Did God Murder Jesus? (Part 1 on the Meaning of Christ's Death)
How C.S. Lewis & the Church Fathers Lead Us Toward a More Mystical, Sacramental, & Covenantal Model of the Atonement
As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, most people do not need to have a theoretical understanding of how Christ’s death works but that it does work. Christ’s medicine does its work on us even if we do not have a theoretical understanding of how all of the ingredients work together to make the healing occur.
But skepticism is on the rise. Many people today think Christ’s death is irrelevant to their daily life and even push it aside. Many young moms might even rate a class of yoga, a session of therapy, or a glass of wine as more impactful on their spiritual life than what happened on Calvary 2,000 years ago. Other people may go further and view the message of Christianity as non-sensical or even immoral. “Why would God torturing and murdering an innocent person (or Himself) fix humanity’s problem with evil?”
Is the central message of Christianity ultimately irrelevant, non-sensical, and immoral? In this series of articles concerning Christ’s atonement or saving work on the Cross, I will address these contemporary concerns to show that Christ’s redemptive acts make more sense of our place in the universe than less so. Let us begin with the latter of the 3.
IS THE CROSS IMMORAL?
Some people have caricatured the Gospel message like this:
A. God is full of rage, wrath, and hatred toward humanity for rebelling against Him.
B. God will pour out all of his rage, wrath, and hatred on human beings and torture them forever in hell the moment they die to satisfy His justice.
C. Jesus steps in to take our place and all of our impure sins are transferred to him making him unclean in the eyes of God.
D. God turns His Face from Jesus and pours out all of his wrath, rage, and even hatred upon him instead of us.
E. Those who believe in this event will go to Heaven and those who are not convinced of it will still have God’s rage to contend with the rest of their eternal existence in Hell.
This type of narrating of the Gospel is why many of my peers no longer believe in Christianity. They believe this version of the story renders God immoral or even demonic. They cannot stomach the idea of Hell where God tortures humans like bugs in a jar forever nor can they understand why God torturing Jesus in our place improves the moral situation. In this telling, God the Father looks more like the Dark Lord Sauron than the courageous and gracious Gandalf. C.S. Lewis expressed the same concerns about this depiction of God as an atheist before his conversion. Here are two comments by him:
(Writing as an Atheist) “Strange as it may appear I am quite content to live without believing in a bogey [aka God] who is prepared to torture me forever… a spirit [God] more cruel and barbarous than any man.”1
(Writing after his conversion) “Now before I became a Christian, I was under the impression that the first thing had to believe was one particular theory… God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead… On the face of it that is a very silly theory. (A page before he also admits he thought of the theory as immoral). If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I could see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense.”2
Thankfully, Lewis eventually befriended J.R.R. Tolkien (author of the Lord of the Rings), and he played a key role in helping Lewis reimagine the central narrative of Christianity. (We will discuss Lewis’ multi-faceted views of the atonement more in this series).
A Popular Preacher Problem
In the United States, we have some fairly popular preachers who seem to deepen the moral problem of the atonement in the minds of unbelievers (and some believers). Although I am thankful for the influence of their respective ministries in spreading the Gospel, I find their understanding of Christ’s death at times to be deeply problematic. Billy Graham, known as America’s greatest evangelist, even dabbled in some of these problems when he writes,
“They point to the fact that when Jesus died on the cross, all our sins—without exception—were transferred to Him. He was without sin, for He was God in human flesh. But as He died all our sins were placed on Him… in that moment He was banished from the presence of God, for sin cannot exist in God’s presence. His cry speaks of this truth; He endured the separation from God that you and I deserve."3
What are the problems with Graham’s words? Although Christ did bear our curse (i.e. death) for us, no where in Scripture does it say that Christ was banished or exiled from the presence of God at the crucifixion. And how could He? JESUS IS GOD. For that view to work, the hypostatic union in the Incarnation was temporarily suspended (no one thinks that) or the Nestorian heresy is true which speaks of ‘two sons’ or ‘two persons’ united in Jesus. God the Son would have to be separated from the human son for Jesus to be cast out from God’s presence. I don’t think Billy Graham wanted to preach the Nestorian version of the Gospel!
***Of course, Billy had good intentions and led tens of thousands of people to a deeper commitment to Christ. If evangelists today hope to be half the evangelist Billy Graham was then we must become more rooted in Scripture and the Fathers and avoid some of the pitfalls we see today in many of the popular versions of Penal Substitution.
Another great evangelist and preacher today is Dr. John Piper who writes:
“This was a real forsakenness… The judgment was to have God the Father pour out his wrath, and instead of pouring it out on us, he pours it out on him. That necessarily involves a kind of abandonment… We cannot begin to fathom all that this would mean between the Father and the Son. To be forsaken by God is the cry of the damned, and he was damned for us. So he used these words because there was a real forsakenness."4
Piper falls for the same pitfalls of depicting Christ as damned by the Father when he pours out His wrath upon Him. Here is the problem: For the doctrine of the Trinity to exist, the Father and Son must always be in a relationship of love. The Father always take delight in the Son. Everything the Father has he gives to the Son. Therefore, it is impossible for the Father to actively damn the Son or show displeasure toward Him. The language of Scripture simply never goes there.
Piper’s preaching is quite tame compared to his reformed friend, Dr. R.C. Sproul, who writes,
“If there ever was an obscenity that violates contemporary community standards, it was Jesus on the cross. After he became the scapegoat and the Father had imputed to him every sin of every one of his people, the most intense, dense concentration of evil ever experienced on this planet was exhibited. Jesus was the ultimate obscenity. So what happened? God is too holy to look at sin. He could not bear to look at that concentrated monumental condensation of evil, so he averted his eyes from his Son. The light of his countenance was turned off. All blessedness was removed from his Son, whom he loved, and in its place was the full measure of the divine curse… Jesus had no impurity. So obviously he had some experience of the beauty of the Father until that moment that our sin was placed upon him, and the One who was pure was pure no more, and God cursed him. It was as if there was a cry from heaven, as if Jesus heard the words "God damn you," because that's what it meant to be cursed and under the anathema of the Father. I don't understand that, but I know that it's true.”5
Dr. Wayne Grudem basically summarizes Sproul’s view of the Cross in one line:
“Jesus became the object of [God’s] intense hatred.”
This type language by Sproul and Grudem may preach well among reformed audiences, but it ultimately detracts from the glory of God and what actually took place at the Cross. It also confuses those who are seeking to embrace the Gospel message. How can an intelligent person explore the unfathomable beauty of the Trinity and the Incarnation and then conclude that Jesus became the ‘ultimate obscenity’ and ‘the most intense, dense concentration of evil’? (Even John Calvin rejected the idea that the Father could be angry with the Son in Institutes 16.11). One must ask if Sproul is even narrating the same Gospel story that we see in Scripture and the Fathers.
Dr. Thomas McCall sees the problem here and states succinctly:
“Jesus Christ is nowhere said in Scripture to be the ‘virtual incarnation of evil’ or ‘the very embodiment of all that sin is.’ To the contrary, he is the incarnation of goodness—he is holiness incarnate as truly human. There is no biblical evidence that the Father-Son communion was somehow ruptured on that day. Nowhere is it written that the Father was angry with the Son. Nowhere can we read that God ‘curses him to the pit of hell.’ Nowhere is it written that Jesus absorbs the wrath of God by taking the exact punishment that we deserve. In no passage is there any indication that God’s wrath is ‘infinitely intense’ as it is poured out on Jesus. Such statements may pack a lot of rhetorical punch, but they go far beyond what Scripture teaches.”6
From my perspective, God the Father did not directly punish, torture, murder, or pour out his wrath upon the Son, and so there is no major ‘moral problem’ to deal with concerning the atonement of Christ. Instead, the atonement was God’s way of healing us and repenting for us. Through His death, he closed out the Old Covenant so that with His resurrection, he could establish a new one. He drank the curse in order to neuter the curse. He died in order to ‘disable’ death and blow up the equation of death. He crushed death through death.
Did the Father hide His Face from the Son?
It is invasive in Protestant preaching that the Father turned His Face from the Son as ‘every one of our sins was placed upon Him.’ I heard it a thousand times in my baptist pew growing up. Because God is holy, He could not be in the presence of sin, and therefore he cannot be in the presence of Jesus at this moment. But isn’t that statement a bit non-sensical since Jesus is God and was always holy? Did the holiness of the Son tolerate the presence of sin when the Father could not? Thankfully, St. Athanasius of Alexandria (4th Century) never goes there and states that the darkness of Calvary was loaded with the opposite meaning. Instead of it revealing the ‘forsakenness’ and ‘damnation of the Son,’ it revealed His glory and identity to the world. While the human race executed the Lord of Creation, Creation responded by revealing the identity of its Master to the human race! St. Athanasius writes,
“For He made even the creation break silence: in that even at His death, marvellous to relate, or rather at His actual trophy over death — the Cross I mean — all creation was confessing that He that was made manifest and suffered in the body was not man merely, but the Son of God and Saviour of all. For the sun hid His face, and the earth quaked and the mountains were rent: all men were awed. Now these things showed that Christ on the Cross was God, while all creation was His slave, and was witnessing by its fear to its Master's presence.”
This is a theophany or a glorious of appearance of the Lord that we so often see in the Old Testament! If we recall God’s appearance to the Israelites on Mount Sinai, he comes to them wrapped in clouds of darkness and lightning as the mount shook with His power and might.
While St. Athanasius gives us a most compelling and beautiful vision, Dr. Thomas Schreiner, a large proponent of the wrath-oriented views of Piper and Sproul, concludes that this type of language refers to the judgement of God. He is not wrong, but he is incorrect to say that these signs point to the judgement of God upon Christ as ‘the damned one.’ Instead, this judgement is upon those who rejected Him and who will never believe. The earthquake, the darkening of the sun, and the tearing of the Temple veil was a prelude to the judgement that Christ had predicted concerning the final destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. These signs are also a prelude to Christ’s Second Coming when the One whom we have pierced appears in the sky, and many who despise Him will flee from His glorious presence.
Did the Father pour out His Wrath upon the Son?
First, let’s discuss the nature of God’s wrath, anger, and judgement. The founder of monasticism, St Anthony the Great (3rd century), writes in the Philokalia:
“God is good, and passionless and immutable. If a man accepts it as right and true that God does not change, yet is puzzled how (being such) He rejoices at the good, turns away from the wicked, is angered with sinners and shows them mercy when they repent, the answer to this is that God does not rejoice and is not angered, for joy and anger are passions. It is absurd to think that the Deity could be helped or harmed by human deeds. God is good and does only good; He harms no one and remains always the same. As to ourselves, when we are good we enter into communion with God through our likeness to Him, and when we become evil, we cut ourselves off from God, through our unlikeness to Him. When we live virtuously we are God’s own, and when we become wicked, we fall away from Him. This does not mean that He is angry with us, but that our sins do not let God shine in us, and that they link us with the tormentors-the demons. If later, through prayers and good deeds, we obtain absolution of our sins, it does not mean that we have propitiated God and changed Him, but that through such actions and our turning to God we have cured the evil in ourselves and have again become able to partake of God’s goodness. Thus, to say that God turns away from the wicked is the same as to say that the sun hides itself from those who lose their sight.” (Texts on Saintly Life 150)
In this description, the experience of God’s wrath can only exist for disordered people, because it is their opposition toward Him that creates the friction. Since Jesus was not disordered and sinful, he has no way of experiencing God’s wrath. Wrath and grace are not created objects that are simply transferrable, but instead are intrinsically related to the interaction of persons.
In other words, if my car is driving the wrong direction on a one-way street, my car may experience the wrath of other cars colliding into mine. My direction is opposed to their direction. I am disordered (going the wrong way), while they are rightly ordered. But if my car turns around by God’s grace and drives in harmony with the other cars, we will all arrive to our destination. God is always rightly disposed and ordered, but it is our decision on whether we experience either His wrath or grace. If we remain obstinate toward His intervention to change our direction, we will inevitably collide into Him and experience His rightly ordered anger and justice. (Also think of the film ‘Taken’ when the sex trafficker encounter the ‘wrath’ and ‘anger’ of Liam Neeson who is on a rescue mission to save his kidnapped daughter).
In their commentary on Romans, Dr. Scott Hahn and Dr. Curtis Mitch appear to agree with St. Anthony the Great in describing the nature of God’s Wrath:
“Technically, the notion of divine wrath is an anthropopathism, a metaphorical description of God as though he had human passions and emotions. In reality, God is eternally unchanging; he does not lose his cool or boil over with rage as you and I sometimes do. Hence, when Scripture speaks of divine indignation or anger, it means God’s fixed response to sin--sin being completely at odds with his justice and holiness. The Bible routinely employs such humanlike descriptions for the purpose of making the infinite mystery of God more understandable to finite minds.” Footnote 11: St. Thomas Aquinas holds that ‘wrath’ is metaphorical when attributed to God and interprets to signify the divine ‘punishment’ that comes upon the sinner (Summa Theologiae 1.19.11).7
How then did the Son experience our punishment for sin?
Since Jesus was rightly ordered, he could not experience a ‘penal substitution’ theory where wrath is being poured out upon Him in our place. However, this does not mean that we have to reject all forms of ‘penal substitution.’ Christ did bear our punishment in our place in some sense, but we must be careful in how we speak of it. We want to be Biblical and Patristic, not immoral or non-sensical. Notice how the church father, St. John Chrysostom (the greatest preacher of the ancient church!), sounds a bit different than the preaching of R.C. Sproul:
“How was the battle destroyed and how was the wrath lifted?…
[Notice Chrysostom says ‘lifted’ meaning God’s wrath ‘ceased’ toward us; he never says it was ‘poured out’ upon the Son].
And what did this mediator do? The work of a mediator! For it is as if two had been turned away from each other and since they were not willing to talk together, another one comes, and, placing himself in the middle, loosens the hostility of each of the two. And this is also what Christ did. God was angry with us, for we were turning away from God, our human-loving Master. Christ, by putting himself in the middle, exchanged and reconciled each nature to the other… Christ, Paul says, ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.’ You have seen how he received from on high the punishment that had to be borne!…
[Chrysostom describes how Christ bore the curse (i.e. ‘fallen nature, suffering, death’) of Adam and the old covenant so that we could share in the blessings of the New Adam and New Covenant. In this sense, we can speak of substitutionary atonement and a divine exchange… covenantal curses for covenantal blessings.]
Receiving, as it were, the first fruits of our nature, he bore it up in this way to the Master. And indeed just as it happens in the case of plains that bear ears of corn, it happens here. Somebody takes a few ears, and making a little handful, offers it to God, so that because of the little amount, he blesses the whole land. Christ also did this: through that one flesh and ‘first-fruits’ he made to be blessed our [whole] race . . . Therefore he offered up the first-fruits of our nature to the Father, and the Father was so amazed with the offering, both because of the worthiness of the One who offered and because of the blamelessness of the offering, that he received the gift with his hands that belonged, as it were, to the same household as the Son. And he placed the Offering close to himself, saying, ‘Sit at my right hand!’ (In Ascensionem D.N.J.C., Migne PG 50, 444–46)[25]
[Notice how Chrysostom maintains the goodness of the Father-Son relationship. The Father was “so amazed with the offering” of the Son upon the Cross that he sanctified the human race through Him. Jesus’ offering of Himself united with human nature was actually the greatest act of worship ever performed in human history toward God.]
The renowned Biblical and evangelical scholar, F.F. Bruce, believed that Scripture did not show the Father directly pouring His wrath upon the Son on our behalf. Instead, Jesus bore ‘the curse’ of our sin and rebellion by receiving a human nature that can suffer and die. In other words, he bore the fruit of sin which is death.
"But what of the old argument—that the crucified one died under the curse of the law? Was it no longer valid? It was still valid, but received a new significance. By raising Jesus from the dead, God had reversed that curse. But why should Jesus have undergone the curse in the first place? Sooner rather than later, Paul must have reached the conclusion set out in Galatians 3:10–13, that Jesus submitted to the death of the cross in order to take on himself the curse which the law pronounced on all who failed to keep it completely (Deut. 27:26). The form of this argument—interpreting two texts in the light of a common term which they shared (here, the term ‘cursed’ or ‘accursed’ in Deut. 21:23 and 27:26, lxx)—was such as Paul was quite familiar with in the rabbinical schools, but no rabbi had ever formulated the substance of this bold argument: that, by voluntarily undergoing the curse of the law in one form, the Messiah should neutralize that curse on behalf of those who had incurred it in another form. But in this way the doctrine of a crucified Messiah, which had once been such a stone of stumbling to Paul, became the corner-stone of his faith and preaching."8
Bruce says that Christ neutralized the power of the curse. C.S. Lewis sounds very similar in Mere Christianity:
“We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.”
In contrast to Dr. R.C. Sproul, St. Augustine is much more careful in guarding the goodness of God the Father and the unity of the Trinity in the plan of salvation:
“Was it indeed so, that when God the Father was angry with us, He saw the death of His Son for us, and was appeased towards us? Was then His Son already so far appeased towards us, that He even deigned to die for us; while the Father was still so far angry, that except His Son died for us, He would not be appeased? … Pray, unless the Father had been already appeased, would He have delivered up His own Son, not sparing Him for us? Does not this opinion seem to be as it were contrary to that? In the one, the Son dies for us, and the Father is reconciled to us by His death; in the other, as though the Father first loved us, He Himself on our account does not spare the Son, He Himself for us delivers Him up to death. But I see that the Father loved us also before, not only before the Son died for us, but before He created the world; the apostle himself being witness, who says, “According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world.” Nor was the Son delivered up for us as it were unwillingly, the Father Himself not sparing Him; for it is said also concerning Him, Who loved me, and delivered up Himself for me. Therefore together both the Father and the Son, and the Spirit of both, work all things equally and harmoniously; yet we are justified in the blood of Christ, and we are reconciled to God by the death of His Son.”9
So is the atonement ‘immoral’ as some have said? I hope this first article has helped to disarm such as accusations. To summarize:
God’s wrath against mankind is not one big toddler tantrum, but rather, it is His justice seeking to renovate creation back to its original order and goodness. Those who stand in His way way to heal and renew the human race will experience His power and might against them as well as everlasting exile.
God did not pour out His wrath upon Jesus nor did He need to torture an innocent man in order to maintain ‘his justice.’ Instead, God became a human to bear the curse of the covenant (fallen nature, suffering, & death) in order to neutralize the curse and reverse it, because this was the most fitting way to save the human race and heal our human nature (among many other reasons & benefits as we shall see!)
In the next few articles, we will survey all of the atonement models among the church fathers (and C.S. Lewis) in order to make deeper sense of Christ’s death in connection to our salvation such as the Recapitulation theory, Christus Victor or Ransom theory, Vicarious Satisfaction theory, and Covenantal Representation or Penal Substitution theory (which I call ‘Curse-Bearer Substitution’ in contrast to ‘Wrath-Bearer Substitution).
Gilbert, Douglas and Kilby, Clyde. C.S. Lewis: Images of His Word. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1973. Pg. 17
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. Chapter 4: The Perfect Penitent, Page 57-59
https://billygraham.org/story/did-god-abandon-jesus-on-the-cross-billy-graham-answers/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=bgea-content&SOURCE=BY000BEBF&fbclid=IwAR1Ai139zb8vuOCctUo_u9mDkbQQCZDMJNPgkd-gS_ouE3Epsey1y1D2np8
https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/my-god-my-god-why-have-you-forsaken-me-didnt-jesus-already-know
https://www.ligonier.org/posts/forsaken-jesus-became-curse.
Note: Compared to Sproul, Timothy Keller is much more careful with his language when he writes, “All his life, because of Jesus' eternal dance with his Father and the Spirit, whenever he turned to the Father, the Spirit flooded him with love... But in the garden of Gethsemane, [Jesus] turns to the Father and all he can see before him is wrath, the abyss, the chasm, the nothingness of the cup. God is the source of all love, all life, all light, all coherence. Therefore exclusion from God is exclusion from the source of all light, all love, all coherence. Jesus began to experience the spiritual, cosmic, infinite disintegration that would happen when he became separated from his Father on the cross. Jesus began to experience merely a foretaste of that, and he staggered.” (King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus, 176, 181). Keller speaks more as if Christ’s human mind is overwhelmed with the nightmare of the human project. Here, he sounds much more like Dr. Eleanore Stump placing emphasis on the psychological nature of Christ’s ‘bearing our sins.’ But still Keller mentions the Father turning away His Face from the Son. You cannot find this interpretation anywhere in Scripture or the Church Fathers. He also speaks of Christ beginning to experience the spiritual disintegration from being separated from Father. This no small problem for a sound doctrine of the Trinity.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/march-web-only/is-wrath-of-god-satisfying-good-friday-cross.html
Hahn and Mitch, Romans: Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, Pg. 13
https://faithlife.com/f-f-bruce/activity