The Gospel ascribes a very great importance to the termination of Christ’s earthly life; it is his death on the cross that is preeminently the saving event. Why is this death so important and how does it save?
In the current situation there are undoubtedly those who see in Christ’s death the grand archetype of the non-violent protest demonstration. To speak of Christ’s behavior in his passion as non-violent is the understatement of the ages. For he was completely non-violent while subjected to what was, in view of his nature and person, the starkest violence and outrage of all time. As for protest, Christ’s death is the sharpest possible protest against all accommodation of sin, all cheapening of grace, all humanisticizing of salvation. But in the peculiarly contemporary sense of “protest,” it was actually the ultimate in non-protest. He articulated no grievances and he was inflamed with no indignation. The best of the judges into whose courts he was hustled in the farcical processes of that doleful night and ensuing day was struck by his silence and regally supramundane aloofness. (“Answeredst thou nothing?” “My kingdom is not of this world.”) Manifestly the real happening was on a level far above Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, and the primary address of the cross was to the Father, not to the world.
Others make of the cross primarily a pedagogic posture or a hortatory stance. The great need of the world, in this view, is that men should be taught effectively to love God and one another. All other methods having failed, God, as a last resort, admonishes men through his crucified Son. Now assuredly no teaching stance could be more impressive. But if there was no objective need for the cross (by “objective” I here mean external to the teaching situation), if the impressive posture was assumed just to be impressive while all the time the Teacher claimed that his death was propitiatory and redemptive, then the whole thing backfires—the more so because it is thus reduced to an exercise in, of all things, moralism.
Another view of Christ’s cross refers it to a universal principle, that life comes only by death. This principle has the appeal of the paradoxical, and such a reference seems to have support in Christ’s words, “Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”—an illustration he in fact urged upon his disciples that they might accept the necessity of his death. But is “life through death” a universal principle? Our first parents were created wholly alive. Did God die to accomplish this? Or is revivification different from creating alive, involving the removal of an obstacle not present from the first? We shall come back to this.
Let us examine this saying about the grain of wheat to see whether there is even such application of it to Christ as there is to all other human beings. All of us must die radically to self in order to bear any fruit unto God. But this necessity derives from the corruption of our nature. Christ was fully on God’s side without any prior death. It is true that in Gethsemane he experienced a terrible tension between the desire to live and the desire to accomplish the Father’s will specific to the situation: death. The very degree of this tension issued from the perfection of his holiness. No man “sold under sin” could find “the wages of sin”—in this case the sins, and wages, of others—repulsive to a degree even comparable to what the Prince of Life found them. But though this struggle of a truly holy love of life and an obviously holy love of the Father’s particular will was so great that it caused the effusion of blood in the manner of sweat, at no point was Christ even in the least degree unsubmissive to the Father. This is a profound mystery, but nothing short of it is biblical, or for that matter rational, considering what Christ’s death accomplished. Now, any Epistle to Adam and Eve antedating the fall and urging on them the mortification of their members would have been an imposition; a fortiore no demand like this could justly be made of the God-Man. If Christ’s death had been an instance of the “mortification” we now mention, it would have been disqualified as the basis of life for others. Thus even in the less obvious sense, Christ’s death was not a case of “being crucified with Christ.” Since he could not in the usual sense die unto self but only unto God, his death is sui generis. Only thus springs there from it, for any believer, life from the dead.
Still another view of Christ’s cross makes it primarily a mighty application of God’s muscle to the trouncing of Satan, sin, and death; that is, this view apprehends the cross as directly an action of power. (For the legitimacy of “muscle” as a metaphor of God’s power, consider the biblical “arm of the Lord.”)
The appeal of this view is very great. It recognizes an objectiveness in Christ’s accomplishment on the cross; something was done to more than the minds of men. It is the view of high action: thrashing man’s most tyrannical foes. Again there is the fascination of the paradoxical—a paradox, moreover, that the Scriptures themselves assert: “That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” Furthermore, it is a commonplace that by giving a thing an overdose of itself one tends to kill it. Finally, it is true that Christ by his death has destroyed sin, death, and the devil. This the Scriptures clearly teach. The objection is not to tracing these colossal effects to the cross but to referring them directly and immediately to the cross.
Consider the logical difficulties of understanding Christ’s death on the cross as directly an action of power. Take first the general notion of overcoming anything by death as a power. By definition death is the surrender of life itself. It is the ultimate in capitulation. How then can it ever wage a war? When two combatants, say a hunter and a buffalo, slay each other, the man spearing the beast and the beast goring the man, neither death can possibly contribute anything to the death of the other. Each is killed only by what the other does before he dies. In fact, rather than the death of one causing the death of the other, the prior death of either is the formal cause of the survival of the other. And if either, having exerted enough power to slay the other, had still had a reserve of power, he would have survived. (Incidentally, I cannot think that there were any limits to the endurance of the God-Man except as they were self-imposed; he himself said that no one took his life from him.) Again, the death of anyone cannot be the cause of the death of his antagonist where mere power is the consideration.
Take now the three tyrants one by one.
Sin (except for its guilt) is taken away by the rectification of love. The Man Jesus always loved the Father supremely; we have not. We are made to love God as supreme by the regenerating and sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost working through the word and the sacraments. How can the death of Christ be directly a power to conquer sin?
Death is directly overcome not by death—another death just adds to the domain and prevalence of death—but by “the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16). In the impotence of mortality all about us, what a power that is! This extraordinary power God possesses by virtue of being God, and by the same virtue he bestows it on whom he wills. He bestowed it, as suggested above, on our first parents without the requirement of any death.
Satan is a tremendously powerful foe, but to bring about his immediate and total extinction, God, the “stronger one,” needs only to snip the communication of his being-sustaining providence. Any teaching short of this is a perversion of the doctrine of creation. Where is the place of death directly as a power in the mastery of Satan?
And yet Christ’s death does gloriously save from sin, death, and the devil, and it does so specifically as death, i.e., the expiration and termination of his earthly life. This is the point of the whole system of foreshadowing Old Testament sacrificial ordinances. While the sacrificial animals qualified to die by being fit to live, the redemptive act was precisely the termination of their life. The emphasis upon the expiration of the life of the proper and fulfilling Sacrifice, though frequent in the Scriptures, is perhaps nowhere else made as succinctly as in Hebrews 9:15, where the availability of the promised inheritance is made to turn on just two words, thanatou genomenou, “a death having occurred.” And certainly the point of the soldier’s spear and its penetration of our Lord’s body—as well as the point of the narration—is precisely verification of thanatou genomenou.
If, then, power cannot be the category under which we directly subsume Christ’s action on the cross—since “he was crucified through weakness” and died through an absolute takeover by weakness—to what sphere shall we refer the mighty significance of that action in order to have a true understanding of it? Where do death certificates play a role in ordinary life? Only in the consideration and judgment of rights and liabilities, I submit.
And that’s just where the Scriptures place the primary significance of Christ’s death. The sacrificial ordinances of the Old Testament already alluded to; Isaiah’s relating of these ordinances (“an offering for sin,” v. 10) to the Messiah in his fifty-third chapter with its unequivocal words about atonement by substitution, and that by God’s own working (“Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole.… The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”); the New Testament’s authentication of the identification of Isaiah’s Sufferer with Jesus Christ through Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch; Paul’s clear teaching about justification by faith through the blood of Another (“justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith”); the declaration in Hebrews that Jesus is the substantive Sacrifice; and finally the attitude, behavior, and words of Jesus himself before and on the cross—all these and other Scripture components compel us to understand the dying Christ as a substitutionary sin-bearer on whose account God forgives the believing penitent. We have only to try to reconcile two of the words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” to realize how utterly requisite is the dual character of our Lord—one as he really was, one as he was representatively—to make any consistency of his utterances. On any other basis these cries are but that alternation of faith and unbelief so characteristic of us—and utterly disqualifying to a saviour of the world.
This biblical understanding of the significance of the cross, which, I submit, is the only rational one, has in fact been criticized as being just too patly rational. At the same time it has been faulted as the child of a regional (Latin, Western) turn of mind. Of course, these charges knock each other out. For to suggest (as opposed to noting its predominantly Western development) that one has to have a special kind of mind to take in the cogency of the doctrine of atonement is to impugn its rationality. Actually the Hebrews had received and grasped the rationale of substitutionary sacrifices more than a millennium before they knew any Romans, or indeed before there were any Romans to know. And why should we disparage the rational? Next to a knowledge of God’s word and faith, reason is the best aid in theology. The only time to disparage reason is when it rises up against revelation. Were our minds released from the limitations of creatureliness and healed of the perversions of sin, we should think exactly as God thinks and acclaim his revelation without recourse to faith.
Now, once the primarily and properly judicial character of Christ’s action on the cross has been understood and accepted, we rightly indulge in enthusiastic and hilarious celebration of Christ’s cross as power. All the power of an ordered government is available for enforcing the judgments of the judiciary. So long as a man is under the judgment of God, there is a kind of legitimacy of sin’s and Satan’s harassment of him, and death’s title to him is absolutely indisputable by God’s own ruling. Remove the judgment and all these evils become fair game; in principle they have already been crushed. Pointing to his letter of pardon the former death-cell occupant may well exult: “By this I have handcuffed the hangman and uprooted the gallows.”
But if we end up either way celebrating the same power results—the vanquishing of sin, death, and the devil and the glorious opening of the gates of life—then is not the distinction between a primarily power conception and an expiation-atonement understanding of the cross academic and barren? Not at all. To short-circuit the primarily judicial significance of the cross is not only a violation of scriptural teaching and of reason; it is also antagonistic to a saving faith. The theology of a man—if what he has is a theology—is all of a piece; and such is the integration of doctrine, as well as of doctrine and life, that what a man thinks of the cross of Christ, particularly in view of the centrality of the cross, is bound to affect deeply what he thinks of himself and the kind of salvation he needs. And the reverse is true also. In fact, a man’s view of the cross is the best clue to his whole system. Misconception of the cross entails misconception all down the line and must tend toward malformation of faith.
Consider the attitude to sin and salvation natural to one who short-circuits the judicial significance of the cross and looks upon Christ’s death as directly a power deliverance from the three tyrants. There is nothing necessarily reprehensible and shameful in being a captive. Thousands of lovely and noble-minded princesses have been captured by ugly bandits and robber barons and remained as honorable as ever even though they never got away. Nor does calling one of the bandits Sin really change the picture. It may just be a case of touching one’s hat to an ancient theological term with no real sense of its meaning. Sin conceived of merely as an arm-twister is not the foe whom Christ died to vanquish. The thing about sin is that it never twists merely an arm but also the will and the desires; indeed, it is itself a fearful twisting of the whole man and therefore a corruption and depravity, uniquely in the whole world, reprehensible, culpable, and condemned. The captive princess is not our story. Not only is the figure flagrantly inaccurate—we have indeed been taken captive by the forces of evil, but we love our captors; it is also flattering and titillating to the pride of man. Nothing so radically tickles a man’s pride as a denial or at least some de-peccatation of his sin.
A deep repentance cannot go with shallow notions of sin, nor a deep faith with a shallow repentance. Here our model, since it cannot be Christ, must be David, whose fifty-first psalm is a divinely inspired formulary of penitence. In it he evinces the incredible grace of joining with God in desiring for himself (David) “truth in the inward parts.” Surely a repudiation of all complimentary self-deceptions and a facing up to the sinfulness of sin and the radicalness of one’s corruption is the truth in the inward parts here indicated, as well as a condition of attaining a saving faith.
We then come upon the massive and confirmatory fact that conscience thus awakened and rectified finds no peace except in the Gospel of a Saviour crucified to take away guilt and condemnation. If faith cannot lay hold on him, it is condemned as a fearful exercise in futility and self-deception.
It is exceedingly instructive that the thief on the cross—who undeniably had a saving view of Christ’s cross—described his own condition and Christ’s with exactly the same term, condemnation, the sole distinction being that it was justly incurred in his own case and unjustly in Christ’s; and that having done so he turned to Christ with a prayer for a place in his kingdom—and got it!
