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Fellow Pilgrims,
When I was in graduate school, I heard a teacher give a terrifying backhanded compliment:
“It would be quite a good piece of writing, if it didn’t make one think that they’ve never read Hebrews.”
I made a surreptitious note to reread the book tucked between Philemon and James as soon as possible. My teacher was right. There are theological arguments that cannot survive contact with the book of Hebrews.
Corpus of Christ, 13th century, Spanish; Catalonia, via the Art Institute of Chicago
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking along that line about dismissals of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA).
I understand discomfort with the doctrine.
There are versions of penal substitution that deserve to be criticized and rejected. Anything that would pit the Son against the Father, as though Jesus came to rescue us from God instead of revealing God’s love, is a theological disaster. (See Tom McCall’s brilliant book Forsaken.) The cross is not some kind of cosmic bookkeeping exercise, and the cross should never be used to glorify suffering or abuse. None of that is good news, and some of it parades under the label of PSA. In their new Wesleyan systematics, Love Divine, Tom McCall and Jason Vickers quote John Stott:
“God’s love is the source, not the consequence, of the atonement.”
But I’m not willing to discard PSA. This isn’t because I think that PSA is the only way to understand the cross. The New Testament is gloriously resistant to that kind of reductionism, and metaphors and images for the work of salvation are multiple.
But we lose something if we set penal substitution aside. If we do, I’m not sure we’ll still know what to do with Hebrews. Or Leviticus. Or—and these are important, y’all—the Old Testament and the incarnation.
I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that feminist commitments require taking bodies seriously and that Christianity, by its very nature, does just that. Bodies are how we love and how we sin. Sin is not an idea. It is embodied. And Christianity insists that redemption is embodied too
Sometimes I wonder whether our discomfort with penal substitution is part of a larger discomfort with materiality itself. We would prefer salvation to happen in the realm of ideas. We like it when Jesus teaches, inspires, and models love, and all of those things are wonderful and true. But Christianity insists on something stranger.
A body hangs on a cross.
Blood pours down.
Death takes our Lord.
The resurrection is not the escape of a soul from a corpse. It is the raising of a body. Penal substitution, at its best, refuses to let us forget that salvation happens in history and in flesh.
I think that Christians should stop discounting Leviticus. I know, I know. This isn’t the sort of thing one says at parties. Leviticus is rarely anybody’s favorite book of the Bible. But the New Testament seems stubbornly convinced that if we don’t understand Leviticus, we won’t understand Jesus. The author of Hebrews certainly thinks so.
Read Hebrews without Leviticus, and it becomes almost surreal: Priests. Altars. Sacrifices. Blood. The Holy of Holies. The Day of Atonement.
What is all this doing in a book about Jesus?
The point is not that God enjoys blood. Leviticus has sometimes been caricatured that way. Leviticus insists that sin is costly and real, and that God deals with sin in the material, embodied world. The sacrificial system teaches Israel and the church that reconciliation is never cheap or immaterial.
Modern people often imagine that forgiveness should simply happen. Why can’t God just forgive? But every person who has forgiven someone knows that forgiveness always costs something. If the body keeps the score, forgiveness happens in the body.
Where Romans gives us courtroom language, Hebrews gives us temple language. Jesus is not simply the one who dies. He is the priest. He is the sacrifice. He is the one who enters the Father’s presence carrying his own divine life.
“Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)... let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:19–22, NRSVUE).
Notice how bodily that is.
Blood. Flesh. Bodies. Water. Approaching.
The goal is communion. The whole movement of Hebrews is toward God’s presence.
This fits with McCall’s and Vickers’s insistence that a good theology of substitution leads to transformation.
“this is where Wesley is especially helpful, as he weds a substitutionary view of Christ’s death on the cross to a strong emphasis on the Spirit’s work of joining us to Christ through the sacramental life of the church.”
What if Christians sometimes reject sacrificial language because we have forgotten that Jesus was Jewish? Jesus cannot be detached from Israel’s worship any more than he can be detached from Israel’s Scriptures.
He is the Passover lamb because there was a Passover, and he is the great high priest because there were priests. To be embarrassed by sacrifice is, at least in part, to be embarrassed by the people and the world that formed Jesus. Gnosticism and antisemitism are easy bedfellows.
I cannot let go of the conviction that God takes sin more seriously than I do. This is not because God is some vengeful giant in the sky. It’s because God is more loving than I am. Love does not shrug at violence. Love does not tell victims to move on. Love does not pretend wounds are imaginary.
The remarkable thing about penal substitution is not that God insists someone must bear the cost.
It is that God bears it.
The cross reveals Emmanuel. God with us and for us. God in the flesh.
Which brings me back to feminist theology. One of the things feminist theologians have to ask is: Where are the bodies?
They are in Leviticus. In Hebrews. At Calvary.
The Christian story does not bypass blood, wounds, or death. It passes through them. God chooses to meet us there.
I need a theology that refuses to spiritualize salvation, that remembers that Jesus has a Jewish body, that his blood is real blood. I need a theology that knows that Hebrews belongs in the canon and Leviticus still has something to teach the church. And that, astonishingly, the God who asks everything of us is first the God who gives everything to us.
I don’t want to write theology that forgets Hebrews. Because Hebrews remembers something we are tempted to forget: that our salvation was accomplished not by an idea but by a priest, not by a principle but by an embodied savior, not by a metaphor but by flesh offered in love.
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Grace & peace,
BFJ
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