The Thursday Review: The Ineffable Line

first published May 7, 2010

I've been working on a song for about seven years now. The idea came to me one Sunday morning when I happened to open the Bible randomly to Isaiah 49:16, and read these lines: "Can a mother have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. Look: I have engraved you on the palms of my hands." The imagery stuck in my imagination, and with it, this line rang in my head: "I wrote your name with the nails of the cross / on my hands and feet that it might never be lost." When I got home I sat down at the piano and plunked away until I had the seed of a song planted.

This is the song that the seed's grown up into, seven years later:

I have inscribed you

Now the song hasn't really changed that much in seven years; I only say I've been working on it ever since because of those difficult lines at 2:54: "It was broken for you / It was offered for you / It was poured out to..."

For seven years now I've been trying to find the best way to end that line. It [i.e. Christ's life] was poured out to...well... to what? How do you summarize the meaning of Christ's death in 5 syllables? (That is, 5 syllables so that the line will scan; ideally it will rhyme with "you" too)?

In theological terms, my song writing dilemma has to do with the Doctrine of the Atonement-- that is, how do you explain, primarily, why Christ's death was able to save sinners like us. There are a number of traditional answers to this question in Christian theology, various "Models of the Atonement" that we might draw on to fill in those 5 missing syllables. Let me illustrate with some examples from some contemporary worship songs:

Penal Substitution
Christ took the punishment for sin in our place: You are my King; "I'm forgiven because you were forsaken / I'm accepted, you were condemned"

Christus Victor
Christ won the victory over sin, death and the devil through his sinless death: Hope of the Nations; "In history you lived and died / you broke the chains / you rose to life" also, In Christ Alone; "Then bursting forth in glorious day / up from the grave he rose again / and as he stands in victory..."

Satisfaction
Christ's death satisfied God's wrath and/or impinged honour: In Christ Alone; "Till on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied"

Moral Influence
Christ's death is the ultimate demonstration of God's love towards us, which turns us from sin when we discover it: Once Again; "Once again I look upon the cross where you died / I'm humbled by your mercy and I'm broken inside"

Reflecting on and learning to articulate my own understanding of the Atonement has been an important part of my journey with Christ and my formation for ministry. The various "versions" of my song reflect milestones on that journey.

I'm embarrassed to say, for instance, that the first version reflected the typical, Evangelical, "Personal(ized) Jesus" model of the Atonement that I'd unconsciously absorbed from songs like "You took the fall / and thought of me above all": "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / It was offered only for you" (ugh)

Later I learned about the Christus Victor model of the Atonement from guys like Gustav Aulen, and I worked with versions of the line like these: "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / It was paid as a ransom for you" or: "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / To break death's power over you"

For a while I tried to avoid the Atonement altogether and focused on the sanctifying work of Christ instead: "It was offered to sanctify you"

But a while ago I read Han Boursma's treatment of the Atonement in his book Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, which helped me arrive at a much more robust understanding of Christ's death, and, indeed, the nature of the sin that he atoned for. With his work in mind, this is what I finally came up with:

"It was broken for you / It was offered for you / It was poured out to make all things new"

There are probably better rhymes out there still, but I'll leave it there; or maybe, as a devotional and theological exercise, it would be better to leave the line unfinished, and let the silence symbolize itself the ineffable mystery of the cross.

Three Minute Theology 3.7: Justice for All

In 2007, after years of irresponsible lending practices and unethical mortgage trading had inflated it to unsustainable levels, the U.S. housing market finally collapsed. Global stock markets fell and millions of people lost their jobs, in an economic disaster that cost the world trillions of dollars.

The causes of the 2007 economic crisis are complex, but many attribute it, at least in part, to fraud and corruption among the financial institutions that rated and sold mortgage bonds. Because of the unethical practices of a few large, rich banks, in other words, a lot of ordinary people lost their homes and their livelihoods.

Something that has enraged many people since, however, is the fact that none of the CEOs of the financial institutions seemingly responsible for this situation were ever brought to justice for their part in the mess. Instead, when the crisis threatened to bankrupt many of these banks, the US Government provided a financial bailout, essentially giving them billions of tax-payer dollars to keep them afloat.

To the extent that it is the exact opposite of what happened on the cross, the way these banks were “forgiven their debt to society” without any recourse to justice, it provides us a helpful way for thinking about an aspect of the atonement that is sometimes difficult for us to wrap our heads around.

It’s something called “Penal Substitution.” Penal Substitution refers to the idea that Christ satisfied the demands of God’s justice, by taking onto himself the punishment for our sins, in our place, on the cross.

If it’s misunderstood, Penal Substitution can leave the impression that the Christian God is some petty, vengeful deity who can’t be satisfied until someone suffers to appease his wrath, which is in flat contradiction of the Bible’s own description of God, that he is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Penal Substitution starts to make perfect sense, however, if we think about it in relation to the 2007 financial crisis.

The US government’s decision to bailout the banks—to forgive them their debt—was based on the assumption that the banks themselves were too big to fail, and, if they went under, the whole economy would collapse. In their view, forgiveness was necessary.

But what leaves us with a justifiably sour taste in our mouths is the travesty of justice here—that no one was held to account, and justice was not served.

To grasp how this relates to the cross, we must first consider that, when he created the world, God was after a world where things like fairness, and right relationships, and harmony, and holiness, where all the things we think of when we think about justice, obtain.

Human beings, of course, have not lived up to the Creator’s intention for us; the global economic crisis of 2007 is only one of a million examples of this. We sin.

And herein lies the dilemma.

For us to be included in his plan for the creation (and because he loves us passionately, he passionately wants this for us), God must forgive us our sins. But if he were to forgive us without somehow satisfying the demands of justice, it would sort of be like a government that forgives the debt of a bunch of corrupt banks without just regard to the plight of the ordinary people hurt by them.

From God’s perspective, both undeserved forgiveness and genuine justice are necessary if his plan for the creation is to be accomplished.

And this is the dilemma that he resolves for us through the cross.

Penal Substitution is not about Jesus pacifying the rage of an angry Heavenly Father. It is about a loving God who, in the person of Jesus Christ, suffers the full consequences of our sin, for us, and in our place, so that God can forgive us with just regard for the severity of sin, and so that he can deal with sin in all its severity, without excluding us from his plan for the creation.

Like it says in one place: he made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that we could become the righteousness of God.

Three Minute Theology 3.6: Start to Finish

Russian Composer Dimitri Shostakovich wrote his seventh Symphony in 1941, as an act of defiance during the Nazi invasion of Russia. On December 27, 1941, he formally dedicated it to the city of Leningrad, which was then under siege by the Germans.

The Leningrad Radio Orchestra performed the piece for the first time on August 9th, 1942, at the height of the siege. For 334 days, the city had refused to surrender, enduring fire-bombings, starvation and death.

So, when the Leningrad orchestra began rehearsing, they could barely find enough musicians left alive to fill the score. Their first rehearsal only lasted 15 minutes, because everyone was too exhausted from starvation to play longer.

But here’s how one historian describes the night of the concert: “When the last chord trailed off there was a momentary silence. Then the whole place exploded with thunderous applause. People went to their feet, tears rolling down their faces. The musicians were hugging each other like soldiers after a battle.”

In some mysterious way, this unlikely performance had a saving effect on the city.

At least, Germany never captured Leningrad. One German soldier, who picked up the broadcast of the concert that night, wrote this: “When I heard Shostakovich’s Seventh being broadcast from the famine-stricken city, I realized that we would never take it.”

To the extent that you might think about this defiant performance as the “fulfillment” of Shastakovich’s Symphony—and to the extent that this “fulfillment” was, in fact a “saving event” for the city—it provides us a helpful image for an important aspect of the Atonement that is sometimes overlooked: the way Jesus’ death on the cross saves us by fulfilling for us the Old Testament story of Israel.

To get this, we need first to consider the history of ancient Israel as an over-arcing narrative.

God promises Abraham that he will make his descendants into a great nation, and that through them, he’ll bless the whole Earth. But Israel falls into slavery in Egypt. Through Moses, God delivers them from Egypt, establishing them as his chosen people, and giving them the Law—an elaborate system of sacrificial worship that’s will mediate their life with him.

The people wander the desert 40 years before God finally brings them to the Promised Land.

But through the generations, the people continually fall into idol worship and immorality, only to be called back to God by his prophets. Eventually their sin reaches its lowest point, and the people go into exile. The Babylonian Empire invades the nation, razes their capital, and hauls them off into captivity.

The prophets at the time interpret this exile as an expression of God’s “wrath”—his righteous judgement, that is, on their idolatry and immorality. But they also promise that God will fulfill his promise to Abraham, bringing them home from exile, and back into relationship with himself.

This is a pretty condensed summary of the Old Testament, but when it’s laid out like that, we see how Jesus “fulfills” this story in his own story.

As an infant, he flees to Egypt, later he is tested for 40 days in the desert. He calls the people into right relationship with God, and when his message ruffles too many of the wrong feathers—at the lowest point of human history—we crucify him.

And here’s where the story of God’s dealings with his people come to its fulfillment: because if Jesus represents Israel, the cross is the ultimate exile, as he cut off and condemned for the sins of the people. Through the Cross, he brings all the failure and judgment of the “exile” to an end, by becoming the perfect lamb of God who fulfills all the sacrificial requirements of the Old Testament Law that Israel failed to keep.

Like a beleaguered orchestra, you might say, saving a war-torn city by fulfilling a beautiful Symphony, Christ’s death on the cross saves us, by fulfilling the story of exile and redemption that is our collective history, and leading us into a “return from exile” with the Resurrection on the other side.

Jesus himself put it more even more simply, when he cried out from the cross with his final breath, “it is finished!”

Three Minute Theology 3.5: The Price of Love

There’s an old story from the Polynesian islands called “Johnny Lingo and his ten-cow wife” that goes like this. In those days, and in that part of the world, if a man wanted to marry a girl, it was necessary for him to pay the father of the bride a dowry.

Usually the expected dowry was a single cow, but depending on how badly the man wanted his bride, he might even go as high as three, maybe four cows.

Now: It just so happened that Johnny Lingo was in love with Mahana, a young girl on the next island over, a woman who—well—let’s just say that all the villagers agreed her father Moki would be lucky to get even one cow for her.

She was short, and sallow and sullen, and when Johnny arrived to bargain for her, shrewd old Moki asked for three cows, because he thought, at least that way Johnny Lingo will have to offer one cow in return.

Johnny squinted his eyes for a minute, and then he said: “Moki, three cows is a lot. But it’s not enough for my Mahana. I’ll give you ten cows for her hand in marriage!”

Everyone was stunned, but Moki agreed before Johnny could change his mind. So Johnny paid 10 cows for poor, sad looking Mahana, and with all the villagers snickering behind his back, he went home with his bride.

It was some time before anyone heard from them again. But it so happened that one of the villagers on a trading trip to Johnny’s island stopped by for a visit, years later.

When he arrived, this stunning young woman met him at the door. She stood tall and straight, her face glowing and he eyes shining. Stammering, the villager asked for Johnny Lingo.

After they exchanged pleasantries he asked Johnny, “Who was that beautiful woman?” To which Johnny replied. “That was my Mahana.”

He could tell the visitor was having difficulty lining up the beautiful woman he’d just met with the memory of the ugly girl who left the island so many years ago, so Johnny explained: “What girl could be truly beautiful if she believed she was only worth one or two cows to her man? No: we are as beautiful as we’re told we are. And a woman who is told she’s worth ten cows will become a ten cow wife.”

While the actual practice of paying a dowry for a bride may seem foreign, even distasteful to us, the core idea of this story—“That a woman who’s told she’s worth ten cows will become a ten cow wife”—is a useful analogy for one of the traditional atonement theories, explanations, that is to say, for how and why the death of Jesus is able to save human beings like us.

The theory is sometimes called the “moral Influence” theory.

The idea is that, there is something about the way in which God demonstrates his love for us on the cross—the lavish, reckless, unfathomable love he shows us by dying for us like that—that when we glimpse it—the very fact of his love has the power to save us from sins.

It may not be immediately clear how a mere demonstration of love has the power to save, but that’s where the story of Johnny Lingo and Mahina comes in.

Just like Johnny’s lavish demonstration of love transformed Mahina, saving her from the ugliness she believed was true about herself, so too with the cross: in showing us how much we are worth to him—even to the point of dying for us in Christ—God transforms us into the love-able creatures that the cross declares us to be.

On its own, the Moral Influence theory does not account for the full picture of what Christ accomplished on the cross, but it does add an important and necessary theme to our understanding: that whatever the cross is about, it is, first and foremost, a saving demonstration of God’s holy love.

Like the Bible says it in one place, “God demonstrates his own love towards us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Three Minute Theology 3.4: Won by Love

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis Tennessee.

King was one of the key leaders of the American Civil Rights movement, and was working tirelessly to bring about racial equality in America.

While this was a tragic moment in American History, some historians of the Civil Rights Movement have noted that, rather than silencing Martin Luther King, his murder had the opposite effect.

At the time of his death—the very week he was shot, in fact—the American House of Representatives was debating the Civil Rights Act. The waves of protest that swept the country immediately after King’s assassination forced lawmakers finally to act.

Charles Mathais, a politician at the time, put it like this: “Members of Congress knew they had to act to redress these imbalances in American life to fulfill the dream that King had so eloquently preached.”

President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into Law on April 11, exactly one week after King’s death.

The way in which Martin Luther King’s apparent defeat actually led to a profound and deeper kind of victory over the evil of racism, is a helpful image for us as we think about theories atonement—our theological answers to the question: “How does Jesus’ death on the cross save us?”

One of the answers the New Testament gives for this question is that in some mysterious way, God actually won a profound, and very real victory over evil, through the Cross.

In one place, it says it like this: “by his death he [has] destroyed him who holds the power of death, and has freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” In another place it says, “God disarmed the powers of evil and triumphed over them in the cross.”

This atonement theory is sometimes called the “Christus Victor” theme—Christus Victor being Latin for “Christ the Victor.” And the idea is that human beings are in some kind of spiritual bondange to evil—sin, death and the devil, is how the Bible talks about it. We are slaves to our evil nature and held captive by death.

And because we are unable to free ourselves, God won a decisive victory for us, to break evil’s power over us and set us free from our bondage to death.

Just exactly how the death of a 1st Century Jewish Holy Man could actually be God’s Victory over evil is difficult to explain.

The earliest theologians talked about it in terms of God fighting a spiritual battle with Satan, on the Cross. They sometimes used the metaphor of a fish going for bait on a fish hook. Satan, in this analogy, is the fish, and Christ on the cross was God’s “bait.” Satan believed he had devoured Christ, only to discover the “hook,” that is to say, three days later Christ rose again from the grave.

Modern theologians have developed other ways of talking about Christ’s Victory on the Cross. Some suggest, for instance, that by dying as a perfectly innocent victim at the hands of the World Powers, God in Christ exposed how cruel and idolatrous human power-structures really are. In this way, they say, he broke their power over us.

Other theologians trace human sin back to our fear of death—we exploit others, hoard things, and so on, all because we are afraid to die and we believe that these things will give our lives meaning in the face of death. Through his death and resurrection, Christ replaced our fear of death with the hope of resurrection glory, and so broke sin’s power over us.

Probably none of these explanations gets to the very heart of the mystery, how Christ’s death on the cross could actually mean, for his followers, victory over sin and death, but the writers of the New Testament were pretty convinced that this is one of the things that was happening when Jesus died for us on the cross.

Like the apostle Paul put it: Thanks be to God, who gives us victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Three Minute Theology 3.2: In Living Colour

While it may look white to the naked eye, technically, white light is a combination of all the different wavelengths of light—the different colours, that is, in the electromagnetic spectrum.

When white light passes through a prism, each colour in the beam of light refracts at a different angle, which in turn causes the white light to split up into a rainbow of colours, a phenomenon called “refractive dispersion.”

Besides being a great elementary school experiment refractive dispersion is also a helpful image for thinking about Jesus’ death on the cross, and why, or how, his death “saves” us when we believe in him.

In one sense, of course, the execution of this 1st Century Jewish Holy Man was a single historical event—in much the same way a beam of light is a single thing.

And, while the New Testament writers all agree that there was something “saving” about his death—that God did something there that meant salvation for human beings like us—they don’t always agree on what exactly it was, on how, exactly, Jesus’ death saves.

In some places, it talks about his death as though God were wining a victory over evil for us.  In other places, it talks about Jesus paying our ransom.  In another place it talks about Jesus satisfying the demands of the Old Testament Law, and so on.

Over the years, theologians have debated, sometimes at great length, which explanation for the Cross is best.  These various explanations are sometimes called “theories of the atonement”—theories, that is, for how the cross can and does “atone” for our sins.

Put simply, the question is:  which theory of the atonement is the “correct” one?

And here’s where refractive dispersion comes in handy.  Because just like a single beam of white light is really a rainbow of colours, so too with the cross.  If we could “refractively disperse” the message of the cross, theologically speaking, we’d see a whole spectrum of things happening all at once, that together make up the saving nature of his death.

On the tone hand, his death summarized and fulfilled the ancient story of God’s People, for us and in our place.  On the other hand, his death was an unexpected victory over sin and death, for us and in our place.

His death satisfied the requirements of the Old Testament Law.  It was God’s demonstration of his holy, emphatic “No!” to human sin, and it was also God taking the effects of that “No!” onto himself.

It was God paying with his own life the ransom necessary to free us from evil.  And it was God making peace with us when we were dead set against him, by laying down his life for us, and in our place.

Now: none of these ideas—victory, ransom, satisfying God’s “No!” to sin, making peace, fulfilling the Law none of them on their own explains the cross, but together—just like all the colours of the electromagnetic spectrum together makes white light—together all these make up the content of the message:  Christ died for our salvation.

Of course, the real question remains: what is the prism in our analogy.  That is to say, what allows us to “break up” the message of the cross into its constituent colours?

When framed like that, the thing that stands out as common to all the different “explanations” of the cross is the fact that Jesus was dying for us and in our place.  This is sometimes called the “substitutiary atonement”—the teaching that in Jesus, God was actually standing in as our substitute,” doing for us and in our place what we couldn’t do for ourselves and on our own.

And when we pass the Event of the Cross through the “prism” of the substitutiary atonement, trusting that, whatever happened there on the cross, Jesus was dying for us and in our place—that’s when the death of this 1st Century Holy Man  becomes for us what the Bible says it is:  “The light of the knowledge of God, shining in the face of Christ.”

The Halloween Files (Part VIII): On Trick-or-Treating

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As regular readers of this blog will know, the last few weeks at terra incognita have been devoted to theologically decoding the themes of Halloween.  Halloween came on faster than I could write, so there are a few "Halloween Files" that will have to wait until next year, but one of the big issues we didn't tackle in this series is the supposed pagan origins of the festival.  As it turns out, the "Is Halloween pagan?" question is more complicated than a 500-word blog post could adequately cover anyway.  For those who want some further reading to help them settle the issue, let me recommend the following.

Here's an article about Halloween's Christian (yes, Christian) connections.

And here's my old friend Richard Beck with a psychological defense of Halloween (again I need to credit Beck with having inspired this series here at terra incognita).

And here's Steve Bell on "keeping Christ in Halloween."

I'll keep the jury sequestered on this one and let you make up your own mind.  But since your door will be ringing with cries for treats and threats of tricks in only a few hours, let me try to decode one last Halloween tradition here:  the "trick-or-treater."

Because when you strip away the pillow-cases full of candy, the symbolic narrative of trick-or-treating is as potent as it is old:  a spirit-being (who may in fact be a neighbour in disguise, but there's no way of knowing for certain) comes to your door begging hospitality and threatening mischief if it's withheld.  That is, after all, what's echoing (albeit faintly) under that mask-muffled cry:  Show hospitality (treat), or suffer the consequences (trick).

As a symbolic narrative, this story is old enough to be archetypal: a spirit-being-in-disguise came calling for hospitality, and finding none, exacted reprisal.   Just read the prologue to Beauty and the Beast, or the myth of Baucis and Philemon (in Ovid's Metamorphosis), or the story of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom (in Genesis 18-19).

What these stories all point out is that, in the ancient world at least, there was a spiritual dimension to hospitality.  It's why Abraham was so quick to welcome his guests under the Oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18), and why Lot's house, alone, was spared when the Lord went looking for ten righteous men in Sodom (Genesis 19).  Because graciously and generously welcoming the stranger was once a moral act, and poor hospitality was once a deep spiritual failing.

Trick-or-treating may or may not have descended from old Celtic rituals designed to appease the spirit-beings on the night when the veil between "their world" and "ours" was at its thinnest.  The jury's still out.  But where ever it came from, it is a vestige from a time gone by when we recognized hospitality as a profoundly spiritual act.  As such, it serves as a playful reminder to our world, where we have (for all intents and purposes) closed our minds to the possibility of spirit-beings, and are increasingly closing our doors to strangers:  there is something spiritual going on when we practice genuine hospitality.

And if you're still with me, then let me point you in two equal and opposite directions for reflection this Halloween night.

On the one hand, notice that the "symbolic logic" of trick-or-treating is based on the threat of retribution and the hope of appeasement: appease the spirit world or suffer its vengeance.  In this, its "inner symbolism" is decidedly pagan, whether it came from ancient Ireland or not.  It's based on the idea that "the gods" (or in this case, their cleverly-costumed representatives) threaten terrible tricks unless they are dully treated.  And in pointing that out, I hope you'll understand what I mean when I say that through the Cross, Jesus has actually unmasked the "trick-or-treating god" for us.  In biblical language:  the divine wrath is satisfied, once for all in Jesus, who is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

And if that seems like a bit of a theological leap (from trick-or-treating to the atonement), then let me give you the other hand.  Hospitality is still a spiritual act.  As a Christian and a pastor, I believe that the church is called to extend God's hospitality to the stranger and the outsider in our midst.  In material and spiritual ways, we're called to share with others the hospitality that we've experienced in Jesus Christ, when God invited us to his table, spiritually homeless sinners though we were. 

And  if you'll listen for it, you may hear that call echoing in the background tonight, when those masked gremlins and other assorted strangers stand outside your door, crying out for a treat.  If you'll listen for it, you may hear God say what he said in Hebrews 13:2, all over again:  "Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it."

Happy Halloween, everybody!

The Ineffable Line

I've been working on a song for about seven years now. The idea came to me one Sunday morning when I happened to open the Bible randomly to Isaiah 49:16, and read these lines: "Can a mother have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. Look: I have engraved you on the palms of my hands." The imagery stuck in my imagination, and with it, this line rang in my head: "I wrote your name with the nails of the cross / on my hands and feet that it might never be lost." When I got home I sat down at the piano and plunked away until I had the seed of a song planted.

This is the song that the seed's grown up into, seven years later:

I have inscribed you

Now the song hasn't really changed that much in seven years; I only say I've been working on it ever since because of those difficult lines at 2:54: "It was broken for you / It was offered for you / It was poured out to..."


For seven years now I've been trying to find the best way to end that line. It [i.e. Christ's life] was poured out to...well... to what? How do you summarize the meaning of Christ's death in 5 syllables? (That is, 5 syllables so that the line will scan; ideally it will rhyme with "you" too)?


In theological terms, my song writing dilemma has to do with the Doctrine of the Atonement-- that is, how do you explain, primarily, why Christ's death was able to save sinners like us. There are a number of traditional answers to this question in Christian theology, various "Models of the Atonement" that we might draw on to fill in those 5 missing syllables. Let me illustrate with some examples from some contemporary worship songs:

Penal Substitution
Christ took the punishment for sin in our place: You are my King; "I'm forgiven because you were forsaken / I'm accepted, you were condemned"

Christus Victor
Christ won the victory over sin, death and the devil through his sinless death: Hope of the Nations; "In history you lived and died / you broke the chains / you rose to life" also, In Christ Alone; "Then bursting forth in glorious day / up from the grave he rose again / and as he stands in victory..."

Satisfaction
Christ's death satisfied God's wrath and/or impinged honour: In Christ Alone; "Till on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied"

Moral Influence
Christ's death is the ultimate demonstration of God's love towards us, which turns us from sin when we discover it: Once Again; "Once again I look upon the cross where you died / I'm humbled by your mercy and I'm broken inside"


Reflecting on and learning to articulate my own understanding of the Atonement has been an important part of my journey with Christ and my formation for ministry. The various "versions" of my song reflect milestones on that journey.

I'm embarrassed to say, for instance, that the first version reflected the typical, Evangelical, "Personal(ized) Jesus" model of the Atonement that I'd unconsciously absorbed from songs like "You took the fall / and thought of me above all": "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / It was offered only for you" (ugh)


Later I learned about the Christus Victor model of the Atonement from guys like Gustav Aulen, and I worked with versions of the line like these: "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / It was paid as a ransom for you" or: "It was broken for you / it was poured out for you / To break death's power over you"

For a while I tried to avoid the Atonement altogether and focused on the sanctifying work of Christ instead: "It was offered to sanctify you"


But a while ago I read Han Boursma's treatment of the Atonement in his book Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, which helped me arrive at a much more robust understanding of Christ's death, and, indeed, the nature of the sin that he atoned for. With his work in mind, this is what I finally came up with:

"It was broken for you / It was offered for you / It was poured out to make all things new"

There are probably better rhymes out there still, but I'll leave it there; or maybe, as a devotional and theological exercise, it would be better to leave the line unfinished, and let the silence symbolize itself the ineffable mystery of the cross.