Almost Atonement & The Wood Between the Worlds

Some years ago, self-deprecating comedian Martin Short joked with talk show host Conan O’Brien that his family would write the word “Almost” on his tombstone.^[1] “Almost” because he had, in his mind, never quite fully made it in Hollywood with a smash hit. While it’s hardly true of Short, that’s the line that kept ringing through my mind as I read Brian Zahnd’s 2024 book The Wood Between the Worlds.

I came upon Brian Zahnd’s book as I was working through my own meager reflection on the Passion and Cross of Christ. In this way, my work here will seem self-serving, but the truth is that as I read Zahnd’s book, I was genuinely impassioned to offer a response.

Here, I do not so much hope to convince Zahnd of his errors so much as to persuade those who read Zahnd that there is more to the story. After all, there is no greater “First Thing” than what we make of the Cross. Zahnd styles his work as a poetic and kaleidoscopic reflection on the Cross. My contention with his work is that there is a significant lens being attached to his kaleidoscope. And this lens allows readers to look in certain directions, but not others – and even sheds significant shade on the very heart of the Cross. To be clear, in this essay I am not offering a full review of Zahnd’s work, but rather a critical reply centered around the doctrine of atonement. Of course, this is interrelated with other subjects, as we’ll see in a moment.

What Did the Cross Accomplish?

Here, I want to focus my reply on Zahnd’s chapter titled “The Singularity of Good Friday,” the second chapter of the book. Right at the top of the chapter, he begins by saying,

On Good Friday did God vent his anger by brutally killing his Son so he could finally find the wherewithal to forgive? Are we to imagine that John 3:16 means God so hated the world that he killed his only begotten Son?… If we construe an idea that atonement means the appeasement of God’s anger through the violent abuse of his Son, we have viewed the cross through a pagan lens. (15–16)

This passage highlights one of the key weaknesses of Zahnd’s book. Throughout The Wood, it seems that Zahnd contents himself with knocking over a strawman rather than a steelman, a distortion rather than the genuine article. I am persuaded that the steelman stands still, gleaming and glinting in the sun for all to see. Particularly around Penal Substitutionary Atonement, he is quick to define the doctrine by way of caricature, score a couple of quick jabs, and then walk away. The problem is that he does not bother to interact with scriptural passages which support this idea, the way the Church has historically articulated this belief, and actual theologians who hold this position.

So, in offering a response here, my task is first to properly define Penal Substitutionary Atonement. The classic definition from J.I. Packer is worth quoting here:

The notion which the phrase ‘penal substitution’ expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory.^[2]

PSA does not dissolve all mystery in the cross, nor does it subsume all other aspects of Christ’s achievement in its wake. It simply defines the central work of the cross with precision. Likewise, affirming PSA does not prevent us from viewing the work of Christ on the Cross as a “kaleidoscope” of sorts. It simply affirms that there is a fixed center to “The Wood Between the Worlds.”^[3] Christ in our place is the heart of the Cross, but it does not exhaust the Cross. Indeed, it is expansive! Its vertical and horizontal beams go on into eternity, but the beams do meet in the middle – Christ in the stead of sinners is that middle, the heart of the cross.

Again, the grand problem with Zahnd’s contention above is that this does not do justice to the language of scripture. Startlingly, Zahnd does not ever interact with Isaiah 53 in any substantial way, particularly in the ways that would challenge his view of the cross. Of course, as liturgical theologian Joachim Jeremias summarized, “No other passage from the Old Testament was as important to the Church as Isaiah 53.”^[4] Why does he shy away from it in his book? It is Isaiah 53 itself, the gritty, prophetic portrait of Christ’s sufferings that includes the stunning affirmation that “it was the will of the Lord to crush him,” and to “put him to grief” (Is. 53:10). And here is a related challenge with interacting with Zahnd – does he believe in the coherence of Scripture? Does he believe that Scripture fits together and speaks with one voice? Is it the Word of God or does it merely “contain” the Word of God? Consider this passage: “The Bible is a sprawling collection of texts often unwieldy and difficult to interpret. While some may speak glibly of the alleged perspicuity of Scripture, we nevertheless must acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of what Christian Smith has called ‘pervasive interpretive pluralism’” (2).^[5]

Chapter 2 also includes a discussion of the Passover lamb of Exodus. He states this:

It’s important to recognize that the Passover lamb was not being punished. Rather, it was a sacrifice to provide the covenant meal. The ritual killing of a human or animal to appease the gods is a pagan practice and not what was observed by the ancient Hebrews in the Exodus story. (19)

It’s important to note that God himself criticizes this conception of sacrifice. Psalm 50:13 says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” Then in verse 23, we find that the sacrifices offered are intended to lead to thanksgiving for the salvation of God: “The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!” The sacrifices “appease” or propitiate because they are God-ordained sacraments of grace, so to speak, from God, not merely to God.

In the above quotation, Zahnd glosses over the fact that the lamb was provided so that the judgment of God himself, poured out on the Egyptians, would pass over the Hebrews. The animal not only provides the meal, but its blood also covers the people, providing for them an innocence they do not themselves possess. That is the plain teaching of Holy Scripture.

Here we come to the crux of the matter: distortions of PSA do not disprove the doctrine. That it has been stated badly does not mean it is untrue. Any formulation of penal substitution which begins with God as the subject and Christ as the object is out of bounds from the start. We do not begin with “God vs. man,” but “God in Christ.” In the atonement, we do not have one subject (God) and another object in man (Christ), but two subjects in a union of will and purpose. As John Stott says in one of the greatest treatments ever published on the Cross of Christ,

Any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role – the guilty party, the punitive judge and the innocent victim – is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence. It would not only be unjust in itself but would also reflect a defective Christology. For Christ is not an independent third person, but the eternal Son of the Father, who is one with the Father in his essential being. What we see, then, in the drama of the Cross, is not three actors but two, ourselves on the one hand and God on the other.^[6]

I can only note with passing irony that InterVarsity Press published both The Wood Between the Worlds and The Cross of Christ by John Stott.

Whose Idea Was Sacrifice?

One of the most bizarre and troubling passages of the book comes in Zahnd’s discussion of Old Testament sacrifice in the chapter entitled, “The Sacrifice to End Sacrificing.” Here, he has an entire section on what he calls the “Scapegoat Mechanism,” a term he picked up from philosopher Rene Girard. It is highly significant that the entire chapter is nearly all based on Girard’s work. It seems that the more Zahnd goes out on a limb in his teaching on the cross, the further he has to reach.

Related to the Day of Atonement, he writes,

This phenomenon of projecting our sins upon an accused and vilified victim is known as scapegoating, a term derived from the ancient Hebrew ritual of placing the sins of the congregation upon a goat and driving the goat into the wilderness. The Hebrew word traditionally translated as “scapegoat” in Leviticus 16 is azazel, a goat-like demon in Jewish folklore. The ancient Hebrew instinct to connect the scapegoat with the demonic is very insightful. The practice of achieving unity by blaming an innocent victim – what we call scapegoating – is the very essence of the satanic. (117)

Taken seriously, his argument here makes Satan rather than God the origin of the Temple’s sacrificial system, a teaching unknown in the history of Christianity.^[7] His teaching above also completely overlooks the fact that the “scapegoat” takes away the sins of the people, who are most definitely not innocent.

Again, this is at odds with the plain teaching of Holy Scripture. Two examples will suffice.

First, when God pronounces Adam and Eve cursed because of sin, it is he who provides a merciful covering for them as they are evicted from the Garden of Eden: “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). This is the very first instance of sacrifice in Scripture. Though it is necessitated by sin, it is inaugurated by God himself.

The second is found in Leviticus 17:11. Here, the Lord speaks to the underpinnings of the Old Testament sacrificial system. What does he say? “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” So here, the origins of the sacrificial system are placed squarely with God. It was his idea. This is totally at odds with Zahnd’s contention. It is as if Zahnd has taken the Bible’s teaching on sacrifice, turned it on its ear, and shoved a circle into a square hole, all in the name of making it fit into his own preconceived system of thought.

And this is another great irony. Zahnd has accused PSA of importing pagan ideas. Here, he is actually doing it! By importing foreign (pagan!) ideas of sacrifice into the Hebrew sacrificial system, the outcome is that Zahnd’s position puts the Old and New Testaments at odd with each other. His conception of Jesus’ final sacrifice becomes here more of an overthrowal or undoing of what came before rather than an ephapax fulfillment of the Temple sacrifices (Hebrews 10:10). In Zahnd’s retelling, the Bible is no longer a unified narrative. His thought here becomes a repudiation of St. Augustine’s maxim, “The New is in the Old concealed, the Old is the New revealed.”^[8]

Judge and Savior?

Lastly, related to his denial of PSA, Zahnd denies any sense of retributive justice to God at all. Most salient is his treatment of Revelation 19:11–21 in his chapter titled “War is Over (If You Want It)”:

The vision of the white horse rider waging war from heaven ends with those slain by the Word of God being devoured by the birds of heaven. “And the rest were killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh” (Rev 19:21). Amen. I count myself among those slain by the Word of God and raised to newness of life. May the fowl of heaven consume my flesh – not my embodiedness, but my carnality. There is a way to interpret the Apocalypse that is consistent with the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. (112)

Well, yes, I suppose there are other ways to interpret the Apocalypse, but that does not make them right or reliable. You can also use a spoon for a screwdriver, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Here, I have to give Zahnd credit for at least interacting with other stances on Revelation (particularly the section titled “The White Horse Rider”). But, I also have to say that I found his interaction here quite condescending. One has the impression that it’s either agree with Zahnd or believe that Jesus is going to come back with a literal sword flailing out of his mouth as a “divine Rambo,” as he puts it.

But his exegesis fails on several basic points. First, Revelation 19:11–21 is preceded by the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. It has already started. What is the Lamb being praised for? “[H]is judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants” (Revelation 19:2). It is that judgment that commences in Revelation 19:11–21.

Second, all of the images found in Revelation 19:11–21 are images of judgment, not redemption. This comes to a head with the beast and the false prophet being thrown into the lake of fire, and those who followed them being slain: “And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. And the rest were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh” (Revelation 19:20–21). It is hard to imagine such a swift and arbitrary pivot from judgment in verse 20 to redemption in verse 21. Here, it seems that his a priori commitment to universalism has overcome the plain meaning of Scripture.

Third, Zahnd ignores the apocalyptic and prophetic underpinnings of the book of Revelation. A cursory glance reveals that Revelation 19:11–21 is clearly built on Ezekiel 38–39, which is about judgment on the Old Testament enemies of God’s people, Gog and Magog. Ezekiel 39:17–20 will suffice to show the connection:

“As for you, son of man, thus says the Lord God: Speak to the birds of every sort and to all beasts of the field: ‘Assemble and come, gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood. You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth—of rams, of lambs, and of he-goats, of bulls, all of them fat beasts of Bashan. And you shall eat fat till you are filled, and drink blood till you are drunk, at the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you. And you shall be filled at my table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all kinds of warriors,’ declares the Lord God.”

The Missing Godward Elements: Satisfaction & Wrath

What is missing in Zahnd’s work is any sense of the Godward direction of atonement. For a book that is on the “kaleidoscope” of the Cross, it tends to collapse atonement down to one aspect of one theory of the atonement: Ransom Theory. “The blood of the Lamb is the blood of the covenant that liberates the whole world from its bondage to death. The blood of the Lamb is a ransom paid not to God, but to death” (21, emphasis mine). It is important to note that while several Church Fathers made use of Ransom Theory, the New Testament never states directly that a ransom was paid to Satan or death. The image is never pressed that far. What it does affirm, however, is that God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (that is, in the cross of Jesus, Colossians 2:15). Christ’s victory over death is most certainly an essential part of the cross, but that victory happens because of Jesus’ willingness to stand in the stead of sinners.

And so, satisfaction and wrath are unavoidable elements of the Cross. Why? First, throughout scripture, the Lord consistently speaks of the need to satisfy, not something outside of himself, but he himself.^[9] The Old Testament prophets consistently speak this way of YHWH satisfying himself. One strong example is found in Ezekiel 7:7–8: “Your doom has come to you, O inhabitant of the land. The time has come; the day is near, a day of tumult, and not of joyful shouting on the mountains. Now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you, and spend my anger against you, and judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations” (emphasis mine). It is first and foremost because of God’s holy character that sin must be atoned for.

Second, the nature of God’s wrath is often expressed in the language of burning, particularly by the prophets: “I have spurned your calf, O Samaria. My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of innocence?” (emphasis mine).^[10] What we find in scripture is that there is an absolute consistency between God’s actions and God’s Name. As he revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, he is, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6–7). God is always himself, or, as C.S. Lewis has Aslan put it, he is always “Myself…myself…myself.”^[11] God’s wrath, so often misunderstood, as some kind of “moodiness” on God’s part, is rather his settled hatred for and constant hostility towards the cancer of sin and evil. And, apart from Christ, that includes the evil at work in us. To continue in it unchecked and unrepentant invites wrath. But even the afflictions of his wrath are operations of his love. Or rather, in the words of Augustine of Hippo,

Our being reconciled by the death of Christ must not be understood as if the Son reconciled us, in order that the Father, then hating, might begin to love us, but that we were reconciled to him already, loving, though at enmity with us because of sin. To the truth of both propositions we have the attestation of the Apostle, “God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” … Accordingly, in a manner wondrous and divine, [he] loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us when were such as he had not made us, and yet because our iniquity had not destroyed his work in every respect, he knew in regard to each one of us, to hate what we had made, and to love what he made.^[12]

Certainly, this is a more careful, nuanced, and biblical statement of both the wrath and love of God than anything we find in Zahnd. In fact, he will go so far as to avoid satisfaction and wrath that he ends up affirming a kind of patripassianism, stating that the Father was “co-crucified” with Jesus (pg. 62). Patripassianism, was, of course, condemned by the Early Church as heretical. Rather, we ought to say that while the Father was not crucified, God did suffer through the sufferings of the Son.

In my critical response to Zahnd’s work, it’s important to note that these things emphatically do not represent the private opinions of one priest. The Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles enshrine these beliefs in Article II, when it says that Jesus “truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice.”^[13] The “Homily on Justification,” recommended by Article XI, movingly affirms that “it pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any of our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.”^[14]

Historically, at least, this represents the teaching of the world’s third-largest Christian Communion, and many others besides. The Anglican Church in North America reaffirms this position. Question 64 of the Church’s Catechism asks, “What did Jesus accomplish on the Cross?” Answer: “Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures by the dying on the Cross as a sacrifice for sin in obedience to his Father. He thereby showed the depth of the love of God for his fallen creation, satisfying the justice of God on our behalf and breaking the power of sin, Satan, and death.” ^[15]

Almost, But Not Quite

It is, then, the “rest of the cross,” shaded out by Zahnd that reveals the true depths of the kenosis of Christ (Phil. 2:6–7). In the classic statement of J.I. Packer,

[I]f the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help, and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear, then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement, for it sees the Son at his Father’s will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest. That death on the cross was a criminal’s death, physically as painful as, if not more painful than, any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen.^[16]

A final word. After the judgment and mercy displayed in the Flood, God says in Genesis 9:13 that he has set his “bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” Here, this is not a bow like you might put on a present, but rather the bow of the divine warrior. Here, God has “set up” his bow pointed toward the heavens. At the heart of heaven is the rainbow of God. Why? Because in the battle of God’s wrath against sin, God will pay the greatest cost. Perhaps here it is The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones that most clearly captures this reality in a way that even children can understand:

[After the Flood, i]t wasn’t long before everything went wrong again but God wasn’t surprised, he knew this would happen. That’s why, before the beginning of time, he had another plan – a better plan. A plan not to destroy the world, but to rescue it – a plan to one day send his own Son, the Rescuer. God’s strong anger against hate and sadness and death would come down once more – but not on his people or his world. No, God’s war bow was not pointed down at his people. It was pointed up, into the heart of Heaven.^[17]

So, as for The Wood Between the Worlds, the most that can be said is “Almost.” Almost, but not quite. Friends, there is more to the Cross. That this is the case is not a liability to be managed but a glorious reality to be embraced and proclaimed.

Notes

1. Nancy MacDonald, “The Interview: Martin Short on joy, death, and comedy,” Maclean’s, November 4, 2014,https://macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-interview-martin-short-on-joy-death-and-comedy/. ↑
2. J.I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve?: The Logic of Penal Substitution” 9Marks, August, 20, 2019, https://www.9marks.org/article/what-did-the-cross-achieve-the-logic-of-penal-substitution/. ↑
3. This phrase is not original to Zahnd. In C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, the “wood” is a forest that connects our world to all of Aslan’s other worlds. The wood, the cross, is the thing at the center that connects everything. C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (HarperCollins, 1980), 31-44.But, notice that despite this expansive view of the cross, Lewis went on to make the heart of his theology of the cross the sacrifice of Aslan in the place of Edmund – a sacrifice that “worked” because of the “Deeper Magic” from before time. This Deeper Magic was placed there by the very Father of Aslan himself, the “Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.” C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (HarperCollins, 1994), 178-179. ↑
4. Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, (Redwood Press Limited, 1966) 228. As quoted in John Stott, The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity Press, 1986), 145. ↑
5. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Brazos Press, 2011), x. ↑
6. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 158. ↑
7. But he would not put in those terms. On p. 89 he appears to repudiate personal evil, saying, “More than a metaphor but less than a person, the satan is the phenomenon of accusation and violence that rules the world.” Emphasis mine. ↑
8. Augustine of Hippo, Questions on the Heptateuch 2.73. ↑
9. Actually, John Stott brings out four ways in which scripture speaks of the self-satisfaction of God: the language of provocation, the language of burning, the language of satisfaction itself, and the language of God acting consistently with his Name. I credit his insights here in the following section. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 123–128. ↑
10. Other examples occur in Joshua 7:1, Judges 3:8, and 2 Samuel 24:1. ↑
11. C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (HarperCollins, 1982), 176. ↑
12. Augustine of Hippo, Tract in John, 110. As quoted in Martin Davie, Our Inheritance of Faith: A Commentary on the Thirty Nine Articles (Gilead Books Publishing, 2013), 153-154, emphasis mine. ↑
13. Anglican Church in North America, The Book of Common Prayer (2019) (Anglican Liturgy Press), 772. ↑
14. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition (IVP Academic, 2021), 658. ↑
15. Anglican Church in North America, To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 42, emphasis mine. ↑
16. J.I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve?: The Logic of Penal Substitution” ↑
17. Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible (Zondervan, 2007), 47. ↑