“Why did God have to die?”. At least, I’m pretty sure that is roughly what this translates to but don’t hold me to it. No doubt, the title reminds one of Anselm’s “Cur Deus Homo?”, and that’s certainly what I was going for. I recently read through Anselm’s work around a month ago or so. In his book, Anselm seeks to answer the question of why God became man. He argues in a logical manner that God would not have suffered his original purposes of humanity, to raise them above angels, to come to nothing, and therefore undertook to redeem mankind. I will let Stephen Wellum in pages 168-170 of his book, Christ Alone, summarize Anselm’s argument:
To be sure, there are failures in Anselm’s argument (and I was too often disappointed in reading him, but he was a man of his time) as Wellum goes on to point out, but this post is not about Anselm. I bring him up here because he is absolutely correct in his comments about the necessity of a satisfaction for sin. Indeed, I think my own personal favorite part of Anselm’s book captures this logic quite well:
Now, if in order to make satisfaction one must “restore something greater than the amount of that obligation, which should restrain you from committing the sin” and if it is better for an infinite amount of worlds, all filled with as many creatures as this one is, to collapse back into nothing than to take one sinful glance away from the commandment of God, then surely our sin requires an infinite satisfaction. This shows that an infinite amount of creatures, let alone any one creature in all of the universe is not a sufficient satisfaction for our sins before God. It is for this reason, argues Anselm, that the satisfaction for our sin had to be God. A creature is simply not of enough value to satisfy the demands of God’s justice. Only a divine and therefore infinite person can make the infinite satisfaction that is required of us.
It is, therefore, that Thomas Brooks says,
Obj.: But the pains and torments that are due to man's sins are to be everlasting, and how then can Christ's short sufferings countervail them?
Ans: That Christ's sufferings in his soul and body were equivalent to it; although to speak properly, eternity is not of the essence of death, which is the reward of sin and threatened by God; but it is accidental because man thus dying is never able to satisfy God, therefore, seeing he cannot pay the last farthing, he is forever kept in prison Look, as eternal death hath in it eternity and despair
necessarily in all those that so die, so Christ could not suffer but what was wanting in duration was supplied:
1. By the immensity of his sorrows conflicting with the sense of God's wrath, because of our sins imputed to him, so that he suffered more grief than if the sorrows of all men were put together. Christ's hell-sorrows on the cross were meritorious and fully satisfactory for our ever-lasting punishment, and therefore in greatness were to exceed all other men s sorrows, as being answerable to God's justice.
2. By the dignity and worth of him that did suffer. Therefore the Scripture calls it the blood of God. The damned must bear the wrath of God to all eternity, because they can never satisfy the justice of God for sin. Therefore they must lie by it world without end. But Christ hath made an infinite satisfaction in a finite time, by undergoing that fierce battle with the wrath of God, and getting the victory in a few hours, which is equivalent to the creatures bearing it and grappling with it everlastingly.
In other words, the eternality of Hell is accidental to the punishment of sin because the creature, being of finite value and worth, can never offer a proper satisfaction for his sin. The punishment for sin is, properly, death (Gen. 2:17), but because finite man cannot satisfy God’s justice by his death0, he must remain forever separated from God and therefore life both spiritually and physically. He remains forever paying his debt for sin in Hell. There is no “tetelestai” in Hell.
Now, there is, of course, a penal aspect to the atonement in that Christ suffers the punishment for sin, which is death and spiritual separation from God which are two ways of saying the same thing1, but this post focuses on the satisfaction aspect of the atonement. So we're not focusing here on the first part of Brooks' quote about Christ's hellish soul sorrows and grief (spiritual separation), but rather on the second part of Brooks' quote here (Christ's personal dignity and worth). Put another way we aren’t focusing on what the human nature of Christ did in the atonement (in being forsaken of the Father, experiencing spiritual grief and suffering like those in Hell), but in what His divine nature did (in providing sufficient/infinite worth for satisfaction by virtue of Christ’s personhood)2.
Likewise, John Owen says,
We say that God hath revealed to us that the punishment due to every sin, from his right and by the rule of his justice, is eternal; nor could the thing in itself be otherwise, for the punishment of a finite and sinful creature could not otherwise make any compensation for the guilt of its sin. But as it is certain that God, in the first threatening, and in the curse of the law, observed a strict impartiality, and appointed not any kind of punishment but what, according to the rule of his justice, sin deserved; and as the apostle testifies, that "the righteous judgment of God is, that they who commit sin are worthy of death;" and we acknowledge that death to be eternal, and that an injury done to God, infinite in respect of the object, could not be punished, in a subject in every respect finite, otherwise than by a punishment infinite in respect of duration; -- that the continuation or suspension of this punishment, which it is just should be inflicted, does not undermine the divine liberty, we are bold to affirm, for it is not free to God to act justly or not. But we have shown before how absurd it is to imagine that the divine omnipotence suffers any degradation, because upon this supposition he must necessarily preserve alive a sinful creature to all eternity, and be unable to annihilate it (Dissertation on Divine Justice).
And in his Vindiciae Evangelicae,
That this worm never dies, that this fire can never be quenched, but abides for ever, is also from the relation of punishment to a finite creature, that is no more. Eternity is not absolutely in the curse of the Law, but as a finite creature is cursed, thereby. If a sinner could at once admit upon himself that which is equal in divine justice to his offense, and so make satisfaction, there might be an end of his punishment in time. But a finite, and every way limited creature, having sinned his eternity in this world, against an Eternal and infinite God, must abide by it forever. This was Christ free from; the dignity of his person was such, as that he could fully satisfy divine justice, in a limited season (563-564).
I believe that there is even biblical support for this notion and I have long used Psalm 49:7-9 to support it. I will first quote the passage:
Truly, no man can redeem his brother;
He cannot give to God a ransom for him—
For the redemption price for their soul is costly,
And it ceases forever—
That he should live on eternally,
That he should not see corruption.
Recently, I even found out that Brandon Crowe, in his awesome book, The Last Adam goes in a similar direction as I do here. I will quote his comments:
Crowe does, however, his book being a defense of the active obedience of Christ, take this passage to mean that Christ was able to redeem humanity because of His sinless life. As I’m sure you can already tell, this is not the direction I am going in. The problem is not ethical, it is ontological. The problem is not with what man does, but with who man inherently is. He cannot in himself ever satisfy the justice of God. There is no hint in Psalm 49 that the reason that a man cannot redeem his brother is due to his own unrighteousness (as though a sinless and obedient Adam could have satisfied God’s justice as a sacrifice for a sinful Eve3), rather, the problem is that man has nothing to offer God for the infinite price that must be paid. In contrast, however, to man’s inability to sufficiently satisfy God in order to redeem his brother, a clear contrast can be seen in v. 15:
But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol,
For He will receive me.
The price for man’s redemption is infinite. It cannot be satisfied without some infinite payment. We already know that man cannot offer this payment, yet v. 15 tells us that God will redeem the Psalmist. In contrast to man who cannot redeem, God can. Again, the contrast is between the creature and the Creator, between the infinite and the finite, not between the obedient and the disobedient. Again, it is ontological, not ethical. But if the price for man’s redemption is infinite and God will redeem man, He must do so by some infinite payment. This payment can be found in none other than the God-Man, who has the value and worth to make the payment and the human nature to become a sacrifice in order to suffer and do so.
Crowe rightly connects “ransom” of v. 7 to Matthew 20:28, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many”. It is the ransom of the life of the Son of Man, God Himself, which is given to God as a ransom for man. Crowe again rightly connects v. 8’s “redemption” to Matthew 16:26, “what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”. How is one to pay a ransom for the surpassing value of a man’s soul? Again the answer is found in the payment of the soul/life of the Son of God. In Matthew 27:50, when Jesus yields up His spirit, He is yielding up the spirit of God Himself (indeed, even this verse implies this because this is a thing that only God could do). It is not the soul of an average man that is given as a ransom for many on the cross, but it is the very soul of God (i.e. a human soul that belongs to a person who is God). In contrast to the soul of a human person, which cannot redeem man, the soul of a divine person provides a sufficient ransom price for the souls of men. In this way, it is God who redeems the souls of men from the power of Sheol, not any mere mortal. It was necessary that the mediator be the God-Man so that being God He could ransom the souls of men through His infinite worth and being man He could die so as to be a ransom in the first place. The blood of bulls and goats could not take away the sins of man (Hebrews 10:4), for they are not a sufficient ransom price, but the blood of God is (Acts 20:28; cf. 1 Peter 1:18-19).
So, ultimately, though I agree with much of his exegesis, I do not agree with Brandon Crowe that Psalm 49 should be used to prove the active obedience of Christ/the necessity of His righteous life. It is better to see it as the logic behind why our Savior must be God, not why He must be obedient (though both are definitely true).
Some may think my exegesis to be tenuous. Does Psalm 49 really seek to answer questions of the finite vs infinite value/worth of man vs. God? Ultimately though, it is theologically and literarily inexcusable not to ask the question, "why did it have to be God who died?". The storyline of the Bible tells of a coming messiah who will make penal substitutionary atonement for his people in order to satisfy the curse of God against them and His justice. Yet it also tells us this messiah will be none other than God Himself. Why is this? Why could not a sinless and perfectly obedient, yet not divine man be the one to accomplish this? Are we really to think that there was no necessity for the divinity of the messiah in the atonement? Are we really to believe that God would be satisfied with the sacrifice of one finite man for even the smallest sin committed against an infinite and perfectly just God? Are we really to think that there is no deeper truth behind the fact that it was God who died? Ultimately, a religion whose central dogma is that it was God who made satisfaction for the sins of man, yet has no reason for why this must have been so, is not in any respect respectable.
So, why did God have to die? I wish to end this with the very succinct answer of the great Francis Turretin:
“As God cannot deny his own justice, he could not free men without a satisfaction being made first. Satisfaction could not be made to infinite justice except by some infinite ransom; nor could that infinite ransom be found anywhere except in the Son of God”.
Edit: This was meant to be a short post, but I just want to point out that we can also use Hebrews 10:4 to support this notion. As Turretin says, "that which depends on the free will of God could be accomplished by the intervention of legal victims as well as by the blood of another. Therefore since it was impossible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins (Heb. 10:3, 4), not only from the will of God, but also from the nature of the thing itself (because sin is so foul a thing that it cannot be wiped away by the blood of goats), it follows so to speak that the necessity of such sacrifices depended not on the mere will, but on the very essential justice of God". The demerit of sin is so infinite that a ransom must necessarily be found in the death of the infinite Son of God. Though it was absolutely impossible for the death of bulls and goats to take away the infinite stain and guilt of sin, it is not so for the infinitely worthy Son of God Himself. "No animal was worthy of paying the price for a human being's sin before a holy God" (ESV Study Bible), and certainly no human is either, and as God cannot do that which is impossible by nature, the sufficient ransom for such infinite demerit could be found only in the God-Man.
Notes
0 From Heaven He Came and Sought Her, pg. 211
1 James M. Hamilton Jr., Typology pg. 10; cf. Vos, Biblical Theology pg. 40: “a deeper conception of death seems to be hinted at. It was intimated that death carried with it separation from God, since sin issued both in death and in the exclusion from the garden. If life consisted in communion with God, then, on the principle of opposites, death may have been interpretable as separation from God”.
2 I am concerned that some evangelicals have seemed to collapse the reasons for the necessity of Christ’s two natures in the atonement into one leading to a sort of latent eutychianism. For instance, I recently spoke with someone who, quoted Grudem in regards to why Christ’s divinity was necessary in the atonement: “only someone who is infinite God could bear the full penalty for all sins of all those who would believe in him- any finite creature would have been incapable of bearing that penalty”. There is an orthodox way to understand this, but he took Grudem as saying that “Christ had to be fully God and fully Man to bear the sins of all who believe on the cross and in fact He had to be affected by the suffering of the wrath of God” and rhetorically asked “Would Christ be able to make an eternal once and for all sacrifice it did not affect his enteral Divine nature?”. I responded as follows:
Regarding the quote from Grudem, I think that the way he speaks here is imprecise and can make it sound like Jesus needed to be divine in order to physically endure "the full penalty for all sins of all those who would believe in him". The wording here may make someone think that the penalty for sin is like a giant weight that Christ needs divine superpower in order to lift. The penalty for sin, going back to Genesis 2:17 is death: physical and spiritual separation from God. Christ paid this penalty when he died on the cross and was spiritually cut off from the presence of God, crying out, "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?". As our federal head, when Jesus died, "one died for all, therefore all died" (2 Corinthians 5:14). He paid the penalty for our sins in his body on the tree when He died. The necessity of Christ's divinity for atonement lies in the fact that the satisfaction for sin had to be of infinite value. We can see this in Psalm 49:7-9, "Truly, no man can redeem his brother; He cannot give to God a ransom for him—For the redemption price for their soul is costly, And it ceases forever—That he should live on eternally, That he should not see corruption". Any human person cannot meet the infinite demand of satisfaction for sin that God demands, but Jesus Christ, as a divine and therefore infinite person could. Jesus Christ is worth infinitely more than the whole of creation put together. So, regarding the necessity of Christ's divinity for atonement, I would not say that Christ had to suffer in His deity in order to pay for sin, which, I believe is an impossibility since I hold to impassibility, but rather that Christ had to be of infinite worth in order to be an infinitely satisfactory sacrifice for our sins to meet the perfect standard of God's justice.
It is sadly all too common to see evangelicals viewing the wrath of God as some sort of ontological weight that Christ needs to be zapped with Divine super-endurance in order to bear it all, as though His divine nature divinizes His human nature in order to do that which is beyond its nature. Such a construal ultimately ends up denying divine impassibility (which this person was arguing against using this line of reasoning) because the divine nature and the human nature of Christ end up becoming one superhuman-divinohuman nature that can now suffer so as to survive this ontologically infinite punishment. The divine nature becomes required for a strange sort of "super-suffering". This line of reasoning seems somewhat similar to Obj. 3 in Aquinas' Summa Part III Q.48, Art. 2, "Further, atonement implies equality with the trespass, since it is an act of justice. But Christ's Passion does not appear equal to all the sins of the human race, because Christ did not suffer in His Godhead, but in His flesh", to which Aquinas rightly replies, "The dignity of Christ's flesh is not to be esteemed solely from the nature of flesh, but also from the Person assuming it--namely, inasmuch as it was God's flesh, the result of which was that it was of infinite worth".
See also my comments on Charles Lee Irons here for how to properly speak of merit in Christ's active vs passive obedience: http://wix.to/HD5pv7r?ref=2_cl
3 L. Michael Morales suggests, correctly I believe, that Adam, being a good husband, should have offered himself up on behalf of his wife after her sin. See Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? Pg. 182. Note carefully, “these examples demonstrate, whether or not YHWH will accept such an act is not the point - indeed, in the latter three cases there was no final implementation - but rather the gesture underscores the mystery of the divine purpose. So with Adam’s fall, the theological possibility of his standing as an atoning substitute…is not at issue, but rather what sort of response would have been fitting as the son of God, as the father of humanity, as the woman’s husband?”. God would have rejected Adam’s plea because he was not of enough value to satisfy for Eve’s sin against Him.