What Can Postliberals and Evangelicals Learn from Each Other? Merciful Substitution in George Hunsinger's Philippians and Historic Reformed Theology

Theological, Christological, and Soteriological Realism

Undergirding Hunsinger's exegesis in Philippians is what I like to call a theological and Christological realism. One remarkable instance is his insistence against Schleiermacher that the subject of kenosis (Phil 2:7) is none other than God the Son. To deny that the Son himself underwent a real kenosis, Hunsinger observes, would amount to a subtle Nestorianism according to which the Nazarene is not God. ³ Thus Hunsinger rejects Gordon Fee's suggestion, incidentally typical of nominalistic trends in evangelicalism that have led to various overemphases on penal substitution, that the kenosis is “just a metaphor for self-sacrifice.” ⁴

Adhering to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Hunsinger insists that the Son emptied himself in a real sense, “entering into humiliation without divesting himself of his [divine] essence and its majesty.” ⁵ The kenosis means that the Son really became subordinate to the Father, albeit without ceasing to be eternally co-equal with the Father. ⁶ Citing Anselm, Hunsinger reiterates the exposition of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 680–681) that the human will of Christ is subjected to the divine will without resistance or struggle, such that Christ “‘died not under any compulsion but of his own free [human] will.’” ⁷

The efficacy of Christ's vicarious sacrifice is predicated upon his voluntary obedience unto death as a man who is God.

Salvation occurs through the great exchange (admirabile commercium) … The guilt of the guilty is transferred to the one who is innocent, even as in him the guilty are made innocent (or righteous) by an innocence not their own. Because of the incarnate Son, who is obedient in their place and for their sakes, the guilty do not perish but have eternal life. ⁸

Note Hunsinger's use of the word “transfer” here. He is emphatic that cultic transfer on the basis of participatio Christi must be taken as the basis of the forensic category of imputatio. In Hunsinger's view, undermining the primacy of the mystical reality typified by cultic categories like Yom Kippur has led to what he calls an “undue forensicism” according to which guilt and righteousness are no more than what God arbitrarily calls them in the divine courtroom. ⁹

Cultic Reading of 2 Corinthians 5:21

Hunsinger's soteriological realism and Christological realism converge in his proposal of a merciful-substitutionary model of the atonement, found in the fifth excursus of Philippians. The excursus begins with a reference to “the ritual mystery” of the “‘double transfer’ or ‘wondrous exchange’ … implicit in 2 Cor. 5:21.” ¹⁰

Relying on Léopold Sabourin's report of the exegetical history of 2 Corinthians 5:21, Hunsinger faults “the medieval scholastics” and the “post-Reformation Protestants” for the aforementioned “undue forensicism.” ¹¹ From the “results” of Sabourin's research, Hunsinger concludes that “neither were able … to escape from being overly influenced in their exegesis by the prevailing forensic categories of the Latin West … The medieval scholastics could not allow Christ to be made sin, and the Post-Reformation Protestants … could not break with an undue forensicism.” ¹² According to Hunsinger, this was also true of the Reformers, though to a lesser extent. ¹³

In the next section I will appeal to Owen's interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21 as a counter-example to Sabourin's somewhat misleading report. Suffice it here to say that the normative Reformed view expounded by Owen is in fact much closer to Hunsinger than he appears to think here.

Merciful Substitution: The Primacy of Expiation over Propitiation

Hunsinger's call to “renewed attention to the cultic atonement background of Pauline soteriology” goes hand in hand with his caveats against an excessive forencisism that “penal substitution” often connotes. ¹⁴ He urges: “Salvation in Christ, for Paul, is not a forensic event with a merciful aspect, but precisely the reverse: a merciful event with a forensic aspect. It is a matter of ‘merciful substitution’ with secondary penal elements as opposed to ‘penal substitution’ with secondary merciful elements.” ¹⁵

By no means is Hunsinger opposed to the idea that substitutionary atonement necessarily carries a penal aspect. “Death is obviously a penalty by definition. The point here is not to deny that death is a penalty but to reject the unfortunate idea that punishment is a precondition of mercy.” ¹⁶

Hunsinger affirms that punishment is necessary for the satisfaction of God's justice, but he rejects the idea that mercy is a logical consequence of satisfaction. Rather, it is precisely the reverse: satisfaction by vicarious punishment logically presupposes mercy. “Mercy and righteousness are distinct but not separate on the cross, with the priority and precedence belonging to mercy.” ¹⁷ Note that this priority belongs stricty to the economy of redemption. Hunsinger is speaking of “the primacy of divine mercy in the atonement” as a work of God ad extra. ¹⁸

The simplicity of God, which Hunsinger explicity affirms, entails that “His mercy and righteousness are one in the atoning blood of Christ.” ¹⁹ Although the ultimate purpose of the atonement is the glory of God in mercy as distinct from justice, these noetically distinguishable attributes remain ever inseparable even in God's opera ad extra. “God finds a way not only to be merciful without laxity toward human sin, but also to be righteous without undermining his mercy.” ²⁰

Two corollaries of simplicity are immutability and abiding moral goodness. In an earlier work Hunsinger defends the classical view that “simplicity would not merely be a non-moral attribute. Without parts, whatever is simple must be immutable, and, by at least some measures, immutability indexes goodness.” ²¹

Hunsinger adopts a realist rendition of this classical statement, which entails, inter alia, that moral goodness and evil are not what God arbitrarily calls them. ²² Ethical standards of good and evil among creatures analogically correspond to the abiding moral goodness of God's essence in a real sense.

Hunsinger's theological and Christological realism carries at least three implications for the atonement. First, God “does not need to be ‘appeased’ in order to be made merciful. He is already merciful”—immutably so. ²³ The sacrifice of Christ does not introduce to God's essence any new attribute. “He needs only to carry out his mercy without compromising his righteousness, which is precisely what he does in the vicarious death of Christ (Rom. 3:25–26).” ²⁴

Second, the cultic and the forensic—expiation and propitiation—are both necessary aspects of the atonement. Applying his traditionalist interpretation of the Barthian notion of God as being-in-act (rather than being-as-act), Hunsinger states: “in interpreting Paul's idea of God, ‘being’ ought not to be separated from ‘act.’ Divine being and action coincide in a pattern of unity-in-distinction.” ²⁵

More concretely, this means that “God acts righteously just because God is righteousness in and of himself. Righteousness, like holiness, is a predicate of God's being, not merely of his actions. God's righteousness, by definition, may overlap with his mercy but cannot be reduced to it.” ²⁶

The immutably righteous “God can have no fellowship with those who have corrupted themselves by sin. His condemnation of sin occurs when he abandons sinners to their self-chosen abandonment of him (Rom. 1:26, 28).” ²⁷

For Hunsinger, God's condemnation of sinners is by no means contingent upon God's choice, as if God might have chosen to have fellowship with fallen creatures without removing their sin. God's “wrath is his necessary No to the sin that estranges his willful human creatures from himself (Rom. 1:18).” ²⁸

Substitutionary atonement must carry a penal aspect as demanded by the forensic justice that corresponds perfectly to God's abiding righteousness. “Forensically, the prescribed solution to the problem of wrongdoing is punishment.” ²⁹

A purely forensic solution, however, is obviously inadequate for the accomplishment of the purpose of mercy in atonement. Precisely because revelation forbids us to conjure up a deity that would declare the guilty innocent or the innocent guilty, the forensic solution on its own can only result in the condemnation of sinners in their own persons. For the sole purpose of the removal of God's wrath, this condemnation alone would suffice, but obviously this does not accomplish the merciful purpose of the atonement.

If God is to declare sinners innocent, their sin and guilt must really be removed. Expiation (the removal of sin) is necessary for accomplishing the work of atonement, and propitiation (the appeasement of wrath) follows necessarily from expiation for the simple reason that a deity whose wrath continues to rest upon creatures even when they are no longer guilty of sin is not the God of Scripture who is immutably truthful. Expiatory sacrifice as such is precisely the cultic aspect of the solution to the problem of sin: “from a cultic point of view the solution is not punishment but removal.” ³⁰

The cultic and forensic solutions to the problem of sin converge typologically in Yom Kippur, as expressed by the gold lid of the Ark of the Covenant, which Luther famously calls “mercy seat.” Hunsinger takes the hilastērion of Romans 3:25 to be a reference to the mercy seat. ³¹

Just as “expiation” (the bearing and removal of sin) and “propitiation” (the bearing and removal of wrath) are not mutually exclusive, but rather coincide, so also is neither of them incompatible with the cultic metaphor of the “mercy seat” (Rom. 3:25). “Mercy seat,” in this interpretation, is the place where the cultic process of separating the sin from the sinner happens in the presence of the most holy God. “Mercy seat” is thus a metaphor standing for “expiation/propitiation.” It can of course also stand for “covering” sins or “blotting” them out, but the central idea of removing sin through sacrificial blood remains broadly the same. All three—“mercy seat,” “propitiation,” and “expiation”—intersect. ³²

Third, while expiation and propitiation are equally necessary to the work of atonement, they are not equally basic. Propitiation logically presupposes expiation, and expiation necessarily implies propitiation.

More concretely, the atonement is accomplished by means of substitution, and substitution must be understood as a fundamentally cultic reality with a penal aspect, rather than the reverse. “Within a priestly/cultic scheme … , substitution is not primarily ‘penal’… In a cultic scheme the sacrificial animal is made to bear the dreadful consequences of sin vicariously, and to bear them away.” ³³ If sin were not borne away by the vicarious sacrifice of Christ through mystical union, the penalty that Christ suffered and the forgiveness of sin declared at Golgotha would have amounted to a forensic fiction.

Hunsinger's theological and Christological realism thus precludes excessively forensic readings of 2 Corinthians 5:21. Christ was not merely declared to be a sinner by imputation. Hunsinger would have agreed with Matthew Henry's (1662–1714) commentary on this verse, representative of a mainstream Reformed view in the latter half of the seventeenth century, that Christ “was made sin; not a sinner, but sin, that is, a sin-offering, a sacrifice for sin.” ³⁴ Without this cultic reality as the basis of imputation, the forensic aspect would have amounted to a purely contingent exercise of God's power of choice.

The Inadequacy of a Purely Forensic Model and the Necessity of a Primarily Cultic Model

Hunsinger critically resorts to Kant to make this point:

Working with a logic that was forensic or moral … , Kant argued that, in the case of sin, no innocent person could bear the guilt of another. Such an infinite guilt could only be borne by the person who was responsible for it. It could not be transferred to another, least of all to an innocent party … In a strictly forensic model there can be no place, under such circumstances, for substitution. ³⁵

Hunsinger finds the term “penal substitution” disagreeable, not least because this terminology has often been suggestive of a primarily or sometimes even exclusively forensic model in which the notion of “substitution” can only contradict God's abiding righteousness.

Just as expiation and propitiation are equally necessary but not equally basic, forensic justice in substitutionary atonement must be predicated upon God's mercy as an essential attribute. It is true that Hunsinger recognizes God's wrath as God's necessary No to sin. Unlike mercy, which is itself an attribute of God, however, wrath is his response to sin necessitated by his righteousness. ³⁶

The term “merciful substitution,” on this view, serves to underscore Hunsinger's insistence that the atonement corresponds perfectly to all that God immutably is ad intra. Substitutionary atonement is at once expiatory and propitiatory, cultic and forensic. Forensic justice is satisfied through Christ's vicarious suffering of the death penalty on the basis of the cultic transfer and removal of sin. Substitutionary atonement as such is an economic outworking of God's eternal decision to be merciful pro nobis—a decision anchored in his immutable mercy a se—in such a way that it is a primarily expiatory event with a propitiatory aspect, rather than the reverse.

John Owen on the Inadequacy of an Exclusively Forensic Model

Hunsinger, as we saw, appeals to Kant to disclose the inadequacy of an exclusively forensic model of substitutionary atonement. The thrust of Kant's argument, in his own words, is that moral guilt is “not a transmissible obligation … like … a monetary debt…” ³⁷ Moreover, “satisfaction must be rendered to the highest justice, before which someone punishable can never go unpunished.” ³⁸

The same argument was in fact advanced by Socinianism long before Kant. Herman Bavinck reports:

From ancient times … very serious objections have been leveled against this doctrine of vicarious satisfaction. Especially the Socinians attacked it with strong arguments. Money debts, they reasoned, are debts that one person can take over for another and pay on his or her behalf. But sins are moral debts and adhere to the person. They cannot, in the nature of the case, be taken over by another. It is contrary to God's righteousness, which does not hold the guilty to be innocent nor the innocent guilty. ³⁹

Yet the Socinians were well aware of a difficulty that Kant would later point out: the radically evil human being “started from evil, and this indebtedness it will never be possible for him to erase.” ⁴⁰ In their attempt to resolve this problem, the Socinians turned to a radical voluntarism, ascribing the saving significance of Christ's death exclusively to the declarative or prophetic office. Louis Berkhof explains: “The justice which is commonly so called and which is opposed to mercy is not an immanent attribute of God, but only the effect of His will. This also holds for that mercy of God which is opposed to justice. It is not an internal quality in God, but is merely an effect of His free choice.” ⁴¹

One of the most definitive rejoinders to Socinianism from post-Reformation Reformed theology is John Owen's (1616–1683) Dissertation on Divine Justice (1653). Owen agrees with Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) that God does not hold the innocent guilty nor the guilty innocent. ⁴² Whereas Socinus's contention is framed within an extreme realism/intellectualism grounded in the rational principles of forensic logic, however, Owen, like Hunsinger, subscribes to an ectypal realism that seeks to make sense of human conceptions of justice in light of Christ's vicarious sacrifice.

Owen sharply demonstrates the radically nominalistic-voluntaristic nature of the Socinian solution to a problem premised upon an excessively realistic-intellectualistic view of forensic justice: “But when our opponent has come to the conclusion of this dispute, he introduces many fictions about the mere good-will of God in pardoning sins.” ⁴³ Socinus's understanding of “the justice of God is twofold”: on one hand, God is obliged to punish sinners “according to his law,” but on the other hand, God chooses to either punish or forgive by purely contingent exercises of his power of choice. ⁴⁴

Against the Socinian view that God's wrath against sin is a matter of God's “mere good will,” Owen contends: “Punitive justice is natural to God, and necessary as to its egresses respecting sin.” ⁴⁵ Again, in the case of Owen, this is not based on an abstract principle of forensic logic, but rather a truth revealed supremely in Christ's expiatory sacrifice.

Owen's ectypal realism stands in close proximity to Hunsinger's view that God's wrath is his necessary No to sin: “He who cannot but hate all sin cannot but punish sin; for to hate sin is, as to the affection, to will to punish it, and as to the effect, the punishment itself.” ⁴⁶ Owen, like Hunsinger, carefully qualifies that this does not make wrath or punitive justice an essential attribute of God: “Now, when we say that God necessarily punishes sin, we mean, that on account of the rectitude and perfection of his nature, he cannot possess an indifference of will to punish.” ⁴⁷

The Necessity of a Primarily Cultic Model

The problem is that if “the holiness of God is natural to him,” such that “an essential … and necessary attribute of God requires the punishment of sinners,” then how can God's purpose of mercy in the work of atonement be accomplished? ⁴⁸ Owen's solution to this forensic problem unmistakably places the emphasis on the cultic aspect of the atonement.

“Sacrifice” is a keyword that pervades the entire Dissertation, appearing over a hundred times throughout. Owen begins with a general consideration of the universal phenomenon of cultic sacrifices and considers the uniqueness of the Old Testament cultus.

Having surveyed various types of pagan sacrifices, Owen comes to the conclusion that even the “light of nature” demands a cultic solution to the moral problem of atonement, and that this cultic solution must take on the form of “propitiatory expiation.” ⁴⁹ Of course, Owen rejects the pagan imagination “that a sinful creature could dream of being able to perform a satisfaction, and make propitiatory expiation, to an infinite God incensed, and such, too, as would be satisfactory for sin.” ⁵⁰

The expiatory sacrifices appointed in the Old Testament, unlike pagan practices, succeed in removing God's wrath and solving the problem of forensic justice, precisely and only because they were “typical expiatory sacrifices” that, “though they could in no wise take away the guilt of sin,” “serve to lead us to Christ” whom God appointed “to death.” ⁵¹

A purely or even primarily forensic model would fail to explicate substitutionary atonement as such, because in such a model God would have been obliged by his immutable righteousness to “punish the elect … in their own persons.” ⁵² The primarily cultic model of expiatory sacrifice, by contrast, envisions God as punishing sinners in the person of

their surety standing in their room and stead; and when he is punished, they also are punished: for in this point of view the federal head and those represented by him are not considered as distinct, but as one; for although they are not one in respect of personal unity, they are, however, one,—that is, one body in mystical union, yea, one mystical Christ;—namely, the surety is the head, those represented by him the members; and when the head is punished, the members also are punished. Nor could even he himself be called a surety absolutely innocent: for although he was properly and personally innocent, he was imputatively and substitutively guilty; for “God made him to be sin for us;” He “laid on him the iniquity of us all.” ⁵³

Third, Owen's reference to 2 Corinthians 5:21 serves as a counter-example to Sabourin's report that post-Reformation Reformed theology normatively reads this verse in excessively forensic terms. Owen adopts a basically cultic reading of the verse with forensic implications, taking the verse to indicate a “translation of guilt from us upon Christ, constituting him sin for us.” ⁵⁴ Only such a cultic translation of guilt would enable imputation and vicarious punishment to meet the criteria of forensic justice manifested in Christ's work of atonement.

The fundamentally cultic-participatory and derivatively forensic-declaratory pattern of exchange expressed in 2 Corinthians 5:21 means for Owen that “God did not punish Christ as his most holy Son, but as our mediator and the surety of the covenant, ‘whom he made sin for us, though he knew no sin.’ Surely, ‘he laid upon him our sins,’ before ‘the chastisement of our peace was upon him.’” ⁵⁵

The Primacy of Expiation over Propitiation

In the foregoing analysis we can see that Owen would have happily agreed with Hunsinger's view that the removal of sin is a prerequisite of the removal of God's wrath. Although Owen contends against a number of opposing voices from Reformed theologians of his time, the position he takes does not by any means pertain to a minority in post-Reformation Reformed theology. Francis Turretin (1623–1687), among others, adopts basically the same view. ⁵⁶

In modern times, this view of propitiatory expiation was expounded powerfully by B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) in an article titled “Christ Our Sacrifice” (1917). ⁵⁷ Like Owen, Warfield offers a comprehensive survey of pagan sacrifices. Under the rubric of sacrifices related to sin, he distinguishes between two general categories, namely, the symbolical and the expiatory or piacular.

He discusses the Graeco-Roman practice of propitiatory sacrifices and categorizes it under the theory of “sacrifices as symbolical.” ⁵⁸ Under this broad category is “that form of the gift theory in which the sinning worshipper is supposed to approach his judge with (on a lower level) a bribe, or (on the higher level) the fine for his fault in his hand.” ⁵⁹

The lower gift theory “is appropriate only to lower stages of culture, in which justice is supposed to go by favor.” ⁶⁰ Propitiatory sacrifices in Roman paganism do not pertain to this lower theory, not least because the public character of Roman Law precludes conceptions of justice being a private matter.

Propitiation in the higher Roman sense, however, still falls short of satisfying the criteria of criminal justice in Roman Law. Punishment is the only way to satisfy the demands of Roman justice in the case of criminal offences. To suppose that criminal punishment can be replaced by a fine is to degrade the moral character of the deities.

Thus, it is

only in the piacular or expiatory view that theories of sacrifice reach their ethical culmination. In this view the offerer is supposed to come before God burdened with a sense of sin and seeking to expiate its guilt. The victim which he offers is looked upon as his substitute, to which is transferred the punishment which is his due; and the penalty having been thus vicariously borne, the offerer may receive forgiveness for his sin. ⁶¹

The final question that needs to be addressed is how the authors of the New Testament rely on the Levitical system to explicate the sacrifice of Christ. After extended engagements with contemporary New Testament scholars, Warfield arrives at a definitive statement of the historic Reformed doctrine of propitiatory expiation:

Whether, then, we look to the Levitical system or to the conceptions current at the time when the New Testament was written as determining the sense of the writers of the New Testament when they spoke of Christ as a sacrifice, the most natural meaning that can be attached to the term on their lips is that of an expiatory offering propitiating God's favor and reconciling him to guilty men. ⁶⁴