The Judge Judged in Our Place: By Whom?

Yesterday in my post ‘Is Molech Hidden in Christianity?’ I asked the question about the use of punishment in atonement. I was grateful to see that Lawrence Garcia took this particular excavation seriously enough to respond. There are two significant quotes by Pastor Garcia worthy of exploration because I think they show the crucial demarcation between those who insist on holding to some form of PSA (penal substitution atonement) and those who reject it entirely.

Garcia argues that I miss the point of punishment inasmuch as I fail to see that the concept of punishment,

“can be present in the OT and NT, but in decidedly different ways that ultimately distinguish them from the Molechian-like brand. However, rather than throwing the penal baby out with the Molechian bath water, we should be able to explicate how elements of punishment are indeed present in the Atonement, but in a way that doesn’t say “God punished his Son Jesus.”

Garcia ends his essay averring that

“Is there an exchange? Yes!—God exchanges his own life in the person and work of his Son, not our lives. Is there punishment? Yes!—but God freely and actively takes it upon himself rather than be forced to exact it upon humanity. Is there sacrifice? Absolutely—One who Jehovah Jireh provides. You see, we do not have to rid ourselves of these realities altogether, we simply must show how they are reshaped, transformed, and corrected through the person and work of Jesus who is one in nature and purpose with the Father.”

Working backwards, I would agree with Garcia that the realities of exchange, sacrifice and punishment are indeed radically “reshaped, transformed and corrected” through the lens of the gospel story of and about Jesus. It is how that ‘correction’ is perceived that illumines the difference between us. One the one hand, Garcia’s thoughtful form of PSA lacks all of the problematics of the caricatures of PSA  found, e.g., in neo-Calvinism or certain Evangelical theologies where God is seen as a divine child abuser. Garcia’s God, and thus atonement theory, has more in common with Karl Barth than John Piper. There is much to laud in this framing of the death of Jesus.

I think it is safe to say for Pastor Garcia and myself that we both affirm:

• the sending of the son by the Abba
• the self-giving character of both the Abba and the son
• the need for reconciliation between humanity and God
• that God takes the initiative in our salvation
• that salvation requires a sacrifice

It is this last point where we part ways. I will do my level best to represent what I understand is Pastor Garcia’s position. For Garcia, God is both the subject and the object of the sacrificial process of Jesus death. In Jesus’ crucifixion, God is performing an act of self-propitiation. Rather than seeing a split between the Abba and Jesus on the cross as some appear to do when they speak of “the Father pouring His [sic] wrath out on Jesus on the cross”, Garcia (and Torrance’s) model of the atonement (both derived from Barth) rightly insists on understanding the atoning work of Christ as an active work of the Triune God.

How is it we differ? Garcia says,

“God, then, is not ‘under the control of an economy of exchange’ because there is no exchange present at the Cross, but because he is free to exchange himself by providing a sacrifice quite apart from human attempts at propitiation which are handed over from their end. It isn’t the case that all notions of sacrifice, exchange, and punishment present in pagan sacrifices were an exercise in totally missing the point, but rather that their conceptions were confused and blurred and ultimately man centered. In pagan sacrifice and exchange man provides a child sacrifice to appease the god, but in Scripture sacrifice and exchange are provided by God himself who suffers death on behalf of his people rather than require it at their hands.”

First, what does it mean to say that “there is no exchange present at the cross” and “because he is free to exchange himself” within the same sentence? I suspect there is a “not” missing before the word “because.” However, I would argue that it was exactly a human attempt at propitiation that was occurring on Calvary; an attempt that was subverted by God. Jesus, on Calvary is a ‘propitiatiatory offering’, not of humanity to God, nor even of God back to God’s self. Rather the cross is God’s offering of God’s self to humanity in Christ. We are the propitiated ones, we humans are the ones with anger management issues, not God. Mark Heim brilliantly puts it this way,

“God enters into the position of the victim of sacrifice (a position already defined by human practice) and occupies it so as to be able to act from that place to reverse

sacrifice and redeem us from it. God steps forward in Jesus to be one subject to the human practice of atonement in blood, not because that is God’s preferred logic or

because this itself it God’s aim, but because this is the very site where human bondage and sin are enacted.” (Saved from Sacrifice, 143).

In other words, with regard to the mechanism of sacred violence or sacrificial processes, there are only two possible entry points, that of the sacrificing community or that of the victim. God chooses to enter, not on the side of the persecuting community but on the side of the victim in the figure and execution of Jesus of Nazareth.

A second point now is that, from this perspective, it is possible to regard the Bible as a book of hills and valleys, as a text that mixes religion and revelation. The Bible is NOT the Word of God in toto. It has two perspectives running through its collection from Genesis to Revelation. I have detailed this hermeneutic approach extensively in my book The Jesus Driven Life. If such is the case (and I argue that it is), then how is it that some end up confusing texts that are clearly the result of human misperception with those of divine revelation? This occurs, according to Rene Girard when interpreters are in  “the habit of tracing structural analogies between the Passion and the sacrifices instituted by other religions.  The sacrificial reading is capable only of seeing such analogies of this kind”  (Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World  233).

Whereas Pastor Garcia would see the sacrificial difference as one occurring between the Testaments (as per his quote at the top of this post), I would argue that the difference lies with the Testaments themselves, between strands of religion and strands of revelation, between the voices of the persecuting community and the voice(s) of the victim(s).

My post from yesterday then is an appeal for Christians who hold to some form of PSA, even in its most generous Barthian version to recognize that even here, one is still beholden to a Janus-faced God. It is this Janus-face that is the true problem faced by western Christian theology and especially by advocates of PSA in any form.