redemption, the idea of a "ransom" comes into view. A ransom is the prices paid to redeem someone from bondage or captivity. Jesus said of himself, "For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 10:45). If we ask to whom the ransom was paid, we realize that the human analogy of a ransom payment does not fit the atonement of Christ in every detail. Though we were in bondage to sin and to Satan, there was no "ransom" paid either to "sin" or to Satan himself, for they did not have power to demand such a payment, nor was Satan the one whose holiness was offended by sin and who required a penalty to be paid for sin. As we saw earlier, the penalty for sin was paid by Christ and received and accepted by God the Father. (It's statement like this that gall us, because they are not only undocumented but just plain wrong. Jesus didn't pay anybody to redeem us, because no one was owed anything. It was not a trade, it was a sacrifice. 

Now, the Bible does use terms like "redeem" and "ransom," but as the author admitted, they do not "fit the atonement of Christ in every detail." These concepts, therefore, are not mechanisms or processes, but rather illustrations meant to convey truths.) 

 

But we hesitate to speak of paying a "ransom" to God the Father, because it was not he who held us in bondage but Satan and our own sins. Therefore, at this point the idea of a ransom payment cannot be pressed in every detail. It is sufficient to note that a price was paid (the death of Christ) and the result was that we were "redeemed" from bondage.

 

We were redeemed from bondage to Satan because "the whole world is in the power of the evil one" (1 John 5:19), and when Christ came he died in order to "deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" Heb. 2:15). In fact, God the Father "has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved son" (Col 1:13).

pg. 256

As for deliverance from bondage to sin, Paul says, "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, ...For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law bur under grace" (Rom. 6:11, 14).

(We see that there is no need to complicate things. It's quite simple, really. Jesus died on the cross to shed His blood, which washes us clean from sin:

He. 9:22 In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

His death deals with sin, which redeems us and reconciles us. It's all the same thing, really.)