Was the Cross Cosmic Child Abuse? (Part 1)
After Sunday’s message previous to Christmas someone asked if the “example” theory of the cross was prevalent in modern Christian thinking. It may not be prevalent but it has a growing number of adherents, moved primarily through Steve Chalke’s (UK) book, “The Lost Message of Jesus” (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003). Convocations and debates are being held in Christendom, among Christians, to determine the validity of what the church has historically known as the penal substitutionary death of Christ. In this doctrine the church has always believed and affirmed that Jesus judicially exchanged places with sinners, and voluntarily endured the punishment their sins deserved. In this fashion, Christ, on the cross, propitiated the wrath of our God Who was (and is) justly angry at sin. This single doctrine is the gospel and what some consider “defining belief of the evangelical faith” which separates us from all other religions. Only the cross of Christ answers the sin question BUT, if the “example” theory is true, then we are, as Paul would say, “still in our sins.” In a press release concerning the book, Steve claimed that penal substitution is ‘a theory rooted in violence and retributive notions of justice’ and is incompatible ‘at least as currently taught and understood, with any authentically Christian understanding of the character of God.’
Basically, the whole controversy boils down to one question in Steve’s book. He asks how modern Christians have ‘come to believe that at the cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own Son?’ (p.182). Steve considers this contrary to Jesus’ teaching about refusing to pay evil with evil, loving your enemies and the biblical statement that God is love (p. 182). And then Steve uses the phrase that has generated all the heat…exclaiming that the cross is not “a form of cosmic child abuse - a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed” (p.182). In other words, although he uses the term in the negative, if penal subsutitionary atonement is true then the term is used in the positive sense. If God did punish His Son for the humanity’s sins, then the cross is cosmic child abuse. According to Steve, the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse if Christ died as our example but if God punished Christ on the cross for sins He did not commit, then the cross most certainly is cosmic child abuse. For Steve, the cross is reduced to only a symbol of love, a demonstration of how far God is willing to go to prove his love (p.182).
For Steve, Christians have always misunderstood Jesus’ cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46). Jesus’ cry was not one of abandonment as He became sin itself but simply ‘mirrors those of countless millions of people who suffer oppression, enslavement, abuse, disease, poverty, starvation and violence’(p.185). In other words, (contrary to what I preached the Sunday previous to Christmas) Calvary wasn’t unique. For Jesus the cross became a way of sharing the experience of all who feel abandoned by God in their own suffering. By means of the cross, we can now know that God is always right there with us in our suffering (p.185-6) in spite of how we may feel in our darkest moments.
As well, ‘On the cross Jesus took on the ideology that violence is the ultimate solution by “turning the other cheek” and refusing to return evil for evil, willingly absorbing its impact within his own body’ (p.179). Oh, the resurrection you ask? The resurrection is the reversal of all that is wrong in the world. It is the triumph of love over hate good over evil, light over darkness, as the God of love takes on the powers of dark evil (shades of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader) and wins the day (p.l87).
Steve’s Bible “never defines God as anger, power or judgement-in fact it never defines him as anything other than love” (p.63). If anyone reads the Bible without love’s lens, they “risk a terrible misrepresentation of his character, which in turn leads to a distortion of the gospel” (p.63). Yet both the Old and New Testaments affirm that God is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29), and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim.6:16). The sight of God’s holiness filled Isaiah with dread and made him conscious of his guilt (Isa. 6:1-5) and Christians are called to holiness not impurity (1 Thess. 4:7). God’s attributes are diamond-like in that He is always and only all of them simultaneously and forever. He is never more one than the other or at any time, less one than the other. Steve’s misconstruction of God’s attributes creates a biblical world in which “Yahweh’s association with vengeance and violence wasn’t so much an expression of who he was but the result of his determination to be involved with his world. His unwillingness to distance himself from the people of Israel and their actions meant that at times he was implicated in the excessive acts of war that we see in some of the books of the Old Testament.” (p.49). For Steve, the conquest of Canaan was accomplished in God’s name but not at His command or with His consent. But this is in direct contradiction to Deut. 7:1-2,16, 20, 22-26; 9:1-3; Jos.6:15-21; 10:40-42. Yikes! In the “example theory” God never judges anything; He only provides an example toward a better life. It’s easy to see how one’s theory of the atonement affects every other area of a person’s theology, belief and even practice. This deeply theological doctrine touches every aspect of how we think and behave in daily living.