By James M. Stanton

In an age when the significance and centrality of the individual seems to be taken for granted, preaching of the cross may seem to be not only counter-intuitive but also counter-productive. It is easy to pillory or caricature the biblical story as follows: God sets up impossible commandments; his human creation cannot fulfill these commandments; God’s divine honor is thereby insulted and his honor requires vindication; because God is infinite the insult is infinite; human beings are finite and cannot pay the debt of the insult; so God sends his “Son” to die a horrible death in order to pay the debt which he himself has imposed.

Many, apparently, are trying to remove the cross from the Christian story. We are instructed by the enlightened today that Jesus is no “savior” and that humanity is not in need of saving. A whole band of New Testament scholars even questions whether Jesus died on the cross at all, claiming that there is evidence of alternative views in the early Church that do not include his death as of any significance, and that offers versions of these other — sometimes called “lost” — gospels and their implications for Christian living.

One does not have to go to the “radical” theologies to find a recasting of the Christian story. Some within the Anglican tradition claim that too much was made of the whole sin-and-redemption motif, and the consequent concentration on the cross, in the past. One often hears, for example, that what sets the Anglican way apart is its emphasis on the Incarnation rather than on the atonement wrought by the cross. In this argument, often simply displayed as a narrative, the critical moment of reconciliation was the “decision” of God to enter the creation in the person of Jesus (all in a metaphorical sense, of course). By deigning to unite Godself with the creation in the Incarnation, God effectively reaffirms God’s commitment to the creation, redeems it, makes it good, and sets about bringing everyone to re-appreciate and actualize this goodness.

In this narrative, sin is our problem, not God’s. The gulf between God and us is to be bridged by us. God has already done God’s part in the Incarnation. If we are to talk about sin, it is in terms of greed, selfishness, the bad things we do to each other, knowingly or unknowingly. But there is no need for a savior or a system to deal with all this: because God created the world good, and because God is now immanent in this good world, what is needed is a change of mind or heart — we need to understand where we stand, who we are, and live into this good world to become “all we can be” while maximizing the ability of others to do so as well. This is called “grace.”

The martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was prophetic when, shortly before his death at the hands of the Gestapo, he wrote: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. … Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate” (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 47).

Bonhoeffer would pour scorn on attempts to have a Christian faith without the cross. The truth is that ridding the Christian faith of the cross is not an effort to redefine or reinterpret one aspect of that faith, but a replacement of that faith with another. It is not a matter of emphasis, but of substance. Cheap grace is not just cheap, but fraudulent — not a new approach, but a deception. The only grace worth having is a costly grace, the grace that comes precisely through the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The emphasis on Incarnation (“incarnational theology” as it is often flagged) is itself incoherent without the crucifixion and resurrection. Had Jesus not died the traumatic death he did, and been raised by the sovereign power of God, we would not be paying any attention at all to Jesus, or his message, or his movement today. Jesus, for all the good he was and did, and all the good people today want to find in him, would have been quickly forgotten in the years following his demise.

“Christ died for our sins,” Paul writes. Not surprisingly, given this formulation, we must begin with sin. Sin for the Old Testament, as for the New Testament, is the problem. But what is sin? The sovereign God, by a sovereign act of will and love, created a world. He created the world for his own ends — an expression of his love and generosity. This created world was good, because God called it into being. But something went wrong. You will remember the story. It’s all about a serpent and a woman and a man. Sin is a human thing. But in what does sin consist, exactly? The serpent tempted the woman to do something which, as they both well knew, God had forbidden.

When the tempter tempts, he does so in, as Scripture says, a most subtle way. When the woman tells him what he knows perfectly well, that God had given a commandment, and that if that commandment were abrogated, “you shall surely die,” the tempter says: You won’t die. God only told you that because he knows that if you eat this fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God — knowing, or having power over good and evil. Ah, this is what gets the woman’s attention. She is a thoughtful woman, as it turns out — Eve, the model critical thinker. She ponders the fruit, sees that it is naturally beautiful, has certain healthful properties, and is desirable for its ability to make her wise, to expand her world, to fulfill her longings and so forth. So she eats.

The abrogation of God’s command is here occasioned only on a more basic temptation: to be like God, to replace God, to be God of her own life. And it is this that constitutes sin: the desire to replace God and to be God. In the period of the Judges, the greatest condemnation is that “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The prophetic condemnation was that Israel had pursued its own course rather than acknowledging God as sovereign. Jesus says it succinctly: “You follow the traditions of men rather than the word of God.”

The something that went wrong is that the human pair and all humans subsequently have hungered and thirsted to be God rather than to trust God. It is this which leads to the abrogation of God’s commandments, God’s law, rather than the other way around. And it is this which is at the root of sin generally, and sins specifically. Corresponding to the sweep of this backdrop are the many ways in which the cross addresses the essential problem. Paul and, indeed, all Christian writers from the beginning use many images and words to describe and explain what is meant by “Christ died for our sins.”

Christ Died Because of Our Sins

Jesus died because our sins — human pride, arrogance, hubris — put him there on the cross. The cross is the ugliest instrument of human torture and death imaginable; it was contrived to be so. It was meant to strike terror in everyone who ever saw it. It is what human beings are left to contrive when the majesty and dignity of life which God intended is abandoned, and human beings wander off to pursue their own ends. Paul says essentially this toward the end of the first chapter of Romans. As he looks out on human history, he sees the wrath — the anger and judgment — of God displayed over human sin, and he says:

since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless (Rom. 1:28-31).

It is to deal with this godlessness, sin in this sense, that Christ died. And in his dying he embraces this reality of the human situation. He takes it on, and it destroys him. Jesus’ cry from the cross — “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” — is poignant precisely because it is the cry of the human soul in the face of the cruelty of life without God, and because it demonstrates the complete unity of Jesus with us. Our sins put Christ on the cross, and overtook the one who had no sin.

Christ Died to Overcome Our Sins

This, too, is part of what “Christ died for our sins” means. He died for the purpose of dealing with sin. In part, this is explained in one of the most powerful parts of Paul’s writing:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:5-11).

This fascinating passage is almost a retracing of the garden story of the Fall. Here, Christ is understood to have been pre-existent and, indeed, to have had unity with the Father. Though he had equality with God, he did not hold on to this equality — he did not cling to his divine prerogatives. Instead, he emptied himself, and took on human form. Indeed, so complete was his identification with the will of the Father, and so faithful was he in obedience to God, that he became subject to death, the death of the Cross. Here, Paul exhibits Christ as bearing the full image of God and at the same time exercising that complete trust in God that was abandoned in the Garden precisely in the quest to become like God.

If sin is pursuing our own ends in the place of God’s ends, and seeking to become like God, then the action of Christ in the kenosis, the “emptying,” is its opposite. And while certainly this dramatic decision takes place before any earthly human events — and is in that single sense Incarnational — nevertheless, the kenosis is not a remote event in a transcendent dimension, but finds its fulfillment in the very cross which stands at the center of the Christ’s life and the Christian proclamation concerning him.

This is God’s act, not ours. Consistent with the long tradition of Christian teaching, the atonement— however that may in fine detail be understood — is always at God’s initiative in human favor. It is not merely God’s call to us to come to new understanding and behave differently. It is an objective act, God’s act, which opens up new possibilities for human existence.

This act is crucial precisely because it represents something human beings could never effect on their own. Christ in his self-emptying and faithful obedience displays precisely the character that Adam and Eve reject in the garden. They cannot turn back the clock and get things right. Only God can do this. And Christ, the one who was equal with God, has done it with extraordinary grace and at a great price.

Clearly Paul uses this example to point the way forward for Christians: “Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus.” Many people have mistakenly interpreted this as the “ethical model” for understanding the atonement — or, as some have called it, the “bootstrap theory.” If we become obedient to God as we have the example of Christ, then we too can be reconciled with God. But while Jesus sets the example for us, and we are in truth called to understand and live into that model, the gospel does not end there. Because Christ Jesus has done what he did, the whole creation is made new. Perhaps, in the garden, Adam and Eve could have chosen otherwise. But they did not. And because they did not, because fundamentally human beings seek to be their own gods, the whole possibility of “bridging the gap” was foreclosed until God acted to bridge it.

Christ is the Sacrifice for Our Sins

The cross was always seen in terms of sacrifice. And yet we may ask in what sense this sacrifice operates.

Clearly the vast majority of Christians have come to see the death of Jesus as in some sense substitutionary. Jesus dies on the cross bearing the punishment for the sins we have each committed. He dies, both symbolically and literally, in our place. There can be no doubt that this is a biblical image, one way in which the cross is to be understood. And it is compelling when we — convicted of our sin, our arrogance, our pettiness, our failure as image bearers of the living God — realize that we are not worthy of the God who made us, and who wills for us far more and far better than we are either willing or able to be. This intensely personal and deeply real apperception is probably what accounts for the enduring character of this image of the atonement.

But this understanding or icon of the atonement, while everywhere present in the New Testament, is not the most compelling, still the only, such image, understanding or icon. If taken to its theological consequence, it also entails much deeper, much more dynamic images.

Paul shows this in several ways. By baptism, we are incorporated into the death of Christ. His sacrifice therefore becomes our own. It is not that we can “earn” our salvation by being baptized, but rather that we come to see that we must empty ourselves, as Christ emptied himself, and by incorporation into Christ actually become what he is. We give up, we must give up, all claim to self. We must “lose ourselves,” as Jesus himself taught.

We are to look at the whole of life as sacrificial. “Be living sacrifices,” Paul says. “This is truly spiritual worship.” The meaning of the cross must be confronted day by day, step by step, in the most ordinary aspects of our lives. In the thoughts we think as well as the deeds we do, we are being trained up into the full maturity of Christ — or not, as the case may be. The sacrifice of Jesus is not something done once long ago. Though complete in itself, its whole point is to catch us up into his self-offering, so that he is able to present us in him to the Father, a bride without spot or blemish. Christ died in or place that we might live in him! This is sacrificial theology in its fullest voice.

The Rt. Rev. James M. Stanton is Bishop of Dallas.