Is Jesus the good cop? is the question which Adrian Warnock asks as he continues his long series on the atonement. He argues correctly, and importantly, that we should not see the Old Testament God as the “bad cop” and Jesus as the “good cop”. Rather, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in character and purpose. But I would have liked to see less emphasis from Adrian on the shared wrath of the Father and the Son, which makes it sound like they are both bad cops, and more on their shared love; in fact not “more”, because astonishingly Adrian does not mention at all in this post God’s love or any of his related positive attributes.
But how does this relate to the penal substitutionary model of the atonement which Adrian is continuing to promote above all others?
Adrian is happy with the description of PSA as the Father punishing Jesus, although J.I. Packer for example does not share this understanding, and although Adrian’s favourite book on the subject does not include this aspect in its problematic definition of PSA. But if the Father punished Jesus, that inevitably implies a division in the Trinity. In that distorted version of PSA God the Father does appear as the bad cop, but Jesus is not so much the good cop as an innocent victim who is allowed to take the rap so that the bad cop’s friends get away with their crimes.
Or in this version perhaps God is not so much a bad cop as an unjust judge. For in a human criminal court, if a judge lets guilty defendants go free because of love for them and instead condemns someone known to be innocent, that judge would be counted unjust. Why does a different standard apply to our heavenly Father? Since, as we all affirm, God the Father is in fact just, then the problem must be with this simplistic model of the atonement as God punishing the innocent one and acquitting the guilty.
As Packer wrote in 1973 and is still true today,
penal substitution sometimes has been, and still sometimes is, asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its critics — ‘crude’.
Let us all avoid such distorted presentations and return to a version of PSA which is, to quote Packer again,
a Trinitarian model, for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic,
that is, one with no division in the Trinity, none of the Father turning against the Son and punishing him unjustly, no “the Father killed the Son”, no bad cop but a loving heavenly Father.
“astonishingly Adrian does not mention at all in this post God’s love or any of his related positive attributes.”
This seems a little unfair. For instance, Adrian says “God is IN CHRIST reconciling the world” (prefaced by “As we have already said”, which in itself suggests a context). The quotation he gives from Psalm 2 climaxes with “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
It seems that for anyone to present anything about God in a blog-post/article/book, there is an expectation placed on them that they have to balance it out with codicils on every other aspect of God which to our limited minds might possibly SEEM to stand in opposition to it. I’m pretty convinced that Adrian believes in a God of love, but I don’t think that He should have to clarify it in every sentence or paragraph he says when it is clear enough from other ones. If every presentation of an aspect of God’s character has to be explicitly balanced with every other aspect I definitely wouldn’t have time to read anyone’s blogs.
I think John touched on something similar when he said about Jesus works, “if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.”
Si, fair enough, you don’t need to explain everything in every post. But this one did seem rather too unbalanced. It looked like an attempt to prove that Jesus is a bad cop, rather than that God the Father is also a good cop. There is something seriously lacking in a treatment of this particular issue which ignores God’s love, and allows readers to persist in the false idea that the God of the Old Testament is not a God of love.