SOME VERY SERIOUS ISSUES FACING EVANGELICAL ANGLICANS IN AUSTRALIA

I have recently been in correspondence with the Anglican Bishops of Armidale in New South Wales, and of North West Australia in relation to the centrality or otherwise to the Anglican faith of the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement.  They are both implacably committed to this single theory of the Atonement; indeed, they seem to treat it as though it were the very essence of the Christian Gospel. Furthermore, they are of the view that the vast majority of clergy exercising ministerial priesthood in their dioceses are also committed to belief in the penal substitutionary theory.

The Bishop of Armidale in his 2024 Address to Synod (which is available on the website of the Anglican Diocese of Armidale), in responding to the book Darkness: The Conversion of Anglican Armidale, 1960-2019 by Thomas Fudge, contended, for example, that “the primary authority of the scriptures, and the penal substitutionary atonement are foundational doctrines in the Anglican Church of Australia both historically and currently. Our fundamental declarations and ruling principles make this crystal clear.”[1] 

Apparently, it is the Bishop Chiswell’s view that Professor Fudge, in the course of his critique of the last sixty years of history of the Diocese of Armidale, had abandoned the “primary authority of the scriptures” and had been consistently disparaging about the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement.

The most serious of the theological questions that are raised by this charge is whether the penal substitutionary theory is really foundational to Anglicanism.  Or, indeed, is it foundational to Christianity generally? I do not think there is really an issue about the primary authority of Scripture. 

1.    First, it has to be said that there may be an issue amongst Anglicans about the role of tradition and the use of reason in the interpretation of Scripture, but not about “the primary authority of scripture.”  The Fundamental Declarations of the Anglican Church of Australia clearly state: “This Church receives all the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith given by inspiration of God and containing all things necessary to salvation.”  The use of the word “ultimate” here, and the Bishop’s own use of the word “primary”, both already imply that other elements may legitimately come into play in the exercise of authority in relation to matters of faith and doctrine; the interpretation of the Scriptural texts in the light of the defined dogmatic tradition of early Christianity, and the use of reason in the pursuit of theological truth, are therefore not necessarily excluded from the interpretation of Scripture. This has been the case historically in Anglicanism at least since Hooker, but there is no debate about the primary or ultimate status of the canonical Scriptures as the rule or standard of faith in the Anglican tradition. This statement of the Fundamental Declarations is clear and cannot be changed.

2.    The status of the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement is quite another matter.  The Fundamental Declarations of the Constitution state that the “Anglican Church of Australia, being a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, holds the Christian Faith as professed by the Church of Christ from primitive times, and in particular as set forth in the Creeds known as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed.”  The hard fact is that the theory of penal substitutionary Atonement has never been defined as a fundamental or required doctrine in the long history of the Christian Church.  It is not mentioned in the Creeds, and is not a foundational doctrine of the Anglican Church of Australia.

3.    The theory of the penal substitutionary Atonement was developed in the nineteenth century, though it has theological roots going back to the federal theology of Zacharius Ursinus and his Heidelberg Catechism of 1562. Ursinus interpreted the work of Christ employing problematic legal categories: first, God is said to have made a contractual covenant with Adam that was thought to be conditional upon Adam’s obedience.  Adam in disobedience broke this contractual arrangement. Like all broken contracts, this may be understood quite naturally to have incurred a legal penalty.  This penalty was understood in turn, on the basis of a disputed reading of Genesis 2.17, as the penalty of death, which is said to have been imposed on Adam and all sinfully disobedient humanity after him. On the basis of this understanding of things, the penal substitutionary theory holds that God the Father made a transactional agreement with his eternal Son, whereby the Son was sent into the world to die in willing obedience, and so paid the penalty of death instead of us humans.  This is regularly said to satisfy both the wrath of the Father and the just need for a penalty to be paid for the disobedience of Adam and of all humanity after him.

4.    The Oxford scholar Alister McGrath in a recent book entitled The Nature of Christian Doctrine (2024) points out that attempts to outline “theories of the atonement” were “a theological innovation of the nineteenth century”, the first use of the phrase dating from the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur in 1838.  These attempts to engage in the rationalization of the process of redemption have tended in more recent years to focus exclusively upon the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement as though it were the only “theory of the atonement.”  McGrath speaks of all this as a “modernist intellectual emphasis on a (presumed) theoretical framework” and of “its reluctance to confront the rich diversity of soteriological images in the New Testament.” (The Nature of Christian Doctrine, p. 139). 

The rich cache of metaphorical images found in the New Testament indicate something of the diverse nature of early Christian attempts to describe the experience of redemption “in Christ”. These range from references to Christ’s death understood on analogy with the Temple cult of sacrifice, to the idea of being pronounced righteous or free of guilt, drawing on the language of acquittal of a law court, to the payment of a debt and release from prison, or the payment of a ransom and release from captivity, or even victory in battle. Then there are the New Testament references to the continuing work of the Raised and Glorified Christ as advocate “who ever lives to make intercession for us”, and the gift of the Spirit, also understood as our advocate before God.

Given the “ultimate” or “primary” authority of Scripture we are obliged at the outset to acknowledge the metaphorical nature of this imagery; the verbal reductionism of limiting the salvation of God to the status of a mere “theory” is something pursued at our peril, particularly given the indeterminate nature of metaphor generally, and quite specifically when metaphors are used in relation to God and his works.

5.    Even so, in a previously published response to Thomas Fudge’s book (which is also still available on the website of the Anglican Diocese of Armidale), Bishop Chiswell ventured to ground the theory of penal substitution in the Ruling Principles of the Constitution of the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia.  By contrast with the Fundamental Declarations which cannot change, the Ruling Principles uphold the importance of traditions characteristic of historical Anglicanism, specifically including the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. Bishop Chiswell declared that Article 15 of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles states the theory of penal substitution “plainly.” However, it has to be said that Article 15 has no mention whatever of penal substitution. 

Moreover, in that original response to Professor Fudge, Bishop Chiswell unfortunately muddled the penal substitutionary theory and the sacrificial theory of the Atonement when he said that Christ "died a sacrificial death to pay the price for human sin" - as though the language of the Temple and the language of a law court were univocal. Furthermore, as we shall see, his contention that "the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement is found all through the Bible" is also quite patently untrue. 

6.    The penal substitutionary theory has been once again unequivocally affirmed by the Bishop of Armidale in a more recent defence of complementarianism in a "Bishop's Position Paper" on the role of women in ministry, which is currently on the Armidale Diocesan website. In Section e of this document, (Regarding Salvation), Bishop Chiswell says that all of us "deserve his (God's) just punishment" and that Christ bore this punishment by "dying in our place".   This simply by-passes the possibility that Christ died in our behalf rather than in our place or in our stead. Indeed, in the proof text which is then cited at this point from 1 Peter 3.18, the actual text explicitly says that Christ died for the benefit of sinners, “the righteous for the unrighteous” or “for the sake of the unrighteous", not "the righteous instead of the unrighteous."  In other words, the Bishop’s own proof text actually disproves the penal substitutionary theory.

7.    Apart from this appeal to I Peter 3.18, generally speaking Bishop Chiswell has relied on very broad and general statements relating to an alleged sweeping textual support for the penal substitutionary theory whether in Scripture or in documents of the Anglican tradition. This reference to 1 Peter 3. 18 is a welcome exception, even if it falls short of proving his point. By contrast, in my correspondence with the Bishop of North West Australia, Darrell Parker, Biblical references have been more focussed. While also contending that the biblical evidence in support of penal substitutionary atonement is “utterly unambiguous”, Bishop Parker has helpfully furnished some specific texts that he had in mind. 

8.    One text which is cited in support of this assertion was Isaiah 53, in which the suffering servant who was “wounded for our transgressions” is said to have “borne the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” There is still some scholarly disagreement about the original identity of the Suffering Servant, but the ancient text of Isaiah 53 is usually understood to have referred to Israel itself as the Suffering Servant who suffers vicariously on behalf of others. In any event, it is understandable that it immediately came to mind as early Christians sought to interpret and come to terms with the trauma of the suffering of Christ. But it is a stretch to argue that it actually prophetically referred beyond the “wounding” and “stripes” to the actual death of Christ explicitly understood in a penal sense as a penalty imposed on him by God the Father.

In other words, one who suffers vicariously on behalf of others does not necessarily pay a penalty instead of others. There is no mention of the alleged “penal” nature of death in this text (or anywhere else in the Old Testament for that matter). At this point Bishop Parker is in the company of a lack-lustre Report into the Penal Substitutionary Atonement of the Sydney Doctrine Commission of 2010, which also imagined that the penal nature of death could legitimately be read into the Old Testament, even citing the fact that a succession of patriarchs lamentably “died”. This lament, however, is entirely without any specific allusion to the notion of death as a penalty.

Admittedly, it has to be said that the assumption is regularly made, even by evangelical scholars, that Isaiah 53 somehow supports the penal substitutionary explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death.  See for example, Mark D. Thompson, A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture, p. 59: “The key to understanding the disturbing chain of events that leads up to his (Christ’s) death is to be found in the Old Testament, in places such as Isaiah 53. In the language of contemporary Christian theology, Jesus’ death is substitutionary.” 

This is asserted despite the fact that there is no reference in Isaiah 53 that demonstrates that the Father’s eternal Son had to die in order to satisfy the Father’s wrath, or to demonstrate his justice - as a necessary consequence of the need for the disobedience of Adam (and all humanity after him).. Though it is regularly said by supporters of penal substitution that God, being a just God, is bound by the necessity of his own just nature, and cannot allow Adam’s disobedience to go unpunished, as though the Son had to be publicly punished so as to demonstrate God the Father’s justice,  nothing of this is to be found in Isaiah 53.  

9.    Another text that Bishop Parker has raised in support of Scripture’s alleged "utterly ambiguous" meaning is Philippians 2. Those who appeal to this Pauline text in support of penal substitution and the submissiveness of the Son to the will of the Father often develop a kenotic Christology from it of the kind that suggests that Paul was talking, not about the historical Jesus, but about an alleged  heavenly transaction prior to the incarnation which resulted in the Father’s sending of the Son, and consequently of the Son’s “emptying himself” in the sense of leaving behind some of his heavenly powers, and thus humbling himself by becoming man.  Bishop Parker himself suggested this by saying that "though he was equal with God he took on the form of a servant".  In fact, what Paul says in Philippians 2 is that "though in the form of God" the man Jesus Christ, “being found in human form”, did not snatch at equality with God but, precisely as he lived and died as a man, took on a lowly form of humanity - that of a servant - and so revealed something of great importance about the true nature of God. Paul is of course in this Philippians text, probably appealing to the Platonic category of "eternal forms" that, in an empirical and methectic sense, are known in concrete particulars in this world.

In any event, however, the kenosis or self-emptying is not that of God leaving divine powers behind in heaven and becoming man, but that of Jesus the man living as a lowly self-effacing man, and his revelation of the heavenly character of God - the divine nature that is equally shared by all three trinitarian identities. So the kenotic condescension involved the decision of Jesus the man not to snatch at divine powers of the kind human generally associate with God, but to live the life of a lowly servant and thus actually to reveal something of the true nature of divinity. This is just the opposite of the older kenotic Christologies insofar as it involves, not the abandonment of divinity, but the true revealing of the nature of divinity. 

This interpretative point was argued by the great evangelical Cambridge New Testament scholar, C. F. D. Moule in "Further Reflections on Philippians 2.5-11", in History and the Gospel, ed., W. Ward Gasque and Ralph R. Martin (1970), pp. 264-76.  Charlie Moule was a very good friend of mine at Cambridge, so I guess I am biased, but as far as I am aware his point has never been refuted, and has in fact been supported by many others, including notably John Macquarrie in “Kenoticism Reconsidered” in Theology, 77, (1974) 115-24.  Indeed, it had even earlier been articulated by the Belgian Jesuit, Piet Schoonenberg in "'He Emptied Himself':  Philippians 2.7", in Concillium 1/1, (1965), pp.47-66, and "The Kenosis or Self-Emptying of Christ", Concillium 1/2 (1966). 27-36.”

In any event, clearly, there is no “utterly unambiguous” joy in Philippians 2 for supporters of the penal substitutionary theory!

10.In support of the alleged “utterly unambiguous” Scriptural evidence for the penal substitutionary theory, Bishop Parker has also cited Luke 22:42 (“not my will but thine be done”; cf its parallel in Matthew 26. 39). However, the text of Luke 22:42 is uttered by the historical human Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and is an expression of his human will.  This text has nothing to do with penal substitution, which has to do with a heavenly transaction between the eternal Father and Son somehow “behind” the historical event of the Cross. 

Unfortunately, supporters of penal substitution face a very serious theological problem at this point. It appears to be thought by those who support the penal substitutionary theory that the willing obedience of the incarnate Jesus is somehow continuous with that of an alleged obedience of the heavenly Son who is said to be eternally subordinate to the Father. Apart from this being neo-Arian (as we shall see below), in this case, supporters of penal substitution reveal that they are also monothelite - by thinking of the historical Jesus as having a single divine/human will. Indeed, that seems the inevitable logical implication of the view that Luke 22:42 supports penal substitution.

However, this monothelite view is in fact contrary to the Chalcedon Definition of the two natures of Christ which, as the Third Council of Constantinople made clear (following the robust and courageous teaching of Maximus the Confessor), involves two wills (dyothelitism).  -  the divine and the human wills proper to the two natures of Christ which Chalcedon said should not be "confused".

This means that we have to take care not to muddle the human and historical willing of Jesus with the alleged divine willing of the eternal Son which is shared equally by all three of the Trinitarian identities

In other words, when Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane said “Father take this cup (of suffering) from me; nevertheless not my will but thine be done” he was expressing his human will as a function of his human nature. The human Jesus in the agony of Gethsemane naturally feared death, but willed to do what was demanded of him. Likewise, as a human, the suffering Jesus may be said to have willed, for example, to have a drink of water to quench his thirst on the Cross.  This was a function of his human nature.

Clearly, the will to quench one’s thirst is not appropriate to the nature of divinity. The divine will which the eternal Son shared with the Father and the Holy Spirit may by contrast be said to be the will for the salvation of humanity. This is what is referred to when Jesus said “thy will be done.”  While the eternal Son’s willing is something shared equally with the Father - the will for the salvation of humanity - the obedience of Christ is something that had to be learned in the course of his human life (Hebrews 5.8); on the other hand obedient submissiveness is not to be attributed to the divine nature of the eternal Son as something complementary to the Father’s commanding will. The will of the eternal Son is quite positively in orthodox Christianity shared equally with the Father as a function of their equally shared divine nature; it is not an individualized eternal will that is different from (even if complementary to) that of the Father. This is quite categorically the orthodox Christian teaching of “the Church since primitive times” as originally defined in the Chalcedonian Definition of the two natures of Christ.

Though not to be confused with the divine will, Christ’s human nature and will was, however, not in tension with his divine nature and will. Rather, as Maximus very effectively argued, his human willing was entirely harmonious with the divine will that was equally shared with the Father and the Son and the Spirit. This is the single and undivided will of the One God, equally shared by all three of the Trinitarian identities, who will the salvation of humanity.

(An example of Maximus the Confessor’s helpful thinking in relation to this that is actually based upon Bishop Parker’s quoted text of Luke 22.42 may be found in Opusculum 6: “On the Two Wills of Christ in the agony of Gethsemane”. This is discussed by Pierre Piret, “Le Christ et la Trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur”, Théologie historique, 1983, 203-39, and by Caleb Sinclair in On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ, Maximus the Confessor, Delhi/Mumbai: Grapevine India, 2024, final pages. For the Opuscula of Maximus the Confessor, see Patrologia graeca, J - P Minge, Paris, 1865, Vol. 91, columns 10-286).

11.Those who seek to promote the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement appear to find it difficult to honour the Chalcedonian requirement not to confuse the two natures of Christ. For example, Dr. Mark Thompson, the Principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney, uncritically assumes the penal substitutionary theory and tends to conflate an alleged willing obedience of the eternal Son in becoming incarnate and the historically expressed obedience to God the Father of the historical Jesus in taking the form of a servant. (In A Clear and Present Word, p. 55, 59, and 83-84). All these decisions, he says, “are described in the New Testament in terms of obedience”, citing Philippians 2.5-11 and Hebrews 5.1-7). 

However, as we have already seen, Philippians 2.5-11 does not necessarily refer to an obedient decision of will of the Son’s eternal nature, and in fact does not explicitly mention the concept of obedience. On the other hand, Hebrews explicitly and quite positively speaks of Jesus “learning obedience”  “in the days of his flesh.” His obedience is a function of his human nature. There is no reference to the obedience or submissiveness of the eternal Son in relation to the Father.

Indeed, the Nicaean homoousion entails the equality and indivisibility of the single divine nature shared by the Father Son and Spirit; the orthodox Christian tradition has insisted that this involves the sharing of one single and undivided will – the Persons of the Trinity equally share the single will for the salvation of humanity, for example.  As we shall see below, talk of two complementary divine wills, the commanding will of the Father and the submissively obedient will of the Son, is a step towards an inevitable tritheism. Furthermore, talk of the eternal subordination of one divine will to another. is essentially Arian and thus heretical.

12. I have checked John Calvin on this point about the human obedience of the Son. When Calvin affirmed that we are justified by the obedience of Christ he followed Anselm's orthodox dyothelite Christology, and clearly says it is "certain that he performed all these things in his human nature."  The Son's obedience was a human obedience which he lived out "in the form of a servant". It is interesting that Calvin here cites Philippians 2.7 - thus, at this point even before C.F.D. Moule and others, indicating that the kenotic condescension was not that of God simply becoming man, but of Jesus the man consciously and willingly living as a servant, thus revealing something of the nature of divinity. This may be found in Calvin’s Institutes III.11.9.

13.It is also very important to note that, for the penal understanding of things to hang together in logical terms Genesis 2.17 has to be interpreted as expressing God’s threat of the imposition of a penalty rather than as a warning of what would inevitably happen if Adam persisted in wilful disobedience. In other words, by presupposing a contractual covenant that is conditional upon Adam’s obedience, God is said to have threatened the punishment of death if Adam insisted upon going it alone in the world. However, this penal view of death is in fact missing from the rest of the Old Testament, and even in the Genesis story Adam’s punishment was not death, but expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Adam in fact did not immediately die, but lived on to enjoy “length of days.”  According to Genesis he lived for 930 years!  However, his expulsion from Eden meant that he forfeited access to the Tree of Life in the centre of the Garden. 

14.In other words, Adam was not created immortal and then punished with death and so became mortal.  He was created mortal, as a creature of space and time, with a destiny to occupy a small part of space for a comparatively limited period of time, though with the opportunity of living in trusting obedience under God and with the ultimate prospect of enjoying fellowship with God eternally. The “penal” view of death as always a punishment of God, as distinct from the natural view of death simply as a part of life, is not found in the Old Testament.  If death is thought of as a punishment in some Old Testament stories it is a premature death as distinct from death in the natural course of life.  In the normal course of things, death is not an explicit punishment but a natural occurrence of finite life in space and time.

15.It is very important to note that, apart from the problematic nature of the alleged contractual covenant said to have been made by God with Adam that has to be read into Genesis 2.17, and the alleged “penal” view of death as the punishment of God on Adam and all humanity for Adam’s disobedience, the theory of penal substitution is unfortunately inimical to the trinitarian norms of “the Christian faith as professed by the Christian Church since primitive times, particularly as enshrined in the Nicene and Apostles Creeds.” 

The Nicene Creed lays down the trinitarian norm of the homoousion which grounds the unity of the one God in the equal sharing of the Three Persons in the one and the same substance and its divine nature. There can be no substance without a nature, and as Constantinople III stated, unpacking the definition of Chalcedon, willing is part of a nature. Orthodox trinitarian faith therefore insists that there is thus one equally shared divine substance, nature, and will.

However, the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement promotes the view of a multiplicity of different, though complementary wills in the Trinity, as expressed in talk of “the commanding will of the Father and the obediently compliant will of the eternal Son.” This multiplicity of wills is implicit in the story of the Father who allegedly sends the Son  explicitly to do the Father’s will, so as allegedly either to assuage the Father’s wrath, or to demonstrate the Father’s commitment to justice (since it is said that the Father cannot just turn a blind eye in the face of the sinful disobedience of humanity).  This alleged commitment to justice is said to entail that a punishment must necessarily be exacted for human sinfulness and disobedience; somebody must of necessity therefore suffer that punishment in order to satisfy the Father’s just will. By dying on the cross the eternally obedient Son is said to satisfy this requirement “instead of” the rest of humanity – for all of us in the wake of Adam’s disobedience deserve to die.  Hence the “penal substitutionary theory.”

But since primitive times the Church’s trinitarian faith has steadfastly avoided talk of two wills in the Godhead, such as the commanding will of the Father and the submissively obedient will of the Son. Instead, it has insisted on the equal sharing of one undivided will so as to ensure the indivisibility of the divine action in the world (see, for example, Basil of Caesarea on the “coincidence of willing” in the Godhead, rather than of two or three “complementary wills” in On the Holy Spirit, or  St Augustine of Hippo’s insistence on the single and undivided divine will in De Trinitate). 

This is essential to the maintenance of the unity of God. A multiplicity of different wills, even if complementary, inevitably leads to tri-theism. This is quite positively not “the faith of the Church from primitive times” and is thus a very serious departure from the Fundamental Declarations of the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia. 

Furthermore, if the Son is said eternally to be willingly obedient to the commanding will of the Father, this eternal subordination is a form of the heresy of Arianism, with a clear family likeness to the heresy of Arius which was condemned at Nicaea 1700 years ago in 325AD.

16.By pursuing the penal substitutionary theory of the Atonement and the alleged “complementarian” understanding of the Trinity that it inevitably involves, we end with a disastrous theological casualty which clearly falls short of the orthodox commitment to the authentic trinitarian faith “of the Church of Jesus Christ from primitive times” required by the Fundamental Declarations of the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia.

17.But what is the alternative to thinking of God’s redemption of humanity exclusively in terms of the penal substitutionary theory?

It has first to be said that the Christian Gospel cannot be reduced to a mere theory. It is generally accepted that the New Testament references to the Atonement do not articulate a theory but actually resort to a rich variety of metaphors in an attempt to describe the newfound experience of redemption that was understood to have been won by Christ through his death and resurrection. The authority of Scripture as it is has to be respected as the “primary” or “ultimate” rule of faith, and steadfastly upheld precisely at this point. In other words, if we really acknowledge the “primary” or “ultimate” authority of Scripture, we cannot fail to acknowledge the rich variety of soteriological metaphors in the New Testament. As Alister McGrath correctly says: “The New Testament is more concerned to articulate the actuality of salvation than to offer an intellectual account of its mechanism  or plausibility.”  (Alister McGrath, The Nature of Doctrine, Oxford, 2024, p. 138).

This means that the Christian Gospel is not a matter of believing in a theory, so much as trusting in Christ, and by baptism entering “in Christ” upon a new form of life in reconciliation with God as something in which we actually participate. This is not merely a theoretical or notional commitment, but an eschatological reality that is actually experienced. It is an entry to a newfound life with a status that is gained through faith in Jesus Christ, a reality of concrete experience to which we have access by the grace of God.  The purely theoretical speculation of a “theory of atonement” involves an unfortunate kind of rationalistic reductionism that fails to do justice to the rich diversity of the New Testament’s atonement metaphors.  

By contrast, the ineffable mystery of God’s redemption of humanity is something concretely experienced in which we stand, as St Paul says in Romans 5:2. It is inevitably spoken about in metaphorical language, which like all religious language about God and his ways cannot be reduced to clear and distinct specification.  It is therefore not amenable to reduction to rationalistic theories, but something to be entered into by faith in a participatory way that is therefore in a sense “beyond words.” This is why it has to be emphasised that redemption is described metaphorically as something concretely experienced and that in the New Testament redemption is not just treated as a speculative theory of a rationalistic kind as something to be notionally believed in, but as something to be participated in through faith in Christ.

18.It is curious that the evangelical inclination to focus on a theory relating to some kind of celestial transaction between the Father and the Son “behind” the outward and visible event of the Cross that in turn is said to have a kind of propitiating effect in relation to God’s wrath and anger, tends to by-pass any serious discussion of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as also being integral to an understanding of the achievement of human redemption and reconciliation with God. 

Though Bishop Chiswell in his “Bishop’s Position Paper” emphasised the saving significance of Christ's death by speaking of the “centrality of penal substitutionary atonement through the death of Jesus” and citing 1 Peter 3. 18, he is at least prepared then to touch upon the redemptive importance of Christ’s resurrection, which other supporters of penal substitution regularly ignore.  As 1 Peter has it in the same quoted text (I Peter 3.18), Christ saved us from our sins so as to “bring us to God” by "being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit".  A little later 1 Peter spells out that by Baptism we are saved “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (I Peter 3.21).  Likewise, when speaking of the saving significance of Christ, Paul also holds his death and resurrection together in the same way: "Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification" (Romans 4.25).

19.The declaration that our redemption by God also involves our “being made alive in the Spirit” also reminds us that justification is not only a matter of “being accounted righteous” but, as the Lutheran New Testament Scholar Ernst Käsemann has very persuasively argued in his commentary on Romans, it also involves our “being made righteous” (as in Romans 5. 19), not least through the promised transformational gift of the Spirit. This reminds us that the human redemption won by Christ involves his death, resurrection and the consequent gift of the Spirit.

By emphasising an abstract theory of atonement that focusses exclusively on the death of Jesus at the expense of both death and resurrection, and indeed, the gift of the Spirit, the rich complexity of the New Testament understanding of the nature of human redemption by God’s grace is lost.

20. Furthermore, an emphasise on the saving significance of Christ's death as though this might be isolated from the redemptive significance of the whole the incarnate life of the historical Jesus is almost certainly also a mistake. Christ’s entire life, his death on the Cross, his being Raised from the dead, his Ascension into heaven to assume his glorified place at the right hand of the Father, and the gift of his Spirit, form a continuum in God’s redemption of humanity.

St Paul illustrates how these various elements form an integrated continuum when he says that “while we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. And having been reconciled to God by the death of his Son, we shall be saved from the wrath of God (that is yet to come) for Christ was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4.24). As a consequence, Paul declares that we have “peace with God” (Romans 5.1): “through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand” …because… “God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holt Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5.5.)

Clearly, Christ’s death is not to be understood as an isolated event whose meaning can be discerned without reference to what followed on from it. Just as the killing of a sacrificial victim in the Temple in Jerusalem was a preliminary to the taking of the sacrificed animal’s blood by the High Priest into the Holy of Holies where he splashed it on the mercy seat as the symbol of the presence of God, so in the metaphorical application of this specifically sacrificial imagery in discerning the meaning of the shedding of Christ’s blood, his death is a necessary preliminary to his “passing through the heavens” to sit at the right hand of the Father where, as  the Epistle to the Hebrews declares, “he ever lives to intercede for us” (Hebrews 7.25). It is very significant that 1 John (at I John 2.1-2) picks up this very same insight, when John explicitly says that Christ is our “advocate with the Father” or as AV, RSV, and NIV all have it “one who speaks to the Father in our defence.” (I John 1.7).

It is thus the continuum of Cross/Resurrection/Ascension/ Glorification/Heavenly Intercession, and Gift of the Spirit, as an integrated whole, that was initiated by the self-giving of Jesus on the Cross, that ultimately achieves the redemption of humanity and reconciliation with God. This continuum is what issues in our justification, and the sense of freedom from sin and evil that accompanies this new standing with God. It is thus “in Christ” that we, who have received the gift of his Spirit actually know and experience reconciliation with God in a participative sense, and not just know about it in a rationalistic and theoretical sense. In this way, the end result is an authentically trinitarian doctrine of redemption

Furthermore, Paul makes it abundantly clear that the Spirit is but a down payment, a promise of what is to come – the ultimate eschatological salvation when all humanity will sit down in reconciled peace with God. In faith we thus claim to  know that we are called by God, predestined, and justified by faith in him, and so can now declare with Paul that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8.28-39).

+Peter Carnley                                                                       Easter, 2025

[1] The reference to ‘fundamental declarations’ relates to the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia.