In rural Europe the traveler frequently comes to a crossroads and finds a crucifix in a shrine at one of the corners. So the Christian Church today, as in every day, stands in her pilgrimage before the Cross of Christ.
In any discussion of the Atonement, oversimplification is a pitfall. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this study, which deals with current views of the meaning of the Cross, two categories are suggested: the “transactional” and the “revelational.” A view of the Cross that is true to biblical insights must have some characteristics of the transactional category. On the other hand, an exclusively revelational view stands in profound tension with certain aspects of biblical thought, a tension that has far-ranging implications.
By “revelational” is meant any view of the Cross in which its significance consists of its making known to men a timeless, divine truth. In such a view the key “happening” takes place within the minds of men. In the minds, or souls, of men, as they perceive the truth and respond to it and decide to act upon it, is the locus of reconciliation. Insofar as the Cross so considered is an event, it is an event in communication. Consequently the Cross in itself cannot be the reality that the good news tells about. Instead, the Cross is the means of disclosing good news, which may not be news in the strict sense but as old as God himself. What is new is only that God has said it and that men have learned of it.
By the transactional category, however, is meant those views of the Cross affirming that something happened at Calvary, something great and even cosmic, a change affecting and involving God. The change is something that happened objectively and not merely in the minds of men. It is not simply a timeless truth but rather an event on the basis of which God can say things to men about himself and his relation to them that he could not have said before.
Let the reader endeavor to forget any commercial or legalistic connotations the term “transaction” may have for him. For the transactional view of the Atonement has often been crudely and crassly stated. Nevertheless, certain aspects of biblical, Christian thought constrain us to see the Atonement as transaction. To be sure, this view also has revelational facets. The revelational and transactional are not mutually exclusive; it is possible to find both revelation and transaction in the Cross, both message and event. But any understanding of it as only revelation is deficient.
First, a merely revelational view fails to do justice to the fact that in biblical thought sin is against God and that atonement therefore must involve some kind of reckoning with sin on his part. As God, he cannot let sin pass. It is a challenge to his deity that he must respond to and put in its place. His love may prompt him to forego judging the sinner and to continue with the individual sinner as though nothing had happened. God may very well want to forgive and forget, although it is of course inconceivable that he should be indifferent to what sin does to the sinner. But there is another side to his being that must be satisfied and reconciled. And it has to do with the fact that he is the God of the man sinned against as well as the God of the sinner.
Behind the biblical picture of the problem of sin is a simple fact that the modern mind (with its democratic ways of thinking) tends to forget. The biblical conception of Deity, especially in the Old Testament, is closely tied to the conception of kingship. Etymologically, the Hebrew roots behind such words as “glory” and “majesty” refer to the materialistic splendor and pomp with which an earthly monarch is wont to surround himself. Now a king is in a way responsible for the well-being of his subjects. If during his reign the life of the kingdom flourishes, he is considered a good king. This is especially true of law enforcement. Under a good king, law-abiding citizens have protection and the righteous prosper. Under a poor king, robbery and brigandage abound.
Crime Against The Crown
Thus, when one man sins against another, more is involved than the impairment of a man-to-man relation. The glory of the ruler is called into question. He cannot be a good ruler and let such evil go unnoticed. Indeed, he should not have let it happen at all. He must therefore choose between the guilty and the innocent and set his face in some recognizable manner against the former, thus depriving the sinful subject of the presence from which all blessing emanates. This is why a crime is a crime not only against one’s fellow men but also against “the crown,” why the state pays for the prosecuting attorney, and why in former days something more than correction seemed to motivate the sentencing of the guilty to punishment. Something like this underlies the fact that in biblical thought sin is “against thee and thee only.”
Certainly our common ways of thinking support this. There is nothing to which the unbeliever points with greater effectiveness than man’s inhumanity to man, and the fact that the inhumane man does not always receive his just deserts. This is the prime datum of the atheist. And every thinking believer admits a real problem with his faith at this point.
The sinner, then, is a standing assertion that there is no God. He is against God, and God therefore must be against him. For God to ignore the sinner as a sinner would be an unacceptable compromise, although God’s love may preclude all desire for personal vengeance. His love for the victim of the sinner has been called in question by what he, the Sovereign, has allowed to happen in his realm. Thus, as has been so often said, the love and holiness of God are two sides of the same coin. To the sinner, God’s love for the man sinned against appears as holiness, or even wrath, because God’s love for the man sinned against requires him to turn his face from the sinner. And if God, the Source of all life, withdraws from us, our inevitable destiny is death.
Accordingly, it seems reasonable that even though God may want to relate himself to the sinner in ways of love, that relation must at least be veiled—to use a biblical term—until there has been an objective reckoning and the record has been put straight. That, we may believe, is what God was doing at Calvary. He was there in human flesh submitting to that ultimate humiliation to which his bearing with sinners leads. The Cross was an event, something that had to happen, something that could happen only by his taking the form of a human creature. Only by dying as a man could God be true to himself as the living God. But once he has died as a man, the veil between him and sinners can be put away.
This idea that the Cross made possible a change in God’s relations with men is not congenial to many twentieth-century Christians who like to think of his love as being too patient and enduring to be affected by sinners. Only men, they say, need to be reconciled, not God. And to substantiate their assertion they point to the various texts in the Bible using the word “reconcile.” However, there is one massive biblical fact that outweighs all these texts. It is that in the Bible record the Holy Spirit does not come to man unreservedly until after Calvary. Biblical theologians have often pointed out that under the old covenant the enduement of the Spirit always seems to have been qualified, as the prophets looked forward to the time when the Spirit would be “poured out.” On the other hand, under the new covenant men are baptized in the Spirit. The Spirit comes upon “all flesh.” Whatever our theories about the Atonement, the Bible testifies to a change in God’s relations to sinners as a result of Calvary; and this is attested by the very order of the books of the Bible. It is unthinkable that the Book of Acts with its account of Pentecost could be placed ahead of the four Gospels with their crucifixion story.
Transaction And Incarnation
Secondly, it is a fact that only a transaction-type of Atonement requires an incarnation. Here is another aspect of biblical thought that transcends any exclusively revelational view of the Atonement. For the revelational function could be served by any means that communicated the idea; an illusion or a theophany would suffice. If we epitomize the revealed message of the Cross as “God forgives sinners,” then we need on the Cross only an object that suggests God to our minds. This could be done by a remarkably good man or by a god who appeared to be a man, as extreme liberalism on the one hand and ancient gnosticism on the other hand have advocated with logical consistency. Both heresies stressed a God of love while tending to minimize his wrath and holiness, and neither needed an ontological incarnation.
The position that the Atonement is merely revelational and that this revelation of God’s love for us cannot occur except in an act of incarnation, fails to carry conviction. Let us give credit to the proponents of this view for wanting to take the Incarnation seriously and for stressing the fact that God was in Christ, but it is not required by their view that the Atonement consists of historical fact. All that is needed in this view is the story of the Cross. The real Cross, the Cross of history with a real God-man hanging upon it, is in the end superfluous for the revelational view.
Nowadays we often hear that one of the distinctions, if not the distinction, of the Christian faith is its basis in history. The assertion, with some allusion to the “mighty acts” of God, is almost a cliché. But if we limit our view of what God has done for us to revelation, we are jeopardizing this distinction. Thus we have another aspect of biblical thought with which our understanding of the Atonement should be in tune.
When the redemptive work of God is described solely in terms of revelation, the truth about God that has been revealed must inevitably become more important than the means by which it is revealed. For example, in the study of prophecy, the psychology of prophecy usually fascinates us for a while; but eventually we find that we must wrestle with the message on its own terms. When we shift focus altogether from the event to the timeless, we necessarily demote the event from the essential to the secondary.
Anyone who reads between the lines of contemporary theology can see that the currents of rationalization are slowly undercutting the offensive, historical particularities in which the Christian religion has hitherto been rooted. These currents erode the finality of the historic Christ. They treat theology in a framework of subjectivity. They describe salvation as an exercise in existential decision. The danger is real that the tree will lose its hold on history altogether and topple into the stream of immanentism and generality, and this at a time when, paradoxically, it is recognized as never before that the uniqueness of Christianity lies in its grounding in history.
If it should ever happen that Christian theology becomes detached from history, there is nothing to prevent the rapprochement of Christianity with Buddhism and Hinduism. Both these religions accommodate timeless, suffering saviours, and both may assent to the timeless divine love revealed by the Cross of Christ. Many no doubt look upon this eventuality with composure; winds blowing in that direction are evident. But as long as Christians see an indispensable transaction in a particular Cross, syncretism cannot come to pass, for such a Cross still remains an insurmountable stumbling block.
The twentieth-century Church indeed stands at a special “crossroads” as she ponders the meaning of the Cross. The integrity and identity of her heritage are at stake. The Cross is still crucial. As we form our judgments about it, God through the Cross is judging us.
Walfred Erickson is pastor of the Clyde Hill Baptist Church, Bellevue, Washington. He holds the B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota, the Th.B. from Northwestern Bible School and Seminary, and the B.D. and Th.D. from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Erickson is dean of the Lay School of Theology of the Greater Seattle Council of Churches.
