Thinking about the Atonement: the New Testament

In my last blog piece I discussed the Old Testament view of the atonement.  Here I would examine the New Testament understanding of the atonement.

As with the Old Testament, there is in the New Testament no clear and detailed elaboration of how the atonement “works”, which of course accounts for the current debate about it.  But all Christians agree that it centers upon the life, death, and resurrection of Christ:  because of Him, the cosmos has been cleansed and reconciled to God.  Through Christ our sin has been forgiven, death has been trampled down, and divine life has been given to us, making us sons of God and co-heirs with Christ.  Orthodox believe that the Atonement is but one element in this salvation, a salvation involving our complete theosis and the transfiguration of the cosmos.

Christ’s execution as a criminal on Golgotha was not just an execution carried out by the Romans, but also Christ’s voluntary self-offering, a sacrifice which took away the sins of the world.  We see this atonement in several passages of St. Paul:  “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).  Through Christ, God “has reconciled all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of [Christ’s] cross, whether things on earth or things in heaven.  Although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in [Christ’s] fleshly body through death” (Colossians 1:20-22).  We were “justified as gift by [God’s] grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed for the demonstration of His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:24-26).

Similarly St. Peter:  the world was redeemed “with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:19).

St. John says the same thing.  He described Jesus as the “propitiation [Greek is ἱλάσμος/ ilasmos] of our sins and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).  The Church’s testimony is unanimous:  by His death Christ reconciled the world to God.

We also find this truth in the prophetic words of Christ, for He said that He came to serve others and give His life “as a ransom [Greek λύτρον/ lutron] for many” (Mark 10:45).  We have seen that the notion of a ransom has its roots in the Old Testament, expressed in the Hebrew kopher, something offered to atone, to wipe away sin, to secure forgiveness of a penalty.  Here the question is sometimes asked, “To whom was the ransom paid?”  In our modern understanding of a ransom, we assume that a ransom is a sum paid to someone to release a hostage.  So if Christ said that His death was a ransom, for whom was the ransom intended?

The Fathers of the Church, being a more diverse lot than they are often given credit for, offered various answers.  Since our sins meant that we were held in bondage to the Devil, some Fathers (e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa) suggested that the ransom was paid to Satan.  Others (such as St. John of Damascus) found this this notion inappropriate.  The Damascene suggested instead that Christ died “because He took on Himself death on our behalf, and He makes Himself an offering to the Father for our sakes.  For we had sinned against Him and it was fitting that He should receive the ransom for us and that we should thus be delivered from the condemnation.  God forbid that the blood of the Lord should have been offered to the tyrant!” (Exposition 3.27).

I suggest that it is a mistake to press the ransom metaphor too far.  By describing His death as a ransom Jesus meant to emphasize that His coming death by execution would not be an unfortunate martyrdom, but the means by which the world was released from its slavery to sin and death.  In the words of Leighton Pullan (in his 1907 book The Atonement) commenting on St. Paul’s words in Romans 3:24f, “There is no need to narrow the meaning of this [divine] righteousness into a mere severity or the readiness to inflict a deserved punishment…The righteousness of God shown in the dying Christ is therefore a judicial righteousness; it demanded and secured a ‘propitiation’.  And God secured it by giving it.  He exhibited His judicial righteousness, His reaction against sin, and condemnation of sin, by showing that sin must no longer go unpunished unless removed by the propitiation which He Himself furnished…[But this does not mean] that God was under a moral obligation not to forgive sin until He had punished it, and that He punished sin in punishing Christ.  On the contrary, S. Paul’s teaching is that God could not forgive sin until He had condemned it.  And He condemned it at the tremendous cost of sending His own Son to be a means of propitiation by His blood…The Levitical sacrifices do not imply that the sinner’s guilt is transferred to the sacrificed animal.  Sacrificial propitiation was regarded as a vindication of the holiness of God, which purified sin by means of sacrificed blood…Sacrificial propitiation is primarily this cancelling of sin and simultaneous cleansing of the sinner”.

About seventy years later, Fr. Thomas Hopko said the same thing (in rather fewer words).  Resisting the notion that the ransom was paid to God (or to the Devil), Fr. Tom wrote, “Christ ‘paid the price’ not to God the Father in the sense that God delights in His sufferings and received ‘satisfaction’ from His creatures in Him.  He ‘paid the price’ rather, we might say, to Reality itself” (From his four-volume work The Orthodox Faith, volume 1).  Reality and justice demanded that sin be atoned, the punishment borne, the guilt wiped away.  As our representative, Christ did all that.

This is the teaching of the Fathers.  We cite three of them.

In his work On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius wrote:  “There was a debt owing which must needs be paid, for as I said before, all men were due to die.  Having proved His Godhead by His works, [Christ] offered the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man’s account with death and free him from the primal transgression.  In the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection”.

We see the same teaching in St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his sermons on the Gospel of John:  “As our truly great and all-holy high priest, Christ appeases the wrath of His Father by His prayers, sacrificing Himself for us”.  And again:  “Bearing on His shoulders the wood on which He was about to be crucified, He went out, condemned already and suffering the sentence of death, even though He was innocent.  And He did it for us.  He took upon Himself the punishment that the Law justly assigns to sinners.  He became a curse for us, as it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’.  We are all cursed because we cannot fulfill the divine Law.  Since the divine Law said somewhere, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things written in the book of the Law, to do them’, the curse applies to us and not to others.  So the One who knew no sin was cursed for us in order to rescue us from the ancient curse.  God, who is over all, was sufficient to suffer this on behalf of all and to purchase redemption for all through the death of His own flesh”.

Much later, St. Symeon the New Theologian said the same thing in his homily On the Transgression of Adam:  “Since Adam had fallen under the curse, and through him all people also who proceed from him, therefore the sentence of God concerning this could in no way be annihilated; and therefore Christ was for us a curse, through being hung upon the tree of the cross, so as to offer Himself as a sacrifice to His Father, to annihilate the sentence of God by the superabundant worth of the sacrifice.”

It is easy, of course, to caricature this, and to twist it around to portray God as a blood-thirsty sociopath whose blood-lust would only be sated by the death of the innocent—and our adversaries have not been slow to do this.  Admittedly sermons like those of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” give them lots of ammo.   But at its heart the atonement is a love story, the tale of a God who took upon Himself the stroke due to His creation when it rebelled against Him.

Even children can understand this.  That is why C. S. Lewis wrote in his The Magician’s Nephew that when Aslan discovered that some children from earth had inadvertently brought sin into His newly-created world of Narnia, He announced to the Narnians, “You see, friends, that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam.  But do not be cast down.  Evil will come of that evil, and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself”.

This is the New Testament doctrine of the Atonement.  Christ offered Himself up as a ransom for many, and by His blood He washed the cosmos clean.  Our sin has been expiated and wiped away.  The joyful and open road of forgiveness now lies open to all who will travel it in penitence.  Wayward sinners can now come home without a fear.