The Kindness and Severity of God – Part 1

The Kindness and Severity of God – Part 1

I often find myself thinking about or quietly singing the comforting words of the modern hymn In Christ Alone. Still, sadly, those beautiful words sometimes bring back the unpleasant memory of a recent and very public controversy. In 2013, the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to exclude the hymn from its new hymnal because the composers refused to allow a change to the lyrics. The issue was this:  the second verse contains the line, “Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” The committee wanted to change it to “the love of God was magnified,” arguing that the word “satisfied” reflects a specific theological position they reject.

1. I. Packer wrote his Knowing God long before this controversy, but he explains concisely and defends vigorously the theological position the committee found unacceptable. He wrote:

The doctrine of propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much that He gave His own Son to the end that He, by His blood, should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ’s work to deal with the wrath so that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God’s good pleasure.

Parker’s language here—’propitiation’ and ‘objects of wrath’—is consistent with scriptural teaching on the propitiatory nature of atonement. However, a majority of the Presbyterian committee did not want to ‘perpetuate… the view that the cross is primarily about God’s need to assuage God’s anger’ (Debating hymns | The Christian Century). Evidently, like many in the religious world today, most committee members were uncomfortable with difficult biblical truths such as Jehovah’s wrath and the doctrine of righteous retribution. Divine severity has fallen out of favour along with the idea that the cross of Christ assuaged the wrath of a holy God. This tendency to remove judicial elements from the crucifixion account is not new. About 1000 years ago, the medieval theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142) wrote in his Commentary on Romans:

How cruel and wicked it seems that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be slain, still less that God should consider the death of his Son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world.

(To be continued) Rex