Was God Forced to Kill Jesus?

Kevin Harris: Bill, listeners have been learning a lot about the atonement of Christ in recent podcasts and in your work, of course, and one of the ways that one can remember what one has learned is to apply it. I'd like to take what we've been discussing regarding various views on the atonement and what you've written in your book, Atonement and the Death of Christ, and apply it to an article from a popular blogger called, "Did God Really Need to Kill Jesus to Forgive You?"^[1] Dan Foster writes for the Backyard Church. He questions much of what he grew up believing. He's kind of going through deconstruction, I think. But it can be very interesting reading. And now he's re-evaluating the atonement. And here's how he begins. He says,

Christianity, I was told, could not possibly be a human invention.

I remember a youth leader in my teenage years explaining that the Gospel’s logic was so upside down that it could only have come from God.

His reasoning was simple. A system where people are saved by grace alone, not by effort, morality, or religious performance, was so upside down, so counterintuitive, that it had to be divine. . . . Only God would come up with something as scandalous as unearned grace.

I'm going to stop there for a moment. Bill, are there arguments for the truth of Christianity based on its unusual or counterintuitive reasoning that you know of? I know that C.S. Lewis said something like that, that Christianity had that certain twist that real things have. And I just wondered if there's something to that.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I've heard arguments of that sort offered occasionally, but I have to say I've never found them very compelling myself. I think, though, that they could be part of a cumulative case in connection with other arguments.

Kevin Harris: Dan continues, the youth leader’s argument

framed Christianity as this wildly imaginative divine interruption in an otherwise transactional world. Which is why years later, I find myself stuck on a troubling question. If grace is so unimaginably generous that no human could have invented it, why does the story we often tell about the cross feel so painfully predictable? . . . I've just received another dressing down from a well-meaning evangelical in the comments section of an article I wrote where I dared to suggest that God did not need Jesus to die in order to forgive. The commentator said scripture was clear. The cross was necessary. Justice demanded satisfaction. God could not simply forgive without first dealing with sin through punishment. In short, God had no choice. The underlying claim is this. Once sin entered the world, God became bound by a moral and legal framework that even he could not override. Wrath had to be expressed. Justice had to be paid for. God in this telling is no longer free.

And he'll elaborate further below, Bill, but I want to address the problem that he seems to be having. Is he troubled that God's freedom and power are diminished because God had no choice but to express his wrath and punish Jesus in our place?

Dr. Craig: A couple of things that are wrong with this paragraph. First of all, not all Christian theologians have thought that the cross was necessary. Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius both thought that God could have saved us without Christ's passion, but that he contingently chose it as the most effective demonstration of both his love and justice in achieving our salvation. And it certainly does do that, I think, far more than Jesus' teaching or Jesus' life. It has been, above all else, that Christ's passion has been so arresting in drawing untold millions of people to faith in Jesus. So the position of Aquinas and Grotius that the passion of Christ is contingently chosen, I think, is certainly defensible.

But second, on a necessitarian view like St. Anselm's, God is not bound by some external legal framework. Rather, God is himself “the good.” His love and justice are essential aspects of his moral perfection. Neither can be compromised. He can no more cease to be just than he can cease to be loving. Failure to understand this point leads Dan down a false path of erroneous thinking that has, I think, disastrous consequences. The consequence of Dan's view is an Islamic conception of God where God's free will trumps everything, even his own nature. God is free to act even contrary to his own nature. So on the Muslim view, if on the Judgment Day God were to decide to send all faithful Muslims to hell, he could do so. And all one could say is, "It's the will of Allah." What Dan doesn't seem to appreciate is that if God can act contrary to his own justice, then he can also act contrary to his own love. God could freely choose to be hateful and vindictive and damn everyone who places his faith in Jesus. Is that really the kind of God that Dan wants?

Kevin Harris: Wow. Well, this seems to be the crux of Foster's objection. He writes,

I believed this view myself for years, but the conclusion it leads to is hard to ignore. The God who creates out of nothing, who speaks reality into being, who heals, restores, and reconciles with a word, suddenly runs out of options when it comes to mercy. Faced with human failure, the solution is not restoration, healing, or transformation, but punishment redirected. Someone must die. We are told that grace is unimaginably radical, something no human system would ever invent. Yet the mechanism that supposedly makes grace possible follows the most familiar human logic imaginable. Someone pays. Someone suffers. Order is restored through violence. That isn't surprising. That's how human systems have always worked. Empires function this way. Legal systems function this way. Religious systems function this way. Is this really the most creative thing God could do?

OK. What I'm getting here is that if, as Dan was taught, Christianity is so imaginative and generous that it could not be a mere human invention, then why is God's solution in the PSA so typically and unimaginably human rather than the creative solution that he was taught that it was by the youth director? Maybe this just overturns the youth director's argument and nothing more?

Dr. Craig: Right. That could be one conclusion you could draw. The youth director's argument wasn't very good. But really, the doctrine – think about it – that God himself would assume a human nature and voluntarily bear the punishment that his own justice exacted is startlingly creative and unexpected. Have you ever heard of anything like this? On a necessitarian view, restoration, healing, and transformation are achieved through God's bearing the punishment that we deserve.

Kevin Harris: Hey, let's pause the action for just a moment. I want to remind you that you will get a lot out of the free Reasonable Faith newsletter. Dr. Craig talks about a lot of things in the newsletter that he doesn't discuss anywhere else. It's a look behind the scenes of Reasonable Faith. There's always some extra teaching, the latest news and events, and usually some things that are just on Dr. Craig's mind. Go to ReasonableFaith.org and sign up. Again, it's free. While you're there, take advantage of all the free resources at ReasonableFaith.org. As always, thanks so much for your prayer and financial support. Now, let's get back to the studio with Dr. Craig.

Dan does offer some scriptural support. Next, he says,

In the version of the story I keep encountering, God creates a moral universe governed by justice, wrath, and punishment. Humanity violates that order, and suddenly God finds himself constrained by it. Forgiveness is no longer freely available. Mercy has limits. Grace must now pass through a legal filter before it can be released. The law once given becomes absolute. God does not choose the cross. He is forced into it. The system demands blood, and God must comply with the rules of his own creation. At this point, the law is no longer serving God. God is serving the law. This is where things start to feel inverted. Throughout scripture, laws exist to serve life, not to override it. Jesus heals on the Sabbath. He interrupts executions. He forgives sins without sacrifice. Again and again, he treats the law as something subordinate to mercy, not superior to it. And yet, when we reach the cross, God's hands are tied.

You just addressed a lot of this about God being consistent with his own nature. And that's the way you would want it if you think about it. Maybe it's not that God's hands are tied, but it's simply that God sees the PSA as the best way to atone for our sins when all the factors are considered. Personally, the trauma of the cross has always made me want to own my sinfulness and to take it seriously.

Dr. Craig: Absolutely. Dan is obviously unfamiliar with the contingent view of theologians like Aquinas and Grotius. But even on a necessitarian view, it is not the case, to quote Dan, that "God finds himself constrained by a moral system." It's simply that God cannot act contrary to his own nature. Does Dan really want a Muslim concept of God who can act contrary to his own goodness? If God is free to violate his own justice, he is equally free to violate his love. Dan's view thus undermines our assurance of God's love for us.

Kevin Harris: So what is Dan's explanation of Jesus' atonement on the cross? He writes

What makes all this even more troubling is that God becomes less like a father and more like a cosmic administrator, less healer than judge. But what if the cross was not God solving a problem, but God revealing one? The cross exposes what happens when love confronts fear without resorting to violence. It shows what human systems do when faced with a God who refuses to play by the rules of domination, exclusion, and control. Seen this way, the cross becomes a mirror rather than a mechanism. It reveals the cost of grace in a world addicted to power. But if the cross exposes violence rather than requiring it, the meaning of the cross shifts entirely.

What historical view of the atonement does Dan's view most characterize?

Dr. Craig: I don't know what his view of the atonement is. As I read this and reflect on it, it's not clear to me what he thinks. He says Jesus suffers as a martyr to the corrupt powers in the world. But how that serves to cleanse us of the guilt of our sins and reconcile us to God is utterly mysterious. His view seems to be closest to a moral influence view of the atonement. On this view, the cross demonstrates how much God loves us, thereby motivating us to turn to him in repentance and faith. The problem is that the moral influence view, once it's detached from penal substitution, becomes unintelligible. If someone were to throw himself into the water to rescue my drowning child and were to lose his life in saving my child, my response would be to say, "Greater love hath no man than this. He gave up his life to save another." But if the person just said to me, "See how much I love you," and threw himself into the water and drowned, that would just be absolutely bewildering. It wouldn't make any sense at all. So the moral influence theory of the atonement, though capturing one facet of an adequate atonement theory, is not a standalone theory. And for that reason, I do not think Dan has offered us a plausible theological alternative.^[2]