Nor is this the only Pauline passage where such themes come together. Space limitations forbid even a survey of 2 Corinthians 5:14— 6:2,49 but it is important to see the place of 2 Corinthians 5:21 in the argument. Strangely, Travis writes, “But God’s wrath is not mentioned in the context, and the focus is in fact on Christ’s death absorbing or neutralizing the effects of sin. And that does not involve notions of retribution.”50 Yet already in Romans 5:10, Paul has established that all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive recompense for what has been done in the body. Certainly in a parallel passage that treats the theme of reconciliation (cf. Rom 5:1-11), wrath is not absent. The fact of the matter is that in Christ’s reconciling work, God was “not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19). Why not? Because he 47This is mentioned five times in 1:18ff. 48Peterson, “Atonement,” 38. 49On which see, in addition to the major commentaries, Peterson, “Atonement,” 36-39. 50Travis, “Christ as Bearer of Divine Judgement,” 27. GloryofAtonement.book Page 133 Monday, June 18, 2007 10:18 AM 134 T H E GLORY O F THE ATONEMENT simply wiped them out, in the sense that he treated them as if they did not matter? No, far from it: “God made [Christ] who had no sin to be sin51 for us” (Rom 5:21). It is the unjust punishment of the Servant in Isaiah 53 that is so remarkable. Forgiveness, restoration, salvation, reconciliation—all are possible,
not because sins have somehow been cancelled as if they never were, but because another bore them unjustly. But by this adverb “unjustly” I mean that the person who bore them was just and did not deserve the punishment, not that some moral “system” that God was administering was thereby distorted. Rather, the God against whom the offenses were done pronounced sentence and sent his Son to bear the sentence (Rom 5:8); he made him who had no sin to be sin for us (2 Cor 5:21). And the purpose of this substitution was that “in him we might become the righteousness of God.”52 In this context, “righteousness” cannot call to mind “covenant faithfulness” or the like, for its obverse is sin.53 “The logic of 2 Corinthians 5 is that God condemns our sin in the death of his sinless Son so that we might be justified and reconciled to him (cf. Rom. 8:1-4, 10). This ‘great exchange’ is a reality for all who are ‘in him,’ that is, united to Christ by faith.”54 51Even if one decides to render this “sin” by the paraphrastic “sin offering,” the ideal of penal substitution remains inescapable. See Richard Gaffin, “’The Scandal of the Cross’: The Atonement in the Pauline Corpus,” chapter 7 in this volume. 52dikaiosu/nh qeou~, 2 Corinthians 5:21b. 53Part of the contemporary (and frequently sterile) debate over whether or not Paul teaches “imputation,” it seems to me, turns on a failure to recognize distinct domains of discourse. Strictly speaking, Paul never uses the verb logi/zomai to say, explicitly, that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the sinner or that the sinner’s righteousness is imputed to Christ. So if one remains in the domain of narrow exegesis, one can say that Paul does not explicitly teach “imputation,” except to say slightly different things (e.g., that Abraham’s faith was “imputed” to him for righteousness). But if one extends the discussion into the domain of constructive theology, and observes that the Pauline texts themselves (despite the critics’ contentions) teach penal substitution, then “imputation” is merely another way of saying much the same thing. To take a related example: as Paul uses “reconciliation” terminology, the movement in reconciliation is always of the sinner to God. God is never said to be reconciled to us; we must be reconciled to him. At the level of exegesis, those are the mere facts. On the other hand, because the same exegesis also demands that we take the wrath of God seriously, and the texts insist that God takes decisive action in Christ to deal with our sin so that his wrath is averted, in that sense we may speak of God being “reconciled to us”:
Wesley was not wrong to teach us to sing “My God is reconciled,” provided it is recognized that his language is drawn from the domain of constructive theology and not from the narrower domain of explicit exegesis (although, we insist equally, the constructive theology is itself grounded in themes that are exegetically mandated). On the theme of penal substitution, it is still worth reflecting at length on J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Bulletin 25 (1974), 3-45. 54Peterson, “Atonement,” 38. GloryofAtonement.book Page 134 Monday, June 18, 2007 10:18 AM Atonement in Romans 3:21-26 135 In some such frame as this, then, it is entirely coherent to think of God as both the subject and the object of propitiation. Indeed, it is the glory of the gospel of God. But let Paul have the last word: You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (Rom 5:6-10, emphasis mine)55 Or, in terms of Lincoln’s summary of Romans 3:21-25 thus far: Corresponding to the universal situation of guilt, bondage to sin, and condemnation under the wrath of God is a gospel of the righteousness of God, which is available universally to faith and which through Christ’s death offers a free and undeserved pardon, liberates into a new life where the tyranny of sin is broken and righteous behavior becomes possible, and provides satisfaction of God’s righteous wrath.
