God is not the Witch! C.S. Lewis on the Atonement - Brad Jersak

No Christian thinker has synthesized the rich and varied imagery of the gospel into a single beautiful picture as did C.S. Lewis in his classic novella, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Through Lewis’ children’s fantasy, the New Testament themes— redemption and reconciliation, substitution and sacrifice, ransom and victory—coalesce into one of literature’s greatest plotlines. After all, it is a retelling of the greatest story ever told! 

Spoiler alert: I’ll summarize the epic climax shortly! 

Plot: Four English adolescents pass through a magical wardrobe into the strange world of Narnia, which has fallen into a deathly winter through the dark magic of the witch, Jadis. The witch succeeds in luring one of the boys, Edmund, into her evil clutches and deceives him into betraying his siblings. 

The great lion Aslan—Lewis’ Christ-figure— conceives a plan to rescue Edmund, but Jadis claims eye-for-an-eye justice to demand Edmund’s execution. Aslan secretly bargains for Edmund’s life by offering his own in exchange. Jadis is delighted; Aslan’s death will be her final victory. She and her minions tie Aslan to ‘the Stone Table’ (representing the law of condemnation). They shave his mane, mock and beat him, and finally, Jadis delivers the fatal wound with a stone knife. Wondrously, though the Witch can kill Aslan, she cannot take his life! Aslan is resurrected, the stone table is broken, Edmund is redeemed and the witch is destroyed! 

This is the Beautiful Gospel as C.S. Lewis imagined it. This famous fiction captures essential truths of Christ’s saving work as understood by the first apostles, evangelists and theologians. But the tale also underscores Lewis’s corrections to the most popular ‘atonement theory’ of his time (or ours). In his letters (to Bede Griffith), Lewis refers to the Anselmic theory (after Anselm of Canterbury) and says it “was not to be found either in the N.T. or most of the fathers.” In Mere Christianity he describes it:

“According to that theory God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the Great Rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let us off. Now I admit that even this theory does not seem quite so immoral and silly as it used to; but that is not the point I want to make. What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.”

Yet neither Lewis’ letters nor his non-fiction compare to the beauty and clarity of the gospel preached in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

To summarize: 

1. In the story, God appears only as Aslan—the Incarnation of God in Narnia. 

2. In the story, God never demands the death of Edmund or of Aslan. The witch does. God is not the witch. God is Aslan. 

3. In the story, the witch thinks she has cornered Aslan into satisfying the wrath of the Stone Table. But she has not and he does not. There is no law higher than Aslan. He willingly gives himself to save the victim, he breaks the Table and conquers both death and the witch. 

4. The Table is not God’s intractable wrath. It is the law of retribution and condemnation, broken by the deeper “magic” of sacrificial love. If the Stone Table can be broken, then it is not one of God’s eternal attributes. 

5. The witch could and surely did execute Aslan—but she was wrong to believe she could take his life. Like Christ, Aslan alone has the power to lay down his life, and therefore, the power to take it up again. She never took his life. He gave it, but not to her and not to death. He gave it for love to ransom everyone. The witch (like Satan and death) fell into her own trap and found Aslan to be very much alive. 

C.S. Lewis provides an important corrective to ideas of the Cross that mistakenly cast God into the witch’s role. But more importantly, he expresses the Beautiful Gospel in a way that even children can see it, even if some theologians cannot. 

Brad Jersak

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The Suffering Judge - Greg Albrecht

… If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.—Romans 8:31-34

You probably have heard of honor killings. An "honor killing" is the term used to describe a practice in which one or more males murders a female relative who, according to their perspective, dishonored the family. 

Honor killings are usually inspired by cultures whose values are based on shame and honor. Based on our scriptural foundation in Romans 8:31-34, we're going to talk about shame and honor in The Suffering Judge. 

One of the most profound questions we humans can ever ponder has to do with the question of atonement. Given our complicity in hurt and pain, what does it take for us to find healing, forgiveness and peace? 

How can—how DOES—the Cross of Christ atone for the ugliness of our lives and make it right?

Human society has generally seen the problem of sin, guilt and shame being resolved by the shedding of blood— usually the blood of the perpetrator, the person who is deemed to have brought shame to the family or community. 

How can we find healing, forgiveness and peace? God provides an answer that is at odds with human ideas. While God offers a Christ-centered answer, religion, over the years, even within Christendom, has corrupted the love and mercy God offers. 

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Exclamation Point on God's Love: Greg Albrecht with Brad Jersak

The following is a transcript of a live interview with Brad Jersak by Greg Albrecht on the meaning of the Cross

Greg Albrecht: Hello everyone, this is Greg Albrecht. We're going to remember and discuss our Lord's ultimate sacrifice for us and reflect on his life, death, burial and of course the significance and meaning of his resurrection. Helping us with his insights and observations is Brad Jersak. Brad is Senior Editor of our magazines and a Christ-centered professor, speaker and author from Abbotsford, British Columbia. 

Brad, in one sense it seems to me that these two events, the crucifixion and the resurrection, are the crowning jewels in God's demonstration and revelation of his love for us. When I think of the resurrection specifically, I often think of it as the fulfillment of the new covenant. Jesus didn't come simply to make a new covenant with us, he came to be the new covenant. We might think of his resurrection as the final act in the life of Christ, the final part of his three-part revelation— his death, burial and resurrection. And this three-part revelation is a dynamic illustration of God's love, his very own nature. 

Brad, would you begin by talking about Good Friday, giving us some background about the cross of Christ and its relevance and significance to and for us in the light of the resurrection?

BJ: First of all, let's focus on the fact that the cross, and specifically the way Jesus experienced the cross and what he did on the cross, is a revelation of God. What you just said is right on—the cross reveals the central nature of God. That's such a good way to phrase it. In Christ God demonstrated his unsurpassable love. When we look at Christ on the cross, we are looking at God in the flesh. It's very important where we locate God on Good Friday. As we know, there are many within Christianity who virtually picture the Father punishing Jesus, crucifying Jesus, or being appeased by the torture and death of his Son.

But Paul tells us that God was in Christ on the cross reconciling the world to himself (Colossians 1:19-20). So if you want to find or locate God on Good Friday, he's on a cross. God is the Word made flesh even when that flesh was being wounded and pierced and crucified.

So when we look at Christ on the cross we're seeing something central to the very nature of God, and you've alluded to it already. What is it we find out about God when we look at the cross? We do not see that he was angry and had to get his wrath off his chest. No, rather we see self-giving grace, we see sacrificial love and we see radical forgiveness. 

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Calvary: Crucifixion as Torture, Cross as Hope - Brad Jersak

Trite or true, we're each and all on a journey, not quite sure whether any given year, week or moment is really ascent or descent -- the calm before a storm or the dark before dawn.

I see this tension in the biblical story of Calvary, at once a crucifixion and a Cross, the intersection of goodness and affliction, of torture and hope. At Calvary, we see the violence of religious fanaticism married to national security ... and we see the humility, forgiveness and self-giving love of God.

I hear this tension in Augustine, who is quoted in the movie, Calvary, as saying, "Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned." Calvary the movie is a profound and powerful tale of an Irish priest (played by Brendan Gleeson) who receives a death threat during confession and is warned to get his house in order over the course of a week. During that week, we see two themes intensify towards the climax.



First, we see how Gleeson represents goodness and sincerity. Even his would-be killer, the victim of long-term childhood sexual abuse by a priest, says, "There's no point in killing a bad priest ... but killing a good one. That'd be a shock." In that sense, Gleeson's character (Father James) serves as a Christ figure--and each character in the drama defines his or her own spiritual condition by their response to him. The truth of their lives become transparent through their attitudes and actions towards the priest.

What 'Christ Died For Us' Meant to the Fathers - Brad Jersak

The following summary represents what we find in the classics of early Christian thought as they recalled the 'faith once delivered,' and sought to articulate the meaning of the Incarnation in light of the revelation that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. 

For primary readings on this, see for example:

Athanasius, On the Incarnation

Gregory of Nazianzus, Letters in Critique of Apollonarius

Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ

When the apostles say Christ suffered and died for us, once for all (Rom 6:10; Heb 9:28; 1 Pet 3:18), for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 13:28; Col 2:13) and not ours only, everybody's (1 John 2:2), what does that actually mean? 

1. The NT connects sin with it's inherent destructive consequences, its intrinsic judgment. Among the metaphors used for what sin holds over the sinner are 'wages' (Rom 6:23) or 'debt' (Matt 6:12). Having collectively turned from God -- our source of life -- to sin -- the source of death -- humanity has come under the domination of sin and it's bitter fruit.

2. The NT identifies the destructive consequences of sin, ultimately, as the curse of death (Rom 5:12; 6:23). Sin condemns us to 'perish' (John 3:16-18), a death sentence already at work in us, through which the satan holds us in bondage to fear all our lives (Heb. 2:15).

3. The gospel of Jesus Christ is that Jesus has come to rescue, redeem or ransom us from the curse of sin, which is death. The Incarnation was God's decisive redemptive act, through which he set us free from root to fruit: from the domination of sin, the corruption of fallen sinful nature, and the condemnation of death itself.

4. How does Christ accomplish this redemption? 

a. The divine Word (God the Son) assumed the likeness of sinful human nature (Rom 8:3) in the person of Jesus Christ to heal human nature of the curse. As St. Gregory once wrote, 'Whatever is not assumed is not healed,' so Christ assumes the whole human condition in order to heal it all, including the curse of death itself. 

b. Christ proclaims the Father's grace and freedom to forgive sin by freely forgiving sin throughout his life and ministry, and then does so once, for all and forever, when on the Cross he invokes the Father's forgiveness, even for the supreme human sin of deicide. The Father's answer comes through the voice of the Son, 'It is accomplished.' Our sin is forgiven and our lives washed clean by this act of mercy and grace.

c. Having freely forgiven us, we are reconciled to the Father, but the curse of sin must still be broken: death itself must be eradicated. So Christ does for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. He dies to enter death and so to overcome it. As all the church fathers testify (from Irenaeus to Athanasius, to the two Gregorys, Cyril and Maximus the Confessor) If Christ were merely God, he could not die. But if he were merely man, he could not defeat death. So Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, enters death by death to annihilate death itself. This victory is made complete and manifest in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. 

5. Thus, through Christ's incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection, he has brought about salvation (rescue from Satan, sin and death) for all people. His sacrifice was not the pagan appeasement of a wrathful deity, but rather, the sacrificial love of a God who became man to enter the human condition, including death and hades itself to rescue his beloved children. 

6. Yes, Christ died for the forgiveness of sin, but as we see, this is an abbreviation that includes the truths that Christ came, lived, died and rose for the forgiveness of sin, cancellation of the curse, and defeat of death. Now we are invited to return to the open arms of the Father who opened the way back home through his Son. As we respond, we experience now what Christ already accomplished. By faith, we experience that forgiveness and freedom and salvation from sin and its awful consequences. We find that just as God in Christ participated in our human nature, we who are in Christ participate in his divine nature. As he took on our likeness to heal humanity, we are transformed more and more into his likeness and glory.

7. This is the apostolic testimony, received and faithfully preserved by the early church. This is not a theory of the atonement, but the gospel itself, the faith once delivered from the beginning. In this Gospel, Jesus is indeed a substitute, in that he does vicariously, as a man, what humanity could not do for itself. What is it that he does for us? God-in-Christ engaged and experienced the penalty (wages, debt or curse) of our sin -- namely death itself -- triumphing over it through his death and resurrection. In exchanging his life for our death, we rise with him in his life and find that death is no more. 

For those committed to the language of 'penal substitution,' this telling of the gospel takes seriously the penalty of sin (death) and the substitution of Christ (as our vicarious representative), but it is distinguished from the much later version which identifies the penalty with God's wrath and punishment rather than sin's consequences and curse. In this telling, God the Word himself, via His incarnation as Jesus Christ, saves us from sin and death, swallowing them up in the magnificent victory of grace.