What Happened at the Cross

April 15, 2022 By Gene Veith

What happened at Christ’s crucifixion was an act of divine omnipotence that was more monumental, more miraculous, and more mind-blowing than the Creation. It entailed, in effect, a cataclysm within the Godhead, involving, if we can dare use this way of speaking, the inner psychology of the Holy Trinity.

Critics of the doctrine of the Atonement say that it would be unjust for God to punish Jesus for what we have done. And if Jesus is God’s son, then he would be committing “cosmic child abuse.” But God did not select a mere man, related to Him or not, as a human sacrifice. That would not only be unjust, it would do no one any good. Rather, the man on the cross was God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity.

So consider these staggering miracles that were taking place on that first Good Friday:

(1) God the Son took our suffering into Himself.

This aspect of the atonement is often overlooked, but it is a clear statement of Scripture: “Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 43:4). This is of the greatest importance for those who struggle with suffering and the problem of theodicy.

(2) God the Son was made sin.

Isaiah’s prophecy of atonement continues: “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 43:6). He bore our sins. St. Paul puts it even more strongly: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

How is it possible to bear the sins and the sorrows of someone else, much less to be made sin? This can only be an unfathomable act of omnipotence. It may have something to do, though, with the incarnate Son’s identity as the Son of Man. We moderns think in terms of human individuals, but the Bible, while affirming that, also speaks of a collective identity we have as human beings. Thus, in Adam–a word that means “Man”–we all fell. Christ is the Second Adam who took upon Himself our sinful, fallen nature, to undo the catastrophe that Adam caused. Thus, as St. Paul says, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).

(3) The Great Exchange took place.

Look at the second half of the verse we quoted above: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The Son takes our sin, and we receive His righteousness. All of His love, His healings, His love, as described in the Gospels, are considered to be ours. Here is how Luther describes it:

“That is the mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied Himself of His righteousness that He might clothe us with it, and fill us with it. And He has taken our evils upon Himself that He might deliver us from them… in the same manner as He grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in His righteousness.” –Martin Luther, Werke (Weimar, 1883), 5: 608.

(4) God was forsaken by God.

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” (Matthew 27:46). God the Son is forsaken by God the Father, one God, with the Holy Spirit, in three persons. God the Son thus experiences being bereft of God, His judgment against sin: being lost, being cast out, being damned.

Yes, I know that Jesus was quoting Psalms 22, or, rather, David in that Psalm was prophetically quoting Him. And that psalm resolves in faith, showing that Jesus retained His faith through His being forsaken, looking ahead to His resurrection. But it’s important not to weaken the force of His being forsaken, as the Holy Father turns His face away from sin, collected and embodied in His Son. This is the cup of God wrath that the Son of God drains to the dregs (Luke 22:42).

(4) God died.

Jesus died. God the Son died. In doing so, He paid the wages of sin (Romans 6:23). To be sure, God cannot suffer or die. Only a human being can do that. But the one who sacrificed Himself for us was both the Son of God and the Son of Man. He was fully human, so that He could die, and He was fully God, so that His death atoned for the sins of the world.

The Formula of Concord, no less, insists that it is correct to say that, because of the personal union of Christ’s two natures and the communication of attributes within the Trinity, it is correct to say that God died: “For in His nature God cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is correctly called God’s death, when the man dies who is one thing or one person with God.” (See the full discussion in “VIII. The Person of Christ, Solid Declaration.)

(5) We are justified.

What happened on the cross saved us. Our sins are obliterated. We were justified; that is, declared to be righteous, even though we are not righteous in ourselves. Our justification was completed at the resurrection of Jesus (Romans 4:25), so that we have a new life in Christ.

The whole world was justified! The Son of God “is the propitiation for our sins,” says St. John, “and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (John 2:2). The atonement was not limited to the elect, as some say, but, as it clearly says, Jesus died not just for “our sins,” but for the sins of the “whole world.

This is the doctrine of “objective justification“. We still must receive that justification by faith–what is called “subjective justification”–as the Holy Spirit connects us to Christ by His Word, as we are joined to His cross and resurrection by baptism, and as He we partake of His body “given for you” and His blood “shed for the remission of your sins” given in Holy Communion.

But everything was accomplished for us in the miracles of the cross.

[Note: This is a free post. To subscribe to the Cranach blog, go here.]

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Christ’s Presence

April 14, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Today is Maundy Thursday, when Jesus instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion. Tragically, that has become a contentious issue. Many Christians cannot get their heads around the possibility that Christ is actually present in His Supper.

And yet, Christians acknowledge Christ’s presence, which is a common theme in the New Testament, in other contexts.

Jesus promises His presence with Christians when they worship. “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). I have never heard anyone argue that Jesus is just speaking symbolically. Surely, when Christians gather together, He is actually present.

Evangelicals often speak of Christ’s indwelling presence in the hearts of believers. And they are right to do so, since this is a clear statement of Scripture. “Because I live, you also will live,” says Jesus, referring to His resurrection in a great text for Easter. “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:19-20). You are in me. And I am in you. Isn’t this speaking of a real phenomenon and not just a figure of speech?

To be sure, Christ’s indwelling is a mystery, as St. Paul says: “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

Then there is the Great Commission, with its climactic promise: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). This is just prior to Christ’s Ascension, but I’ve never heard what is commonly said by opponents of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament that after Jesus ascended to His Father, He is in Heaven and no longer on earth, applied to this text. Surely, Christ’s being with us “always, to the end of the age” is a real presence. As St. Paul says of His ascension, because He is at the Father’s “right hand in the heavenly places,” He “fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:20-23).

One of the classic attributes of God is His omnipresence. He can be everywhere without crowding out the presence of His creation. Both the Reformed and the Catholic positions on the Sacrament agree that the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ must be one or the other, not both. But Lutherans teach that there is a communication of attributes between God the Father and God the Son, as well as God the Holy Spirit. But this too is a Biblical teaching, as St. Paul explicitly states in reference to the indwelling of Christ. Strictly speaking, it is the Holy Spirit who dwells within believers (John 14:17; Romans 8:9; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 2 Timothy 1:14). But because the Holy Spirit dwells within us, the Son dwells within us, as St. Paul says, showing the inter-relationship of the entire Trinity:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:17)

So if Christ is present in the Sacrament in the same way that He is present everywhere, wouldn’t that mean that He is just as present in any meal or in any object, so that the Lord’s Supper is not that big a deal after all? No! In the Sacrament, Christ’s body–not His spirit–and His blood are objectively present in a saving way, for the forgiveness of our sins. This happens by virtue of God’s Word, which, along with the elements, constitutes the Sacrament.

As Luther says in the Catechism, “Certainly not just eating and drinking do these things, but the words written here: ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’ These words, along with the bodily eating and drinking, are the main thing in the Sacrament.”

(See the Formula of Concord, VII, the epitome and the solid declaration.)

At any rate, Christians need to recover the presence of Christ, in all these senses, in order to counter the prevailing assumption about God that He is distant and far away, looking down on us from a great height. This is the legacy of Deism and it is rampant among both those who say they believe in God and those who do not. Rather, God–indeed, the incarnate second person of the Trinity, is close to us. “‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:28). “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (Romans 10:8). To be sure, we were far removed from God, but not anymore: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13).

Photo by John Snyder, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Real Reason Why the Church Is Falling

April 13, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Today, churches across the spectrum–liberal and conservative, Protestant and Catholic, evangelical and Pentecostal–are often downplaying justification by faith in the work of Christ on the cross, in favor of alternative gospels of leftwing politics, rightwing politics, social justice, prosperity, psychology, positive thinking, and a wide range of moralisms.

According to the Reformers, justification is the article upon which the church stands or falls. So, insofar as justification is lacking, of course the church is falling. And even if where a church seems successful, without justification, it is still falling.

From the Introduction to the new and expanded 3rd edition of my book Spirituality of the Cross:

In my opinion, the moral and spiritual weakness of Christianity today derives from a broad-based de-emphasis on the Cross. To be sure, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity is central to all of Christianity and all branches affirm that Christ’s crucifixion, in some sense, is connected to our salvation. Lutheranism is in solidarity with all of the other branches of Christianity, but it puts a particularly strong emphasis on the Cross of Jesus Christ, who, through His suffering and death, atoned for the world’s sins and gives us redemption. Indeed, the teaching that we are justified by faith in the atoning work of Christ on the Cross is considered “the chief article”—the underpinning of every aspect of Lutheran theology and, indeed, of the Christian faith as a whole.

In recent years, both liberal and conservative churches have been minimizing this teaching. Mainstream Protestants have been saying things like, “If God punished His son for other people’s sins, that would be cosmic child abuse” (ignoring the union of the Father and the Son in the Trinity). Many conservative Protestants and Catholics have been downplaying a high view of the atonement as an offense against God’s righteousness and so shifting the burden of righteousness back on us (ignoring our inability to bear that burden, as only God can). Christians from across the spectrum are saying that when the Apostle Paul teaches that the Cross frees us from the Law, that he is referring only to the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament (ignoring how those laws themselves are manifestations of atonement for moral transgressions).

Our natural religious impulses and the religions that we devise for ourselves tend to condition salvation based on what we do and what we deserve, on our “good works” or our “merit.” When churches downplay the Cross, this legalistic, merit-based spirituality rushes in to fill the void. Thus, it is commonly believed, both inside and outside the church, that Christianity is all about morality, about “being good.” As opposed to the Lutheran emphasis that Christianity is primarily about finding forgiveness when we fail to be moral, when we are not good.

Certainly, Lutherans believe in morality, in being “good” in all of the senses of that term, but this comes not from rules, external constraints, and the repeated cycle of failing and trying harder, but from an internal transformation that Christ creates by means of our faith. Without Christ’s justification, we try to justify ourselves. That is, we declare ourselves righteous by insisting on how virtuous we are, which becomes a formula for hypocrisy, rationalization, and conflict with others. And when we justify ourselves, we end up justifying our bad behavior. This explains why moralism is so often accompanied by immorality.

But when we no longer have to justify ourselves because Christ justifies us through His Cross, we are freed from all of that. Lutheran theologians say that this kind of justification is “the article upon which the church stands or falls.” When a church plays down the Cross, it “falls.” And that is what we are seeing today. Churches are falling.

Illustration: “The Crucifixion” (1538) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Mary of Bethany’s Response to Jesus

April 12, 2022 By Gene Veith

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The Bible is inexhaustible. No matter how many times you read it, study it, and hear it preached, you can always learn something new.

The Sunday before last, Pastor Fraser Pearce at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Adelaide, preached about the woman who, shortly before Passion Week, anointed the feet of Jesus with costly ointment and wiped them with her hair (John 12:1-8). He disclosed aspects of the narrative and its context that I had never realized before. What follows is from Rev. Pearce’s sermon, as well as my own reflections.

St. John identifies the woman as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. The first time the gospel writer mentions her, in the previous chapter, he says that this is the Mary “who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair” (John 11:2), a flash-forward to what will happen later.

But we have also been introduced to her in the Gospel of Luke, who tells about how her sister Martha was “distracted with much serving,” while Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching” (Luke 7:39-40). Jesus commends her, telling her busy sister,“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 7:41-42). So Mary was an unusually pious woman, with a great devotion to Jesus.

Much later, St. John records that the sisters send a message to Jesus saying that their brother Lazarus is gravely ill. Strangely, though, Jesus delays. By the time he gets to Bethany, Lazarus has already died and has been buried for four days. When Jesus finally gets there, the sisters display their resentment. “When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house” (11:20). Practical Martha comes out to meet Jesus, but devout Mary refuses to! Martha herself rebukes Jesus for His delay: ““Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (11:21).

To be sure, she is also affirming her faith in Jesus, knowing His power, and, as Jesus interacts with her, makes a clear confession: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” Pastor Fraser made the point that waiting on God is part of faith, that we too may sometimes be frustrated at God’s delays, but that we need not lose heart.

At any rate, Jesus calls for Mary. She comes out to Him, where He still is with Martha. She responds with the same words of rebuke as her sister: ““Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (11:32).

Now Jesus weeps with her (11:33). And He raises her brother’s rotting body from the grave, restoring Lazarus to life, restoring him to his sisters. What Jesus did for them was overwhelming, far beyond anything they could have imagined or hoped for.

The next time we see Mary is the day before the Triumphal Entry and the week that Jesus goes to His death. His Bethany friends throw Him and His disciples a dinner. Martha is serving, as usual. Lazarus, the man who came back from death, is at the table, tying this episode to the account of his death and raising.

As for Mary, she had been sullen and her last recorded words to Jesus were to rebuke Him. But now, in light of what He has done for her and her family, she responds with a gesture of utter extravagance and overwhelming emotion:

Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:3-8)

A denarius was a day’s wages. The ointment Mary lavished on Jesus was worth 300 denarii, a year’s income! (This was evidently a wealthy family.) But this was Mary’s outpouring of devotion. Again, Mary is insanely impractical. But she “has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

And in this anointing of the Anointed One, which is the meaning of “Christ,” she prophesies His death in the week ahead and, as the other faithful women will do, begins His burial.

Illustration: Mary of Bethany Anoints Jesus’s Feet, Stained glass window from Grace Episcopal Church in NYC by Lawrence O.P., via Flickr, Creative Commons License 2.0.

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Secularists Seeking Forgiveness

April 11, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Vox–the progressive, trendy online magazine–has been running a series of articles on forgiveness.

The editors start with the recognition that cancel culture, social media outrage, exposing the faults of great Americans, and the overall climate of indignation are causing problems of social cohesion. And that individuals who have become demonized, sometimes for transgressions they have committed decades ago, lack a way to become accepted back into society. So they asked various writers to discuss ways forward.

The various titles in the series are worth reading, but they reflect the difficulty of the task:

When justice isn’t served, how do we find forgiveness?

The Limits of Forgiveness

The Promise–and Problem–of Restorative Justice

The Impossible Task of Truth and Reconciliation

How to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry

As long as the fixation is on justice, you will never come to forgiveness. Justice means giving people what they deserve. Though greatly to be wished, justice is the opposite of forgiveness. The question is what to do when someone has been unjust but now seeks to be restored. That is hard for these experts to come to grips with.

One essay, though, does grapple with the real issues and is particularly revealing. Vox staff writer Aja Romana contributed Everyone Wants Forgiveness but No One Is Being Forgiven. As she wrestles with the problems that come from lacking any mechanism for forgiving and being forgiven, she never so much as mentions religion. But she uses religious–even theological–language.

It isn’t enough to simply say “I’m sorry,” she recognizes. There needs to be some kind of atonement:

If we applied a positive road map to a typical outrage cycle, what we would hope to find after that initial period of outrage is discussion, apology, atonement, and forgiveness. That process almost never happens on the modern public stage. . . .

While plenty of research has been done on the perfect apology, we’ve had very few cultural examples of one being delivered effectively and sincerely. We’ve had even fewer examples of such an apology being followed up with a process of actual atonement.

Forgiveness, she recognizes, requires some kind of grace:

Most moral and spiritual authorities teach us that the cycle of repentance usually involves grace. Grace, the act of allowing people room to be human and make mistakes while still loving them and valuing them, might be the holiest, most precious concept of all in this conversation about right and wrong, penance and reform — but it’s the one that almost never gets discussed.

That’s understandable. Grace relies on some huge assumptions: that people mean well and that their intent is not to be hurtful; that they are capable of self-reflection and change; and, of course, that we all possess equal shares of dignity and humanity. . . .

That’s what makes the concept of grace so powerful. It forces us to contend not only with other people’s human frailty but with our own: to remember how good it feels when someone, out of the blue, treats us with respect, empathy, and kindness in the middle of an angry conversation where we expect nothing but hostility. To be shown the kindness of strangers when we expect cruelty, and then bestow that gift in turn — that’s the remarkable quality of grace. But there’s little room for it when we’re barely able to handle the concept of forgiveness, and equally unable to stop being angry with the offender after all is said and done.

And so, we arrive back at the beginning of the cycle: We hang on to our anger, and all of this anger puts the possibility of grace even further out of reach.

The writer sees that forgiveness requires atonement and grace, but, in her secularist perspective, she can’t really find them. Atonement, she assumes, is something that transgressors have to do for themselves. But having to atone for one’s own sins becomes identical with punishment. The sinner must pay for his transgressions, if not in prison, by losing his job or being socially ostracized. The writer suggests that this payment should be made voluntarily, which would make it possible to forgive the sinner. But the thread of forgiveness is lost, and we are back to retributive justice.

As for grace, she is coming closer, but she assumes that grace is something that the transgressor must earn. (“That people mean well,” “that they are capable of self-reflection and change,” etc.) Thinking of what people deserve is not grace. We are back to justice.

So, of course, atonement “almost never happens,” and “all of this anger puts the possibility of grace even further out of reach.”

But what if there is an atonement and a grace outside ourselves? What if these are not subjective or self-manufactured qualities, but objective realities? What if God Himself atoned for us? What if we are objects not of other people’s grace but of God’s grace?

Then we would find actual forgiveness and have a basis for forgiving others.

This is what Holy Week is all about. . . .

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Nuclear Weapons Reconsidered

April 8, 2022 By Gene Veith

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Australia has some of the most deadly snakes in the world. Fortunately, we haven’t seen any of them. Our host in Queensland said that we shouldn’t worry about them. He told us that they usually run away from human beings, that if we see one, we should just stomp our feet and the vibrations will drive them away. “They are only dangerous when they are cornered.”

I immediately thought of Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president would be dangerous if he wins in Ukraine, but he may be even more dangerous if he loses, as he seems to be doing. Frustrated, enraged, and humiliated, he has been threatening to use nuclear weapons. With President Biden calling for him to be ousted and for him to be charged with war crimes, he is probably feeling even more cornered.

Now American officials and NATO allies are pondering what to do if Putin actually does use nuclear weapons.

From an Associated Press article by Ellen Knickermeyer, West, Russia mull nuclear steps in a ‘more dangerous’ world:

Russia’s assault on Ukraine and its veiled threats of using nuclear arms have policymakers, past and present, thinking the unthinkable: How should the West respond to a Russian battlefield explosion of a nuclear bomb?

The default U.S. policy answer, say some architects of the post-Cold War nuclear order, is with discipline and restraint. That could entail stepping up sanctions and isolation for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Rose Gottemoeller, deputy secretary-general of NATO from 2016 to 2019. . . .

Gottemoeller, a chief U.S. nuclear negotiator with Russia for the Obama administration, said that the outlines that President Joe Biden has provided so far of his nuclear policy stick with those of past administrations in using atomic weapons only in “extreme circumstances.”

“And a single Russian nuclear use demonstration strike, or — as horrific as it would be — a nuclear use in Ukraine, I do not think would rise to that level” of demanding a U.S. nuclear response, said Gottemoeller, now a lecturer at Stanford University.

Well, that is probably a good policy, just as ousting Putin and trying him for war crimes are good policies. But it seems foolish for officials to say so.

The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevented nuclear war from breaking out through all of the tensions of the Cold War. The threat that any country that used nuclear weapons would be retaliated against with nuclear weapons, so that both countries–indeed the world itself–would be devastated, made actually using the things taboo.

Publicly setting that threat aside surely makes Putin more likely to use nuclear weapons, whether smaller tactical weapons against Ukrainian targets or one of Putin’s prize hypersonic missiles against the United States. Whereas the prospect of getting nuked himself might well restrain him.

Even if the American president won’t actually take that step, it is in America’s interest to make our adversaries think he might, so that they dare not take the chance.

Now, not only Russia but China, North Korea, and Iran are rattling their nuclear sabers. And in response, other countries are considering acquiring nuclear weapons for self-defense against all of these threats.

The unthinkable is now thinkable.

Image by Alexander Antropov from Pixabay

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