(avg. read time: 8–15 mins.)
As I mentioned prior to the start of the year, I wanted to open up the possibility of writing replies to inquiries from my paying subscribers, “to see what questions you might like for me to answer with full posts or what you would like to hear/see my response to. I am certainly not lacking for ideas of what to write about, but I want to hear your input on the sorts of things you want to read about related to my subjects of interest.” Today is the first such reply to something I was asked by my former roommate, John Schneider. He wanted to get my feedback on the idea of viewing the cross as God the Father punishing Jesus for our sins, which he linked with the notorious line from “In Christ Alone”: “on the cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” I say “notorious” because this line has been the subject of controversy among those who wanted to use the hymn without this line included. If you are not familiar with the controversy, just know that it led to the hymn being either removed from some hymnals or altered so that the offending reference to the wrath of God was changed to “the love of God was magnified” (a point the song already made otherwise).
I want to proceed first by offering some clarifications of what I think about atonement more generally, and why this is a subject I have only written adjacent to insofar as I have addressed various Scriptures related to it (like in my series on forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation here, here, and here, or in my comments about how Jesus was heard in Hebrews here). Second, I want to disentangle some issues here. Third, with that disentanglement in mind, I want to restrict my scope to the role of God’s wrath in the atoning work of Christ (with the understanding that this is not to describe atonement in its entirety).
First of all, I have not written a dedicated entry on atonement prior to this because there is so much to sort through, including various issues of theology and interpretation as well as confusions, for a subject that, while important, is not one of my major research interests. In many cases of what I have written for this Substack, I had made some inroads in researching a subject before I decided to post on it, which I could then supplement with further work. I do not have such a thing prepped for a subject like this that is quite wide-ranging. If I were to write about it in general, I would feel like I had not given it the treatment I should unless I wrote something of book-length.
Also, as a form of ground-clearing if I ever did write more fully on the subject, I have sought to emphasize the theological roles of Jesus’s resurrection (most often) and his exaltation. Theories of atonement are linked primarily or exclusively with Jesus’s death. Jesus’s death is obviously necessary to any biblical theology of atonement, but the rest of the gospel story ought to contribute to it as well. (See the various posts here.)
As of now, I do not hold to only one theory or model of atonement. I think various models should be used because Scripture, particularly the NT, appeals to multiple ways of describing atonement. Indeed, I agree with a statement I have seen attributed to I. Howard Marshall about (I am not sure where), except that I would apply it more broadly in that the language of the NT (and the Bible more generally) is more focused on the results of Christ’s death (and, I hasten to add, the larger gospel story) than on its character. Another way you could put this is that the NT focuses more on the effects/outcomes of atonement, including in how to live into it, than on the mechanics of how it is achieved. That is not to say that the latter is irrelevant, but it is frequently based on implications of the former. And the NT has a variety of ways of saying what the atoning work of Christ accomplished in achieving victory, redemption/ransom, substitution, paying debt, establishing union (hence “at-one-ment”), effecting reconciliation, providing a way to/of life, and so on. Different models are useful for highlighting different aspects, but none are sufficient for expressing the entirety. I thus take the approach that it is better to hold multiple ideas together to affirm the orthodox whole than to drift away from the whole counsel of Scripture by eschewing any of the language presented therein.
Second, I want to disentangle some issues. One, to speak of the role of God’s wrath in the atoning work accomplished in Christ does not necessitate accepting various caricatures of penal substitution. While we are told that God condemned sin in the flesh (i.e., the flesh of Jesus) in Rom 8:3; we are not told that God condemned Jesus per se. Two, as such, accepting this role of wrath also does not require accepting some notion of rupture within the Trinity. The Godhead has one will and the Son voluntarily took upon himself what was needful to do for atonement to be accomplished. Three, whatever you think of the phrasing of the Father punishing Jesus for our sins, I do not see the controverted line from “In Christ Alone” as declaring that per se. It simply says that Jesus’s death brought satisfaction (or appeasement, but no form of that word rhymes with “died”) to God’s righteous wrath against sin. In any case, I quite like the song for how it summarizes the gospel, and it is one of those that I would like to have sung at my funeral (we will talk about why you should think about your funeral another time).
Third, let us look at what the NT specifically has to say about whether or how the wrath of God is involved in atonement, specifically by reference to Jesus’s death. This will involve looking at a few different aspects. One of these aspects concerns not so much key terminology as what I have highlighted elsewhere about the cost of forgiveness (besides my aforementioned series, see here). With matters of debt or penalty, those matters do not simply go away. Someone must absorb the cost. One way is by what we see with student loan debt forgiveness. That debt does not simply disappear; it is cost that is transferred to people who did not agree to the loan and did not reap any of the attendant benefits it potentially provided. The alternative is that the cost is assumed by the one to whom it is owed in one way or another. In this much more significant and wide-ranging case, it is God himself who absorbs the penalty in Trinitarian fashion by the events of the gospel story and the results thereof.
Another of these aspects are some key controverted terms that have the hilas-/ἱλας- root: ἱλάσκομαι, ἱλασμός, and ἱλαστήριον. Since the first word is a verb (appearing in Luke 18:13 and Heb 2:17) and the other two are nouns (appearing in 1 John 2:2; 4:10; and Rom 3:25; Heb 9:5 respectively), they are obviously not going to be translated in the exact same way, but the controversy tends to swirl around whether they are best translated as being related to expiation, propitiation, or even the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant. A lot of ink has been spilled on defining these various words, but they fundamentally concern the notion of making amends between parties and thus effecting reconciliation. As such, there is significant overlap in expiation and propitiation, though scholars and theologians tend to describe the former in terms of removing sin and the penalty thereof while they describe the latter in terms of appeasing (or even averting) wrath. Propitiation includes expiation particularly in Christian contexts, as the former happens by the latter, but expiation is more restrictive/reductive in that it does not necessarily entail a sense of wrath being involved.
Of course, not all of these texts are directly connected to Jesus’s atoning work. Specifically, Luke 18:13 is about a tax collector’s prayer to God. Typically, the key verb here is translated as involving “mercy” often as “have mercy on me.” Since this is followed with the man describing himself as a “sinner,” I think this translation tends to owe something to the Jesus prayer, even though the terminology in the Greek version of the Jesus prayer is not this Greek verb. The HCSB and the YLT are rare exceptions in that former translates it as “turn your wrath from me,” and the latter translates it as, “be propitious to me.” He hopes that in showing his repentance that God’s wrath against a sinner should be appeased/mollified/satisfied in granting him favor via forgiveness. The standard translation is not the most accurate way of rendering the idea into English, but it still expresses the desire of the repentant one wishing to make amends with God by asking him not to execute the wrath against him that he is expecting.
Hebrews 9:5 uses the key term in direct reference to what the cherubim overshadow, which is the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant. Its connection with the other uses of the term is that this is where amends were made, particularly when the blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat (esp. Lev 16:14). This is part of the description of the earthly type of the heavenly sanctuary in which Jesus made everlasting atonement.
The other uses of this terminology do directly concern what Jesus did. Romans 3:25, a text that is notoriously controversial in its translation, speaks of how God placed Jesus before himself as an amends-making offering through faith by his blood to demonstrate his righteousness. And this was because he previously showed forbearance in passing over sins until that time. This is akin to what we see in Acts 17:30–31. It shows that the forbearance was not going to last forever because something needed to be done about sin and its consequences, which is achieved by Jesus, and God himself sets Jesus forth to be this one who makes amends (as shown in 3:24–25 and the larger context of this statement). And since Romans more broadly has been addressing the wrath of God against sin since 1:18, this text thus shows how the wrath of God is appeased and averted, and that by his own will and offering. In the absence of this amends-making offering, wrath would have been the outcome.
Hebrews 2:17 arguably puts the sense of expiation at the forefront given that the direct object, without intervening prepositions, is “sins of the people.” At the same time, propitiation could still be in the background here because of the reference to Jesus as the merciful and faithful high priest. He would be bringing mercy through making propitiation for his people, but that is not what is prominent in the text (and would need to infer a preposition that is not present in the Greek, even though such grammatical features could be gapped on certain occasions anyway). Another reason that expiation is at the forefront here is because the sense of wrath is not directly evident in the text itself, but one should note that it is part of the larger context when we look at the alternative for those who scorn his offer in chs. 3 and 4. In any case, the work is fundamentally that of making amends for the sins of the people, like a high priest is supposed to do (though he obviously did this work on a level no other high priest ever did).
Both texts in 1 John 2:2 and 4:10 use the same phrase ἱλασμός περὶ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν. Some commentators reject the propitiation sense of what Jesus accomplished according to these texts because the terminology of wrath is absent. But if the point was simply expiation, it is obvious that John is capable of expressing that point by other means (1:9). He could have even used a similar phrase like we see in Heb 1:3. But he instead uses this one and the fact that it is followed by a prepositional phrase (unlike Heb 1:3) shows that it is something that had to be done for sins or concerning sins, rather than that this is an action directly on sins. This is something that is necessary because God needs to be propitiated (for one wonders why else atonement would be necessary). But again, as 4:10 in particular shows, this propitiating action is the divine initiative, one taken up to show God’s own love. The point is that reconciliation was made and the price that was necessary for it—the making of amends—was paid for those who accept it.
While we have noted that propitiation is not restricted to when wrath explicitly appears in a NT text, it will also be worthwhile to consider pertinent references to wrath. John 3:36 is particularly noteworthy for its implication, as it says that the one who has faith in the Son has everlasting life, but the one who does not have faith does not see life but instead has the wrath of God remaining upon him. The fact that it “remains” indicates that it was there before the relation of faith or denial thereof is established. Wrath is thus presented in a present tense, although the sense best conveys the idea that the prospect of wrath is ongoing, as the actual execution/implementation is in the future. But the point remains that this would be the outcome if not for faithful union with Christ, the salvific effect of which will be made effective by the events of the gospel story.
Romans 3:5 ties God’s wrath to his justice, meaning that it is at least one outcome of God’s determination to set the world aright. As with most texts in the NT, the focus on wrath here and elsewhere in Romans is the future prospect at the final judgment (and possibly some time leading up to it). We see this also in 5:9, where the hope is that we will be saved from the wrath of God because we have already been justified. The expectation is that God’s wrath will be averted because those who are in Christ now have peace with God that they otherwise would not have (5:1–2, 11). But again, this is the result of God’s own love, as his love is shown in how Christ died for us while we were sinners and thus enemies of God (5:8, 10).
Ephesians 2 brings elements of these various texts together. We are told in 2:3 that we were once by nature children of wrath. That is, if we continued to live as we did, the expectation would be for wrath to be the outcome (cf. 5:6; Col 3:6). But God himself through Christ determined to make us alive even when we were dead, so that rather than being subject to death in separation from him we might be made alive and reign together with Christ (2:4–7). The wrath is a future prospect, but it is something that characterizes people presently as those who would be subject to wrath but for the counteraction of God.
Another text that is more focused on the future wrath is 1 Thess 1:10. There we are told that Jesus is the one who is delivering us out of the wrath that is coming. This is also stated in a similar fashion in 5:9, for God has not appointed us for wrath but for the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. The implication is clearly that wrath would have been the outcome otherwise. But again, this shows that God took the initiative in establishing salvation through the work of Jesus.
Of course, if our brief survey of the hilas- words shows us anything, it is that we cannot simply look for the key word of wrath (mainly ὀργή). God’s wrath is linked with his holiness, his justice, and his love, not least since it is because of his holiness, his concern for justice, and his love for his creation that he is wrathful towards that which brings it ruin through sin, and because God’s love and will for reconciliation mean that he himself provides the way of appeasing his wrath through purification in Jesus. Since these notions are so intertwined in the Bible, we cannot simply look for key words. As but two examples to start with, consider John 3:18 and Rom 6:23. The former does not use the language of wrath, but it is structured similarly to John 3:36, where the wrath language is explicitly used, as faith in Jesus entails not being condemned but not having faith in him entails being condemned (cf. 3:19–21). The latter also does not use the language of wrath but of “wages,” the due outcome of sin, which is death, being itself contrasted with the gift of God that is everlasting life in Christ Jesus our Lord. This also matches with the contrast we have seen elsewhere in which the language of wrath is explicitly used. Additionally, we could also go into the many uses of Isa 52:13–53:12 in the NT as a key way of presenting Jesus and what God accomplished in him, even though the terminology of “wrath” per se is absent there. (There is much more I could write about that text and its use in the NT. For more extensive engagements, see here, as well as the pertinent portions of here, here, and here.)
One could also consider the book of Revelation as a whole. In light of what we see of the gospel and identity formation in Revelation (also see here), it is no surprise that those who are sealed by their allegiance to God in Christ and have washed their saintly attire in the blood of the Lamb have the wrath of God averted from them like the Hebrews who marked their doorframes with lamb’s blood. They will not face the wrath of God like others will.
Again, this has been but a brief survey on one dimension of atonement. It is important to remember that the role of God’s wrath in atonement cannot be separated from his holiness, justice, and love. He himself willingly absorbed the demands of justice because of his love, thereby opening the way to make us holy. The alternative is that we absorb the cost ourselves, which would mean our destruction.