Healing the Gospel

A Radical Vision for Grace, Justice, and the Cross

Flood

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894216
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Why did Jesus have to die? Was it to appease a wrathful God's demand for punishment? Does that mean Jesus died to save us from God? How could someone ever truly love or trust a God like that? How can that ever be called Good News? It's questions like these that make so many people want to have nothing to do with Christianity.Healing the Gospel challenges the assumption that the Christian understanding of justice is rooted in a demand for violent punishment, and instead offers a radically different understanding of the gospel based on God's restorative justice. Connecting our own experiences of faith with the New Testament narrative, author Derek Flood shows us an understanding of the cross that not only reveals God's heart of grace, but also models our own way of Christ-like love. It's a vision of the gospel that exposes violence, rather than supporting it--a gospel rooted in love of enemies, rather than retribution. The result is a nonviolent understanding of the atonement that is not only thoroughly biblical, but will help people struggling with their faith to encounter grace.

1

The Limits of Law

Penal Substitution and the Failure of Retributive Justice

When I was a teenager I had the typical born again experience, complete with all the strong emotions and tears. Only it wasn’t typical at all for me. I had not been raised in church. I was an agnostic, and so had always assumed that God was just an idea in your head. So to feel God’s loving presence, to hear that still small voice telling me, over and over again, that I was loved, that I was not alone, was simply earth shattering for me. I can hardly express how profoundly it changed me to experience being loved by God like that. It turned my whole world around.

Naturally, I wanted to share this with everyone I met, so when they handed out tracts for us to distribute and told us how to “share the gospel” at my church, I was the first in line. Only, I quickly discovered that the message I was taught to share with others was very different from what I had actually experienced. It seemed more like bad news, and led to all sorts of awkward conversations like this:

Jesus died for you!

Why did Jesus have to die?

Because of our sin.

What if we haven’t sinned?

“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” No one can keep the law.

But if no one can keep it how can we be blamed for that?

Because “the wages of sin is death” and so justice requires that you be sent to be tormented in Hell for all eternity.

That’s awful!

Yes, but there’s good news: God has provided a way out by sacrificing his Son.

God kills his own son?

Yes, that’s how much he loves you.

Why would that make anything better?

Because it satisfies God’s need for punishment. Sin must be paid for with blood because “without blood there is no forgiveness.”

I feel ill.

Can’t you see this is God’s mercy and love? Don’t you want to open your heart and let him into your life?

I think I have to go now.

The above dialog is of course overplayed in order to drive home this simple point: The way many of us have learned to present the “good news” can sound like anything but good news. I had experienced God’s overwhelming love and grace filling my life. Yet I was taught to tell people that they deserved to be punished by God forever. Taught that we should see ourselves as worthless, totally depraved, capable of nothing good apart from God. I was taught that the reason Jesus died was because God demanded that someone had to suffer the penalty of sin, someone had to be punished to appease God’s wrath. No wonder I got a cold shoulder when I tried to share this “good news” with people.

Countless people filling our pews have internalized this hurtful view of God and themselves. Roberta Bondi recalls the revival meetings at Pond Fork Baptist Church in Kentucky she attended each summer as a child:

The goal of a revival was to create or revive in everybody the threefold conviction that each of us was so rotten to the core that we deserved to die and roast in hell forever; that God was enraged at us enough to kill us; and finally, that, in spite of everything, God loved us enough to rescue us by sending his son as a sacrifice to die in our place.1

Bondi goes on to tell how this led her to internalize a sense of self-loathing that robbed her of joy. It is the kind of shame, she says, that “consumes you with anger, that renders you passive, that swallows you in depression, that keeps you from loving and knowing yourself to be loved.”2 Faith motivated by fear, threat, and feelings of worthlessness. Her story is, sadly, not uncommon.

This kind of religious self-loathing is often expressed as pious devotion: “I feel myself to be a lump of unworthiness, a mass of corruption, and a heap of sin, apart from His almighty love.”3 These are the words of Charles Spurgeon, a preacher who genuinely intended these words to be understood as an expression of love and gratitude towards God. People offer such prayers thinking this is what the Bible says about them, and believing that it is what God wants to hear us say. But consider for a moment how you would feel if your own child said such things to you: It would devastate you to hear your own son or daughter speak of themselves this way, and all the more to know that this is what your child thought you wanted to hear. If we as parents would feel this way about our children, how much more would it break God’s heart to hear us say such things? Isn’t God the father who runs out to meet the prodigal son? Isn’t God the one who loved us even in our estranged state?

How could things have gone so wrong? When did the good news become bad news? Behind all of this lies an image of God as a judge who is primarily concerned with satisfaction of punitive justice. This is the image of God that plagued sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther with the horrible sense that he could never be good enough. The weight of this became so pronounced that at one point he confesses bitterly, “I did not love, and in fact I hated that righteous God who punished sinners . . . I was angry with God . . . I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience.”4

It is not insignificant that Luther’s own father and mother were both harsh disciplinarians, but regardless of the cause, Luther had clearly internalized a crippling image of God as judge that tormented him until he discovered grace. This message of grace and forgiveness has been a life-changing one to many people over the ages since Luther rediscovered it, but it has often been tragically accompanied by a message of fear and condemnation itself. Luther, for example, preached that one must face the horrors of wrath before one could come to grace. In other words, he believed that everyone needed to be forced to go through the horrible struggle he did before they could hear about grace.

Ever since then, there has been a long history of revival preachers who have proclaimed this “pre-gospel” of fear, threat, and condemnation—telling people the bad news so they could then receive the good news, wounding people first, so they could then heal those wounds. The philosophy behind this strategy is that people need to be shaken out of their complacency and made ready to respond to the gospel.

This may indeed be true for some, but for others it amounts to little more than abuse, and has resulted in a hurtful image of God being hammered into their heads that has estranged them from God, and driven them away from faith. For a person struggling with moral failure, facing up to their brokenness and realizing that God loves them and died for them despite it is a crucial step towards life. But to tell a person whose sin is self-hatred that they need to face how bad and worthless they are is like making them swallow the wrong prescription medicine—what was healing to the first person, is poison to the second.

For people like Luther, Bunyan, or Wesley (all of whom have deeply shaped the character of evangelicalism), I would suggest that their true struggle was not one of guilt at all. Their problem was not the petty infractions they would constantly accuse themselves of (Wesley, for example, after doing some good deed for the poor, would often condemn himself for feeling pleased about it5). No, their real struggle was with the devastation done to their souls through self-loathing masquerading as piety.

So they struggled with their feelings of shame and worthlessness, desperately longing for grace, longing for God’s assurance and love, yet continuing to assume that their broken view of an angry, condemning, punishing God was the correct view, the biblical view. What I want to propose is that this is not in fact what the New Testament teaches at all.

A History of Violence

For centuries the assumption of punitive justice has saturated nearly every segment of our Western society—shaping how we approached child rearing, education, mental health, and of course our criminal justice system. It was common in the past for instance to think it was good to beat children at home and at school, or to beat one’s servants and workers.

Over the last century however, there have been major shifts in how we understand justice and its relation to punishment. Far from being good for a person’s soul, today we have increasingly come to realize that such violence instead can cause significant psychological damage that stunts a person’s healthy development. As I am writing this for example, the Twitter universe is exploding with the shocking story of school officials who put an autistic boy in a closed gym bag and left him in the hallway to discipline him. People across the country are understandably outraged, but this is exactly the kind of thing that we used to do to people all the time, believing that inflicting this kind of discipline would “make him come to his senses.” The outrage people expr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Limits of Law
• Chapter 2: God’s Justice
• Chapter 3: Salvation Means Healing
• Chapter 4: Loving Sacrifice
• Chapter 5: Christus Victor
• Chapter 6: The Tyrant of Wrath
• Chapter 7: Incarnational Atonement
• Chapter 8: The Suffering Servant
• Chapter 9: The Theology of the Cross
• Chapter 10: A Crucified People
• Appendix
• Bibliography