Post 1: Why the Father Did Not Turn Against or Away from the Son
John Stott’s The Cross of Christ
In his now-classic book, The Cross of Christ, John R.W. Stott presents a sweeping and impressive defense of penal substitutionary atonement. He gives a thoughtful exposition of Jesus’ ‘cry of dereliction’ from the cross, his quotation of Psalm 22:1, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’[1] Stott considers three other interpretive options before he gives his own.
First, Stott notes, some have suggested that Jesus’ cry was one of disbelief and anger, even despair. Stott rightly rejects this option. It attributes unbelief to Jesus. Interestingly, since this suggestion shares with penal substitution the view that the Father did in fact forsake his Son Jesus, Stott does not explore what it attributes to God the Father.
Second, others have interpreted Jesus’ cry as one of loneliness. In this view, Jesus felt forsaken by God in the sense of not being able to sense his presence, and for some reason, was not able to name God his intimate ‘Father,’ but could only name him more distantly and impersonally as ‘God.’ Stott points out that the problem with this view is that it ignores the original meaning of Psalm 22:1: ‘Yet there seems to be an insuperable difficulty [in that] the words of Psalm 22:1 express an experience of being, and not just feeling, God-forsaken.’[2] Maintaining continuity of the Psalm’s original meaning is important as a criterion of what Jesus meant when he quoted it, which makes it all the more strange that Stott ignores that original meaning when he advocates the penal substitution view. In Psalm 22, David did not believe that God had forsaken him in a vertical, personal sense relating to not being able to sense God’s presence, or experiencing God’s wrath. David was referring to God forsaking him horizontally to menacing foes. David knew that the anointing of God’s Spirit was still upon him, which meant that God was still present to him, and he was still present to God. I will explore this exegetically below.
Third, Stott considers the view that Jesus was uttering a cry of victory, which comes from the possibility that Jesus was invoking the latter half, or perhaps the whole, of the Psalm. Stott considers this to be a clever but far-fetched position, although he doesn’t provide much explanation. I agree with Stott in the sense that even if Jesus was invoking the whole Psalm, laying stress on the latter half of the Psalm at the expense of the former appears to be little more than an attempt at avoiding a perplexing question. However, Stott demonstrates little to no appreciation of biblical intertextuality, which is the use one text makes of another. The Gospel writers establish multiple points of contact between Psalm 22 and Jesus’ crucifixion, which they communicate through both direct quotations and allusions.[3] Perhaps, then, Stott is premature at declaring wholesale intertextual referencing ‘far-fetched.’ Like many cases of biblical intertextuality, Jesus’ quotation of the first verse functioned like an HTML hyperlink, which drew his listeners’ attention to the whole Psalm, not to one verse considered in piecemeal fashion. Once again, we must consider what the Psalm originally meant in the life of David.
Fourth, Stott argues for Jesus’ cry as a cry of real dereliction. He reasons:
‘Jesus had no need to repent of uttering a false cry. Up to this moment, though forsaken by men, he could add, ‘Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me’ (Jn.16:32). In the darkness, however, he was absolutely alone, being now also God-forsaken. As Calvin put it, ‘If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual… Unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been the Redeemer of bodies alone.’ In consequence, ‘he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man.’ So then an actual and dreadful separation took place between the Father and the Son; it was due to our sins and their just reward; and Jesus expressed this horror of great darkness, this God-forsakenness, by quoting the only verse of Scripture which accurately described it, and which he had perfectly fulfilled, namely, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’[4]
Stott’s approach to this passage would affirm that God does abandon and forsake us indeed, through the experience of Jesus himself. While a few people might take comfort by contemplating Jesus on the cross as commiserating with us in our experience of divine forsakenness, it is unclear to me why contemplating such a thing brings any comfort at all. Much to the contrary, my treatment of Psalm 22 on the lips of Jesus confirms that the opposite is true. God does not turn against or away from us in a vertical sense, because ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28) and ‘in him all things hold together’ (Col.1:17), even though we might struggle with how we feel exposed to hostile forces horizontally. And, since our limited perception is actually the problem, the pastoral task is to remind people that God never turns against or away from us, especially through the experience of Jesus himself. Why, then, did Jesus quote Psalm 22:1? What does ‘forsaken me’ mean?
As he quotes John Calvin, Stott provides a footnote acknowledging that there are some difficulties with how Calvin thought.
‘It is true, and somewhat strange, that Calvin (following Luther) believed this to be the explanation of Jesus’ ‘descent into hell’ after his death. What matters most is the fact that he experienced God-forsakenness for us, however, and not precisely when he did so.’[5]
Unfortunately for Stott, the difficulties with Luther and Calvin’s re-reading of Jesus’ ‘descent into hell’ after his death are even more problematic than he lets on – insurmountable, in fact. I will first comment on Calvin’s reading of the tradition of Jesus’ descent to the dead, and then comment on Stott’s reading of Calvin.
Jesus did not descend into hell, since hell proper does not exist yet, and will not exist until Jesus returns to resurrect all the dead (2 Pet.3:7 – 10; Rev.20:7 – 15). Jesus descended into hades, the abode of the souls of the dead which corresponds to the Hebrew conception of sheol, the grave.[6] This belief answers a basic question about the fate of those who died before Jesus came, especially those mentioned – faithful or not – in the Old Testament. From a biblical standpoint, Jesus’ descent is rooted in 1 Peter 3:18 – 20 and 4:6, where Peter discusses the event as a gospel proclamation to those souls,[7] and Ephesians 4:9, which says that Jesus descended to a place ‘under the earth.’ Moreover, the liturgies and beliefs of the church, which precede the composition of 1 Peter and Ephesians, strongly suggest that the church believed in this event from its earliest, apostolic period based on oral tradition handed down from the apostles.[8] The phrase ‘he descended to the dead’ appears in Apostles’ Creed and its precursor creedal statements, found in various early church fathers even before Nicaea 325 AD,[9] clearly modeled after Jesus’ baptismal, trinitarian creed in Matthew 28:19. This phrase explains why ancient, pre-Reformation churches celebrate the liturgy called ‘Holy Saturday,’ also tellingly called ‘Joyous Saturday’ and ‘the Saturday of Light,’ between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, while some Protestant churches are often left wondering what Jesus did on Saturday. This celebration stresses Jesus’ victory over death and the grave by his deliverance of souls from there. The Orthodox and Catholic tradition possess innumerable murals and icons of Christ trampling down the doors to hades and calling forth souls from the grave. One particularly beautiful mural is in Chora Church in Istanbul and is called ‘anastasis’ in Greek, for ‘resurrection.’
Luther and Calvin asserted that the meaning of this event should be changed, without any precedent from exegesis, the history of biblical interpretation, or the church’s liturgical memory. They argued that Jesus descended to the dead not to awaken and deliver the souls therein, but to be tormented even further by God’s retributive punishment in the fires of hell. Much more can be said here, but what I have provided above suffices to call into question Stott’s use of Calvin as an authority on the subject.
To get around these problems while trying to maintain that Jesus suffered a retributive punishment somewhere and somehow, Stott and others assert that Jesus’ human soul suffered the torments of hell while on the cross itself.[10] But Stott must now work at a double remove from Scripture and church history. Nowhere is this view attested in the Gospels themselves, except for Jesus’ use of Psalm 22:1. The belief stands or falls on this text alone.
Continuing, Stott acknowledges that there are a number of ‘theological objections’ to his position and various ‘problems’ associated with it.
‘The theological objections and problems we shall come to later, although we already insist that the God-forsakenness of Jesus on the cross must be balanced with such an equally biblical assertion as ‘God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.’ C.E.B. Cranfield is right to emphasize both the truth that Jesus experienced ‘not merely a felt, but a real, abandonment by his Father’ and ‘the paradox that, while this God-forsakenness was utterly real, the unity of the Blessed Trinity was even then unbroken.’ At this point, however, it is enough to suggest that Jesus had been meditating on Psalm 22, which describes the cruel persecution of an innocent and godly man, as he was meditating on other Psalms which he quoted from the cross; that he quoted verse 1 for the same reason that he quoted every other Scripture, namely that he believed he was fulfilling it; and that his cry was in the form of a question (‘Why…?’), not because he did not know its answer, but only because the Old Testament text itself (which he was quoting) was in that form.’[11]
Here Stott admits that the penal substitution theory defies rational consistency concerning the Father-Son-Spirit relationship. My stress here is on the word consistency. Was Jesus really abandoned by his Father? Yes, Stott says. Was Jesus really not abandoned by his Father? Again, Stott maintains, yes. One wonders whether penal substitution now steps beyond the bounds of rationality itself. To say that Jesus both was and was not abandoned by his Father makes one hesitate to use rationality as a tool for theology, biblical exegesis, or criticizing other belief systems as irrational, if that tool can be so easily turned aside by handwaving over logical contradictions.
In medical substitution, and in the early church fathers, there is no rational inconsistency about the Father’s loving presence with and for the Son. Glancing at the Gospel of John’s theme of the Father-Son relationship gives us a very different understanding of Jesus’ experience on the cross. Jesus defended himself against his opponents by saying that he does all things with the Father in tandem (Jn.5:17 – 21), and even exercises all speech and judgment and authority on behalf of the Father (Jn.5:22 – 30). Jesus declared, ‘Not even the Father judges anyone’ (Jn.5:22a), which would seem to include the Son himself, since Jesus continued, ‘but He has given all judgment to the Son (Jn.5:22b). The Father is revealed in the Upper Room as being in the Son, and the Son being in the Father in an inseparable way (Jn.14:8 – 21; 17:20 – 26), even to the point where the Son glorifies the Father on the cross (Jn.17:1 – 5) and experiences the cross as a moment of self-sanctification (Jn.17:19), which comports well with medical substitution: Jesus’ experience of the Father and holy status by the Spirit are intensified as he finally puts the corruption of sin within his sinful flesh to death (Rom.8:3), judging it on the Father’s behalf and with the Father, thus preserving the Father-Son relation – not to mention healthy exegesis of John’s Gospel – without ambiguity or contradiction, and without setting John against Mark and Matthew. The Father loves the Son (Jn.15:9; 17:23 – 26).
Surprisingly, Stott appears to feel no regret about interrupting and reworking Jesus’ statement in John 16:32. ‘Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.’ This is deeply problematic, because Jesus’ entire point in John 16:32 is to contrast the disciples, who will leave him during his time on the cross, and the Father, who will not. Stott, in effect, must make Jesus retract his statement. Stott must then group the Father in with the disciples on precisely this issue. This is an astonishing move, especially given John’s stress on the Father-Son relationship of mutual abiding throughout his Gospel.
I propose that we revisit this question of Jesus’ cry, using better tools than Stott had, chiefly from the field of biblical intertextuality and literary exegesis, but also a wider set of church fathers on the topic of atonement.[12] In the next few blog posts, I will examine Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22:1 from the cross, and what it means.
[1] John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p.78 – 83
[2] Ibid p.80 – 81
[3] Direct quotation signaled as such: ‘They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’ (John 19:23 – 24 and Psalm 22:18). Implicit allusions: ‘O my God, my soul is in despair’ (Mark 14:34 and Psalm 42:6). ‘They pierced my hands and my feet’ (Mark 15:24 and Psalm 22:16). ‘They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’ (Mark 15:24 and Psalm 22:18). ‘All who see me sneer at me; they separate with the lip, they wag the head, saying, ‘Commit yourself to the LORD; let Him deliver him; let Him rescue him, because He delights in him.’’ (Mark 15:30 – 32 and Psalm 22:7 – 8). ‘My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws’ (Mark 15:36 and Psalm 22:15). ‘I am thirsty’ (John 19:28 and Psalm 22:15).
[4] John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p.81
[5] Ibid p.81
[6] The King James Version’s translation of the Hebrew sheol with the English hell is misleading; conflating the two is incorrect.
[7] I have encountered some who claim Jesus merely mocked the dead (or the angelic powers chained there) without giving them the opportunity for deliverance. But this does a great disservice to Peter’s logic in his letter. Peter parallels the proclamation that happened among the dead (by Jesus) and the proclamation that happens among the living (by Christians). He makes this parallel because he is reminding the suffering Christians that their proclamation must continue. Christ’s suffering led to death, but his death only enhanced his ability to preach, this time to a new audience: the dead! Similarly, the Christians’ suffering could lead to their death as well, but if they die virtuously, their death will further advance their proclamation among the living. Christians fearful of death might have argued that their removal from the world of the living would eliminate their testimony, thus making death a potential weakness in Peter’s argument. Rather, virtuous death strengthens the argument. This is a challenging perspective for the suffering Christian, but a useful one if we ask God for the courage and strength to live in it! For more, see my paper, Christ’s Proclamation to the Dead: A Brief Look at 1 Peter 3:19 in Context, found here: http://newhumanityinstitute.org/pdfs/peter1.3.19%20analysis.pdf.
[8] I accept the traditional dating of 1 Peter to the 50’s or early 60’s AD, based on the view of authorship as a collaboration between Peter and Silvanus (1 Pet.5:12) to explain its more sophisticated Greek. For the purposes of my argument here, skeptical scholars, who date the letter to the reign of Domitian (81 – 96 AD) and the persecution of Christians during this period, simply imply that the belief in Jesus’ descent to the dead must have spread as part of basic Christian beliefs years, if not decades, before 1 Peter was composed. For Peter in his brevity seems to assume that Jesus’ descent to sheol/hades is already common knowledge.
[9] Archbishop Hilarion Alfayev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (New York, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009) lists a formidable amount of literature: (1) non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Gospel of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Teachings of Silvanus, and the Gospel of Bartholomew; (2) liturgical materials which were used in early Christian services such as the Odes of Solomon and Melito of Sardis’ On Easter; (3) the writings of bishops and theologians including (in the 1st – 2nd century) Polycarp of Smyrna, (in the 2nd century) Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyons, Melito of Sardis, (in the 4th century) Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Ephrem the Syrian, (in the 5th century) Cyril of Alexandria, (in the 6th – 7th century) Maximus the Confessor, and (in the 7th – 8th century) John of Damascus. A particularly noteworthy explanation comes from Athanasius, Contra Apollinarius 1, in which he argues that the human soul of Jesus entered the realm of souls.
[10] R.C. Sproul, Christ’s Descent into Hell, http://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/christs-descent-into-hell/ last accessed December 10, 2013, writes,
‘In a few hours, Jesus suffered and exhausted the infinite punishment that impenitent people cannot exhaust even after an eternity in hell. He could do this because, in His deity as the Son of God, He is an infinite being… On the cross He suffered the full wrath of God that is poured out in hell… the hopelessness of losing the gaze of His Father’s blessing and the torment of experiencing God’s wrath for the sins of His people.’ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 2, chapter 16, paragraph 10 believed that Jesus descended into hell after his death: ‘If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. No — it was expedient at the same time for him to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment. For this reason, he must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell and the dread of everlasting death… No wonder, then, if he is said to have descended into hell, for he suffered the death that, God in his wrath had inflicted upon the wicked!’
[11] John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p.81 – 82
[12] Stott grossly mischaracterizes the early church as if they believed that Jesus merely tricked or satisfied the devil (p.112 – 114). Stott makes very brief mention of ‘Latin fathers,’ starting with Tertullian, then Ambrose and Hilary, as using the language of merit and satisfaction (p.116); he does not answer the question of why they did not believe in divine retributive justice or penal substitutionary atonement which would sit on top of it. Stott then moves to the 11th – 12th century theologian Anselm (p.117 – 120), and from Anselm to the Protestant Reformers (p.120ff.). Conspicuously absent from Stott’s account of the history of Christian thought on the atonement are: Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, and Augustine of Hippo. He mentions the Cappadocian theologians Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, but sadly misunderstands them.