[Died for us]
Dear Donagh,
…. Could you throw some light on what it means to say that Christ died for our sins? I hear it all the time, but when I think about it I realise I don’t really know what it means…. Thanks…. Claire
Dear Claire,
Yes, there’s a difference between being familiar with something and understanding it. The penny catechism gave us answers to every question, and it was considered sufficient to be able to run them off the tongue at top speed, even when we had no idea what they meant. The religious world, people thought, was stabilised for all time; there would be no storms to test the rigging. It was unnecessary, we thought, and unwise, to ask questions. I remember an old man who used to say, “It’s dangerous to question the Faith.” He was right, I'm sure, but it’s much more dangerous not to question it. For an adult faith it is necessary to ask basic questions, to dig below the familiar surfaces – even if we sacrifice the false clarity of the catechism by doing so.
The question you ask is a central one. From the beginning, Christians have been struggling to understand what is being said. The explanations that theologians gave in various centuries probably satisfied most of their contemporaries, but many of these explanations didn’t wear well. There was a buried metaphor that caused a lot of confusion, a metaphor from the business world: ‘redemption’. It was taken to have perfect credentials, so much so that it was reshaped as a title for Jesus himself: the ‘Redeemer’.
Look at the basic meaning of the word. It comes from Latin emere, to buy, and redimere, to buy back. True, the idea that the suffering of the innocent has redemptive value for others was a common notion in the Old Testament (see, for example, the passages about the Suffering Servant in Isaiah), but in both Hebrew and Greek the word was used in a steadily growing metaphorical sense of ‘liberate’. Sadly, however, in later centuries there was a return to literalism. “Some Fathers of the Church permitted themselves some unsound speculations on the hypothesis that the ransom was paid to Satan” (J.L. McKenzie). The suggestion was that we had become Satan’s property through sin, and we had to be bought back. The price, the ransom, was the suffering and death of Jesus. We don’t have to be connoisseurs to see that this was a very crude notion.
St Anselm of Canterbury (+1109) thought he would improve it by asserting that the ransom was paid not to Satan but to God the Father. This chilling thought became known as ‘substitutionary satisfaction’. It was not an improvement, it was worse than the other. The idea was that sin, though to all appearances limited like everything human, was an offence against the infinite God, and was therefore infinite. And so it was a debt that we could never repay, because we are not infinite. But into the gap stepped Jesus, who being infinite in his divine nature, was alone capable of repaying this debt. How did he pay it? By his suffering and death on Calvary he took the rap in our stead, thereby appeasing the Father’s wrath. This explanation portrayed God the Father really as a psychopath. It is still common in some Christian groups to say that Jesus on the cross was the object of God’s wrath. There is a hymn that contains the chilling words, “On that cross as Jesus died, / The wrath of God was satisfied.” When it was suggested that the words should be changed to “The love of God was magnified,” the authors refused, saying this would be liberalism. That was a Presbyterian hymn, but look at what we Catholics have in the Breviary for Easter Sunday Morning: “That guiltless Son, who bought your peace, alleluia / And made his Father’s anger cease, alleluia….” There you have it: substitutionary satisfaction.
St Paul made it clear that the word ‘redemption’ should not be understood literally: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).
It should not have been difficult for Christians to step away from commercial metaphors and legal arguments. Jesus drove the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and he abhorred the legalism of the scribes and Pharisees. Words that should come first when thinking of how we are saved by Christ are perhaps reconciliation, restoration, healing…. These have echoes of the word atonement (a word that became prominent in the 16th century), if that word is shorn of later connotations such as compensation, punishment, expiation…. Its original meaning, ‘at-ONE-ment’, says everything. (The word ‘one’ was pronounced ‘own’ until about the 15th century.) Christ makes us one with God, mending a broken bond.
We were made one again with God when the Word became flesh and lived among us. He took on our human nature (in its innocence, not in its fallen state). In him, God and humanity are one; he is, according to the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), perfectus deus, perfectus homo, fully God and fully human. Because he took on our human nature we are his Body. This is St Paul’s constant teaching: “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27). Read the whole passage, 12:12-27. And among other passages, read Rom 12:4-5 “As in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” This is how we are saved – by being made one with Christ. The Incarnation is the pivotal moment in our salvation.
But where then does Calvary come into the picture? I haven’t said anything yet about Christ dying for our sins, and this is what your question is about.
I wanted first to sketch the background, without which salvation is only some kind of business or legal transaction. I want to add now that while the Word took on our human nature in its state of innocence, he was not insulated from suffering. It was not some abstract version of human nature that he took on, but human nature in the concrete – step by step, every inch from birth to death. He was not remote from human experience; he was more immersed in experience than we are, because he had no filters, no protections from the reality and truth of everything, no evasions…. In the end, this choice brought him to his death. He ‘redeemed’ every part of life (if you want to use that word), he entered every part of life, including death. He proved that everything, even death, leads to God. He died to lead us every step of the way to God. He died to show us that sin is a tragic waste of a life, that it leads us astray from God. He didn't just point this out, he went through it before us to show that in him God had opened the way. He lived and died because we didn't know how to live or die. He died to save us from that. He “died for our sins.”
That's not all that can be said, but I hope these few words may help clarify it a little for you, Claire.
Donagh