I’ve decided to participate with Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program again. This time the book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is chapter 2, The Nature of the Atonement.
Update: Tim’s summary of this chapter is here.
This was a much longer chapter than the first one—thirty-one pages on the nature of the atonement. Murray starts by classifying all of the work Christ did in the atonement as obedience and then gives us a short discussion of the active obedience and passive obedience of Christ. Those terms, says Murray, refer to Christ’s meeting both the “penal and preceptive requirements of God’s law.” Christ’s passive obedience was his bearing of God’s judgment agains sin in our place, and his active obedience was his fulfilling all the positive demands of God’s law in our place.
The chapter then moves to a discussion of the “specific categories by means of which the Scripture sets forth the nature of the atonement.” These are
- sacrifice. We need to understand the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice by looking at the Old Testament sacrifices. They were expiatory; they were the substitutionary endurance of penalty due to sin. So is Christ’s sacrifice, but Christ’s sacrifice is the prototype and the Levitical sacrifices are the copies. His sacrifice, then, is efficacious and complete in a way the Levitical ones could never be. Furthermore, and often overlooked, Christ was not only sacrifice, but also priest: He offered himself. And he remains a priest, making intercession for us.
- propitiation. The idea of propitiation presupposes the wrath of God. In propitiation, Christ turned away—or placated—the wrath of God. A few things to keep in mind: First, it is God’s love that provides propitiation; propitiation does not cause God to love us. Second, propitiation does not turn God’s wrath into love. Rather, “propitiation is the ground upon which the divine love operates.” In other words, God’s love does it’s work in us because God’s wrath has been propitiated on our behalf. Third, propitiation reveals the depth of God’s love and mercy.
- reconciliation. This is closely related to the idea of propitiation, but while propitiation focuses on the wrath of God, reconciliation focuses on God’s alienation from us. It presupposes a disrupted relationship. The doctrine of reconciliation is not primarily about our reconciliation to God, but his reconciliation to us. Murray makes this point about the meaning of the word reconciliation by looking at several scripture passages which use the term, and then concludes, “God himself in his own Son has removed the ground of offence and we receive the reconciliation.”
- redemption. This is not just simply deliverance, but release by the payment of a price. It presupposes bondage or captivity. We are, says Murray, redeemed from the law in the sense that we are redeemed from the curse of the law, the ceremonial law, and the law of works. Christ redeemed us from the penal sanction of the law, from the guardianship of the Mosaic law, and from the need to keep the law in order to be justified. We are also redeemed from the guilt and power of sin. We are forgiven our sin and justified; we are delivered from the dominion of sin. This second piece of the redemption picture includes what Murray calls “the triumphal aspect of redemption”: victory over Satan and death.
Even though this chapter was longer than the first I found this bit of reading much less difficult, perhaps because I’m more familiar with the subject matter. But if you need more explanation of the points Murray is making, I’d suggest The Atonement: It’s Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris as a supplement. It includes a whole chapter on each of the above terms, going into them in even more depth, and what’s more, it’s written in much simpler language.
Glossary for Chapter 2
- archetypal: original model after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype.
- ectypal: copy of the original.
- piacular: making atonement.
- a fortiori argument: a proof of a claim by means of an already proved stronger claim.
- commutation: a substitution or exchange.
- privisional: [could find no definition for this.]
- collocated: grouped or placed together.