Michael E. Wittmer: Extreme Measures

Thoughts on Embracing the Cross

If desperate situations call for extreme measures, then extreme measures are a sign that we are in a desperate situation. When a police car flashes its lights behind me, my wife turns to me and says in her disapproving voice, "What did you do?" If my car is surrounded by police cars and a television helicopter is hovering overhead, my wife’s tone will become more accusatory, "What did you do?" If a fighter jet joins the chase, dropping bombs in the direction of our car, my wife might scream like the leading lady in a Schwarzenegger movie, "What did you do?!"

Consider what God did to save us. He didn’t hand us a brochure or ask us to attend a seminar, as if our problem was merely ignorance. He didn’t hold an intervention or send us to boot camp, as if our problem was merely stubbornness. He answered our need with the cross, which can only mean that we have really messed up. If the cross is necessary to save us, then What did we do?

The cross is a dagger through the happy talk of "you’re okay, I’m okay" and if we just try harder we can get past our issues and change the world. The center of history is a weapon of torture—imagine holding hands around a guillotine or electric chair and you’ll get the idea. The cross informs us that things have gone horribly wrong, and they won’t be right unless somebody dies.

That somebody is Jesus. It’s fashionable to deny that Jesus died to pay the debt which we owed to God (the penal substitution view of the atonement). I agree that penal substitution doesn’t explain everything that happened on the cross (Jesus also defeated Satan and left us an example), but it does express the most important thing. Take away penal substitution, and you can’t explain what happened there.

Consider William Channing, a Unitarian who said that his liberal friends "have no desire to conceal the fact that a difference of opinion exists among us in regard to an interesting part of Christ’s mediation,--I mean, in regard to the precise influence of his death on our forgiveness."¹

Or Greg Boyd, whose Christus Victor view contributes a necessary aspect of the atonement. Nevertheless, without penal substitution, Boyd is forced to concede that "Obviously, this account [Christus Victor] leaves unanswered a number of questions we might like answered. E.g., precisely how did Calvary and the resurrection defeat the powers? …at the end of the day we must humbly acknowledge that our understanding is severely limited."²

Perhaps the reluctance to embrace penal substitution—despite its explanatory power—lies in part in an overly optimistic view of ourselves. We don’t think we’re really that bad, surely not bad enough to deserve God’s wrath, and so we are unable to say precisely why Jesus died.

That somebody is us. Jesus died instead of us but not without us. We don’t get away scot free, but are called to take up our cross and be crucified with Christ (Matt. 16:24; Gal. 2:20; Rom. 6:1-14). Karl Barth explains: "That Jesus Christ died for us does not mean, therefore, that we do not have to die, but that we have died in and with him, that as the people we were we have been done away and destroyed, that we are no longer there and have no more future."³

Salvation is free but it’s not cheap. It cost Jesus his life, and if you accept his gift, it will cost yours.

1) William E. Channing, "Unitarian Christianity," in The Works of William E. Channing (1882; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 378.

2) Greg Boyd, "Christus Victor View," in The Nature of the Atonement, ed. James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (InterVarsity, 2006), 37.

3) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 295.

Comments

[Mel Cartera]

Amen! Praise God for the cross.

Thanks, Michael. God bless you.

[Joe Rutherford]

This is a wonderful message about the Lord Jesus and his death upon the cross for our sins. Just as important is the message of how God unites us with the death, burial , resurrection, and heavenly rule of the Son. In the 3ard chapter of John we read that one must be born of the water and of the Spirit, in order to enter into the kningdom of God. It is so important that folks really know what it means to be born again. We all need to be sure that we have truely been united with Christ from the cross to glory.

[Ajith Fernando]

I think the problem today is not that some of the newer understandings of the cross are entirely wrong, but that we are not sufficiently emphasising the difficult to understand scandal of Christ's death as an act of penal substitution. Because of this neglect we may have a new generation of Christians who embrace the more culturally appealing aspects of the cross while knowing nothing of the heart of the cross--that Jesus died in our place for our sins. This article is an excellent corrective to this problem.