Beilby, James and Paul R. Eddy. The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views. Downers Grover, Il: IVP Academic, 2006. 208 pp. $20.00Contributors include: Gregory Boyd - Christus Victor; Joel Greene - Kaleidoscope; Bruce Reichenbach - Healing; Thomas Schreiner - Penal Substitution.
Survey says? Within evangelicalism everyone agrees that Christ died to atone for sins. But, take a poll asking what the primary emphasis in Christ’s death was and you are liable to be struck by an errant stone thrown from a radical feminist who blames God for societal child abuse, get weak-kneed under the weight of a party of healing hands determined to free you from your sin-sickness, be whisked off to a Christian séance where the oppressive demons haunting your life are exercised or even given a paint brush and ushered up to a partially lit stage and encouraged to have a canvas conversation narrating which view of the atonement feels best for you at the given time in your given life-stage. All joking aside, while these are extreme positions, they are actual and go to show that theology and practice are wed. One’s view of the atonement is an outworking of, or a solution to his understanding of man’s problem and God’s requirement(s) to be in relation with Him. Is there a view of the atonement that garners biblical precedence over all others? A view by which all others are to be interpreted? A view which answers the historical problem of man and God’s requirement for a relationship with Him in a biblically faithful and foundational way? Or, is the testimony of Scripture equally weighted regarding atonement metaphors? A view that is a situationally-exalted position?
The Nature of the Atonement is a self labeled “panel discussion” attempting to answer some of these long pondered questions through a survey of four views over “the complexities of the Christian view of the atonement” (9). The dialogue flows in a positive-statement, three-rebuttal format. While each contributor affirms multiple shades of useful metaphors in the New Testament, all but one argue for a definitive model which informs the others (21). In the next four paragraphs I will point out from each author’s contribution, his preferential view of: 1) the atonement, 2) the nature of sin and the problem in the fall, and subsequently, 3) how he sees his preferred view of the atonement to be the solution reconciling God and man. To the four views we now turn.
Greg Boyd, arguing for the Christus Victor model, claims that “through the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ, God defeated the devil” (24). He believes that the overarching testimony of Scripture is “accurately described as a story of God’s ongoing conflict with and ultimate victory over cosmic and human agents who oppose him and who threaten his creation” (25). In other words, Boyd thinks that the post-fall cosmic interplay of Satan’s kingdom and God’s kingdom is the explanatory story of history. Sin is an impersonal, human-victimizing force wielded by the cosmic powers; a “quasi-autonomous power that holds people groups as well as individuals in bondage” (29). God’s solution was His Son’s breaking into this long raging “cosmic war” (30) “to destroy the power of sin rescuing us from the cosmic powers that keep us in bondage to sin…this is the essence of the Christus Victor view of the atonement” (29). Jesus “set Satan’s captives free” (30). For Boyd salvation is “most fundamentally about [being] ‘transferred’ out of Satan’s dominion and brought under the reign of God through his son” (32). For these reasons and others “the Christus Victor paradigm…can be described as Satanward in its focus” (12). Next, we turn to the penal substitution view of the atonement.
Tom Schreiner forwards the penal substitution position. He defines it as such:
The Father, because of his love for human beings, sent his Son (who offered himself willingly and gladly) to satisfy God’s justice, so that Christ took the place of sinners. The punishment and penalty we deserved was laid on Jesus Christ instead of us, so that in the cross both God’s holiness and love are manifested (67).
Schreiner understands man’s fundamental problem as internal rather than merely external. “We ourselves are radically evil…wrongly related to God himself. Evil powers reign over us because of the evil within us. We are victims to sin because we have failed to glorify and thank God the way we should” (68). The problem in the fall is man’s idolatry or “spiritual adultery” whereby he “[finds] delight in the praise of people instead of seeking the glory of God (Jn 5:44)” (77). Schreiner shows the link between man’s “spiritual harlotry” (77) and the intensity of the problem in the fall by arguing that “(1) lawbreaking is not impersonal, (2) God judges sin retributively, and (3) God is personally angry at sin” (77). From this framework the atonement can be understood “theocentrically and not anthropocentrically” (88). “In the cross of Christ the justice and mercy of God meet. God’s holiness is satisfied by Christ’s bearing the penalty of sin, and God’s saving activity is realized in the lives of those who trust in Christ” (88). The penal substitution theory can be described as Godward in its focus or “objective” – “[understanding] the work of Christ as primarily addressing a necessary demand of God” (14). The healing view by Bruce Reichenbach follows.
In dealing with the nature of sin, the healing view understands man’s problem as a disease from which he suffers which “describes not only [his] spiritual condition but [his] physical, economic, political, social and environmental conditions” (120). Reichenbach admits that “God punishes sin by bringing sickness, devastation and death to person, nation, and land” (122) in the Old Testament, but also emphasizes that “not all suffering results from sin” (123). In order to reconcile “sin-sick” (120) man to Himself, the Great Healer, “God, in love sends the great Physician to take on and remove our sin; otherwise we are left without a cure for our deep human predicament” (138). This solution or healing can be physical and spiritual and here and now, not just eschatological (139). The healing view is known as part of the “subjective trajectory of atonement theories” where the “primary focus…is humanward” (18). The final view is the multifaceted kaleidoscope view.
Joel Green prefers an all-inclusive equally worthy view of the atonement. He favors this approach because of his understanding of Jesus’ crucifixion as so centrally wed to “the means for comprehending the eternal purpose of God” that “we may never exhaust the many ways of articulating its meaning for our salvation” (158). Green argues that “the death of Jesus cannot be understood apart from the powerful social, political and religious currents he set himself against” (163). In this context “his mission…was directed toward revitalizing Israel as the people of God” (163). Green, against my approach of defining each view as to how it deals with sin and the human problem and God’s solution, opts for a view that he claims “cannot be reduced to the relationship of the individual to God, nor an objective moment in the past when Jesus paid the price for our sins” (165). His kaleidoscope, he believes, privies him to a vantage point which upholds the “diversity in the Scriptures” (167) and “the diversity of the tradition” (168). For the sake of proving his multi-operative viewpoint to the situational audience, North America, he presents two “at home” (171) models, “atonement as sacrifice” (172) and “atonement as revelation” (177). The kaleidoscope view can be classified as the postmodern, relativistic, “incredulity to metanarrative”[1] view which is humanward in its orientation. Next, I consider chief objections to the Christus Victor, healing and kaleidoscope views from the perspective of a penal substitutionary view.
In his response to the healing position presented by Reichenbach, Greg Boyd employs an illustration of a scientist and a “self-replicating organism” (143) to argue his Christus Victor model. Using Boyd’s illustration, with appropriate biblical modifications, let us analyze the ineptitudes of each view from the perspective of the penal substitution model. The illustration goes as follows:
A scientist named Dr. Joe produced an airborne, self-replicating organism that would instantly annihilate every virus it came in contact with. Once released into the atmosphere, all viral diseases would eventually be eradicated from the earth. Now, those who had been suffering from viral diseases would be perfectly correct in proclaiming, “Dr. Joe healed us of our infirmities!” (143).
Greg Boyd goes on to point out that the great thing that Dr. Joe fundamentally did was not completely or best answered as the healing of people’s diseases. Boyd, argues that the great accomplishment was the annihilation of all evil viruses. Accepting the illustration for now, the penal substitution model would say that even if (and it’s a stretch) all the evil viruses lurking around the atmosphere were killed, the primary culprit, the evil viruses within each human, have been left unscathed. The real virus is a genetic disorder so debilitating that all are infected by their own desire to be such. The self-replicating Organism which, may I say was begotten not produced or made, from Dr. Joe had to be just like Dr. Joe in His immunity to man’s genetic disorder, but just like man as well so he could break the genetic lineage. Not only that, Dr. Joe’s anger against all organisms He made which rebelled against Him flow from His justice as the perfect Maker. At this point the relativist may come in with his kaleidoscope and analyze the cultural, political, socio-economic environment into which the defeator organism came and attempt to allow every diseased individual to come to a communal agreement through drawn out dialogue over the viability of any medicine to heal their disease, even if the medicine is out of date, not prescribed for the particular ailment or not accessible for whatever reason to the community at large. Much further and the illustration gets lost and/or breaks down, as all non-canonical analogies do.
Looking a bit more closely at the two positions, one can see the presuppositions concerning sin and reconciliation with God. The healing view sees man’s spiritual condition as having a high fever or the flu from a virus that to some degree is outside of him infecting him. So, the solution is not concerned with the Creator’s just nature, rather His love. Likewise, the Christus Victor view sees man as a victim to the controlling evil forces which are holding him in bondage. As go the bondage-making evil forces, so goes the freedom of man. Victory is won when the Hero defeats the forces of darkness. The Bible sees man’s spiritual problem as spiritual death (Eph 2). Man is hostile to the things of God because man is an idolator in need of a New Man to destroy the works of the flesh in his place. There are other arguments, but these should suffice for now as we move to the book’s impact on the field and its readers.
The Nature of the Atonement is a useful tool for evaluating four views of the atonement sided by side. The editors made a particularly helpful choice of which four views to put on display considering the recent vitriol against the penal substitutionary position and the growing strength of the postmodern or relativistic hermeneutic. Tom Schreiner did a fine job showing that the tree producing the fruit in the atonement views is the penal substitution model. I would like to have seen a brief final argument from each position after the three counterarguments were given. That said, the critique is minor.
Readers are presented with a straight forward, balanced view of the perspectives of the atonement. The compilation work is highly assessable and well represented by each author. Each did a fine job presenting the biblical information on the doctrine at hand. There is much spiritual value within the pages as one considers his sin, God’s holiness and what God has done to reconcile wicked man to Himself in His Son.
FOOTNOTE
[1] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xxiv.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyd, Gregory A. God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict. Downer's Grove, Ill: IVP, 1997.
_______. God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2000.
_______. and Edward K. Boyd, Letters From a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father’s Questions about Christianity. Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor Publishing, 1994.
_______. Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Warfare Theology. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
_______. Trinity and Process: A Critical Evaluation and Reconstruction of Hartshorne's Di-Polar Theism Towards a Trinitarian Metaphysics. Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
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