A Response to Dr. Lane on the Atonement

On August 15th, I wrote a rebuttal of a published article by Jason Lane. He is the author of “That I May Be His Own: The Necessary End of the Law,” a chapter in Handing Over the Goods: Determined to Know Nothing But Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. James A. Nestingen (1517 Publishing, 2018).

On September 30th, he replied on this blog.

Dr. Lane’s reply is conciliatory and deferential, which is admirable in itself, considering the fact that I had taken issue with his piece, and in particular the theology of the atonement which is at issue. I do understand the context of his article, that it was written for a festschrift for someone whose own colleagues, Dr. Lane admits, “dismiss the vicarious satisfaction on the false assumption that Anselm’s view of the atonement of Christ is strictly legal and nothing else.” One doesn’t do well who writes for a festschrift meant to honor someone by taking issue with his positions, after all. Yet in navigating troubled waters one must take care to watch for the shoals on both sides, something I suggest he has not quite done. From the tone of his response I take it he is aware of this, at least by now.

Dr. Lane divides my critique into two related discussions, which is fair enough. First, there is my concern about whether he denies the vicarious satisfaction. He says I “think” he does, because I inferred that he “seems eager to tear down traditional ways of talking about the atonement.” The reason I made this inference is that he does critique them, giving his own view: “God does not fit into a legal scheme” (Lane, 56). In fact in his reply he repeats: “I wrote that the necessity of our salvation in Christ does not fit into legal categories.” But this, he now says, was misunderstood, because, he admits, “I made no attempt to present a different view of the atonement as my own position, but sought to lay out the position of those who critique the doctrine as a purely legal transaction.”

I’m certainly pleased to see Dr. Lane insist in his reply that he has no reservations about Christ’s vicarious satisfaction, the universal atonement for the sin of the world, and objective justification. But with due respect, I’m not sure that he made no attempt in his article to give his own view. I’d like to explore that. If he wants to say without qualification that “the necessity of our salvation in Christ does not fit into legal categories,” he is at least minimally, if unintentionally, either giving his own position or still misspeaking.

To wit, into what legal categories does the necessity of salvation not fit? To be sure, my own research came to the conclusion that “necessary” means something different for Anselm than for Luther. Anselm’s view of the necessity of the atonement argues for its reasonableness according to a priori reasoning, whereas Luther’s view never looks at the matter from the standpoint of raw reason. Yet there does not appear to be any fundamental difference between them on the meaning of the vicarious satisfaction. Both, as I have made clear, and as Dr, Lane agrees, are Chalcedonian in their views on the incarnation and the atonement. But Nestingen’s sometime colleague Gerhard Forde (d. 2005) disagreed, placing no difference between the famous view of Gustaf Aulén (d. 1977) and his own. For them the atonement was not a payment Christ made to satisfy the demands of righteousness in order to reconcile the world to God, for this would restrict God’s freedom, to use Dr. Lane’s words. Aulén rejected the view that the atonement was the payment to God of what man owes for his sin, and in this, he was definitively contrary to Anselm and Luther, which for Lutherans ought to be a very serious matter. As Aulén’s position is virtually the same as Forde’s, for my part I would certainly have had difficulty providing any critique of the latter that could be classified as “mild,” although Dr. Lane admits that his critique was that. So I am pleased to see that he recognizes that he is “willing to take some blame for that misunderstanding” and that he “should have said much more.” He says I did not understand his argument, which is possible, although even now as I reread the wording of his description of Forde’s position I am still pressed to see it as Forde’s and nothing more. The claim he discusses, over against the Lutheran dogmaticians, is that if God were to have an “inner law,” which was “created for man,” it would be a “stricture on his ultimate freedom.” It remains unclear whose position these words are describing, Forde’s or his own, though if he disagrees with Forde here it seems confusing at best if he does not say so. He does not clarify what needs to be clarified, that the law is not something God created, which, being created, would be a finite thing. On the contrary it is critical to affirm that the law is not a created thing, and Dr. Lane seems to admit so now, saying that it is “a quality of God’s essence.” What he does say, however, is that “[a]lthough God is love and the summary of the law is love, the law did not pour love into our hearts” so I still wonder. This seems a sleight of hand, because attributes of God are of couse not God Himself, and no one is saying they are. Neither did, say, compassion pour love into our hearts, yet compassion is not a creation of God any more than the law is. I would offer this, instead, that we ought never be reticent about speaking of any strictures placed on Christ by the law of God, for indeed it was these very strictures that so conflicted Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. How can Christ, whose singular desire was to please His Father, and so fulfill the eternal requirements first laid upon the human race, do this one thing His Father requires of Him, to become the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world by His sacrifice to His Father for it, and thus become the object of the Father’s eternal scorn, the very thing He was loathe to do? A divine, eternal conundrum which only the eternal God in the flesh can solve.

Further, Dr. Lane says that we “cannot use the atonement to bind God to philosophical categories” since “God’s freedom and transcendence” must be maintained in our discussion of God. I admit that I don’t quite understand what he means here. I dare say, it seems obfuscatory at best. Though I agree with Robert Preus, whom he quotes in support, that we should “make no attempt to define God and His essence,” that does not mean that we cannot list and confess His attributes. Moreover, God’s transcendence cannot mean that He would be free to dispense with the philosophical category, to use Dr. Lane’s term, of the atonement if He wanted to. And I wonder how “law” might limit our understanding of God’s transcendence, except if we limit the meaning of law. Of course it is right to say that God’s essence cannot be limited to a forensic courtroom discussion, but if, as Dr. Lane concedes, law is actually “a quality of God’s essence,” then there is no reason for us to limit our consideration of law to the bounds of a courtroom. Courtrooms, such as they are, do not and cannot deal with love, the essence of God’s law, and as such they are themselves limited. But if we see divine law as having to do with a description of God’s heart, then we need not abide by such limitations. Indeed the Apostle James speaks of law this way as the perfect law of liberty, something in which we ought to continue (James 1:25). Could we not say that because the love of Christ compelled Him to make His sacrifice, this is a perfect picture of the divine law as it was meant to be seen?

Here’s another thought, with which I suspect Dr. Lane would agree, namely that even if we were to concede that the law is a created thing, the only way the necessity of our salvation could not “fit into it” would be if we become Zwinglians and insist, finite non est capax infiniti, thus in principle rejecting the very possibility of Christ’s humiliation! Not only must we reject “Forde’s language about the atonement that makes the death of Christ seem unnecessary and forgiveness as by fiat,” we must insist that “necessary” means what it says, and is not merely an indication that what happened happened. Christ Himself indicated that it had to happen before it was accomplished, as He said to John the Baptist who would have prevented His Baptism: “Thus it is necessary (δει) for us to fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15).

In Dr. Lane’s second part of the discussion, he clarifies that “for Christ to promise us forgiveness, He must also have won forgiveness for us. If sins are forgiven in the words of absolution, Christ must have paid for those in reality and nailed them to the cross in fact. . . . Christ has in fact . . . fulfilled the demands of the law, defeated sin, death, and the devil by His sacrificial death and by His glorious resurrection.” Agreed, as far as it goes. My concern, however, is over the question whether that event may also in itself be said to have achieved and made a present reality for the world, as well as declaring to the world, the actual forgiveness of sins. Faith, to be sure, appropriates that forgiveness, but does not make it a reality. Dr. Lane’s analogy of promising his son a new bike for his birthday includes this: “the promise depends on my having the bike to given him in reality.” That doesn’t quite say what needs to be said here. The analogy must go further: the promise in this case must actually be more than a promise, but a statement of fact, because the “promise” depends on the bike in reality already being his for the taking. If he should refuse it, it sits unused and unhelpful to him. But that is not the same as to say that if he should refuse it, I have not yet given it. The angelic announcement in Bethlehem was that there is peace on earth because Christ the Lord has come; this was not merely an invitation to have peace because He has come. The distinction is critical, and is in fact what constitutes what theologians call objective justification. The world has been justified in Christ, not merely redeemed. Here is where I think Dr. Lane misreads me, saying that I think it is his view “that the death of Christ does not make full satisfaction of God’s wrath as substitution for the wages of sin, because the full atonement and payment for sins can only take place when the gospel of Christ is believed.” This is not his view, and I agree that it is not. But that’s not quite what must be clarified. I understand our agreement that payment for sin is completely by Christ’s sacrifice. What I am not hearing is whether he believes that actualization of that forgiveness has been yet triggered, so-to-speak. Is the forgiveness of the sins of the world an actual reality or not? And if not, must faith be said to exist for it to become so? And if so, then faith has a heavy burden to lift, leading me to wonder whether Dr. Lane’s discussion of the doctrine of election as “particularly comforting . . . for Christians who doubt God’s love for them” is his only comfort in this regard. What is particularly comforting in this context, rather, is the proclamation of the reality that the atonement has already reconciled the world to God.

Dr. Lane is correct that “[t]he notion that justification is not a reality until it is believed clearly contradicts Scripture.” But what he means by justification’s being a reality is still unclear to me. I think I do understand his argument that “God’s work in us is not yet complete,” notwithstanding his assertion that I do not. We do agree that the work of Christ in us will not be brought to completion until the eschaton, but I still do not know if we agree that the work of Christ for us has already reconciled the world to God, that is, justified the world objectively, without and apart from faith. What faith does is appropriate and believe that reconciliation by Christ’s atonement; it does nothing more to that reconciliation by its appropriation of it. Do we agree on this?