One of the parents in the congregation recently was saying how hard it is to answer good questions from children about why Jesus came and had resorted to trying to explain it in terms of the Naughty Step.
I thought it might be helpful to lay out some of the main theories of the Atonement thus:
- Ransom theory – our parents were so naughty that they deserve the naughty step and have passed their naughtiness onto us. Justice requires that someone has to go to the naughty step to pay for this and God tricked the devil into seeing Jesus on the naughty step as sufficient payment for this.
- Christus victor theory – Jesus has gloriously broken down the powers and dominions of naughtiness and only has to glance at the naughty-step for his holiness to turn it in to dust. Nothing can withstand his might and power.
- Moral influence theory – Jesus came to teach us how to be so good that we would never be sent to the naughty step.
- Penal substitution theory – God simply won’t forgive anyone until He is satisfied that the naughty step punishment has been fulfilled in full. Fortunately, Jesus comes along and takes on that naughtiness for himself, freely offering to pay the debt of naughtiness to God the Father. We need urgently to recognise this offer and accept it.
- Incarnation theory – the amazing thing is that Jesus comes and sits on the naughty step with us, sharing our frailty and sharing our sorrows.
There are other possibilities, but those should keep you going for a bit.
Now, all these things have been believed by Christians. However, it doesn’t make much sense to claim that you believe them all at once. Notwithstanding that, I’d say that they all move me at one time or another, even though I tend towards one of them as my dominant way of understanding why Jesus came. We encounter all of these theories in our hymns, if not elsewhere.
That’s the way atonement theory works for me.
This is the greatest explanation ever of various atonement theories. For some reason, understanding it in the context of the naughty step has allowed my brain to actually get what in the world these various theories are actually trying to say.
The preface to Ian McEwan’s fine novel “Atonement” is an interesting one:
‘Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
Jane Austen, “Northanger Abbey”
I’ll try again:
Child: “How long do we have to stay on the naughty step for when God sends us there?”
And what really IS the ‘naughty step’ (in reality)?
Just asking, y’know.
Sorry to disappoint you John, but I try not to make a habit of getting into long debates about substitutionary atonement. Notwithstanding my original post and the interest there has been in it I’m struggling to get that excited about engaging now.
Many thanks for your comments. However previous experience suggests that engaging with folk who are trying to persuade the world that one kind of atonement theory is fundamentally true leads neither to an interesting debate nor to a conversion on my part.
(I probably ought to put my commenting policy more prominently online – http://thurible.net/2012/08/04/revised-commenting-policy/)
I think I may have posted this earlier, but it seems to me Kelvin, ‘you started it’ ;-). Your explanation of atonement theories included an ‘explanation’ of the one that you now say in your comments policy people should not try to explain.
Why (really, why?) pick on this one? But in any case, my questions were aimed at the problems I have with other theories of the atonement that your illustration illustrated. Can’t we discuss them, at least?
There are significant problems with the alternatives to PSA:
Ransom – Satan, not God, is calling the shots
Christus victor – if the naughty step has been vaporised, then what will God do about evil?
Moral influence – what about forgiveness for past sins?
Incarnation – Jesus is with us, but we are still on the naughty step.
The real issue, though, is that all of these (including PSA) are just human ideas. It doesn’t really matter what feels instinctively right or wrong to us. We can’t decide which is right without looking at what God says on the topic.
And I bet you know what God says, Mike. I just bet you do.
Kelvin, I think the frustration some of us feel is that the unanswered questions are not about penal substitution but some of the other theories, and indeed the whole scenario.
So let’s try this one: Is the Law (as in OT Law) God’s ‘naughty step’?
I wouldn’t want to push the naughty step analogy too far.
The Law derives from experience of the peoples of the OT as they tried to relate to God.
Thanks Kelvin, but I wasn’t really asking about the origins of the Law, I was asking about its function.
My thought is, doesn’t ‘law’ function exactly on the ‘naughty step’ – you break the rules, you pay the price, you (hopefully) learn your lesson? And isn’t this the function of all law, not just religion-based law? We pay the price, and so long as the price is ‘payable’ there is no need for a further act of ‘atonement’, either on our or anyone else’s part.
In the Church of England, though, we start from the principle that Christ suffered, died and was buried to reconcile his Father to us, so we believe in Christ’s work of atonement, therefore (I presume) we believe that our time on the naughty step is actually not enough to atone for our own ‘naughtiness’.
That’s why (I take it) it helps if we have an account of atonement that makes sense, and why it was worth trying to elucidate it with the ‘naughty step’ analogy as this allows us to ask questions of each account to see whether they hold water.
You may also recall the words of the Prayer Book Ordinal, which remind us that the role of the priest is (inter alia) “to seek for Christ’s … children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.”
Perhaps the ‘naughty step’ analogy isn’t so inappropriate.
I spend my life seeking for Christ’s children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.
However, I’ve never heard the prayer book ordinal used and I’m in no position to comment on what the Church of England believes.
Expressions of boredom with a subject (not least one we have brought up ourselves) tell us nothing about the truth or value of the subject but rather our emotional or mental capacities. Discussions of quantum physics or high finance soon cause my eyes to glaze over, but that is because of my lack of knowledge of and engagement with these issues.
In any case, the point of a naughty-step (as any sensible parent knows) is educative and restorative, rather than retributive, so it isn’t a good model for the Cross. If you want to use that analogy for the Cross, it is Jesus *sitting on the naughty-step *instead of us (you obscured this with your abstract talk of him “taking on the naughtiness”) – exactly the reason why Socinius argued that PSA was “immoral”.
When the NT speaks about being “crucified *with Christ” [sitting on the naughty step together?], the meaning is not the just punishment of our sins (for Christ has undergone this already, according to Romans 5) but the askesis of our characters (mortification, in old language).
All I can hope, Miles is that it makes you feel better to think that you’ve explained something to me that you believe I don’t understand.
Kelvin, I can understand that you don’t agree with something (we get it too!), but do you have to be so ‘snarky’ about it with contributors? It is an unfortunate trait that seems to affect Christian blogging. Probably done it myself, but still …
Actually John, I don’t see any evidence in Miles’s comment that he does get it too.
It has so often been the case with people who want to comment here in relation to this topic that that the same dynamic plays out. As though just one more comment “explaining” just a bit better will convince me that substitutionary atonement is right. It is my soul that I’m gambling with primarily. The stakes for me are pretty high – people don’t seem to trust me when I say that I’ve thought about it plenty.
As to snarkiness, I guess I could get uppity about you describing me on your own blog as being afraid of all this – but I’m glad that the discussion has moved over there and pleased to have stimulated some discussion with my original post.
Perhaps we should both spend time on the naughty step – though when Jesus comes along, I’ll be off, but you’ll have to stay while he shares your sorrows.
JUST KIDDING!!!!
“The Law derives from experience of the peoples of the OT as they tried to relate to God.”
So the Mosaic Law is “what the Israelites thought God was like [but may not be?] and what they thought He said [but may not have?].” Is that right? What did ‘the peoples of the OT’ actually ‘experience’? And what did Jesus think the Mosaic Law was and where it came from?
It seems hard not to conclude that the peoples of the Old Testament had different responses to the Law at different times. (And some may have had different responses within their own changing experience.
I wouldn’t presume to think that a question like “What do the Jewish people” think about the law could be answered simply nowadays, much presume that the communities whom we find in the Old Testament had only one experience.
What Jesus thought of the Mosaic Law is a more interesting question and one that I explore in my preaching sometimes and in dialogue with other preachers here at St Mary’s.
What Jesus thought of the New Covenant is another interesting question. Certainly in the Hebrew Scriptures, sacrifice/blood can be used to seal a covenant. It is not a ransom, in that context, nor a price paid.
Kelvin, I wasn’t trying to ‘explain something to you’ (presumably on penal substitution?) but was arguing that your use of the ‘naughty step’ analogy failed because it confused the historic work of Christ on the Cross (ephapax) with the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit (sanctification). As a father, teacher and priest, I know there are different ways of thinking about ‘punishment’. However you think of ‘atonement’ (to use Tyndale’s word) – whether as fighting against evil, offering a sacrifice or paying a penalty (Scripture uses all three models), it is first of all what Christ does ‘for us’, ‘instead of us’, ‘in our place’.
I’m fairly immune to ‘snark’, but I hope we’d agree it’s better to answer a person’s arguments than to speculate about his emotional state (‘it makes you feel better’ etc). One of the finest expositions I know of substitutionary atonement with the ongoing blessings of being bound to Christ (what I think you were aiming at in your ‘incarnational analogy’) is found in Luther’s ‘Concerning Christian Liberty’ with its famous image of faith as the wedding ring that binds us to Christ, so that our sins become his (substitution) while his graces become ours (antalagma, exchange). I commend it warmly!