The Completed, Objective Reality of the Justification of the World By the Atonement: A Review Rebutting the Contrary.

Jason Lane may have done the service of helping me dust off my own research and thinking on the atonement, which is always a good thing for me to do. One can never think too much about the atonement, after all. But I got more than I needed, or wanted, when I read “That I May Be His Own: The Necessary End of the Law,” Lane’s contribution to Handing Over the Goods: Determined to Proclaim Nothing But Christ Jesus & Him Crucified, a Festschrift in Honor of Dr. James A. Nestingen (ed., Steven Paulson and Scott Keith, 1517 Publishing, 2018).   

Lane seems eager to tear down traditional ways of talking about the atonement, in favor of some better structure. This is reminiscent of Gerhard Forde whom Lane quotes favorably, and of Gustaf Aulén, whom Forde quoted favorably.

First, Lane distinguishes two kinds of necessity when speaking of the atonement. “[T]he Son of Man goes as it is written of Him; it is necessary (Matt. 26:53). Necessity, we assume, is legal, but this necessity is different. Christ makes clear that it must happen this way; there is no other way” (54). That certainly sounds Lutheresque, since the Reformer was averse to speculation about things that aren’t so. Luther was concerned about what actually is, and in this respect he was different than the long history of speculators that began with Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109). But Lane seems determined to show that even Anselm’s understanding of necessity was not what the traditional Lutheran scholars thought it was, and so he uses both Anselm and Luther to jettison the idea that their “legal” definition of the atonement is sufficient. Lane rejects the claim that the law is an eternal attribute of God. “God,” he counterclaims, “does not fit into a legal scheme” (55). Here he is arguing against “the Lutheran orthodox view,” by which he is evidently referring to conservative nineteenth century scholars like Theodosius Harnack (d. 1889). Harnack was famously opposed by the more “modern” theologians like Albrecht Ritschl (d. 1889) and those of the Tübingen school, the so-called classical liberals who wanted to reconstruct the origins of Christianity. Perhaps it would be unfair to see Lane as preferring to line up with Ritschl’s brand of Biblical criticism, but at least here he is distancing himself from Ritschl’s opponents, the “Lutheran dogmaticians” Harnack et al., on the question of the atonement. Instead Lane chides them for claiming that God operates according to an “inner law,” because, he says, this restricts God’s ultimate freedom. “His mercy then can only stem from His legal righteousness to satisfy justice and fulfill the law that was beyond the power of sinners to fulfill. Here Christ must do what the law requires and pay for sin, but only because justice requires it and God's honor demands it. Necessity, as it is conceived here, is entirely legal” (55). This is what Lane is arguing against.

To do this he charges, in the manner of Forde, that the notion of an “inner law” of God is a “a stricture on His ultimate freedom” because God is hereby hamstrung, inasmuch as He is “now restricted by His own law. . . .  Christ must do what the law requires and pay for sin, but only because justice requires it and God's honor demands it. Necessity, as it is conceived here, is entirely legal.” And this conception, he insists, is not only at odds with Luther, but “this description of the atonement as a legal transaction within the bounds of an eternal law robs St. Paul's statements” (55).

But this is in reality a caricature of the law that sees it as having to do essentially with a binding transaction, something that conjures up the contracts of business or the dealings of a courtroom. What Lane forgets is what the essence of the law actually is.  According to Jesus Himself, God’s law is summarized by love. Love is the summation of the law, and of every divine commandment (St. Matthew 22:38-40). Hence to say that God has an inner law is really nothing more than to say that love is an eternal attribute of God. By his refusal to see this Lane has merely set up a straw man and torn it down.

Yet Lane does not include Anselm himself in his straw man. “The neat picture of Anselm and later orthodoxy on the legal scheme, however, needs further examination, especially since it ignores a very important passage in Anselm's discussion of necessity where he asserts God's absolute freedom in regard to man’s salvation.” Lane’s “further examination” of Anselm’s discussion of necessity attempts to show that Anselm speaks of necessity in much the same way as Luther does, and that in fact for Anselm too, “God does not fit into a legal scheme” but rather, “once God decides to show mercy, He cannot do otherwise. He is as He does and He does as He wills. For Anselm, the antecedent necessity is God's free choice to rescue humanity” (56). Lane uses a quotation of Anselm that refers to freedom, but only in the sense that Christ died “of his own free will,” that is, without any external compulsion to do so. In the quotation, Anselm says, “it was necessary—since the belief and prophecy concerning Christ were true, that he would die of his own free will—that it should be so” (56, quoting Cur Deus Homo, ed. Hugo Laemmer, Berlin: G. Schlawitz, 1857, 82-83). But for Anselm this freedom is no arbitrary of dark decision on the part of God. For although Christ willingly went the way of the cross, nor was the Father forced against His own will to send him there, this “free choice” is not the same as to say that He had some other kind of choice buried somewhere in the depth of His inscrutable will to save or not to save mankind. Yet this is the door Lane leaves open: “God is entirely free in justifying man and acts only according to His own good pleasure” (55). But for Lane to say, or at least imply, that God in an antecedent way had the “free choice” (56) whether to rescue or not to rescue humanity makes God appear arbitrary rather than bound to His own essence, which includes His love. God willingly chose to save because He cannot be other than He is. Lane misrepresents his opponents on this: “To save humanity, it is supposed, God must act in a particular way because justice and His own honor require it” (55). But that is not quite an accurate description of what they suppose. Rather, one could as well say that God deems of necessity to act in this particular way, and freely, because He is God, and cannot be, nor would He want to be, other than God, and therefore His own lovingkindness requires it. Lane, however, notwithstanding his own insistence that we cannot speculate about what is not, actually suggests that God may indeed have had an arbitrary choice, or at least a choice about which we can know nothing: “Once the deed is done and God has become man and died to rescue us, there is no use in speculating about alternatives: ‘Was there another way?’ What is actually the case is what must be, not according to abstract concepts of divine attributes but because ‘He has mercy on whomever He wills’ (Rom. 9:18) as we learn in Christ” (57). So we are left with a God who chose to redeem the world for reasons we cannot plumb, in direct contraction to the simple truth that “God so (thus, ούτως) loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” etc. (St.  John 3:16). Lane elsewhere even seems to agree with this as if to contradict himself, for he says that “[God’s] will is mercy and His very nature is that of a loving father” (58). Yet Lane is careful to say this only when speaking of “us” and never when speaking of “the world,” a hint that he is rejecting objective justification.

Lane also misreads Anselm when comparing him to Luther. There was indeed a salient difference between them. Although Anselm’s understanding of the incarnation and of the atonement is entirely Chalcedonian and therefore traditional, as was Luther’s, there was a real difference between them on the matter of their approach to it. Anselm was eager to bolster the claims of faith by a raw appeal to their reasonableness apart from Scripture (remoto Christo, Christ being removed, as he called it). He wished as it were to set up a scaffolding alongside the revealed truths to serve as an apologetic aid to believing them. This method was encapsulated in his Proslogion where we find his well-known ontological proof for the existence of God, as well as in the Cur Deus Homo, a meditation on the established Chalcedonian articles of faith sola ratione—by reason alone. In this he was not opposed to anything Luther would confess about Christ, but his method of arriving at these confessed truths was of little use to the Reformer, who always preferred to let the Word do its own work.

But Lane gets into deeper trouble when he makes Christ’s work of atonement somehow incomplete until it is believed: “Christ's past tense work is then delivered in time by the Holy Spirit through His church and brought to completion on the day of resurrection” (57). Although to be sure we can agree that the “past tense work” is rendered useless if it is not believed, and its effect is not fully realized until the eschaton, that is not the same thing as to suggest that it is not “brought to completion” until the eschaton. Here Lane sets up another straw man:

Some may want to emphasize the death and resurrection as the objective, historical event of man's redemption and the fulfillment of the scriptures. Although this certainly gets the facts right, it misses the delivery pro me or pro nobis that Paul is so concerned with in Ephesians 1, Romans 10, and elsewhere. The fulfillment comes when the gifts are delivered and the goal of God's plan is complete. (60)

Here again although Lane sounds Lutheresque, he disagrees with the Reformer. Luther also understood necessity to include the preaching of the Gospel and that this preaching is every bit as necessary as the necessity of the cross. But for Luther this is not at all to say that the preaching of the Gospel is in itself part of the act of redemption. This is a matter misunderstood not only by Lane but also by Forde (see Forde, “The Work of Christ,” in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 2, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 5-104, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984, 68). Yet Luther is clear on this; for him the Word is a means not a means of redemption but a means of grace: “Our fanatics do not understand this either. A fact is one thing, the use of a fact is another. . . . the real redemption and the redemption preached are distinguished from each other” (WA 26:40, translation mine).

Does Lane really mean to say that the objective completion of the work of atonement is not actually completed until it is received? He leaves the question open, which is problematic in itself, and he even goes so far as to say, “when we confess, for example, the atonement of Christ from outside the experience of God’s concrete word of repentance and forgiveness, we venture inevitably into legal structure to which the mind must give assent” (63). Given Lane’s distaste for legal language, one must wonder whether this is indeed an implicit denial of objective justification. It would be far better to refer again to the simple truth, and to separate the objective, completed reality from the mind’s (and heart’s) assent to it, and say that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have eternal life” (St.  John 3:16).