Recently I was in a discussion with someone about the Reformed Theologian Michael Horton, and how he appropriates and comments on the language of sacrifice used by the early Church Fathers such as Athanasius and Chrysostom in his work on Justification. To be fair, I have only read a few pages from this particular work. But, speaking as a former Reformed theologian (Amyraldian, Infralapsarian, Four Point Calvinist to be exact), I have read a ton of stuff like this: Calvin, Berkof, Grudem, Erickson, Packer, Sproul, early Horton, and the like. I would say the entire Reformed tradition is all just an adventure in error, except for folks like Karl Barth and Jan Bonda and William Barclay. Horton here is trying to take the great riches of the Orthodox Theosis tradition, cut off its limbs, and shove its corpse into the coffin of Reformed Theology. Spoiler alert: I have a lot to criticize in the Reformed tradition, particularly in its vision of salvation and the ideas embedded in the so-called "TULIP" of Calvinism. Better off to ditch the Horton and just read the original sources.
To be more specific: Do the early Church Fathers talk about sacrifice and atonement? Yes. But that discussion comes out of a completely different worldview than Reformed theology. Sacrifice in the patristics is linked to a sacramental worldview in which the whole created order is a means of participation in the Divine Life (theosis) with Christ as the nexus and epitome of that Union. Sacrifice in reformed theology is linked to a worldview of commercial payment and legal (forensic) declarations of guilt and innocence, epitomized in the hilariously named “Penal Substitutionary Atonement”. Reformed theologians cherry pick sacrificial language from the Patristics to make it sound as if their theology is a continuation of their project. When this is not the case. It would be as if I talked about the experience of eating a warm, gooey, messy chocolate chip cookie. Then someone takes the word cookie as a euphemism for genitalia, and then twists my words to make it sound as if I was talking about sex. The same words are distorted to make them fit a completely different and obscene context. In the same way, Reformed theology hijacks earlier theological language in a way that is both foreign to the original intent and obscene in the way it makes God oriented toward absolute power, control, and retribution.
Am I denying the language of sacrifice, substitution, and exchange in the New Testament and Early Fathers? Not at all. Yet, there are lots of different models of atonement, and the phenomena of substitution or exchange happens in a lot of different dimensions of life. In physics you have heat and energy exchange. In sex you have exchange of bodily fluids. In medicine you have exchange and substitution of blood and organs. In culture you have exchange of information. In commerce you have exchange of currency and debt. In law there are exchanges of penalty and punishment, reward and merit. In familial and romantic relationships you have the exchange that comes from forgiveness and bearing each other’s burdens and sharing in each other’s lives.
Within that total spectrum of types of exchange and substitution, it seems clear that some are more natural to the Divine-human relationship, while others fundamentally distort it, or are reflective of arbitrary human constructions that bear no relation to how or why we were made in God’s image. The governing images of Reformed theology— as is natural to a theology constructed at the origins of modern nation states and mercantile capitalism— come from the humanly constructed realms of commerce and judicial punishment. And some analogies are just bad analogies to be used to convey the Divine-human relationship. Commerce and legal debts and punishments are such bad analogies, as well as many medieval analogies drawn from feudalism which were used to construct much of Anselm’s atonement theology, as well as the system of indulgences and purgatorial punishments.
Why are the analogies drawn from commerce and jurisprudence flawed? I think it is because of the arbitrary nature they assume. In commerce, at the end of the day, the price of a commodity is determined by the seller, who can price it as high or low as she voluntarily wants to. She can choose to make or lose money on a deal. So, to transfer this analogy to God makes it seem as if the price of sin and alienation from God is arbitrary. The same is true for judicial punishment as opposed to natural consequences. The natural consequence of hitting a wall is bruising and breaking one's hand. The natural consequence of contracting a disease is getting symptoms. But if a person commits a crime, the penalty assessed on that crime is arbitrarily assigned by the judge and jury. There is no intrinsic connection with a certain crime and a certain penalty. This is why we protest unjust legal punishments in a way we do not protest the effects of the law of gravity. And thus, to portray the effects of sin as a realm of judicial punishment makes God seem as if the consequences of sin are purely arbitrary.
Instead, we need to draw on analogies for atonement in which the consequences are intrinsic to the system described, and not merely arbitrary human constructs. Or, put another way: The atonement of Christ is not merely an arbitrary act of God to deal with an arbitrary punishment assigned by God. The atonement is a necessary act of God to bring people back to healing and wholeness and union with God after the intrinsic and necessary consequences of sin.
Thus, if we are to look at the substitutionary aspects of the atonement, I think we need to draw analogies and images from human relationships, and perhaps medicine or biology or physics, to help explain and describe the nature of the exchange that happens. My go-to tends to be what I call “relational substitution”, which has two aspects: First, in relationships there is a kind of solidarity in which we voluntarily go through pain and suffering with our beloved. This God does in Christ. Second, relationships require forgiveness to last. And forgiveness is inherently substitutionary: You take into yourself the consequences of the harm I caused you, without visiting it back on me, in order to heal the rift between us. This God also does in Christ.
I also think there are some other analogies of substitution that are fruitful. CS Lewis speaks of Christ as the “good infection” that is injected into humanity to heal the disease of sin. This kind of “blood infusion” or injection is a form of substitution. One could also speak sexually of the blood of Christ as that which impregnates us with the Divine Life. Although that image of atonement is too erotic for most Westerners. One could also draw from physics and speak of Christ as that which receives and dissipates the destructive energy of sin, and via “heat exchange” fills us with the Divine Energy of the Spirit. In short, there are a LOT better images of Divine Substitution which better convey the life and love of Christ than substitutionary images derived from the Court Room and the Cash Register.
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