This week we’re back on Atonement Island, that terrible show where evangelicals go to test their commitment to penal substitution! Here’s a quick recap, a summary, if you will:
At the heart of the Christian religion is the claim that the death of Jesus of Nazareth saves people. Depending on your brand of Christianity, you may have been taught that this means a very specific thing…and ONLY that thing. Most Protestant Christians, and especially evangelicals, follow the logic of penal substitutionary atonement. A big phrase but easy to break down:
Penal = punishment. God’s wrath at human sin required punishment, specifically, death.
Substitutionary = exchange. We were supposed to receive God’s punishment, but Jesus took our place on the cross.
Atonement = at-one-ment. This action makes us one with God because God’s sense of justice over our sin has been satisfied by Jesus.
Most evangelicals have come to believe that this is the ONLY way to understand the death of Jesus, even though Christians didn’t really believe this until it was introduced by Martin Luther and fine tuned by John Calvin in the 1500s, and wildly popularized by John Wesley in the 1700s.
This week, our heroine meets Irenaeus (of Lyons, France, 120-200ish A.D.), the early bishop and martyr who taught one of the earliest atonement theories: Recapitulation. Just two generations away from John the Apostle, Irenaeus connected the faithfulness of Jesus (both in life AND death) to the disobedience of the first human, Adam. If the first Adam fell from grace and brought sin, suffering and death into the world, Christ is then the Last Adam, a recapitulation (or recap), who fully sums up God’s intentions for humanity, thus restoring the image of God in us. Though death took victory over Adam, in Christ, we now take victory over death. It’s a beautiful understanding of atonement, that refuses to disembody the life of Christ from the death of Christ.
Our heroine also meets Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 A.D.), famed for his contributions to both philosophy and theology. Anselm contributed the Satisfaction theory of atonement, which would dominate Catholic understanding of Christ’s death, and morph into Penal Substitution for Protestants a few centuries later. Living in the feudal system of lords and serfs, Anslem compared Christ’s death to the debt a peasant might owe a king. Feudal law required satisfaction, or proper repayment, that grew exponentially as debt was owed to a superior. In other words, if you stole a penny from another serf, you only owed a penny, but you steal a penny from a king, and you owe a hundred dollars. Finite humans suffer an infinite debt to an infinite God, and therefore, we are completely hopeless to satisfy God. Only the God-man, the Christ, could satisfy an infinite debt. Christ had to live a sinless life in order for his death to be sufficient, but as you can see, this theory of atonement is beginning to place all the emphasis on the death of Jesus.
Finally, when our heroine checks in to see how Penal Substitution is doing, she is shocked to find that he has made his bed with John Calvin’s theory of double predestination. While many who hold penal substitution may reject double predestination, the ideas went hand in hand for Calvin. Christ took on the punishment we deserved. God’s wrath would have every human eternally tortured in damnation, and we deserve nothing more. It is a miracle of God’s grace that anyone would be chosen (predestined) to be saved through Christ’s death on the cross. The vast majority of humanity is eternally chosen to be damned, Christ did not die for them. For Calvin, this gives all the glory to God, but for many of the rest of us, this makes God seem like an abusive, arbitrary monster.
I’m sure we’ll come back to Atonement Island someday soon, if for no other reason than it’s fun to write cringey pick-up lines for the church fathers.