The wrath of God was satisfied?
What the ancient day of atonement ritual has to say about Penal Substitution
One of my favorite songs to sing when I was deep in the Young Restless Reformed movement, Acts 29 to be specific, was In Christ Alone. In the second verse of the song, we hear:
'Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live, I live
I found in this song, a comprehensive systematic theology that encapsulated what I thought the gospel. That God in his perfect justice demanded a sacrifice to forgive sins because his wrath had to go somewhere, and thus was poured out on Jesus, is a major tenet of the gospel story for Reformed folks. They might even say this idea is equivalent with the gospel itself. It’s certainly not something you can question.s I came to learn after I left my church though, this “atonement theory”—Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) to be exact—is only one of many ideas throughout church history to explain the cosmic impact of Jesus’s death. Said another way it tries to answer the question: “Why did Jesus have to die?”
If you’re like I was, you may be thinking, penal substitution is the Biblical answer to this question. It’s right there in Romans and Hebrews. How could anyone believe anything different? Well, as it turns out, it’s really only Reformed and Evangelical Protestant Christians who hold the PSA theory of atonement.
After reading a lot of early church fathers, and hearing what they had to say about God and forgiveness, I started to think, maybe God doesn’t actually need a sacrifice to forgive. For those of you who aren’t protestants reading this, this may be a “Well duh” moment for you, but for me it was like waking up and seeing God for the first time.
PSA didn’t come around as a mainstream Christian idea until the Middle Ages under Anselm’s satisfaction theory, which imagined God as a feudal lord whose honor was impugned by sin and needed to be satisfied. John Calvin, a lawyer a few hundred years later, took this idea further. This time it was God’s justice and wrath that needed to be satisfied by a substitution of a perfect sacrifice: Jesus.
temple theology
The idea of the atonement ritual comes from Leviticus 16, and for those of you who haven’t read this yet, it may seem a bit bizarre. Remember this is from a culture over 2000 years ago, so we need to try to set aside our modern sensibilities to understand the intention of this practice. Why was it done in the way it was done? Before we get into the atonement, it’s important to understand how the temple, was laid out. Each component has deep symbolic significance representing the cosmos as ancient Israel understood it.
The Holy of Holies was a small room that held the Ark of the Covenant, on top of which was the “Mercy Seat” surrounded by angels. This represents heaven, and the throne room of God.
The Holy Place just outside and separated by a thick curtain between God’s world and ours, represents the created world as it should be. Eden if you will. Where God’s presence dwells with his people. Here we have a lampstand, which has seven branches and gives off unending light representing the seven days of creation and light God brought to the world, taming the chaos. There’s more here too, but we’ll address that another day.
The rest of the Temple represented the created world that we live in, particularly God’s chosen people of Israel.
None of should be particularly earth shattering, the symbolism is fairly obvious once you think about it. What’s not so obvious, at least to me, and probably Calvin as well, is what the ritual of the atonement was for.
We tend to think of sacrifice in a pagan sense from the influence from GrecoRoman mythology. Frankly I think many early Christians did as well. The conclusions that Christian theologians came to about Jewish customs were often assumed based on non-Jewish tradition. This is an area where anti-semitism is woven into our DNA sadly.
yom kippur
The ritual associated with the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur in Hebrew, is described at length in Leviticus 16 but its referenced at length metaphorically in the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. This is where we get the most clear defense of the PSA stance, but only if we come at the word sacrifice with the pre-supposition that the sacrifice is TO God and the killing of the animal is a substitute for us, who God should have killed.
The basic ritual goes like this:
When the High Priest donned his white clothing, he symbolized a direct messenger of YHWH, a “son of God”, who needed to be first purified with blood, which represented life and provided atonement, restoration to God. (Lev 17:11) In the ritual, the high priest played the role of YHWH for a day, as Fr. James Alison puts it.
The act of spreading blood around the temple was symbolic of God coming out of his high throne, walking among us as in the Garden and healing the created world from the chaos brought by sin.
In this ritual or even liturgy, God is restoring order and peace to a broken world.
THEN the sins of the people were confessed to the scapegoat by the High Priest and NOT killed, by the priest but sent away.
What we tend to think of as the animal being killed in place of Israel is not actually part of the ritual. The blood was a symbol of purification, and the ritual was a symbol for the people of God restoring the world to the way it should be and forgiving (bearing) their sins away.
God does not NEED a human sacrifice to forgive, like pagan gods, he does so freely if we ask.With this interpretation, try reading Hebrews 8-10 with fresh eyes and see if you can spot the symbolism.
Sources and further reading:
Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ — James Alison (Chapter 5)
Atonement: The Rite of Healing - Margaret Barker