Penal Substitutionary Atonement And Covenant Curses

This morning I woke up thinking about that podcast I did on the theory of penal substitutionary atonement (I don’t know how my family puts up with me).

One point that was raised to me (I think by Derek) was that the Bible is very clear that there are covenant curses that accompany covenant breach, and that you can’t evacuate PSA without also evacuating those verses. In the heat of the moment, I sort of brushed that aside because I wanted to gesture towards a broader point about Biblical hermeneutics and dogmatic theology (which I did badly), but just to wrap this up.

The New Testament does describe what happens to the covenant curses: they fall on the nation of Israel. This is what the prophecies of the Fall of Jerusalem in the Gospels are all about. Israel rejected YHWH’s envoy Jesus, YHWH’s call, and so it received the covenant curse of military defeat and exile.

I think Wright is helpful here when he analyzes Jesus’ role as, first and foremost, a Jewish prophet. (He wasn’t just a Jewish prophet, in Wright’s understanding or in reality, but he was also a Jewish prophet.) And Jesus was, very much so, a Jewish prophet of national liberation for Israel. But he was a Jewish prophet of nonviolent national liberation. (And this explains why he made an enemy of both the Jewish collaborators and the anti-Roman militants.) Jesus’ agenda as would-be Messiah was not to propose to Israel some private spirituality independent of political concerns, some anachronistic “Gospel of grace” as opposed to “law religion” or any of that nonsense–no Jew would have listened to him if he had. Rather, it was to call back Israel to its true, original calling: to be a holy, priestly nation, that would spread YHWH’s blessings to all the nations not by violence, but by the example of holiness.

And in the course of making his “pitch”, Jesus warned of what would happen if his way was not followed: Israel would be destroyed–not primarily as a threat of divine retribution, but in the way that almost everyone in the public square who makes a proposal also warns of dire consequences if their advice is not followed. Wright has a great aside where he questions the commonly-accepted notion that we can date Matthew and Luke after the Fall of Jerusalem because they include prophecies of this event; as he says (I’m paraphrasing), but if you were in Palestine circa 30 AD, you didn’t have to be the Second Person of the Trinity to realize that if Jewish militants kept escalating their resistance to the Romans, what did happen was what would happen.

That was the shape of Jesus’ “bid for Messiahship” as it would have been understood by 1st century Jews until the Crucifixion, and we have to believe it was a sincere offer, because God doesn’t make insincere offers; he knew the offer would be rejected and that there would have to be the Cross and the New Passover, but the offer was nonetheless sincere and “real.”

Just to clarify that I’m not talking about a “supersessionist” theology of “divine retribution”, it is very clear, both in the Biblical narrative and in historical reality, that this describes a self-inflicted wound. I am not saying that God actively punished the Jews with the Fall of Jerusalem for their rejection of Jesus; I am saying that, as was obvious a priori to objective observers, and as is now tragically obvious a posteriori, Jewish militants precipitated Israel into a war (even a series of wars) that it could not plausibly win, and that God, both through Old Testament prophets and through Jesus (and John the Baptist) tried to warn off his people Israel from this self-destructive path.

To circle back to the question of penal substitutionary atonement, then, the covenant curses did fall, not on a substitutionary innocent victim, but on the party to the covenant–the nation of Israel.

And all of the other passages that seem to suggest PSA can all be comfortably put under the heading of recapitulation (as in Paul and Hebrews properly understood), or moral example (especially (I know some will balk) Girardian anti-scapegoating example), or thanksgiving/drawing-near sacrifice (as opposed to propitiatory in the pagan sense; again, Hebrews must be well understood).

So there.