Archive: The Missing Cross

Has the Church stopped preaching the message of Calvary?

By David F. Wells

The New Testament never says that Christ lived for us, thirsted for us, was tempted for us or became weary for us, true as all this is. What it says, and says repeatedly, is that He died for us.

More precisely it says that He died for our sins, bearing them as His own, assuming responsibility for them and suffering the full wrath of God in consequence. In view of the clarity and insistence of this apostolic witness, the fact that it is so commonly misunderstood is remarkable.

Protestant liberals expressed an optimism that grew out of their evolutionary understanding of life. They announced the coming kingdom that would consist of the realization of God’s universal fatherhood and man’s corresponding brotherhood. Jesus was the historic pioneer of this message, they said, and His pioneering in revealing God’s love is redemptive.

This concept evoked the scathing response from (H. Richard) Niebuhr that it offered a God without wrath who had brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a real cross. The shallow optimism that underlay it was shattered by the First World War in Europe and the Depression of the 1930s in America.

Salvation as Freedom from Societal Sin

Although the same optimism has not reappeared, there is nevertheless a widespread understanding of Christ’s death that is still classically liberal. For instance the 1973 Bangkok assembly of the World Council of Churches defined salvation as freedom from societal sins. Working back from the effects of sins, it then deduced from these the nature of the Atonement.

Sin was here conceived in a purely horizontal manner: what we need to be saved from is racial oppression, economic injustice, sexual prejudice, class distinctions and psychological inhibitions. Jesus is important because He exhibited freedom from and opposition to these evils. Indeed His example, by which the love of God was revealed, has provided our redemption. The Church’s mission is to call persons to a full humanity through Jesus, whose “salvation” brings liberty, unity, justice and peace.

During the last ten years the same model of understanding the work of Christ has been used in the so-called political theology that has refined the horizontal understanding of salvation in relation to the political order. Salvation means freedom from economic injustice, political corruption and class oppression.

Towards this end a Christian-Marxist dialogue has been established, and the cost of discipleship has been described in terms of revolution by Jurgen Moltmann or, at least, active resistance by Daniel Berrigan. Similarly James Cone has made black racial identity the basis for his assertion that “Black Power” demands are Gospel correlates. Different as these concepts may be in details, they agree that sin is a disruption of just horizontal relationships in society, that salvation is the rectification of these and that insofar as Jesus is important it is because He pioneered this movement as a revolutionary or at least a dissenter.

Sin undeniably has horizontal ramifications. While government exists to curb lawlessness, it is sometimes the vehicle of it; minorities are oppressed in spite of the laws and sometimes because of them. Given man’s inherent greed, it is a foregone conclusion that the American economic system, even if it is preferable to the alternatives, will never deliver equitable treatment to all who are embraced by it.

Denial of Vertical Dimension

The basic divergence in interpreting Christ’s death, then, does not arise because some think of sin societally (horizontally) and others think of it only religiously (vertically). New Testament faith acknowledges the horizontal dimension, but the new liberalism denies the vertical aspect.

Is sin most to be feared because it breeds distrust, foments greed, causes personality to disintegrate, fuels cruelty and leads to institutional corruption? Not according to the New Testament. It is most to be feared because it draws down the wrath of God. What makes our predicament hopeless on the one hand, and what necessitates a Gospel on the other, is not man’s inhumanity to man, ghastly as that sometimes is, but the fact that the world lies under God’s condemnation. Therefore the Atonement cannot be understood merely as the genesis of societal reform; it must be seen, centrally and primarily, as God’s provision for averting His own anger.

This vertical dimension of the Atonement gives God’s love its real sanctity, but for several reasons it has not been as prominent in evangelical thought and preaching as I believe it is in the New Testament.

Understanding the Wrath of God

It is obvious that the notion of God’s wrath is subject to serious misunderstanding, for it could be equated with human anger. Human anger is invariably tainted with and becomes the servant of evil. With anger comes malice, hatred, revenge, jealousy, distrust and uncontrolled passion. Clearly God’s anger is free of these defilements. What, then, is divine wrath? According to Frederick Godet it is:

… moral indignation in all its purity, the holy antipathy of the Good Being for that which is evil, without the slightest alloy of personal irritation or of selfish resentment. It is the dissatisfaction which is excited in a pure being by the sight of impurity. The wrath of God, so understood, is a necessary consequence of the profound difference which separates good from evil. To deny this would oblige us to consider evil not as the opposite, but simply an imperfect form of good [Godet’s Biblical Studies: Studies on the New Testament, ed. by W. H. Lyttleton, London, 1985, p. 152].

Emil Brunner, who speaks of wrath as “the negative aspect of holiness,” goes on to say that it [wrath] is necessarily an “objective reality” that stands between God and man. The price of affirming all this may be the appearance of “foolishness,” as Paul said—a lack of sophistication; but it is that kind of “foolishness” in which God excels.

And is it really so unsophisticated? What the divine judgment tells us is that good and evil are not equally ultimate. They are not on the two ends of a cosmic seesaw tilting up and down eternally. The days when error can be on the throne and when truth can be condemned to the scaffold are numbered. The time is coming when God’s zeal will “burst into flames.” What opposes His will on earth and in heaven will be destroyed.

This fact alone gives us both a mandate and a rationale for interpreting life in moral terms. This is what provides a major incentive to be moral; and this is why the New Testament, which is so intensely ethical, insistent upon our choosing good, is so often eschatological. To speak of God without acknowledging His wrath is to assume His ethical indifference. More than that, it is to require man’s ethical indifference too. What at first sight may appear to be rather cross, and has no doubt been treated crassly in innumerable “fire and brimstone” sermons, is actually of the essence of the nature of God and the whole moral order. Inevitably, then, it is of the essence of the Atonement too.

The Full Work of Christ

The work of Christ is a complex mystery, and the New Testament writers ransack their vocabulary to find language to express it. Their chief words are: redemption, by which Christ delivers sin’s captives from their bondage at the ransomed price of His life; sacrifice, by which our guilt, both as subjective shame (its psychological dimension) and as objective blame (its metaphysical dimension), is dealt with; propitiation, the way in which God’s wrath is diverted; and reconciliation, the restoration of fellowship between God and man.

The theme of reconciliation probably takes in as much of the work of Christ as any. Reconciliation presupposes a prior hostility between two parties. At first sight it may appear that man is hostile toward God but that God is not hostile toward man, for in Romans 5:10 and 2 Corinthians 5:20 only man’s reconciliation is mentioned. And in 2 Corinthians 5:18, Ephesians 2:16, Colossians 1:20 God is spoken of as reconciling us to Himself. If this were the case, then Christ’s work would be directed only toward changing our distrust of God and not toward changing God’s disapproval of us.

In the other instances of reconciliation in the New Testament (Matt 5:23, 24; 1 Cor. 7:10, 11), however, the focus actually falls not on the enmity of the offending party but on the need to assuage the anger of the person against whom the offense was committed. This pattern is duplicated precisely with respect to the Atonement. In Romans 5:8-11, for example, what is underlined is not primarily that Christ has changed our feeling about God but rather that He changed God’s feelings about us. The enmity to which Paul refers (v. 10, “For if while when we were enemies, we were reconciled. … “) is clearly God’s, not ours; otherwise He would have said: “If, when we felt enmity toward God, we were able to lay it aside through Christ’s death. … ”

On the contrary what Paul affirms is that in reconciliation no less than in justification we are helplessly passive; we must be reconciled and we must receive rather than effect our reconciliation (v. 11).

We are, therefore, separated from God by sin, and God is separated from us by wrath. For reconciliation to be effective God must be able to look on us without displeasure, and we must be able to look on God without fear. And what was required has been done, as the words of that well-known hymn affirm:

“Bearing shame and scoffing rude/In my place condemned he stood/Sealed my pardon with his blood/Hallelujah. … ”

In the reconciliation of Christ sin is expiated, wrath is propitiated and our alienation from God is overcome.

The Church’s Only Message

Our redemption is not achieved by Christ’s revealing God’s love to us; rather, Christ reveals God’s love to us by achieving our redemption. Indeed the apostle John goes so far as to say that we would not even know the real nature of love (1 John 3:16) unless God had undertaken to shoulder our guilt and make common cause with us in our sin.

Divine love, therefore, is not even understood outside the context of this Cross. It is with the Cross that we must begin, and it is with the Cross that we will end (Rev. 5:9, 10). The simplest message of the evangelist and the most profound message of the theologian are the same: Christ bore our sins, mediating between the estranged parties. There was no other Gospel known in the early Church; there should be no other Gospel known in ours.

Dr. David F. Wells is professor of historical and systematic theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Manchester, England.