God Crucified?

Excellent post  about the issue of PSA (penal ubstitutionary atonement) which manages to capture helpfully and briefly the difficulties it has as a telling of how the cross might work. First off a positive telling from Nadia Bolz Weber:

God Crucified? | Storied Theology: … that’s not “God’s little boy, like God is some kind of divine child abuser sending his son (and he only had one!).” Come on, give me a break! “God’s little boy and he only had one, and as this divine child abuser and as this cigar-chomping loan shark demanding a pound of flesh, sending his little boy…” What hogwash, right? That actually is God on the cross, God saying, “I’d rather die than be in the sin-accounting business you’ve put me in.”

 But the then post goes on to re-assert why there is a problem:

The problem I keep coming back to is that everywhere and always in scripture, the son who dies is precisely the son who is not the father, and is nowhere the God who, as Godself, is dying to save us.

 And that is precisely the thing that is so difficult to try to explain in evangelism. Something like the doctrine of Communicatio Idiomatum is part of the response to the issue then raised:

Is the need for it to be God as such who dies so profound that we simply have to abandon the suffering Human One of the Synoptic Gospels, or the obedient Second Adam of Paul? Or do we simply need to return to the question of why Jesus died to shore up a better answer of why this man, man I say!, goes the way of the cross?

But then that's no easier to tell at a popular level. Whatever else is said, it points to the difficulty of using PSA in popular preaching; it actually needs quite a sophisticated Trinitarian theological explanation to sustain it in the face of the increasingly likely follow-up questions.

I actually think that the kind of approach I try to sketch out in my posts on the Cross as an Eikon of forgiveness helps to handle these issue more helpfully in terms of giving a frame to say why God should be implicated intimately in the Cross, dying and so forth, and by having something which connects incarnation and the Cross very closely helps to deal with the issue of the Persons in a more wholistic light by seeing it as a Trinitarian action rather than some how as a fragmentedly Personal action.