Speaking of Atonement theories, Hugo had a very good post yesterday talking about his attachment to traditional theories of the Atonement despite the fact that many in his progressive milieu sharply reject them. He also linked to an article by Richard Mouw defending a Reformed doctrine of the Atonement against criticisms that it promotes violence and acquiescence in unjust suffering (the link Hugo offered requires a subscription or fee; you can read an abridged version here).
One of the points Mouw emphasizes is that he thinks of Christ’s suffering in our place more in terms of experiencing God’s wrath than suffering physical punishment. By “wrath” he means the experience of separation from God that would be our just punishment as sinners:
These formulations [i.e. in the Heidelberg Catechism and the Geneva Catechism], then, locate the redemptive significance of Christ’s suffering, not so much in pain that can be thought of as being actively inflicted upon him by the Father, but rather in his profound experience as the innocent one of the cursedness of being abandoned by God on behalf of those who do deserve that abandonment. Thus the greatest redemptively significant agony that he experienced on the Cross, on this view, is not when he gasped in pain when they pounded the nails into his flesh, or when he pleaded that his thirst be quenched, or when he heard the mockery of onlookers, but when he cried out in utter forlornness, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).
Mouw highlights this aspect of Christ’s redemptive suffering in part in order to defuse the criticisms from some feminist theologians that Atonement theory promotes “divine child abuse” and encourages Christians to imitate Christ by submitting to unjust suffering. Mouw says that it is precisely this aspect of Christ’s suffering that we can’t emulate. Because his suffering has a once-and-for-all quality, Christians need not seek to imitate Christ’s experience of abandonment.
One thing that Mouw doesn’t make explicit, but which seems implied by his account, is that this understanding of what Christ suffered on our behalf helps explicate the connection between sin and punishment in a more compelling way than it is sometimes presented.
A common problem with Atonement theories is that people will say, “If God is so compassionate, why doesn’t he just up and forgive us and forget about punishment? Why the need for someone to be punished on our behalf?” This can make God seem like some petty bureaucrat enmeshed in a web of rules that he is unwilling or unable to break.
But if punishment for sin is understood as abandonment by God, then things aren’t quite so simple. The understanding of sin this seems to imply is a kind of “turning away from God” or separating ourselves from him. This is how Augustine, for instance, seems to have understood sin – we turn away from God (our true Good) and toward some finite good(s). But this is essentially irrational because God is the source of Being; so to turn away from God is to turn toward nothingness. It’s like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.
This understanding of sin seems to imply that punishment has a much tighter connection with sin than we might think. We often think of punishment as a kind of arbitrary penalty tacked on to a particular offense. Rob a convenience store and get ten years, say. But if sin is separating ourselves from God, then punishment, understood as final separation from God, would seem to simply be a logical consequence of sin. This punishment would seem to be an inevitable (barring intervention) outcome of the sin, not a penalty that God arbitrarily attaches to particular acts. Separation from God just is what sin is all about.
This would seem to indicate why God can’t simply “commute the sentence” as it were, since the punishment involved is an inseparable aspect of the sin itself. Instead, God is somehow able to take the punishment onto himself. The inevitable consequence of sin is “deflected” from us and onto the Cross. And through the Resurrection the power of sin is absorbed and transformed into the life-giving power of the Spirit. As Mouw says:
In the death on the Cross, God also took our violent impulses upon himself, mysteriously absorbing them into his very being in order to transform them into the power of reconciling love; and then he offers that love back to us as a gift of sovereign grace.
A Thinking Reed 
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