Common Ground and the Distinctive Issue in Atonement Theory
COMMON GROUND AND THE DISTINCTIVE ISSUE
IN ATONEMENT THEORY
Virgil Warren, PhD
I. Common Ground
We all believe that (1) salvation means being brought back into personal relationship with God (reconciliation). In this respect, 2 Corinthians 5:17-21 stands out by using reconciliation repeatedly to describe the nature and purpose of Christian mission: “ . . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself . . . having given us the ministry of reconciliation” (5:19).1
We all confess that (2) Jesus Christ is the only savior, the only One in terms of whom God figures the salvation of any person that is saved in any dispensation or circumstance. We put the point this way because Jesus Christ is more than savior of those who lived after him. Hebrews 9:15 says that God figures the salvation of all Jewish saints in terms of Christ:
“He is the mediator of a new covenant that, a death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant, they who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”
1 Peter 3:19-4:6 speaks similarly about saved people from the patriarchal age: “. . . the gospel was preached even to the dead that they might be judged indeed according to people in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.”
We all believe that (3) sin is what separates us from God, that we have all sinned and are all thereby separated from him, and that not everyone will be saved. In Isaiah 59:2 God declares, “Your sins have separated you from me.” Romans 3:23 serves as a familiar reference for the conclusion that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Matthew 25:46 joins many texts in saying, “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
We all know that (4) we cannot save ourselves, but that God saves us on the basis of our identity with Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:4-10, etc.). In addition to the Great Commission itself, a host of statements about Christian baptism express the idea that in it we identity with Christ: “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). In Christ we receive grace and glory (Ephesians 1:3-14, etc.) and have fellowship with the Father (1 John 1:3).
Furthermore, we agree that (5) as a matter of practical appropriateness, God identified with mankind through incarnation in the person of the Son, who carried his obedience to the Father to the point of shedding his blood in violent death on a cross, thereby establishing his own obedience to the same degree that he calls on his own disciples to do for him as their savior (Matthew 10:38; 16:24; Mark 8:34; 10:31; Luke [8:23]; 14:27).
(6) Identification with Christ means deliberate, total, permanent, exclusive commitment to him in contrast to all parallel possibilities. It means commitment to carry our righteousness to the same level as he carried his in our physical arena. It means commitment to him as a person, to his values for our life, to his purpose for our future, to his leadership and lordship in everything. It means our sense of being on his side as well as our sense of who we are. We agree on the facts up through this point.
II. Statement of the Distinctive Issue
The difference in our view comes in the next step. What is the manner in which Christ saves us? What does identification with Christ give us access to? Does it give us access to an interpersonal act (forgiveness as in identification theory), a legal mechanism (penal substitution as in John Calvin’s atonement theory), a supernatural power (conquest of Satan, sin, and death as in Christus Victor theory), or a ransom of one person by another? Identification theory means that personally identifying with Christ is the condition God established for viewing us as righteous and for giving us everything implied by that. On the basis of our identity with him who is righteous, God is willing to view us as righteous (forgiveness), regard us as in fellowship with him (gift of the Holy Spirit), and add us to the body of Christ (church membership). Salvation occurs in God’s mind. The death that we are in (alienation) and would continue to be in (hell) is replaced by reconciliation, a reconciliation based on being viewed as righteous, not because we are but because we have identified with him who is. The correctness and adequacy of this last step is the point at issue and no other.
In other words, the issue lies in “the theory of the atonement.” Any concern over the theory offered here implies one of two things: (1) this final step contradicts one or more of the previous confessions or cannot provide the basis for them; (2) this final step cannot account for actual statements of scripture. On the first point, we have not seen any such implication. On the second, we have not found any texts that are incompatible with identification theory. In fact, our search for an alternative to John Calvin’s popular penal substitution theory arose because of texts and concepts that did not fit with substitution language taken as straightforward explanation.
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