Atonement Theories & Anger, Part 6: Why Penal Substitution Encourages Traumatized People to Fight and Flee
Mako A. Nagasawa
Insecure Attachment and Trauma
Babies instinctually know to look at another person’s face. They lock eyes. When a mother or father looks into their baby’s face, and smiles, that baby smiles back. The baby’s smile originates from the limbic system[1] – meaning, it is not processed through the prefrontal cortex. It is simply a direct reflex showing the baby’s happiness. Smiling may also express more than just happiness. Smiles could communicate curiosity, anticipation, etc. Probably because infants don’t have motor control over their arms and legs, the face is what communicates their inner movements, and smiles especially so.[2]
Even more mysteriously, though, babies apparently “time” their smiles to make their moms smile back at them.[3] To the baby, connection through the face reinforces love and attachment. A baby feels loved and secure at seeing the face of Mom, Dad, or a known caregiver, or hearing their voices, or feeling their touch. Even blind babies grin when they hear the familiar voice of their loving adults, or feel their touch. There are videos of nearly-blind young children who are given strong corrective glasses. When a baby sees Mom for the first time clearly, and connects voice to face, that baby’s smile can melt your heart.
From the moment we are born, we are meant to develop secure attachments to stable parents or caregivers[4]: Adults who spend time smiling into our faces when we are infants, nourishing us, and holding and patting us build healthy attachments. It has a physiological impact. It impacts our brains, nervous, digestive, and immune systems. From them, we learn to trust others, and learn all kinds of cues about how to regulate our own emotions. From that “home base,” we venture out to form new friendships. Face time at home helps us face others with composure, courage, and openness.[5]
What happens to us if we do not have those “face to face” encounters? What if we have not had the chance to develop meaningful attachments in general? If children have parents or adult caregivers who are unstable, whether from internal or external causes (e.g. death in the family, illness, war), they can develop insecure attachments. This manifests itself in a variety of ways: emotional clinginess, bodily aches and pains, excessive desire to control their bodily experiences, sensitivity to touch, and emotional anxiety.
When we are caregivers to children who have not grown up with healthy attachments, showing anger will probably set them off into fight or flight. Stern verbal warnings may not work. In order to build healthy relationships with children and young people with attachment trauma, you have hide or swallow your anger when you feel disrespected most of the time. Sometimes, your own anger will be a trigger for a child or young person.
One book designed for teachers, foster parents, and other caregivers that I found helpful for relating to certain children advises the following. I will add my own comments in brackets. On a human level, as a friend, neighbor, mentor, teacher, foster parent, and church elder, I cannot underscore how counterintuitive this was for me at first, which is why I inserted my commentary directly into the quotation. Then I will draw out the implications for how I think people with insecure attachment will think and feel about God:
“When working with children who struggled with attachment problems, avoid asking them why they misbehave were saying that they should know better. Rather, when you are aware of inappropriate behavior or a breach of expectations, try saying “I see you need help with ____.” It could be sharing, dividing up the snacks, following rules, speaking respectfully to peers, not kicking your chair, etc. Instead of giving warnings [which I would have normally done, because I grew up not feeling anxiety about whether my parents loved me or not], help the child to comply or stop the activity. Warnings and second chances are not helpful for these children [which mystified me at first]; they often experience these as inconsistent and unreliable adult behaviors [and often view it as fighting them, anyway]. When there is a disruption, you can say to the child “I see you aren't ready to” do the activity. Use a natural [or intrinsic, not extrinsic] consequence, i.e. “Since it took longer than 5 minutes for you to zip up your pants (brush your teeth, pick up your shoes, etc.), we've run out of time for a story.” Then, follow through without argument or becoming emotional [which is hard to do!]. This helps the child realize the interconnectedness of relationships, the larger world’s expectations, and the need to comply with rules and limits in order to benefit and contribute. To the uninformed such a response may seem overly strict or rigid [and at times, lax and lacking in serious consequences to drill home the point that I’m in charge and my feelings matter, because the child does not yet have the capacity, perspective, and trust to properly handle my feelings]. However, keep in mind that due to profound underlying mistrust and misjudgment of other’s motives, the child will want to control every aspect of relationships (and people in general); therefore, it is best to react as if the child hasn't yet learned how to respond in appropriate ways to normal, everyday, interpersonal activity. A child diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder often displays misguided beliefs that she can use threats, noncompliance, and defiance [or constant negotiation, pleading, etc.] as weapons to maintain control and to prevent being hurt, even in situations that are inherently benign.”[6]
Some people are emotionally reactive to such a degree that for many practical purposes, anger and anxiety are involuntary and disproportionate. They are also fine-tuned to any statements about God using relational distance, or being angry, and what that might mean for God and for them. I recommend readers to allow not only attachment theory, but neuroscience[7] and body trauma insights[8] to help us understand and appreciate this.
My point here is to suggest how attachment disorders impact people’s relationship to God, and how Penal Substitution exacerbates the problem of anger in these contexts. What happens in the hearts and minds of people with attachment disorders when they are presented with the anger of God in the framework of PSA?
The Cost of “Preaching the PSA Gospel to Yourself”
When I believed in PSA, I became interested in why Jesus didn’t endure pain longer on the cross. Yes, he did hang on the cross for six hours, but why not more? I became interested in whether Roman crucifixion was the “most painful” way to die. I compared crucifixion to another cruel Roman method of torture: being fried in scalding oil in a human-sized frying pan. And when Jesus supposedly experienced “the anger of God the Father” while on the cross or when he died, what was that anger like? Was it like feeling broken up with? Did it feel like the sinking weight of total rejection in his chest? Was it like being humiliated by your parents’ public ridicule, or negligent absence? Did it feel like hearing curses howling in his ears, while his cheeks burned with shame? Was it like depression? Did it feel like staring into a dark void, wishing he could end his own consciousness but instead having it stretched out to infinity with no hope? I wondered how God the Father could pour out infinite wrath on Jesus in a finite amount of time.
Why did these questions come into my mind? Because the logic of PSA pushes us into those kinds of questions. PSA advocates are likely to make matters worse for people with trauma because of what they call the “passive obedience of Christ.” Jesus’ “passive obedience,” they say, was to absorb the suffering that the Father demanded from us, because the Father willed that Jesus suffer it instead. In essence, the Father inflicted trauma on Jesus as a necessary part of PSA. That leads people to ask questions about what trauma Jesus passively absorbed, and what part of it counted towards satisfying the Father’s anger.
In PSA, Jesus’ bodily and emotional trauma on the cross shows us something about God the Father. As one popular worship song by Stuart Townsend says, “The Father turns his face away”[9] from Jesus. In PSA, Jesus’ trauma was required by some aspect of God’s character, and reflects what God would impose on people more generally. PSA advocates call that aspect “divine retributive justice,” or “holiness,” or a characteristic that encapsulates both moral expectations and the “absolute need” to punish deviance. We must logically conclude, then, that God desires to inflict trauma to compensate that aspect of His character that is offended by human sinful actions. If we are speaking with theological precision, the word “satisfy” is vital. How is God “satisfied”? If God was expecting obedience, but received disobedience instead, then He must be “satisfied” by human suffering – if not ours, then Jesus’. “Satisfaction theory” is a core definition of PSA. Altering that basic idea – like how Hugo Grotius expressed his governmental theory of atonement – may be worthy of consideration, but constitutes another atonement theory, and may or may not escape the concern I am raising here. Be that as it may, PSA and PSA-adjacent views lead their advocates and observers to become unnecessarily interested in the details of Jesus’ pain and trauma, and perhaps unnecessarily fixated there.
PSA advocates insist that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity must frame this exchange between the Father and Son, and I am happy to grant that framework. I reject with them the accusation that PSA constitutes “divine child abuse.” For the Son’s will and the Father’s will were perfectly aligned, and the “exchange” happened inside, not outside, the Trinity. Even so, however, the “aligning of wills” “inside the Trinity” does not resolve the problem I am describing here. Because all PSA advocates retain that aspect of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity that the incarnate Son, the second person of the Trinity, has a locus of personal experience and perception specific to his human self.
When I started leading a small group Bible study, and giving messages from up front, the Father’s anger on Jesus was the framing, indirect, “motivational tool” to get people to follow Jesus. I concluded from various PSA authors – who said this directly or indirectly – to interpret other people as fundamentally not inclined to follow Jesus. What would inspire gratitude and stir up motivation and produce the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work of conviction? “The passive obedience of Christ” positioned against the infinite, retributive anger of God the Father. To appreciate the former, you had to feel the latter. Since Christian believers are not supposed to directly feel the retributive anger of God the Father, we can only feel it indirectly. We contemplate the suffering of people in hell. Or we contemplate the suffering of Jesus at the cross. It was the practical and emotional application of the Augustinian doctrines of total depravity and prevenient grace which are shared by Lutherans, Calvinists, and Arminians. The only way to overcome other people’s resistance to God was to preach Penal Substitutionary Atonement. But does this re-traumatize already traumatized people?
If people with trauma and attachment disorders are confronted with Christians who believe that the strongest possible conversions and most reliable motivation for discipleship requires that they understand God’s anger at them, for their personal guilt, what happens? While some fear and fall in line, some fight, some flee, and some freeze.
Responses to PSA: Those Who Fight and Those Who Flee
Here is how some people fight and/or flee Penal Substitutionary Atonement. Methodist minister and theologian Roberta Bondi is an example of someone who fought PSA and fled it. In her memoir, she recounts her early impressions of God in a PSA framework. Her great-uncle would regularly pray, “Oh Lord, you know we are all sinners who deserve to die, but you love us and you sent Jesus, your son, to die a terrible death for us instead” (italics hers).[10] This focus on deserving terrible things was and is typical of PSA-informed piety:
“Everything I had heard in church told me that my heavenly Father was a parent even stricter than mine. As a parent, he loved us very much, but in the matter of his power and authority, his anger was more dangerously volatile than that of my human father. Although God loved us, by our sin we had enraged God so much that punishment wasn’t enough. Somebody had to die for it. Jesus was that somebody.”[11]
After her parents divorced, the experience of “sacrifice” took on poignant meaning for Bondi, because of what was generally expected of white women in her generation, and what her mother endured in particular. She says:
“The years of my adolescence were difficult years for us all, but they were made unbearable to me by my awareness of the special hardship of my mother’s life. Not only did she wrestle daily with her own devouring grief and anger; as a proud woman for whom the care of her family had always been primary, she had to suffer the fear and judgmentalism of the fifties toward divorced women. But this was only part of it. Without an education and no job experience since her marriage thirteen years earlier, she was also left at the mercy of a world that wouldn’t pay her a living wage for her “women’s work” as a secretary. Later, when I turned fifteen and was allowed to work at Grant’s, I learned that, as hard as Mama’s life was, it was not nearly as hard as the lives of many other women with children or elderly parents to support on their solitary salaries…
“What I knew was that Mother’s life was hard in a way it never would have been if she had not had us children. It was because of us that she had to work so hard.
“In the face of all my mother’s sacrifices I was full only of an overwhelming sense of unworthiness and obligation I could never meet. I could not bear to feel my mother’s suffering. I was the cause of her hurt. I ought to be able to make it up to her by being who she wanted me to be, but I couldn’t. I still hadn’t learned not to want things [which was what white American society expected of women in the 1950s, because women, as wives, sacrificed, and husbands, benefited], and now, when we had no money, it really mattered.
“I knew I was unworthy of my mother’s sacrifices, and the shame and guilt that I carried because of what she was suffering on behalf of my sorry self left me helpless. The whole situation filled me day and night with sullen rage. I did not want to be sacrificed for; I did not want my life in the place of my mother’s. I did not want my mother’s loneliness and anxiety and exhaustion. And most of all I did not want the whole burden of the pressure to be worthy of all my mother’s love and pain.
“Now, I was being told that because of my sin, Jesus had actually gone through with it and died. How on earth could this be good news? I could never survive that cosmic burden of guilt and gratitude and obligation. No matter how many prayer meetings I went to, no matter how much I repented or how many times I asked Jesus to come into my life as my personal Lord and Savior, it never worked; I just couldn’t believe.”[12]
The young Roberta tasted her mother’s sacrifice and what it cost. This was emotionally complicated to the point of being a serious mental health problem. She loved her mother and did not want her to suffer. Being the beneficiary of her mother’s pain gave her gratitude without joy. She felt “sullen rage” that her mother had to suffer this way. Instead of feeling liberated, she felt the unremitting “burden of the pressure to be worthy.” Bondi’s self-loathing intensified. She appreciated her mother even while she pitied her and desired to not become like her. That pull towards and push away from her mother led to a “feedback loop” which led to even more negative feelings about herself.
Not surprisingly, when the young Roberta Bondi considered Jesus’ sacrifice, she felt gratitude without joy, an unremitting “burden” that was now elevated to the cosmic level. Bondi implies that, to the extent that she actually did love Jesus, the more she actually felt a “sullen rage” over why he had to suffer, because of the emotional similarity between her mother’s suffering and Jesus’ suffering. She felt a self-loathing and awareness of her own sin, to be sure. But she also felt that if God the Father was such a cosmic perfectionist that, ultimately, he was the one who made Jesus suffer, knowing him was not “good news.”
Which is not to say that Bondi turned away from Jesus and Christian faith entirely. But she simply could not accept that the crucifixion of Jesus had this particular meaning. She studied theology and church history at Oxford University. Then she made a discovery that freed her heart from this burden:
“It was also then in the great library of Oxford that I first read more widely in the ancient theology of early Eastern Christian writers such as Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, and from them my heart began to receive hints of a new way of thinking about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.”[13]
In other words, in the end, Bondi did not flee Jesus. She fled Penal Substitutionary Atonement. And she rediscovered Jesus in the writings of the early church. Bondi writes:
“Indeed, in the equation “sin + love + sacrifice = salvation” the early church redefined all the terms. They did not see sin as our hopeless badness. Sin was about being blinded and wounded by our own and society’s patterns of seeing, feeling, and acting so that we could not love one another or God. God did not love us sternly in spite of our unworthiness, nor was God or Jesus victimized by God’s love. In fact, God was not even interested in questions of worthiness or unworthiness. For some inexplicable reason, God actually liked us, and Jesus suffered not because suffering in itself is a necessary proof of love. Rather, Jesus chose to suffer in order that the hold death had on us would be loosened and the image of God be restored in us so that we could once again learn how to love.”[14]
Bondi describes a God who is no longer concerned about compensating Himself because of how “unworthy” we are. For God to not even be interested about “questions of worthiness or unworthiness” was a dramatic shift, because it meant that sin and death are their own punishment, and God was not the one paying out the consequences on us. Instead, God is concerned – truly and utterly concerned – about our well-being – everyone’s well-being – in connection with Him. This healed her view of God, encouraged her in her own journey of personal healing, and fueled her passion to contribute to the healing of others.
Now imagine if Roberta Bondi’s mother not only suffered hardship as a divorced white woman in the sexist 1950s America, but also complained constantly to young Roberta that the reason why she suffered so much was young Roberta herself. That would be emotional abuse. How would that Roberta Bondi have heard the God described by Penal Substitution? As much as a parent’s silent suffering is a weighty inheritance for children, being told that would be an order of magnitude worse. To the extent that I understand Bondi’s portrayal of her mother, I am so thankful that her mom did not speak this way.
But I do know people who have been told that by their parent(s): the person whose father was a pastor and only brought out the Bible to punish; the person who was abused by multiple foster parents and then spiritually abused by the cultish International Church of Christ; and many others. I know of only one way to talk about God with those people, which brings me to more recent comments about Penal Substitution and emotional abusers made by N.T. Wright.
N.T. Wright describes how some people who are abused have this fight and flight response to Penal Substitution. Wright is important not only a New Testament scholar and former Anglican bishop of Durham, but also because he has served in parish ministry for decades. He maintains a passion for helping people and churches everywhere. Although he does not write or speak very often about his pastoral work, it is obviously important and informs his scholarship. On one recent occasion in 2017, Wright said:
“To hear some people talk about the gospel, you’d think that John 3:16 would have said, “God so hated the world, that He killed His only Son.” It doesn’t. It says, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” Sometimes people say, “Well, that picture’s important – wrath and sin and hell and all the rest of it – and it’s because God loves us.” But simply adding the word “love” onto the end of that story can be, actually, even worse. It is what abusers do when they say, “I love you so much.” So people have seen that in our generation and have reacted against it.”[15]
PSA advocates will agree with Wright that God’s love motivated the Son’s work of absorbing divine anger. However, Wright is not talking about nominal agreement with the bare words of John 3:16. Wright insists that there are larger frameworks on offer which affect how we interpret John 3:16. Wright is concerned that in PSA, God’s wrath and anger are in fact directed at human personhood, so that God would be “satisfied” by human suffering. That is why Wright cautions against “simply adding the word “love” onto the end of that story” about God’s motivations and character. Abusers also do that.
Abusers are not concerned about how other people genuinely are. Abusers are only concerned with how they themselves feel. That includes narcissistic parents who make their children feel guilt and shame for simply existing and making the parent feel inconvenienced. If an abuser plays the “what do you deserve” card and says, “What you deserve is a terrible life, so just be glad for what I do for you,” then the abuser is accustoming the abused to the abuse. This is why the notion of God “satisfying Himself” in PSA is problematic for anyone who has ever wrestled with those feelings. If God can say, “What you deserve is the full force of my anger in a punitive, eternal hell, so you can just accept whatever explanations or things I give you with gratitude,” then what kind of God is that, exactly? Should we feel guilty for wanting more, or hoping that God is better than that? Some people who have suffered prolonged relational and emotional abuse can sniff it out from a distance. Recall from post 4, I quoted PSA advocate John Stott:
“To be sure, ‘self-satisfaction’ in fallen human beings is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon, whether it refers to the satisfying of our instincts and passions or to our complacency. Since we are tainted and twisted with selfishness, to say ‘I must satisfy myself’ lacks self-control, while to say ‘I am satisfied with myself’ lacks humility. But there is no lack of self-control or humility in God, since he is perfect in all his thoughts and desires. To say that he must ‘satisfy himself’ means that he must be himself and act according to the perfection of his nature or ‘name.’ The necessity of ‘satisfaction’ for God, therefore, is not found in anything outside himself but within himself, in his own immutable character. It is an inherent or intrinsic necessity… What is within Yahweh [i.e. divine anger] must be expressed; and what is expressed must be completely ‘spent’ or ‘satisfied’.”[16]
Stott believed that he could free God from the negative implications of saying that God must “satisfy Himself.” I don’t believe Stott succeeded. If “self-satisfaction” is God’s goal in atonement, then God places His own well-being – His own “feelings,” as it were – above our well-being. See post 5 for that discussion.
Wright says that he has seen people fight, wrestle, struggle, and eventually flee:
“If you take a half-truth and make it the whole truth, it becomes an untruth. And that’s a very serious thing. Because the vision of God that people have is distorted. And so many people are actually put off the gospel – some of them having tried to believe it for many years. And finally, they just know that sounds like a bullying God. If there is a God, He can’t really be like that.”[17]
These people recognize that a God who is “self-satisfying” is “a bullying God.” And this is before we get into the debate between Calvinists and Arminians about whether Jesus died for some or everyone. A God who is “self-satisfying” stands upstream from that whole debate, and is still distasteful.
Not coincidentally, this is why N.T. Wright articulates the atonement in language almost identical to how I do it in MSA, following the early church leaders like Irenaeus and Athanasius. This constitutes N.T. Wright’s own flight from PSA. When Wright comments, in his book, The Day the Revolution Began, on Romans 8:3 – 4, he says:
“Paul does not say that God punished Jesus. He declares that God punished Sin in the flesh of Jesus.”[18]
Wright correctly notes in Romans 8:3 – 4 that Paul discusses “sin” not simply as particular bad actions we do, but as a power. That is why Wright capitalizes sin as Sin. In the flow of Romans, we sin because Sin is in us, and, since Sin is a power, we are under Sin in that sense. So at the cross, God was not punishing Jesus but punishing the Sin that took humanity captive. Correspondingly, Wright studiously avoids “satisfaction” as a motivation for God. Instead, Wright grounds his explanation of atonement within the positive vocation of partnership to which God called Israel, which Jesus then inherited and fulfilled himself. God called Israel to be another instantiation of Adam and Eve, and in some sense, to undo the sin of Adam and Eve on behalf of the world.[19] Israel’s vocation highlights the importance of human active obedience, in contrast with, and in comparison to, a passive obedience of simply suffering to “satisfy” God’s anger.
What about death? Didn’t God impose death on humans for our sinful acts, out of His anger? Isn’t that what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23)? Doesn’t the PSA-informed evangelistic tool The Romans Road say so? And doesn’t death mean that God “takes sin seriously” so we, too, must “take sin seriously,” and PSA is the supposedly the only way to “take sin seriously”? Doesn’t God angrily pay out “death” – a terrible death – for our sinful actions? Not at all.
Paul in Romans 6:15 – 23 says that when we sin in action, sin – not God – pays out “wages” – or results – for our obedience to it. Those wages are “death,” which occurs on many levels of our existence. Paul compares obeying sin with obeying Jesus, who rewards us with “life” and “righteousness” for obeying him. Using “bondslavery” as a metaphor to highlight the principle of serving one master or another, Paul says that our alternatives are “either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience [to Christ/God] resulting in righteousness” (Romans 6:16).
Consistent with that, N.T. Wright insists that we interpret “death” as the intrinsic, not extrinsic, consequence of sin. That is, since humans have deviated from our God-given vocation to bear life and bring forth life, we produce death in ourselves and through our hands.[20] Not only that, Israel’s vocation was not to simply suffer exile and death in a passive way, as if that “satisfied” God in His purpose for Israel. Israel’s vocation was to struggle for faithfulness and life, actively, even if they would ultimately be “defeated.” In the process, they would diagnose and document the problem with human nature (Romans 7:14 – 25) and hope all the more for God to do for them through the Messiah what they could not do for themselves (Romans 8:3 – 4).[21]
The bottom line is this: When the New Testament writers tell us that “God in Christ saves us from sin and death” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:16 – 28), they are not using that phrase as a synonym for “God saves us from Himself.” Quite the opposite. They mean, “God in Christ saves us from what we’ve done to ourselves.”
Explanation: Comparing PSA and MSA on Jesus’ Suffering
When I read Athanasius’ On the Incarnation and other early Christian writers, I noticed that they placed atoning value on Jesus’ death, not his experience of all the pain and suffering surrounding his death. For example:
“Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father… This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.”[22]
Irenaeus of Lyons (130 – 202 AD), discusses how the Son had to become human, so that as a human he could do for us what we could not: defeat the corruption of sin within human nature through death. Irenaeus says:
“Man… had sin in himself… For it behooved Him [Jesus] who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man; who had been drawn by sin into bondage, but was held by death, so that sin should be destroyed by man, and man should go forth from death. [Therefore], what He did appear [i.e. human], that He also was: God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man; and therefore His works are true.”[23]
Irenaeus and Athanasius helped me to see the New Testament more clearly, which is what Roberta Bondi experienced, too. Jesus and the apostles spoke of Jesus’ death, not his suffering, as fundamental to the atonement. Here are a sampling of passages:
“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:28)
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:23 – 24)
“Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3 – 4)
“One died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.” (2 Corinthians 5:14 – 15)
One could ask, “But isn’t death inherently suffering?” Yes, but when anyone dies, we distinguish between the act of dying and the pain surrounding it circumstantially. My wife’s mother passed peacefully in her sleep, for example. With Jesus in particular, we need to add another question: What part of his experience accomplished the atonement?
Remarkably, the New Testament indicates that the sheer amount of pain Jesus endured, on the way to dying, and while dying, was circumstantial. In other words, I can affirm as historically true that Jesus endured sleepless exhaustion, the striking of his face, the plucking of his beard, being flogged at his arrest and trial, having his head scraped by the crown of thorns, being pierced by the brutal Roman nails, and hanging for six hours and nearly suffocating under his own weight as crucifixion victims did. Yet it was not all this physical pain that Jesus endured which atoned for sin, but simply his death.
In fact, and even more tellingly, Jesus said that his death did not relate to his supposed “passivity.” It was voluntary and therefore active:
“For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father.” (John 10:17 – 18)
By saying that he alone had authority over his own bodily life, Jesus denied that other people could simply kill him. Could Jesus have survived drowning, a sword through his neck, or a bullet through his brain? Perhaps, though I’m not inclined to think so. Probably, Jesus was speaking expansively about knowing in prayer through the Spirit how to avoid life-threatening situations. Whichever way we go on that, though, we must affirm that Jesus chose to expire immediately after saying, “Father, into Your hands I commit my Spirit” (Luke 23:46; quoting Psalm 31:5). Jesus decided which breath would be his last. And in that sense, he chose the historical circumstances of his last breath.
Could Jesus have decided to die elsewhere, and in another way? Perhaps. Jesus could have chosen to die painlessly in a physical sense. If the chief priests had believed in him, then admitted him into the holy of holies in the Jerusalem temple, and then he went outside into a domain patrolled by the Romans, by way of the scapegoat, bearing the corruption of sin already in his own human nature to finally vanquish it by dying peacefully.
Regardless, Jesus’ statement about his own physical death, and his enactment of it, focus our attention on his active, not passive, obedience. For instance, Jesus could have called legions of angels from the Father in order to not die so painfully (Matthew 26:53), and this statement once again shows Jesus’ active restraint, like the wilderness temptation (Matthew 4:1 – 11), not his passivity. What about the Gethsemane story (Matthew 26:36 – 46)? Does that story not show that Jesus was afraid of something happening to him, which he had to passively endure? No: Gethsemane shows us that Jesus was emotionally troubled because he loved his own human body with an appropriate godly love, as he surely loved other people and would not wish them to die, either. The key question about Gethsemane is not what pain was Jesus going to endure, or how much of it, but what is the character of the one doing the dying?
Together, John’s inclusion of Jesus’ statement, and Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’ last breath call into question whether there was a “passive obedience of Jesus.” In MSA, Jesus’ obedience is completely active. Jesus only did what he saw the Father doing (John 5:19 – 27). Just as the Father was never passive, Jesus was never passive.
To anyone raised in a PSA-soaked church culture, the New Testament witness is remarkable because the Father did not afflict Jesus with suffering before his death; we as humans did. Roberta Bondi’s great-uncle prayed regularly that we deserve a “terrible death” at the hands of an angry God, but that is not true. Nor is it true that Jesus had to die a terrible death at the hands of an angry Father. T.F. Torrance says that while Jesus participated in our mortality, our struggle against the corruption of sin, and the exilic experience of Israel as part of the consequences for the fall in a general sense. But Torrance maintains pointedly:
“We cannot think of Christ being punished by the Father in our place and the New Testament nowhere uses the word kolazo, punish, of the relation between the Father and the Son.”[24]
It is not even certain that hanging “on a tree,” that is, on the wooden cross (Galatians 3:13; Deuteronomy 21:22 – 23) was intrinsically essential to the atonement. The wooden cross appears to help us interpret the death of Jesus because it is connected to other ideas. Deuteronomy 21:22 – 23 itself envisioned a “rebellious son” being killed before his body was hung “on a tree,” arguably to signify that he had, like Cain, so corrupted his own human nature that the land should not, ideally, receive his dead body. Various villainous men in the Old Testament were hung on trees, to poetically evoke Deuteronomy 21:22 – 23, but note that the tree itself was not necessarily the means of execution, but always the means of signification: Pharaoh’s chief baker was killed by hanging on a tree (Genesis 40:22); five Canaanite kings killed by Joshua beforehand were hung on trees afterwards (Joshua 10:26); Absalom hung from a tree by his hair, alive, and in narrative mockery (2 Samuel 18:9 – 10); Haman was killed by being hung on the gallows he had constructed for Mordecai (Esther 7:9 – 10). These were all “rebellious sons” in one sense or another, especially Absalom. Jesus probably decided to use the wooden tree-cross to strategically evoke both a Jewish touchpoint and a Roman touchpoint for the purpose of irony: he was considered by the Jewish leaders to be a disobedient son of Israel, even though he was in truth the only faithful son of God the Father; he was considered by the Roman Empire to be a failed rival to Caesar, even though he was in truth the rightful king of the world on the way to his enthronement.
While it is, of course, true that Paul in Galatians 3:13 referred to Jesus using Deuteronomy 21:22 – 23, the question is whether Paul’s argument required him to do so. Paul’s examination of the “blessing” of the Spirit through the promise to Abraham (Galatians 3:1 – 5) did not require him to explain the opposite, the “curse,” in this particular way. After all, in Romans 7 – 8, Paul shows that he is perfectly able to discuss Jesus setting us free from the “curse” portion of the Sinai covenant (“we have been released from the Law” in 7:6), by referring to Jesus’ death, without referring to the “tree” or the “cross” at all, since human nature itself has been under the most real of curses because of its fallenness and mortality (Romans 7:14 – 25), and Jesus assumed it to use death to cleanse and complete it in himself (Romans 8:1 – 4; cf. 6:6).
Justin Martyr (100 – 165 AD), an evangelist in the early second century, who set up a Christian school in Rome to teach, notes that there were Jewish polemics against Jesus being the Messiah on the basis of his crucifixion and its connection to Deuteronomy 21:22 – 23. Justin Martyr writes a lengthy exploration of their position and the Christian response.[25] This suggests that Paul was already debating that point in Galatians, or anticipating it. Notably, Justin Martyr goes beyond Paul, saying that Moses’ outstretched hands (Exodus 17:8 – 13) were a prophetic indicator of Jesus’ outstretched hands, and the bronze serpent on Moses’ staff was also a prophetic signifier of Jesus on the cross (John 3:14 – 15), but Jesus did not necessarily need to die “on a tree” for the atonement to be effective. For Justin says, “For the whole human race will be found to be under a curse,” because of the fall into corruption as evidenced by sinful actions.[26] So Jesus’ hanging and death on the cross helped to mark him out. He had already entered into the symbolism of the curse that human beings brought upon themselves simply by sharing in fallen human nature, and entered into the exile of Israel simply by being handed over to Gentile powers. The Jewish-tree-Roman-cross was an important signifier and an interpretive symbol, and Jesus certainly did choose it, but it was not the intrinsic means by which Jesus accomplished the cleansing and completion of his human nature in his death and resurrection.
Conclusion
Medical Substitutionary Atonement therefore does at least five important things simultaneously. First, MSA refocuses God’s anger onto the corruption of sin within our human nature, as opposed to our human personhood per se. Second, it frees us from regarding God the Father as the one who inflicts trauma upon people – whether Jesus or us – in his anger. Third, MSA stops us from regarding God’s “self-satisfaction” as a divine motivation; God’s loving motivation is to fix and fulfill us with our partnership. Fourth, MSA helps people love and adore Jesus without necessarily taking the emotional pathway of feeling personal guilt; Jesus is healing the primal wound which was inflicted upon us without our consent, which comes before anything we do. Fifth, MSA maintains human responsibility through the human vocation of partnership with God in all things, including participating in God’s anger against the corruption of sin in each one us, by joining Jesus, partnering with God’s anger, and resisting the temptation to sin.
In the next blog post on anger, I will explore how PSA encourages traumatized people to freeze in their spiritual development.
[1] Mahak Arora, “Smiling Back– The Best Gift for Your Baby,” First Cry Parenting, October 31, 2018; https://parenting.firstcry.com/articles/smiling-back-the-best-gift-for-your-baby/.
[2] Nicholas Day, “Why Do Babies Smile?” Slate, July 1, 2010; https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/07/why-do-babies-smile.html.
[3] University of California - San Diego. “Babies Time Their Smiles to Make Their Moms Smile in Return: Toddler-Like Robot Allows Researchers to Confirm Their Findings,” ScienceDaily, September 23, 2015; www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150923151404.htm refers to Paul Ruvolo, Daniel Messinger, Javier Movellan. “Infants Time Their Smiles to Make Their Moms Smile,” PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (9): e0136492 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0136492.
[4] Lauren E. Maltby and Todd W. Hall, “Trauma, Attachment, and Spirituality: A Case Study,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 2012, Volume 40, No. 4, 302 – 312 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lauren_Maltby/publication/277596197_Trauma_Attachment_and_Spirituality_A_Case_Study/links/556e034608aefcb861db96ae/Trauma-Attachment-and-Spirituality-A-Case-Study.pdf.
[5] Christian Jarrett, “Clues to Your Personality Appeared Before You Could Talk,” BBC, September 9, 2016; https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160907-clues-to-your-personality-appeared-before-you-could-talk. See also Leo Widrich, “The Science of Smiling: A Guide to The World’s Most Powerful Gesture,” Buffer, April 9, 2013; https://buffer.com/resources/the-science-of-smiling-a-guide-to-humans-most-powerful-gesture/.
[6] Arthur Becker-Weidman and Deborah Shell, “Practical Tips for Working with Children Diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder: Teachers, Case Managers, Youth Workers, Wrap-Around Staff,” edited by Arthur Becker-Weidman and Deborah Shell, Creating Capacity for Attachment: Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy of Trauma-Attachment Disorders (Oklahoma City, OK: Wood ‘N’ Barnes Publishing and Distribution, 2005), p.207
[7] Katie Jo Ramsay, “God Made Our Brains to Need Others,” Christianity Today, October 16, 2017; https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/october-web-only/god-made-our-brains-to-need-others.html. See also Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships (
[8] Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017). Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2014).
[9] Stuart Townsend, How Deep the Father’s Love for Us (2010): “How deep the Father's love for us, how vast beyond all measure that He should give His only Son to make a wretch His treasure. How great the pain of searing loss. The Father turns His face away as wounds which mar the Chosen One bring many sons to glory.”
[10] Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.117.
[11] Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.117.
[12] Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), chapter 4, “Out of the Green-Tiled Bathroom. See in particular page 126 – 127, 128, 130, 132.
[13] Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.133.
[14] Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.135.
[15] N.T. Wright, “Why I Reject the Idea of an Angry God,” Premier Christianity, February 22, 2017; https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fK-g9cYer0A&feature=youtu.be. Wright was introducing his book The Day the Revolution Began (2016). On pages 28 – 49, Wright says that indeed God gets angry, but against sin and wickedness, not against human persons per se.
[16] John Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p.124, 126.
[17] N.T. Wright, “Why I Reject the Idea of an Angry God,” Premier Christianity, February 22, 2017; https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fK-g9cYer0A&feature=youtu.be.
[18] N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York, NY: Harper One, 2016), p.287.
[19] N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York, NY: Harper One, 2016), p.73 – 82, 102 – 103. See also his early exegetical work in N.T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), p.18 – 40.
[20] N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York, NY: Harper One, 2016), p.103.
[21] Incidentally, Wright avoids the use of the term “human nature” because he believes using ontological categories is characteristic of a type of Hellenism that did not exist in the minds of the human authors of Scripture themselves. I think he is mistaken on this particular point, because I think “human nature” is a biblical concept, even though it is not called by this term. Human nature is the internal part of the joint project between God and human beings in creation. Humans were meant to fulfill and complete our human nature by our faithfulness to God, just as we were meant to fulfill and complete all creation. Instead, we damaged human nature by corrupting it, and deviated from God’s intended journey for human nature. This reluctance to designate the ontological causes Wright to prefer verbs over nouns. That is, where the third and fourth century Christians speak of humans having a human nature, where Jesus corrects and completes human nature, Wright speaks about human vocation from creation, where Jesus restores the proper worship of God as compared to the erroneous worship of idols. But when explaining why the redeemed in eternity will not sin, and why the unredeemed will not repent, Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), p.181 – 183 relies on an explanation involving human nature: human nature will no longer be changeable through our choices, and will instead reflect the settled direction of our choices. So in the end, to affirm what Scripture appears to imply, if not explicitly say, about eternity and humanity, Wright must rely on the deeper architecture of human nature. Wright says this:
“These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch. My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God’s good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but beyond pity. There is no concentration camp in the beautiful countryside, no torture chamber in the palace of delight. Those creatures that still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense, can no longer excite in themselves or others the natural sympathy some feel even for the hardened criminal.”
[22] Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 2:9
[23] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.18.7, emphasis mine; see also 2.12.4; 3.18.1; 5.1.3
[24] T.F. Torrance, Atonement (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), p.72.
[25] Conversations with Dr. Bruce Beck, in his class, Saint Paul: His Life, Letters, and Legacy at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary in the Fall of 2018, and subsequently. See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 32, 89 – 96.
[26] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 95. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 4.2.8 also sees symmetry between the disobedience of Adam and Eve at the primordial tree, and the obedience of Jesus at the tree of the cross. The underlying logic in the bishop’s mind is a parallel between Adam and Jesus where Jesus returned what Adam stole. Adam took from the tree in self-centered disobedience in a bid for ‘life’ apart from God, whereas Jesus came to a tree in martyrdom to give up his life for the Father and for us. Adam came to the tree and received the serpent’s ‘venom’ into human nature, whereas Jesus returned sinful human flesh to a tree, healing the ‘old wound’ of the serpent. The idea of ‘venom’ being in human nature is early. Jesus spoke of serpents and scorpions as figures for Satan and the demons in Luke 10:19. Serpents and scorpions are dangerous not because of their size or appetite, but their venom: they can inject something into us which harms and/or kills us slowly. This usage by Jesus reflects the imagery of the serpent in the Pentateuch: in the garden (Gen.3:1 – 7); in Egypt as the power of Pharaoh (Ex.7:8 – 13); in the wilderness as the lingering ‘venom’ of Pharaoh drawing the Israelites back to Egypt (Num.21:4 – 7), and indicating the primal venom of the ancient serpent was coursing through the veins of the Israelites, and all humanity.