← Doctrine Matters with Kevin DeYoung
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:05]
Kevin DeYoung
Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina. And you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology, be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other. And the hope, Lord willing, is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters. This week on Doctrine Matters, we come to the all important doctrine of the atonement. Now, I trust that all of the doctrines we've been looking at are important. It's true, however, that when we come to the atonement, we are coming to the heart of the Gospel itself. What was Christ accomplishing on the cross? That word, atonement, is a word coined by William Tyndale as he wrote the English bible in the 16th century. At one ment atonement is how estranged parties come together. When we talk about the atonement, we are talking about an aspect of Christ's priestly work. What did Christ do as a priest to offer up his body? He's the high priest, after the order of Melchizedek, a priest who enters the holy of Holies. And he also offers himself as that sacrifice. Christ's work of atonement is, and this will be very important as we quickly walk through in a moment, various atonement theories we want to keep in mind. Christ's work of atonement is primarily objective and only secondarily subjective. That is to say, the purpose of Christ's death on the cross is not first of all to give us personal transformation. Now, there is a wonderful subjective element that comes as a result of the cross. But the purpose of the atonement was to accomplish something objective. Think about the priests. They did not offer sacrifices in order to effect something in the worshiper. They offered sacrifices to do something about sin. So the work of the atonement is objective to be subjectively appropriated by faith. The atonement is based on the active and passive obedience of Christ. Let's just say something about those terms. They're critically important. Those terms, active and passive obedience, are not about different temporal periods of Christ's work, as if he was passive and then active, or active then passive, but rather different aspects of the one work. The distinction is between all that Christ did to Observe the law. That's his active obedience and all that he did in discharging the debts that the law demanded, that's his passive obedience. The motivation for the atonement that Christ affected is not one thing, but many things. Christ's sacrificial death on the cross was motivated by God's love. There's plenty of verses that say that it was also motivated by God's justice and by God's good pleasure. It's important to say at the outset, lest we make any one of those motivations to be chief above all the others, especially to any, eliminate the others. If someone says, well, this was all about the love of God, well, that's true, but it was also God's justice, and it was also according to his good pleasure. Christ's work of atonement is at the heart of the Gospel, and it is the irreducible minimum of the apostolic message of salvation. Think about the Gospels. Three times Jesus predicts his death and resurrection. Each of the four Gospels climax with the Passion, weak in his suffering and his death and his resurrection direction, and in many cases, his appearances. No Biography spends a third to half of its material on the subjects last week. So clearly we are meant to focus on the cross and the empty tomb as the climax not only of Christ's earthly ministry, but redemptive history itself. So with all of that, by way of some introduction, what can we say about the atonement? Often you'll hear the language of theories of the atonement, and I'll use that language because that's typical. But just realize theory sounds like something mysterious or just sort of throw in spaghetti on the wall to see if it sticks. Hey, you know, I got a theory about Bigfoot, I got a theory about UFOs, I got a theory about the Cross. That's not what we mean by theory. We don't mean speculation. We really mean what are different ways in the history of the Church that theologians have understood the nature of the atonement. And as we'll see, these are not mutually exclusive. Some are better than others, some are not strong. And then many of them are simply looking at different facets of the same diamond as it were. So really quickly, let's go through several theories of the atonement. One we can call the recapitulation theory. Theory often first associated with the Church. Father Irenaeus. In this model, Christ lived out all the stages of human life in such a way that his life of obedience compensated for Adam's life of disobedience. So Christ obeys the Father, he reverses the curse in Adam, he sets us free from the tyranny of the devil. Now this is right in all that it affirms, though what's missing, there's nothing really about the satisfaction of divine wrath and about Christ bearing the penalty of sin. But it's true insofar as it goes, he is living out and recapitulating the history as the second Adam. Here's a second view. Ransom to Satan, often first associated with a church father origin. Now this is popular and well attested model of the atonement. Here Christ's death is seen as a ransom to purchase man's freedom. And importantly the atonement is directed by towards Satan who was duped. So he's, he's fooled, he's, he's a fish who takes the bait on the hook and he thinks the cross is his triumph, when actually it is his defeat. And many people will recognize this in the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that the Aslan fools the white witch with his sacrifice, thinking that she has won, when actually it breaks the stone table and it is the great triumph of Aslan. So CS Lewis there in Narnia gives a picture that is really a ransom to Satan Theory of the atonement that Aslan's death is to pay a debt. To whom? To the white witch. The contemporary version is often referred to as Christus victor, meaning Christ is the one who vanquished the powers of hell. Now this is certainly important and maybe sometimes an overlooked aspect of the atonement, that Christ's death is the victory over hell and Satan and his forces. However, the problem here is the theory gives too much power to Satan in making him the object of the payment. Yes, it is a victory over Satan, but the Bible does not describe the sacrifice of Christ on the cross as paying a debt to Satan, as making him the object of the atoning work. A third view is often called the commercial theory with the medieval theologian Anselm. Now his theology of the atonement did represent a major step forward in biblical reflection. According to Anselm, Christ's death brought infinite honor to God and in turn God gave Christ a reward which needing no reward himself, he passed on to man in the form of forgiveness and eternal life. Importantly, Anselm understood that the atonement was directed toward God and that man's main problem was dishonoring God. So this is all to the good. The nature of the transaction is somewhat vague. Christ's death is offered as a tribute rooted in God's honor. Instead of God's justice. But there is this idea of satisfaction which is eminently biblical and will receive further clarification in the history of the Church. A fourth view we can call the moral influence theory, sometimes associated with Abelard, who serves generations later than Anselm. Also in the Middle Ages, this medieval theologian posited that Christ's death showed God's great love, which in turn gave man the impetus to repent and believe. And Abelard's theory, man's main problem is spiritual neediness and the atonement ends up being directed toward man in order to convince him of God's love. A lot of problems with this. It makes us the object of the atonement and it makes Christ's atoning work really voluntary rather than necessity. It's not necessary. According to the logic of divine justice, it's voluntary. It's a way to impress us and move us to repentance and to faith. Fifth view, the example theory. This was put forward by one of the arch heretics during the Reformation era, Socinius or Socinus. According to Faustus Socinus, 16th century Anti Trinitarian heretic that was opposed by every branch of the Church, he said Christ's death was an example of obedience and piety that can inspire man to the same virtues. Now this is not only Pelagian in its conception meaning, it gives man all sorts of power. It doesn't need a supernatural renovation of the heart. It also devalues the deity of Christ. It calls into question the necessity of the incarnation. Man's need here is simply to be inspired. And if that's all that's necessary, why did God have to become man? Why a violent death? Aren't there other inspirational stories in the Bible? So this is really important lest as 21st century people we believe or we encounter people who say, you know, what Christ's death was about is to set us a wonderful example. Now it's true, Christ's death is an example. It is an example of how much God loves us and how to turn the other cheek perhaps, or how to leave room for God's wrath and entrust ourselves to God. But if we say this is really what the atonement is about, well, we are on the same page as the arch heretic of the Reformation. This view by itself the example theory underestimates the plight of sinners and it overestimates our power and it does nothing to account for the holiness and justice of God. Let's just look at two more and here we'll there's there's several we could. But here we'll come closer to the truth with the final. So a sixth one is the governmental theory often associated with the the Protestant natural law theologian and jurist the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, in this understanding of the atonement, the cross demonstrates that the law must be upheld and must be punished. Sin must be punished for breaking the law. Christ's death, however, is not a vicarious sacrifice, but a way for God to uphold his moral governance. That's why it's called the governmental theory. Grotius so emphasized God's rectoral justice, I.e. maintaining moral rectitude to the exclusion of God's retributive justice, that it's inflicting penalties on those who fail to live by that. So just hear that distinction. God's rectoral justice is maintaining moral rectitude in the universe. His retributive justice is to inflict penalties on those who fail in that moral rectitude. Grotius emphasizes the one virtually to the exclusion of the other. And it ends up hard to know upon what basis Christ specifically had to die. Why not someone else? If this is simply a way for God to say, look, I punish sin, I uphold my justice. Why is it necessary for your son? Why is the Incarnation necessary? And then a seventh view, and we'll try to say more about this next week, penal substitution. And this is the view that we find some hints of or foreshadowing of in Anselm. And it's not like it's completely absent from the early church, but we certainly find its clearest articulation in the Reformation. This view emphasized by Calvin, by Luther, but also traces in Justin, Martyr and Tertullian. And it has come to be the dominant understanding among confessional Reformed Christians and almost all evangelicals. In some way, it's at the very definition of what it means to be an evangelical. On this view, Christ's death was a substitutionary sacrifice meant to satisfy the demands of God's justice. So compare this with different theories we've seen. We have these questions running throughout each of them. What is man's problem? To whom is the atonement directed? What exactly does it accomplish? Well, here we see that the problem is depravity, and thus the atonement is directed not toward us, not toward the devil. It is directed toward God as a payment for the law's prescriptive and penal demands. Now, this understanding does not eliminate every other aspect. So we've said the recapitulation view, the ransom to Satan view even some of the example view there's truth to them, but we should conclude that anything else we want to say about the atonement and praise God. There's lots of things we can say about the atonement. They do all cohere and find their unity. In this view of penal substitution, it fully explains the biblical data for the meaning of the cross. The atonement may be more than a substitutionary sacrifice. That's true, there are other things you can say, but it is not less. And none of the other theories make sense without Christ dying in our place to turn away the wrath of God. It's a great quote from John Stott in his classic book the Cross of Christ. He says substitution is not a theory of the atonement, nor is it even an additional image to take its place as an option alongside the others. It is rather the essence of each image and the heart of the atonement itself. End quote. In other words, in penal substitutionary atonement we find hope for sinners, we find the heart of the gospel, and we find the good news, without which all other news regarding the cross is null and void. You've been listening to Doctrine Matters with me, Kevin DeYoung, your host and teacher. If you'd like to learn more about the topics we talked about today, you can check out my book, Daily Doctrine. It's available in print or audio from Crossway.org and you may want to talk to your pastor or a trusted friend who can recommend other good resources. The Doctrine Matters podcast is produced by Crossway, a nonprofit ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the truth of God's word through publishing gospel centered content. To learn more, visit Crossway.org until next week, I'm Kevin DeYoung, and this has been Doctrine Matters. Thanks for joining us.