We Need a Substitute

For substitutionary atonement theory.

Actually, let's get rid of the word theory first. Because the use of the term atonement theory by theologians is extraordinarily misleading. A theory is a description of the rules governing interactions in nature. One result of a theory, if it is a theory at all, is that it makes predictions about how objects and people will behave in certain circumstances. 

So, for example, Isaac Newton's theory of gravity specified the way that objects having the property of mass would interact with each other (they would each exert an attractive force proportional to their mass.) It was readily testable by observing objects from apples to planets and seeing how they were attracted to one another. And it was thus enormously successful.

Theories of the atonement appear like theories in that they describe the rules governing God's relationship with humans. They glean these rules from interpretations of scripture related to both the character of God the death and resurrection of God's Son on the cross. However, unlike real theories, they make no observable or measurable predictions about how God's relationship with humans have and will play out after the resurrection of Christ. 

Instead each atonement theory posits that some (or all) humans will have eternal life after a final judgment. But: 1. they all predict the same thing, so there is no way (even if we waited for the final judgment) to tell which theory is true. And 2. in any case salvation isn't an observable phenomena. 

In short these are not theories, they are interpretations of scripture that seek to explain how the cross of Christ makes a difference. And they seek to do so in language that is intelligible within particular cultural understandings of God's nature and the human problem. They are contextualizations of the message of the gospel.

The problem we face in Christian witness today is that one such interpretation and explanation (substitutionary atonement) came to dominate the Christian cultures of northern Europe from the early medieval period onward. These cultures in turn provided one basis for European (so-called Western) civilization. In doing so the concept of a substitutionary atonement was normalized as an essential feature of Christianity. It moved from being a contextually useful interpretation of the Cross in one particular setting to being a litmus test for authentic Christianity, and hence another tool to engage in attacks on Christian rivals. 

With the advent of modernity defense of the substitutionary atonement became increasingly strident. 

The culture emerging from the Enlightenment rejected, as fundamentally unjust, the concept of substitution: that one life could be substituted for another in satisfying the demands or retributive justice. Indeed the concept of retributive justice, of Divine vengeance, became increasingly untenable. Justice came to be understood as restorative and rehabilitative (not least under Christian influence!) 

As a result a concept that was widely accepted in pre-Christian Northern European cultures and which was thus drawn into Christian culture, that it served justice to substitute one person for another to pay the price for a crime, came to be seen as barbaric. The idea that vengeance satisfied the demands of justice came to be seen as barbaric. In what modern court could a brother, or a child, or a parent be sentenced to pay the penalty for the crime of a relative? In what modern court is justice served by causing pain and suffering equal that that supposedly caused by the crime? 

But some Christians had been raised on the idea that substitutionary atonement was the single fundamentally Christian understanding of the cross. They came to see it as a necessary feature of a Christian faith resisting modernity. To be a Christian, anti-modernist Evangelicals asserted, one had to believe in miracles, contra-factual accounts of creation, unprovable assertions about human history, metaphysically dubious creeds, and that God's holiness and Divine justice demanded vengeance in the form of blood sacrifice. The last has proven a bridge too far for a growing number of Christians and an insurmountable hurtle for non-believers. 

Which is too bad, because it is totally unnecessary. As Gustaf Aulén showed in his Christus Victor, there have always been other, and more contextually relevant, interpretations of the Cross and Resurrection. And as Timothy Gorringe has shown in God's Just Vengeance, the application of ideas of atonement based on satisfying a holy God's demand for vengeance has actually embedded violence in both our society and the penal system. 

Modern people can understand what it means to have an unpaid and un-payable debt. We can understand the generosity of those who have sometimes paid our debts. We can understand the sacrifice of bearing the suffering of others in one's self. We can understand the need for forgiveness and the restoration of intimacy, and the mercy of those who forgive and receive. We can understand how love can transform us into new persons. So we can understand in these and other ways the God who came to pay our debts, bear our suffering, and forgive our rejection of the Divine through his death and resurrection. 

It is long past time for Christians to recognize that an interpretation of the cross that was intelligible for pre-Christian Germanic peoples no longer makes sense in our time. And worse, it perpetuates injustice and violence. We need to return to our scriptures and seek, among the many ways in which Christ's death and resurrection are explained by the apostles, those which most resonate in our culture today, and thus allow our contemporaries to not only hear the good news, but for ourselves to be good news for the world.