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Why Did Jesus Die?
Our predestination to glory is prior by nature to any notion of sin.
—John Duns Scotus, OFMThirty-five years of men’s work around the world have shown me how deeply
the human psyche in almost every culture has been wounded and scarred by
violent, unavailable, and abusive fathers and other men. The impact of this
wounding on our spiritual sensitivities is profound. Of course, there is no
shortage of reasons why someone wouldn’t trust or believe in God, but surely
one of the most counterproductive things Christians have done is add to those
reasons by presenting “God the Father” as a tyrant, a sadist, a rage-aholic dad, or
just an unreliable lover.
A clear case in point is the now-dominant explanation of why Jesus had to die
and how that transaction is related to our salvation. It made God “the Father”
distant and cold.
For most of Christian history, no single consensus prevailed on what it means
when Christians say, “Jesus died for our sins,” but in recent centuries one theory
did take over. It was often referred to as the “penal substitutionary atonement
theory,” especially once it was developed after the Reformation. Substitutionary
atonement is the theory that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished
in the place of us sinners, thus satisfying the “demands of justice” so that God
could forgive our sins. This theory of atonement ultimately relies on another
commonly accepted notion—the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, which we
were told taints all human beings. But much like original sin, which we
considered earlier, most Christians have never been told how recent and
regional this explanation is, and that it fully relies upon a retributive notion of
justice. Nor are they told that it is just a theory, even though some groups take it