Introduction

Christ came to redeem fallen mankind, to restore us to right relationship with God. He handed over His only begotten Son to sinful men; Jesus "became sin" for our sake, taking on our iniquity. His transformation was so complete that God the Father, looking down from on high, no longer saw His beloved son but only our detestable sin, and abandoned him to the cross to die in our place. Yet miraculously, Christ overcame death in resurrection, in the process destroying its power over us. Through the mysterious action of the Holy Spirit, when we believe in Jesus, we put on his mantle of justice. God overlooks our sin, because He can now see His beloved son in us; Christ’s justice is "imputed" to us, and we are restored to God’s good graces. At least, that is the typical line of reasoning. Sure, it glosses over a few of the details, and the actual theological arguments may use a more technical jargon, but by and large, isn’t this the take-home message of Christianity?

Unfortunately, this legal exchange is precisely what most of us have "taken home" from catechism; a mixed bag consisting of well intentioned but overly simplified doctrine seasoned by a culture rife with legal paradigms inherited from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Not that a legal exchange is absent or even wrong-headed; there is a sense in which these time-honored explanations are true, and arguably a good Christian need never delve any deeper into the theology behind our salvation to lead a life of holiness. However, it is also true that we cannot continue to hang solid theology on the feeble peg of poor analogies. As Aristotle and Aquinas put it, "a small mistake in the beginning is a big one in the end."

If we find ourselves today facing a losing battle with the dominant critical culture, it may well be due to our pallid and shallow understanding of God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ. Only the boldest cynics will argue with Jesus as a precocious moral teacher of great virtue; but our world-wise modern society sees more than a little difficulty with the idea of a God whose version of ultimate justice is to nail some innocent guy to a cross in order to save the rest of us. Far from personal, self-sacrificial love, such a strategy is at best utilitarian and likely Machiavellian or worse, considering that He is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. Maybe we need to revisit our understanding of soteriology after all.

Fr. Norbert Hoffmann has sized up the problem thus: "Whoever clings to a soteriology shot through with expiation finds himself anew, and inevitably, before the task of constructing a ‘theodicy’: he must justify God the Father in the face of the cross, and the cross itself becomes for the believer a question about God loaded with ontological urgency; it becomes a question about the being of God." [1] Who is this Father that could even permit His innocent son to die for guilty men? What kind of "omnibenevolent" deity cannot simply understand the "human condition" in the first place – He made us after all, didn’t He? – and just forgive and forget?

This is precisely the question that I propose to examine here, because a growing number of theologians are beginning to realize that we have been misreading a number of our fathers and doctors, not to mention the Bible itself. It will be a somewhat circuitous path through some of the key historical developments, the Old Testament, and a few contemporary thinkers. Along the way we will also see a number of subtle arguments that have been taken in a way far inferior to how they had been intended. And of course, we will be unable to do any of them justice. Before we are done, however, I hope a new vision of God will emerge: a loving Father who desires nothing more than to extend His family to include all mankind, and is willing to pay even the unthinkable price – to become first a slave and then to die for His children who languish in bondage.