The Impact of Dr. Craig's Book on The Atonement

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, back in March you were invited to speak to Lanier Theological Library in Houston on your book The Atonement and the Death of Christ. Roger Olson was there. He blogged about it.^[1] He writes,

One of the most interesting claims Craig makes in his book The Atonement and the Death of Christ is that God, as judge and ruler of the universe, faced a “dilemma” when confronted with creaturely rebellion and sin—a dilemma caused by his love and his justice which are not just two facets of the same attribute. The substitutionary atonement was, we agree, God’s self-decided, voluntary solution to that inner dilemma.

Is that a good summation?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. The key word or expression here in Dr. Olson’s paragraph is that God’s love and justice are not just two facets of the same attribute. Some Christian philosophers try to reduce God’s moral perfection to his love. And they think that God’s justice is merely an expression of his love. I think that this is quite mistaken. God’s love and his justice are distinct moral perfections, both are essential to God, and these occasion this dilemma that Roger speaks of. On the one hand, as a God who is perfectly just, God must punish sin. He must give the just desert for wrongdoing. On the other hand, as a loving God, God must forgive and pardon sin. So the question is: How can God do both without compromising one of his essential attributes? I'm persuaded that the substitutionary atonement of Christ is the answer to this dilemma. At the cross we see God's justice meted out as Christ bears the penalty for sin that we all deserved, and yet at the same time we see God's love for humanity as he voluntarily takes upon himself the suffering and the punishment for sin that we deserve. So the love and the justice of God kiss at the cross. That is the reconciliation of this dilemma occasioned by God's love and justice.

KEVIN HARRIS: He then says,

Craig has written the best book ever on the substitutionary atonement. If you have qualms about that doctrine, you should read the book. I cannot repeat all that it says here.

Craig and I agree that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is biblical and the best model/theory of what God did for us in Jesus Christ on the cross—not to the exclusion of every other aspect of Christ’s work for us on the cross. Yes, we both affirm, it was a moral example and influence. Yes, we both affirm, it was a victory over the powers and principalities that held and hold people in bondage to sin and away from God. Yes, we both affirm, it unmasked those powers and principalities for what they are. Never have I said and Craig does not say that these other aspects of the atonement are false; our joint claim is that substitutionary atonement is a necessary aspect of the work of Christ—for a complete and accurate understanding of it.

Other aspects, Bill, that he’s talking about?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. In my work I have characterized the doctrine of the atonement as a multi-faceted jewel that includes things like moral influence, Christus Victor (God's victory over sin and death and hell), ransom theory, satisfaction theory, governmental theories and so forth. All of these are facets of this beautiful gem. But the central facet (what gemologists call the table of the gem) that anchors the whole, I think, is penal substitution. And I think Roger agrees with me on that.

KEVIN HARRIS: Roger continues,

Craig and I agree that most of the critics of substitutionary atonement do not understand it correctly. He expounds it absolutely correctly (although I won’t say I agree with every sentence of his book) such that he sweeps away many of the objections to it made by critics. For example, the violence done to Jesus was not done by God; it was done by men. The real suffering of Jesus on the cross for us was his experiencing the God-forsakenness we deserve.

DR. CRAIG: I would say that the physical suffering that Jesus endured on the cross was (however horrible and severe it was) relatively minor in comparison to what Dr. Olson refers to here as experiencing the God-forsakenness that we deserve. I think that's what hell really is, and in that sense Jesus went through hell for us and for every human being that will ever live.

KEVIN HARRIS: He then writes,

And both Craig and I believe in universal atonement. In the book he explains very well how it is possible for people receiving a pardon to reject it and not benefit from it.

That is distinguished from universalism, isn’t it?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that’s right. What he's contrasting universal atonement with is the Reformed doctrine of limited atonement which says that Christ died only for the elect. The reason that Reformed theologians think this is that if Christ died for everyone then they say everyone would be saved, and since everyone is not saved that implies that Christ died only for those who have been predestined by God to salvation. But those who are reprobate (who are not predestined to salvation) Christ did not die for them. So really, in a sense, there's no possibility of their salvation. Dr. Olson and I both reject that. I think that the Scripture clearly teaches that Christ died for the sins of the whole world and that God wants everyone to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. The reason that not everybody is saved is because, although Christ's paying the penalty for our sins satisfied divine justice such that God can now offer us a complete and full pardon for our sins, in order to be the beneficiary of that pardon we have to voluntarily receive it. But if we reject the pardon then we fall back on his justice. In this respect I think God's pardon resembles legal pardons by the president or by governors in our American justice system. The Supreme Court has ruled that if a pardonee rejects the pardon offered to him that it cannot be forced upon him, that he has the right to reject it. In that case he must pay the just desert for his crimes. He falls back under the just condemnation of the law.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next in the article Roger says that he was moved to tears by your testimony, of how you came to Christ, and that just studying your work he and so many other scholars either don't get a chance or haven't had a chance to hear your personal testimony.

DR. CRAIG: What happened was that after the lectures and panel discussion at the library, Mark Lanier invited me to be interviewed in his Sunday School class at Champion Forest Baptist Church. At one point he asked me, “Well, how did you come to Christ?” And I shared my testimony. It's a measure of Roger's heart for the Lord that he would express being moved by that. It shows his love for Christ, I think.

KEVIN HARRIS: Then he gets back to the atonement:^[2]

1. I have considered the possibility of “substitutionary atonement” without the “penal,” but Craig’s book convinced me that’s really not possible. If Jesus Christ was crucified as our substitute and for our salvation, then there had to be a penal aspect or dimension to his substitution. I do not consider the WORD “penal” necessary, especially if it is a stumbling block to someone considering substitutionary atonement.

DR. CRAIG: In the book I have a kind of big tent philosophy for what counts as a penal substitutionary view. I want to include in that view people like John Stott and I. Howard Marshall who said that, although Christ bore the suffering that would have been the penalty for our sins had it been inflicted on us, that he himself was not punished for our sins. Rather he bore the suffering that would have been our punishment had it been inflicted on us. I want to include those as penal substitution theorists. But I agree with Roger that the more adequate view is to say that Christ was indeed punished for our sins. Our guilt and sin was legally imputed to Christ and therefore he was legally liable for those sins and was punished for those sins. He bore the punishment that we deserved.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says,

3. My argument was . . . that rejection of substitutionary atonement is a significant departure from evangelical Christianity. I am a scholar of evangelical theology and so I know this to be the case. I could also mention important theologians who are not usually categorized as “evangelical” (in our American sense) who held very strongly to substitutionary atonement (including penal substitution): Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Juergen Moltmann among others.

. . .

I am convinced that rejection of substitutionary atonement is a step toward liberal theology if not a sign of it.

DR. CRAIG: And our listeners need to understand that by “liberal theology” Roger is not casting aspersions. Rather, liberal theology was the dominant theology of the late 19th century which held that Jesus basically was proclaiming a kind of ethical kingdom of God and that by following his teachings all of us become God's children and members of his kingdom. But there was no substitutionary atonement. I think it was Richard Niebuhr who characterized classical liberal theology in the following way. He said a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment by means of a Christ without a cross. Roger, I think, rightly says that giving up substitutionary atonement is a step in the direction of that classical liberal theology because it abandons the meaning of the cross.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he says,

5. Anselm’s so-called “satisfaction theory” was/is a form of substitutionary atonement even if not exactly the same as they Reformers’ theory of “penal substitutionary” that is highly forensic.

DR. CRAIG: I'm not sure I agree with that. St. Anselm had the view that we owe an enormous debt to God which we cannot pay, and so what Christ did was he paid our debt by giving his life voluntarily to God as a gift. God then needed to reward Christ for this great gift and so what he does is he forgives our sins and we are reconciled to him. I don't think this really is a substitutionary view. It's more a matter of Christ's satisfying the demands of God's honor and then we are the beneficiaries of that.

KEVIN HARRIS: Up next he talks about forensic soteriology. We all have a vague idea of what we mean by “forensic.”

6. Forensic soteriology, in its fullness, as taught by Luther, Calvin, Turretin, et al., is not necessary for substitutionary atonement. Craig seems to think it is, but I disagree. However, I also think that some degree or form of forensic soteriology (that God “counts us” righteous because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross and our faith in him/it) is biblical.

DR. CRAIG: This is just a tantalizing little tidbit in this article that I would like to hear more about. It does seem to me that penal substitution is intimately bound up with the idea of a forensic account of salvation, that is to say for those who are unfamiliar with the terminology, that our salvation is a legal transaction – God offers us a legal pardon for our sins and so declares us to be righteous in his sight. But that doesn't make us automatically become good people, much less holy saints. Just as a convicted criminal whom the governor pardons doesn't instantly turn into a morally virtuous individual, we don't turn into morally virtuous and spiritual people in virtue of being pronounced righteous by God. It's a legal transaction. The convicted criminal is legally pardoned and therefore legally free from the debt of punishment that he owes. Similarly, we are legally pardoned by God and therefore released from the condemnation of sin. But it is up to the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit to progressively make us into the kind of people that we should be and that God has declared us to be. Sometimes in popular Christianity the difference is explained as the difference between our positional status in Christ versus our experiential status in Christ. Positionally we are redeemed, forgiven, cleansed, perfectly righteous. But experientially we are sinful, struggling on the road to sanctification but sometimes slipping back, and so forth.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he writes,

7. Every evangelical Christian denomination I have studied holds to some form of substitutionary atonement; it seems that, historically and empirically, substitutionary atonement has been and is an essential part of evangelical Christian theology. Sometimes the word used is “vicarious” (in place of “substitionary”), but the meaning is the same.

Vicarious?

DR. CRAIG: Right. “Vicarious” means “in the place of.” It means “substitutionary.” So sometimes we'll say, for example, that watching your son play Little League baseball gives you vicarious pleasure when he hits a home run. You experience the pleasure of hitting a home run or catching the fly ball even though he's the one that's doing it. Vicarious atonement would be the idea that Christ is our substitute, our proxy before God, and it is through his bearing the punishment for sin and the wrath of God that we are redeemed and pardoned.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally, Roger writes,

10. I have read the church fathers and have found undeniable affirmations of substitutionary atonement in them even if, in some cases, their main theories of atonement are something else (e.g., the so-called “ransom theory”). I was surprised that Craig did not appeal to Athanasius show, in De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation of the Word), affirmed substitutionary atonement and even affirmed that by Christ’s death all are saved. Of course, he meant “potentially” saved (in light of the whole of the book and other things he wrote).

DR. CRAIG: I quote a number of the early church fathers to show that they affirmed the doctrine of penal substitution but I was not aware that Athanasius did so, and so I thank Roger for the reference.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think that this article by Roger Olson and your lecture at Lanier Theological Library are showing that your book The Atonement and the Death of Christ is having the impact that you hoped it would.

DR. CRAIG: I certainly hope so. I was very grateful to Mark Lanier for the invitation to deliver this lecture, and I'm flattered that Professor Olson would write such a nice review of the lecture and of the book. I do think that since the atonement lies at the very heart of Christian theology that this book on the atonement is one of the most important, if not the most important, piece of work that I’ve done.^[3]