I'm sorry for this question– I feel a bit uncomfortable just asking it, but I'd be lying if I claimed that it weren't on my mind. I'm an agnostic who's been thinking more and more about Christianity lately. The more I absorb the beauty of the Gospels (as cheesy as this might sound, the justly-vaunted John 3:16 has made me tear up with sheer gratitude before), the more potential I feel for a relationship with Christ. But I've arrived at a strange thought, and it's getting in the way of things. I'm happy to accept that I'm in error, but, so that I might become a better believer, I'd like my error explained to me and my thinking corrected.
Here's the thought: as I understand it, humankind was in a state of irredeemable sin before Christ. God, in His infinite mercy, chose to absolve humankind of its sins, and sent Christ (at once God and man) to redeem humankind by suffering and dying on the cross. His death "paid for" the sin, making God's absolution available to anyone who accepted it (by following Christ). But if God wanted to absolve humankind in the first place, and the absolved sin was a sin against God, then why didn't He just... absolve them? What was stopping God from redeeming humankind?– that is, what "rule" could possibly have constrained God such that only Christ's "payment" could make redemption possible? To whom was Christ's "payment" made?
To use an analogy, imagine that Joe owes ten billion dollars to Fred, a debt that he wouldn't be able to repay if he worked every minute of every day for the rest of his life. Fred says to Joe: "I know that you can't pay me back, but not to worry! I'm going to forgive your debt." Fred then takes ten billion dollars of his own money, gives it to Bob, waits for Bob to get sick and die, and takes the money back from him. "Be grateful to Bob," says Fred to Joe. "He paid your debt for you." Fred didn't need to bring Bob into this at all. If he wanted to forgive Joe's debt, all he had to do was say "you're off the hook."
I know that I'm missing some crucial detail here, but I don't yet know what it is. If I'm to become a Christian, I'm going to need to get past this question. Thanks dearly for helping me.
What is often not widely known is that within Christianity there is a fairly wide range of views on the meaning of the Atonement. What are classically known as "Theories of Atonement". What you have described above is more-or-less considered the Penal Substitution Theory.
Penal Substitution Theory arose, primarily, among Reformed theologians in the early years of Protestantism. Prior to the Reformation the main Western view was what is known as Satisfaction Theory, first proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in his major work
Cur Deus Homo? ("Why Did God Become Man?") in which Anselm establishes that the reason for the Incarnation had to do with man's sin by which man has incurred an unpayable honor debt to his Lord, that is, God. Consider the feudal context of the high middle ages when Anselm lived, whereby lords ran their estates and subjects of the lords owed fealty and honor to their lord. Man has offended God's great honor by sin, and thereby God is owed an immense honor debt that no human being can make satisfaction for, therefore God the Son becomes man thereby being able to bridge the gab between Deity and humanity and make perfect satisfaction on man's behalf paying the debt owed God in full.
St. Thomas Aquinas appropriated Anselm's theology but modifies it, that is a good and just God has right to satisfaction against His offender (man), but in His mercy Christ offers Himself in man's stead not to placate God's wrath (as in Penal Substitution) but in order to make satisfaction of the just demands of divine law. Or as Wikipedia describes it:
"
So the function of satisfaction for Aquinas is not to placate a wrathful God or in some other way remove the constraints which compel God to damn sinners. Instead, the function of satisfaction is to restore a sinner to a state of harmony with God by repairing or restoring in the sinner what sin has damaged."
But if we go back to the ancient Church we find other views, most noticeably Recapitulation Theory found in the writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyons (late 2nd century) and among other Church Fathers, Ransom Theory.
In Recapitulation Theory the stress is on Christ who, in the language of St. Paul, is the second Adam, the New Man; as Paul writes that even as sin and death entered the world through one man's disobedience, resurrection from the dead has come to all by one man's obedience. In Recapitulation Christ recapitulates the entirety of human life, history, and experience and undoes what Adam has done, thereby offering to God in obedience the sum total of human being thereby correcting, healing, renewing, and restoring all that was lost, broken, or marred by Adam's disobedience.
Here is a relevant passage from Irenaeus:
"
He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head, as you can perceive in Genesis that God said to the serpent, "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall be on the watch for (observabit ) your head, and you on the watch for His heel." [Genesis 3:15] For from that time, He who should be born of a woman, [namely] from the Virgin, after the likeness of Adam, was preached as keeping watch for the head of the serpent. This is the seed of which the apostle says in the Epistle to the Galatians, "that the law of works was established until the seed should come to whom the promise was made." [Galatians 3:19] This fact is exhibited in a still clearer light in the same Epistle, where he thus speaks: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman." [Galatians 4:4] For indeed the enemy would not have been fairly vanquished, unless it had been a man [born] of a woman who conquered him. For it was by means of a woman that he got the advantage over man at first, setting himself up as man's opponent. And therefore does the Lord profess Himself to be the Son of man, comprising in Himself that original man out of whom the woman was fashioned (ex quo ea quæ; secundum mulierem est plasmatio facta est), in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one; and as through a man death received the palm [of victory] against us, so again by a man we may receive the palm against death." - St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V.21.1
Ransom Theory is that view, held by many of the ancient Christian Fathers, whereby it was understood that through Adam's sin Adam in some sense became the captive of the devil, and the devil has since exercised authority over man since then. The Atonement, then, is God who pays the devil a ransom, offering the life of His only-begotten Son. The devil accepts this payment, but the devil has been tricked, thinking he had won a victory against God it is in fact the devil's very undoing--for the One the devil has received is very God Himself who descends to Hades to destroy Hades. Christ has invaded the enemy's camp and set it to ruin, releasing the prisoners and setting captives free. Indeed in the ancient art of the Resurrection the Icon of the Resurrection shows a victorious Christ victorious standing upon the broken doors of Hades, with the devil and death crushed beneath them. Christ takes hold of Adam and Eve by their writs and lifts them out of their sarcophogi and on either side of Him are all the saints who ever lived from the ancient biblical patriarchs and kings to the apostles, and Christians of later generations on the other.
In the last century a Lutheran theologian, Gustav Aulen, wrote a small book titled Christus Victor in which he argues that the ancient patristic views of Recapitulation and Ransom should be taken more seriously by Christian Westerners, and Aulen puts forward these as, effectively, the Christus Victor Theory. Which has gained significant momentum since its publication (and indeed a very good read).
Many have argued that it is perhaps in error to choose only one theory to the exclusion of all others, that in many ways most of these theories are correct and are therefore not mutually exclusive.
Me? I subscribe to the Christus Victory Theory (and thus find immense value in the ideas of Recapitulation and Ransom), though am not entirely opposed to the language of Satisfaction. Though I do largely reject the doctrine of Penal Substitution, I believe it is in error to believe that God's primary direction toward us is wrath or anger, and that Jesus suffers the wrath of God in order that we do not have to. On the contrary, Christ suffers death not as the object of God's wrath, but as the object of human hate, Christ willingly becomes the Victim of Victims of mankind's inhumanity and hubris. Christ receives the totality of human rejection and embraces all our weakness, all our fragility, all our death in order that He might crucify it, and in rising from the dead lift up the whole human creature as glorified before God. In Christ there is, therefore, a new humanity that is triumphed over sin and death and which is ours now by faith and ours, ultimately, in the resurrection and the eternal life in the age to come.
That is to say, could God absolve sins by choosing to absolve sins? The answer is yes. Christ's death and resurrection is much more than about pardon, it is about restoring the entire human creature, and indeed, restoring the entirety of all creation, not just man, but
all things.
-CryptoLutheran
