More than a Symbol - Christianity Today

That the Cross is of central importance to Christianity is clear even in the language we use. “Crucial” derives from a Latin word meaning “pertaining to a cross,” and “crux” is simply the Latin for “cross.” Whenever we say, “The crux of the matter is this,” or “This is the crucial point,” we are saying, “Just as the Cross is central to Christianity, so is the point central to my argument.”

Of course, the theological centrality of the Cross is seen in the structure of the Gospels, which have well been described as “Passion narratives with extended introductions.” In each one the death and resurrection of Jesus take up a disproportionate amount of space. Everything is arranged to lead up to the climax of the Cross. And Paul can sum up the Christian message in the words “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23).

However, today people sometimes hold that the essence of Christianity is rather to be found in the Sermon on the Mount, in Jesus’ ethical teaching generally, in the idea of liberation, or the like. And indeed, Christianity is a profound religion and its teaching has many aspects. But if we are to be true to the New Testament, we must see the Cross at the center.

Sinners And The Love Of God

Logically, we must start with the reality of sin. Dwellers in the Space Age often see the human predicament as due to lack of education, wealth, or some other resource, but the Bible says it is due to sin (Isa. 59:2). To look at our modern world—with its wars, crime, violence, and policies that allow mass starvation in many lands and the drug culture in others—is almost to gaze on a classical demonstration of the truth of the Christian contention.

And in the Christian view, sin has even more serious consequences than earthly disorder. The Bible speaks often of “the wrath of God” (Rom. 1:18), and we should not forget that Jesus often warned of hell (Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5). Judgment is both a present reality (John 3:19) and a future certainty (Rom. 2:12). The Bible says we are responsible people and in due course must give account of ourselves to God (Rom. 14:12); we cannot dismiss the evil we do as simply the result of the way we are made, as our fate rather than our fault. We are guilty when we stand before God.

What God’s Love Means

But the Bible also reveals the astounding fact that in the face of our sin, God keeps loving us. He keeps loving because he is love (1 John 4:8, 16); it is his nature to love. And in love he brings about the salvation of sinners (John 3:16; Rom. 5:8). We should be clear about this. Sometimes people see the Father as a rather stem judge, who sentences sinners to hell. Into this picture comes a loving Son who intervenes to save them. But this picture is distorted. Any view of the Atonement that does not see it as coming from the Father’s love is wrong.

It is also unbiblical to see the Father’s forgiveness as operating apart from the Cross. Modern sentimentalists often see the Father as a kindly person who does not take sin seriously. “He will forgive; that is what love means” is the thought. But this is to overlook the strong moral demand that runs through Scripture. The God who demands righteousness of his people is himself righteous. He does not forgive sin in a way that might be understood to mean sin does not matter. God forgives sin by the way of the Cross.

That, of course, involves the Incarnation. Salvation depends on what God has done in Christ. The writer to the Hebrews insists that Jesus was made lower than the angels in order that he might taste death for every one of us (Heb. 2:9). He goes on to emphasize the importance of Christ’s being one with those for whom he died (Heb. 2:11–15). He took human nature, not that of an angel (v. 16). But, of course, the Godhead of Christ was involved too, as we see from the way Paul intertwines the thoughts of the Godhead and the manhood (Phil. 2:5–11; Col. 1:19–20).

Our salvation is due to none less than God. We must never forget that. And it is due to the fact that the Son of God genuinely became man. We must never forget that, either. Only by holding both truths can we accurately understand the work of the Cross.

Theories Of Atonement

View the human predicament as you will, it was in the Cross that New Testament writers saw deliverance. But the New Testament never tells us just how the Cross accomplishes this. Consequently, the church through the centuries has not come to one mind on the matter. That does not mean that any way of looking at the Cross is acceptable: some views are so faulty they lead to an impoverished or even perverted Christianity. It is important not only that we see the Cross as central, but that we understand how it is central.

Historical theories about the way the Cross saves tend to fall under three heads: those that see the Cross as victory, those that see its effect on us as the important thing (the subjective view of the Atonement), and those that see it as in some sense a satisfaction for sin.

The idea of the Cross as victory was understood in the early centuries as a ransom paid to Satan. Sinners rightly belonged to the Evil One, and on the cross God handed his Son over to Satan as a ransom for sinners in hell. Satan was happy to accept, but on Easter Day he found he could not hold Christ, who burst the bonds of hell and rose triumphant. The Fathers sometimes used grotesque imagery as they tried to express this truth, and their theory fell into disuse. But there is a profound truth here. Christ did win the victory, and the triumph of the Resurrection is an important part of our understanding of salvation.

That the Cross does something to us (subjective atonement) is also important. This understanding often stresses Christ’s example. The Cross shows us how we ought to live and how we ought to accept suffering, even suffering unjustly inflicted. Or it may be said that when we look at the Cross we see what sin did to the spotless Son of God. This moves us to repent and turn away from the sort of thing that put Christ on the cross. Or it may be put in terms of love. At the Cross we see how greatly God loves, and we are moved to love him in return.

There is no serious dispute about either the victory of the Cross or its subjective effect. Both of these theories are significant. But the New Testament says the Cross does more, that it is somehow a satisfaction for sin.

The “Rightness” Of Salvation

The satisfaction view of the Atonement was first formulated as a coherent theory in the Middle Ages by Anselm. He saw sin as an insult to the honor of God. He made a distinction between the insult of a private person (who may be ready to forgive an insult or an injury done to him) and a public person (who must consider the integrity of his office).

A king in his private capacity may be ready to overlook an offense, but because the state has been offended as well as the person, satisfaction must be made. God is sovereign over all things, and when his majesty is insulted by our sin proper, satisfaction must be made. Anselm went on to argue that the damage done was so great that no one but God could make satisfaction. Yet since the offense had been committed by man, no one but man could make satisfaction. Anselm concluded that it was necessary for God to become man if salvation were to be achieved.

The Reformers took much the same position, except they kept closer to Scripture and spoke of God’s broken law rather than his offended honor. Broken law (no different from offended honor) meant a heavy penalty, and Christ bore that penalty in our place.

Such a view is currently out of favor. We are often told it makes law, not love, the ruling fact in God’s treatment of his creatures. But this is simply shallow thinking. In fact, love and some kind of law go together, or we do not really have love. How, apart from law, are we to rescue love from caprice? How do we know that the love we see today will not be replaced by hatred tomorrow? Surely it is only because there is something of law about the way love works.

We should also beware of confusing love with sentimentality. There is much more of the latter commodity in the modern world. Genuine love is concerned for the very best for the loved ones, not for their immediate and temporary satisfaction. That will mean sometimes taking the hard way of insisting upon discipline and even punishment.

What the New Testament writers are saying is that God saves us in a way that is right as well as powerful. God does not, so to speak, wave a hand and say, “The moral law is unimportant. Sin does not matter. I love people and therefore their sins need not be dealt with.”

The Cross is evidence that, on the contrary, God insisted that sins be dealt with. Christ died to put away our sins. We may or may not be able to see precisely how the death of Christ upheld God’s law in dealing with our sins, but that does not give us license to shut our eyes to the New Testament’s frequent use of legal categories to describe our salvation. Justification is an important category, and its legal force should not be overlooked.

That Christ in some way stood in our place and was our substitute when he died is clear in many places in Scripture. It appears early when Jesus accepts John’s baptism, a baptism that numbered him with sinners (Matt. 3:15) and that points forward to the death he would die for them. Most commentators agree that the Gospels see Jesus as the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, one who suffers in the place of others.

Jesus himself said he would be “a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), with the word for (anti) meaning in the place of; it is a substitutionary word. And what else are we to make of the agony in Gethsemane and of the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)? Many lesser people have faced death calmly, and it is impossible to hold that Jesus’ distress was occasioned by the fear of death. It was not death as such that was the problem, but the kind of death he would die, a death in which he would be forsaken by the Father, a death in which he took the place of sinners.

John records for us the cynical words of Caiaphas, “that one man should die for the people” (John 11:50). He sees these words as a genuine (if unwitting) prophecy that Jesus would die “not for the nation only, to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52). Paul speaks of Jesus as having been made “a curse” for us (Gal. 3:13) and tells us that he who knew no sin, God “made sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21). He says “one has died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5:14).

No Other Way

Was the Cross necessary? Was there no other way of salvation? The deepest thinkers among mankind have always thought that real forgiveness is possible only when due regard is paid to the moral law. C. A. Dinsmore examined such diverse writings as those of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, Hawthorne, and Tennyson, and came to the conclusion that “It is an axiom in life and in religious thought that there is no reconciliation without satisfaction.” Should we not see this as something God has implanted deep down in the human heart? Faced with a revolting crime, even the most careless among us are apt to say, “That deserves to be punished!”

While the New Testament writers do not say this in quite the same way, they emphasize the moral law and insist that Christ has brought about salvation in accordance with what is right. Christ stood in our place and endured what we should have endured. There are other ways of looking at salvation, as we have said. But we must never overlook the fact that sinners have broken the law of God.

It is the witness of the New Testament that Christ saves us in a way that takes that law into consideration. And there is never the slightest indication that anything other than Christ’s atoning work can deal with the problem of the evil that is so much a part of the human situation.

Leon Morris is the former principal of Ridley College, Melbourne, Australia. His many books include The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Eerdmans) and New Testament Theology (Zondervan).

The Profound Effects of Christ’s Death

The New Testament only makes sense when we understand the meaning of the Cross. And to see how thoroughly this theme pervades the New Testament, we can consider several words used by its writers to communicate the gospel.

Redemption. Originally, redemption referred to the release of prisoners of war. A ransom was paid, and the prisoners were set free. It came to be used to describe the release of slaves (by payment of a price), and among the Jews as release from a sentence of death (again by paying a price, as in Exod. 21:28–30). Sinners are slaves to sin (John 8:34); they are under sentence of death (Rom. 6:23). This way of looking at the Cross sees it as the payment of the price that brings us liberty. It tells us there was a cost to salvation and that now we are free, with the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Propitiation. This word means the turning away of anger, usually by the offering of a gift. The Bible is very clear on the fact that God’s wrath is exercised toward all evil (Ps. 7:11; Col. 3:6)—sinners face a dismal future. But Christ’s death has turned away God’s wrath and freed sinners from a dreadful fate (Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 4:10). These days people do not like the idea of the wrath of God, and most modern translations have milder terms, such as expiation or atoning sacrifice. But this is not the meaning of the original Greek. The King James Version correctly renders propitiation. Whether we retain that translation or use another, we must safeguard the truth that the terrible wrath of God, which is exercised toward all evil, is no longer exercised toward those in Christ.
Reconciliation. Reconciliation is a homely word for making up after a quarrel. This is done by taking away the cause of the quarrel; unless this is done, there may be an uneasy truce—but there can be no real reconciliation. In the hostility between God and sinners (Rom. 5:10), the root cause, sin, was put away by the death of Christ, and thus the way was clear for reconciliation. Much the same is the expression “making peace” (Eph. 2:15); indeed, so closely is Christ involved in the process that he can be said to be “our peace” (Eph. 2:14).
Covenant. A word that mattered very much to first century Jews was covenant, for they saw themselves as the unique covenant people of God. There are many covenants in the Old Testament, including those God made with Abraham (Gen. 17:1–2, 9–14), and with the people of Israel (Exod. 24:1–8). Unfortunately, the people persistently broke the covenant by their sin, and in time God, through the prophet Jeremiah, promised a new covenant. The new covenant would be inward (for God would write his law on their hearts) and would rest on the basis of the divine forgiveness (Jer. 31:31–34). When Jesus spoke of his blood as inaugurating the new covenant (Luke 22:20), he was saying in effect that a whole new way of approaching God would be opened up by his death. He was saying that the church, not physical Israel, was the true covenant people of God.
Justification. Justification was a legal concept. It means that in the settlement of legal disputes the judges were to “justify” those in the right and “condemn the wicked” (Deut. 25:1). Paul makes extensive use of this imagery. He sees sinners as facing condemnation when they stand before God. But he also sees God as taking action in the person of his Son, whereby all legal claims on those sinners who are in Christ are fully met by his death. There is no further claim. They can go free.