Man of Sorrows is a much-loved hymn that meditates on the wonder of Christ’s death for us. Like so many Christian songs that churches sing with conviction and praise, we are reminded of the intense beauty and grace of God’s sacrifice on behalf of sinners.

What happens though when a pastor decides to tell his congregation that the heart of the gospel is not only not the heart of the gospel, but is objectionable and not believed by him?  

A Facebook comment appeared on my feed yesterday that caught my attention, and so, in a moment of mimicking my greyhound chasing the rabbit. I followed. 

Now, I am friends with some of the local pastors and there are others whom I have never met or don’t know personally. What I discovered yesterday though made me profoundly sad. I love my local community and long for people to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, and grieves me when pastors and preachers espouse alternative gospels. In this particular case, a local pastor who is well known across Melbourne recently presented a series of sermons and blog posts on the atonement. The first message in the series was dedicated to debunking penal substitutionary atonement.

I’m sure Rob Buckingham thinks he is doing churches a service, but I found his commentary disappointing and misleading, and again sad. Sad, because the Gospel is good news and I fear Buckingham has turned it into bad news that needs changing. The message of the cross is considered shameful to many, but as the Apostle exclaimed, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  The significance of Jesus’ death on the cross centres on atonement. The Bible shows us many facets or aspects of the atonement: Christus Victor, reconciliation, example, and redemption are all aspects of the atonement, and yet at the heart of the cross is penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). This, Buckingham admits, he no longer believes belongs to the Gospel.

I will explain how this is the case shortly, but let’s first visit Rob Buckingham’s argument against PSA.

Dr Jones and how sexual ethics can change the cross

Buckingham’s opening question is this, ‘Did God kill Jesus?’, a line he borrows from Tony Jones. Buckingham explains how his own thinking has been influenced by Jones’ representations of the atonement. For those who don’t know the name Tony Jones (no, not the former ABC presenter), he’s a theologian who was part of the Emergent Church scene in the late 90s and early 2000s. The emerging Emergents saw the dust collecting in many churches and decided to make church relevant again. Sadly, we’re still paying the price today. Many of Emergent’s notable figures, including Jones, ended up seeing Christian orthodoxy as the problem and began dumping doctrine and ethics overboard faster than a hot air balloon throwing off passengers in order to gain more altitude. Jones, for example, came out in 2008 in support of same-sex marriage, long before Obama and Joe Biden realised the shifting pendulum. In 2012 Jones wrote a book, ‘A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin’, outlining why he rejects not only original sin but also penal substitutionary Atonement. It is this material that Buckingham leans heavily upon.

I wanted to pause and mention Jones here because he’s emblematic of holding that two-barrelled deadly combination. This combination of rejecting PSA and affirming the new sexual ethics is commonplace.  If I was given $100 for every time I hear of another pastor/church supporting the new sexual milieu and later learning that they no longer hold to other Christian doctrines, especially PSA, I could retire next year! I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Indeed, my understanding is that Buckingham’s theology of sexual ethics has also changed and moved to closely align with current secular sexual ethics. There is a connection between what churches believe and teach on human sexuality and how they view the cross, and that means we can’t play that disingenuous game of ‘what we have in common is greater than any disagreement’ and ‘we share the same Spirit and body despite these differences’. 

If you doubt the connection, last month Buckingham wrote a separate piece where he explains, ‘How the Bible works’ and there he claims,

“This progression of truth is called the Arc of Scripture. Over time, the Bible shifts from the revenge mentality to a better way. The Bible’s arc shows how people’s view of, and relationship with, God has matured over time…. gender diversity, LGBTIQA+ rights, and dozens of other examples demonstrating that the Bible is not a static book.”

Back to his argument against PSA, Buckingham alleges it’s the Holy Spirit who’s told him!

“In recent years I have sensed the gentle nudging of the Holy Spirit to find out if this really is an accurate representation of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus, and I don’t believe it is”

While Buckingham suggests that it is the Holy Spirit who has changed his thinking, I think it’s best for Christians to stick with what the Holy Spirit has written. The Spirit of God doesn’t give mixed messages or contradict the Scriptures. After all, he is the author of all the Bible! The formula is as old as Eden, ‘did God really say?’

Penal Substitution is older than the Reformation

Buckingham introduces PSA with a reference to the Reformation. He suggests that PSA was ‘popularised during the Reformation’. He then later returns to discount another aspect of the atonement that he finds deeply immeshed in the Reformation. Maybe I’m misreading him here,  but it’s almost as though Buckingham uses Reformation as a byword to represent ideas Christians should avoid today. First of all, every Protestant denomination owes its existence to the Reformation. We are children of the reformation whether we like it or not. Second, Buckingham’s brief reference doesn’t do justice to church history. PSA has been taught and affirmed in Christian churches since the earliest days, indeed in the Scriptures itself. This single point is important because Buckingham is trying to build a case that conflicts with Christian churches extending from the book of Acts right through to today.

A thousand years before the Reformation, the Early Church Fathers taught, affirmed and wrote about PSA. Here are a few examples, 

“If the Father of all wished His Christ for the whole human family to take upon Him the curses of all, knowing that, after He has been crucified and was dead, He would raise him up, why do you argue about Him, who submitted to suffer these things according to the Father’s will, as if he were accursed, and do not rather bewail yourselves?” (Justin Martyr)

“Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by .the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.” (Athanasius)

“But as Christ endured death as man, and for man; so also, Son of God as He was, ever living in His own righteousness, but dying for our offences, He submitted as man, and for man, to bear the curse which accompanies death.  And as He died in the flesh which He took in bearing our punishment, so also, while ever blessed in His own righteousness, He was cursed for our offences, in the death which He suffered in bearing our punishment.  And these words “everyone” are intended to check the ignorant officiousness which would deny the reference of the curse to Christ, and so, because the curse goes along with death, would lead to the denial of the true death of Christ.” (Augustine)

Not only did the early church affirm and explain PSA, but so did Christian theologians throughout the early and high middle ages, the Reformers, and Evangelicals from the 18th through to the 21st Century. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Bunyan, John Owen, Martyn Lloyd Jones,  John Stott, and Tim Keller are but a few of the countless names who preached and believed that Christ died in the place of sinners and satisfied the righteous anger of God.

Definitions matter

Of course, in understanding what someone believes it’s useful to listen to their own words, because definitions and meanings can differ depending on the person. Buckingham suggests this definition of PSA:

“God loves you but is also angry with you because of your sin. Because God is just, he cannot simply forgive you. God’s justice must be satisfied. And so, because he loves you, he punished his Son instead of you. Jesus’ death on the cross appeased God’s wrath. You no longer need to bear God’s wrath if you believe this. If you reject this, you must take the punishment of God’s anger both now and forever. In summary, God killed Jesus for your benefit.“

There are several flaws in this description, not least the final phrase that Buckingham puts in bold. There is this glaring omission in this summary:  the Son is also God. This qualification matters immensely as I’ll explain below.  At this point, Buckingham seems to buy into the same fallacious view of the atonement that Steve Chalke and others have thrown around in recent years, suggesting that PSA is a form of ‘cosmic child abuse’.  Buckingham pulls up short of repeating that allegation, but he does say this, 

“What loving parent would punish their own child for the wrongdoing of another?”

We may not, but God did and in doing so the Son wasn’t thrust onto the cross against his own volition and desire, he willingly went to the cross. 

In what is one of the most important volumes written on the atonement, Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach open Pierced for our Transgressions with this summary of penal substitutionary atonement and notice how it differs from Buckingham in tone and substance, 

“The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin.

This understanding of the cross of Christ stands at the very heart of the gospel. There is a captivating beauty in the sacrificial love of a God who gave himself for his people. It is this that first draws many believers to the Lord Jesus Christ and this that will draw us to him when he returns on the last day to vindicate his name and welcome his people into his eternal kingdom. That the Lord Jesus Christ died for us – a shameful death, bearing our curse, enduring our pain, suffering the wrath of his own Father in our place – has been the wellspring of the hope of countless Christians throughout the ages.”

Buckingham overlooks the vital piece of the puzzle, ‘God gave himself in the person of his Son’. The Triune God was acting in perfect unity and will on that cross. God himself is bearing the penalty for sin, out of love for sinful human beings. As true as it is that the Father gave his only Son, it is true that God is offering himself. As Donald Mcleod wrote, ‘God surrenders himself to the worst that man can do and bears the whole cost of saving the world.’

Does forgiveness require sacrifice?

Buckingham proceeds to argue that God can forgive sin without sacrifice. He says, ’“The cross was not needed for God to forgive people” (I think he’s pointing to life before the New Testament as an example of this). The problem here is that the claim isn’t true. Throughout Old Testament, God made provision for blood sacrifices to be offered for the sins of his people. Those sacrifices, as Jesus indicates at the Last Supper and as Hebrews explains, were a shadow pointing to the real and sufficient sacrifice for sin: the cross. 

Hebrews 9:22 states, 

“without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”.

Both prior to and following the events of Easter, Jesus himself said, he had to die.

‘The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life’ (Luke 9:22).

The verb, ‘must’, functions as a Divine imperative, reinforcing the notion that in God’s wisdom, he ordained for his Son to enter the world and to die on the cross.

PSA affirms the Godness of God

Rob Buckingham has a gift of clarity and he’s upfront in explaining why he can’t accept PSA. There are two reasons and in my view, both trip the alarm. I’ve already mentioned the first, his imagining that the Spirit of God has changed his min, and this doozy,

“This theory makes God somehow less than God. God loves you and wants to save you, but he can’t until his justice is satisfied. See the problem? It makes justice greater than God. Justice is in charge here, and God becomes its servant.”

There we have it. Penal Substitution clashes with Buckingham’s view of God. He has a certain view of God, and that means reinterpreting the Bible to fit that self-made portrait. He shares how God is good and gives good gifts to his children. Yes, he is and God does. But why must we choose between the two? Is God not both? Does God not demonstrate both anger and kindness, grace and judgement? The cross is the superlative example of where God exercises his justice and mercy, his love and wrath. 

Why divorce justice from God? Buckingham’s argument fails in this way: for example, according to Buckingham’s logic, the concepts of love and holiness and righteousness and truthfulness are also greater than God and therefore make God somehow less than God. Love isn’t hovering somehow above God. No God is love. God’s righteousness and holiness are not external entities that attach themselves to the eternal One. Does God contradict God? Can God act outside of his own character? Of course not. He is the God of justice and he acts in accordance with his righteousness. This is one of the sublime truths of the cross: 

“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” (Romans 3:25-26)

Does the Bible teach and affirm penal substitutionary atonement?

The answer is yes. Both Old and New Testaments teach that PSA is central to atonement and they do so by their employment of specific language (ie propitiation) and in the many symbols, metaphors, and images that are sprinkled across the pages of the Bible.

If I may  cite 3 examples here:

First, the temple was central in Israel’s life and key to ministry of the temple was the sacrificial system, and at the heart of the sacrificial system was the blood of an animal taking the place of the sinner to avert the wrath of God. Indeed, the most sacred day in the calendar was Yom Kippur. Kippur (or atonement), carries connotations of forgiveness, ransom, cleansing and averting God’s wrath, and this final aspect is clearly on view in the teaching about the day of atonement in Leviticus 16.

A second example is the Servant Song of Isaiah 53; it may only constitute a small part of this prophetic book and an even tinier part of the OT, but its significance is rarely overestimated. The Servant Song delivers more than a penal substitutionary view of the atonement, but PSA lays at the heart of its presentation of the work of God’s servant.

The four Gospels either explicitly quote or implicitly reference the Servant Song more often than any other OT passage. R.T France is correct when he talks about Jesus‘ repeated self-identification with the servant of Isaiah 53. Thus, the entire trajectory of Jesus’ earthly ministry as recorded in Scripture is an embodiment of the suffering servant whose life culminated in a cross and death, before climaxing in a resurrection:

“But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.”

A third example is Paul’s tome, the letter to the Romans. Paul explains that the primary human condition is sinful rebellion against a righteous God who is now revealing his wrath against us. No human effort can save us from this judgment, only the substitutionary death of Christ. The great turning point of Romans is that masterful exegesis of the gospel in 3:21-26, which spells out God’s gift of righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus Christ and by his propitiatory death on the cross. Throughout Romans, Paul explores the full gamut of the atonement, in all its facets and with many of its wonderful implications, but laying at its heart is PSA.

“With the other New Testament writers, Paul always points to the death of Jesus as the atoning event, and explains the atonement in terms of representative substitution – the innocent taking the place of the guilty, in the name and for the sake of the guilty, under the axe of God’s judicial retribution” (J.I Packer, Knowing God)

There is one point where I found agreement with Buckingham, and that there is no single dimension to the Bible’s presentation of the atonement. The Bible offers us richness in the significance of Christ’s death on the cross: from Christus Victor to example, and indeed penal substitution. Buckingham (and do some theologians) calls these ‘theories’. The weakness of the word theory (and metaphor for that matter) is that it can imply a disjunction between theory and reality.  This is why I prefer to use the language of facet and aspect to describe the different parts of the atonement. I think this matters because the cross carries more than symbolism, it affects actual judicious judgment, brought upon the Son in the place of sinful human beings. The cross brings real salvation and genuine reconciliation. We can no more speak of the cross as metaphor and symbol, as we would of the Federal Court of Australia sentencing a guilty person to prison. There may be symbolism and metaphor to be found, but the atonement cannot be reduced to those categories; it is an actuality.

The old rugged cross

Much more can be said, but I hope this is enough to help readers grasp what’s at stake with the atonement. I imagine Buckingham wants to give people confidence in the message of the cross, but denuding the cross of its power and refusing the Bible’s own testimony doesn’t build confidence. It strips people of the Christian hope. The world needs a God who judges and a God of mercy: that God should take onto himself in his Son my sin and its penalty, this is the kind of good news that saves lives and secures hope for the future. Of course, it’s controversial. The cross creates shame and embarrassment and disagreement, but the way forward isn’t to reframe the cross so that it fits more neatly with the wisdom of the Greeks and the morals of the Romans, Instead, let us cling ever tighter to the old rugged cross.