Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Christ’s Priestly Atonement as Fulfillment and Transfer of Righteousness

Jesus’s sacrifice of himself on the cross fulfills the three main functions of sacrifice in the Old Testament: praise, atonement, and covenantal ratification. First, Jesus was able to fulfill God’s law as the one true and obedient representative human. He accomplished this purely as an act of praise to the Father and not out of compulsion or obligation. 

Christ possessed the fullness of divine glory and was therefore completely free from the law. Consequently, he was uniquely capable of fulfilling the law as a sacrifice of praise. Jesus is the perfect person of faith (Heb. 12:2-3) who trusted that he shared all things with the Father (Phil. 2:6-7). Therefore, he could perform obedient service not because he had to redeem himself or curry favor with God, but only to glorify the Father: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (Jn. 17:4).

Christ’s Death as Atoning Sacrifice

Secondly, Jesus’s death was an atoning sacrifice for sins. Under the old covenant, sin entailed death. As St. Paul wrote: “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:32). Sin necessarily calls for retribution proportionate to the crime in the form of lex talionis. For example, under the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9, taking life must result in the murderer forfeiting his life (Gen. 9:6). Likewise, under Levitical law, the same principle holds true: “you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exod. 21:23-25). 

The high priest, priests, and a sacrifice

Coram Deo, all sin is a rejection of God the creator and author of life. Therefore, the penalty of sin is loss of life, or death. This is why the Old Testament law penalizes all intentional sins with death (Num. 15:29-30). On the other hand, sinners could atone for unintentional sins by offering an animal’s life (present in its life blood) as a substitutionary sin offering: “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” (Lev. 17:11). As numerous interpreters have pointed out, these passages very clearly assert that atoning sacrifice is a kind of payment for sins.1 Levitical sacrifices were not merely a ritual detergent to cleanse impurity, as Jacob Milgrom famously argued in his commentary on Leviticus.2 

Finally, Daniel and the New Testament writings extend the penalty of death into eternal alienation from God in hell (Dan. 12:2, Matt. 25:41-46, 2 Thess. 1:9, Rev. 20:10). This again extends the earlier legal tradition’s logic of proportional retribution. Since God is the infinite and eternal creator, rejection of him through sin merits eternal and infinite death. 

Christ as the Mercy Seat and Our Propitiation

The logic of the Old Testament sacrificial cult continued into the New Testament era when it was fulfilled by Christ. St. Paul and St. John refer to Christ’s death with the Greek term hilasterion (Rom. 3:25, Jn. 2:2), or, in English, “atoning sacrifice” or “propitiation.” In the mid-twentieth century C.H. Dodd challenged this interpretation by arguing that the term hilasterion did not mean “propitiation,” but rather “expiation.”3  Dodd saw a subtle, yet significant distinction in the meaning and implications of the two terms. 

First, Dodd claimed that God had sent Jesus as an act of love and mercy without having been first reconciled by any act of atonement. According to Dodd, then, it was clearly not the case that God needed any reconciliation with humanity. Dodd even went so far as to claim that the divine wrath spoken of by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:18 and elsewhere was not God’s personal wrath against sin. Rather, Dodd interpreted God’s wrath as the impersonal process of condemnation over sinful humans in a fallen universe.4 Therefore, for Dodd, Christ’s death did not placate God’s anger over sin. Rather, in the death of Jesus, God judged sin to remove it as a barrier in the divine-human relationship.  

Numerous New Testament scholars, most notably by Leon Morris, have scrutinized Dodd’s thesis. Morris successfully demonstrated that “propitiation,” or “appeasement,” were the standard meanings of the term hilasterion in Greek literature. Paul and John, therefore, intended “propitiation” when using hilasterion. Obviously though, the act of atonement also involves judgment on human sin. Therefore, properly speaking, it represents a form of expiation as well.5  

The High Priest sprinkling blood on the Mercy Seat on Yom Kippur

The LXX also applied the term hilasterion to the lid of the Ark of the Covenant (Exod. 25:22).6 Luther recognized this and therefore translated the word hilasterion as Gnadenstuhl in Romans 3:25.7 This shows the connection between the work of Christ with the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). 

On Yom Kippur (Lev. 16), the high priest sprinkled the blood of the atoning sacrifice of the “Goat for YHWH” (Lev. 16:8) on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, or the “Mercy Seat.” The presence of God sat between the two cherubim on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant (Isa. 37:16). Correspondingly, Christ sat enthroned in merciful glory on the cross between the two thieves. Within the Ark lay the original copy of the Ten Commandments (1 Kgs 8:9), fulfilled by Christ’s active obedience.

The sacrificial blood on the mercy seat covered the tablets of the law within the ark. Therefore, the high priest interposed the blood of atoning sacrifice between God’s presence and the law of Moses. The Yom Kippur rituals suggest that on the Day of Atonement God looked on the atoning and justifying blood and not the condemning law. Thus, the term hilasterion is appropriate for the death of Jesus. 

Christ’s atoning death was the seat of God’s glorious kingly presence and simultaneously propitiated all human sin with blood. Note that some in the ancient church, including Justin Martyr, interpreted “The Lord reigns” in Psalm 96:10 (LXX) as a reference to the crucifixion and added the gloss phrase “from the tree.”8 As the author of the Epistle of Barnabas wrote, “…the kingdom of Jesus is on the cross…” (8:5).

Must God Fulfill the Law and Punish Sin?

Christ returning as Judge. The lily on Jesus’s right represents mercy. The sword on His left represents justice.

God does not punish sin because he is unloving or unmerciful. As Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, God loves his creation. The flip side of loving the good is punishing and rejecting wickedness.9 However, Socinians and many modern theologians have argued that if God were genuinely merciful he would simply forgive sin by fiat.10 

As Orthodox Lutheran theologian Johannes Quenstedt observes, if God could forgive sin by mere fiat, then the analogy for the debt of sin would be akin to the notion that God is a private creditor who forgives un-payable debts from his client. Quenstedt argues that this is incorrect though because the Bible does not use the analogy of a private lender. Rather, the Scriptures speak of a judge and governor in a political community. God is the great judge and ruler over his creation, and therefore he must impartially punish sin.11 

A judge who commutes all sentences, or even some, without legal justification is a corrupt judge. A judge who unilaterally commutes all sentences fails to consider the right of victims to see their oppressors punished. Indeed, if God forgave by fiat, he would not be loving. Instead, he would become essentially indifferent to injustice, which is inherently unloving. A God who is indifferent to the injustice his creatures suffer is not a God of love.  

Moreover, a God who does not punish sin is a God who is completely unfaithful to his promises. God promises to hold all accountable to the law in the old covenant: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.” (Deut. 32:35, NIV, also see Prov. 20:22). God also promised a universal judgment on the “Day of the Lord” (Yom YHWH) throughout the Old Testament: “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter chiefs over the wide earth” (Ps. 110:6). 

Hence, if God failed to punish sin or demand payment for the debt of sin he would be capricious. Worse, he would be unfaithful to his repeated and emphatic covenantal promises to work justice and punish sin. If God was unfaithful to his promises to punish sin, believers could not expect him to be faithful to his promise of grace found in the gospel.12  

Can God Act Outside the Law?

In Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, Albrecht Ritschl raised perhaps the most difficult challenge regarding the priestly office and role of Christ.13 Ritschl begins his history by discussing St. Anselm’s development of a theory of substitutionary atonement in the eleventh century. As Ritschl observes, there is an odd contradiction lying at the heart of Anselm’s reasoning. 

On the one hand, God is bound by his law and therefore cannot reconcile humans without imposing some kind of satisfaction. Sinful humans cannot render satisfaction because its price is infinite. Although the holy God must be satisfied by the fulfillment of the law, nevertheless, in Jesus, he achieves atonement outside the boundaries of the law.14 Transferring satisfaction for sin (or in the vein of the later Reformers, literally transferring guilt) between Christ and believers contradicts the law’s insistence that all must be held accountable for their own sins. According to Ritschl, this contradiction grew increasingly difficult for medieval theologians, Reformers, and Protestant Scholastics to sustain.15 In this narrative, the Socinian belief that forgiveness could occur by fiat finally cut the gordian knot and destroyed the credibility of Anselm’s atonement paradigm.16  

Ritschl’s critique of substitutionary atonement is substantial and deserves response. Although the law is God’s eternal will (lex aeterna),17 it does not exhaust his will. God wears many creaturely masks (larva Dei),18 but above them all exists a hidden unity. Because the law does not exhaust God’s will, God possesses possibilities that transcend the law. The mere fact that God sent Jesus is an act of unilateral grace. In other words, God did not need the fulfillment of the law in order to graciously initiate reconciliation with us. 

Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that God is already graciously disposed toward us and has a will that transcends the law, he remains necessarily faithful to his law and his original purpose for creation. By analogy, a man who has been wronged by his son will invariably still love his son and seek reconciliation. To achieve this, the wronged party must graciously and unilaterally remove barriers for genuine reconciliation to occur. Both human parties must abandon sinful actions and, if possible, atone for previously committed wrongs as a condition of reconciliation.  

The Transfer of Christ’s Active and Passive Righteousness

Hence, in order to reconcile us to himself, God in Christ must fulfill the law. The content of this law is twofold. On the one hand, God demands that we positively keep his commandments. Therefore, Christ must possess a positive righteousness as God’s true obedient son and covenant partner. Whereas both Adam and Israel failed, Jesus kept the whole covenant as the Son of God. Paul writes that Adam’s sin was counteracted by Christ’s sinless obedience: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19, Emphasis added). 

On the other hand, Christ must bear the debt of sin in order to reconcile humanity. The debt of sin cannot simply be erased without payment for previous wrongs. This is not merely a matter of gaining merit that will counteract God’s dishonor, as Anselm theorized. Rather, as the New Testament testifies, a literal transfer of sin and righteousness occurred: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13); “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21); and “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pt. 2:24). 

Although Luther recognized this twofold fulfillment of the law, he did not give a specific name to the concept.19 Later Protestant theology (beginning with Matthias Flacius) described Christ as possessing a twofold righteousness: “Active Righteousness” (i.e., active fulfillment of the law) and “Passive Righteousness” (i.e., passive reception of the judgment of the law).20 Lutheran pastor and hymnist, Philipp Nicolai, wrote that:

…the Law demands that we all be punished and will allow no one to heaven since none of us has kept it. Christ, however, fulfilled the Law and paid for us actively and passively, that is, with actual obedience and by suffering the punishment. For He does the will of the Father for us and loves us even into death, and He bears our sin and lets the curse of the Law come upon Him, though He did not deserve it, and after the Law is hereby fulfilled and appeased, the Lord Christ gives us His obedience to be our righteousness, our adornment, and, as it were, a beautiful garment with which He covers our sin, provided we take hold of it and put it on by faith.21

Still, one might object that sin and righteousness cannot be literally transferred. Nevertheless, such a judgment remains exclusively within the matrix of the law. According to the law, no one can be punished for the sins of another, and no one can be righteous for another (Deut. 24:16, Jer. 31:29-30). Although in many legal codes, it is possible for one person to pay the fine incurred by another, it is not possible to transfer guilt and righteousness between persons. 

This is, of course, a fine and just principle for preserving order in the current age. But God did a new thing by sending Christ and thereby inaugurated a new age. In the New Testament citations above, the apostolic authors explained that God transferred all the guilt of humanity to Christ. According to the apostolic kerygma, Christ then atoned for the guilt of sin in the crucifixion. Consequently, God is faithful to the law since Christ fulfilled it on our behalf. But the law does not exhaust his possibilities.  

In Christ, God can transcend the law—even the law of identity—and transfer all sin to himself. The great exchange of the Incarnation (i.e., divinity and humanity) culminate in the great exchange of the death of Christ (i.e., sin and righteousness). As Luther writes: “. . . because in the same Person, who is the highest, the greatest, and the only sinner, there is also eternal and invincible righteousness, therefore two converge: the highest, greatest and only sin; and the highest, the greatest, and the only righteousness.”22 

As Luther goes on to explain: “He has and bears all sins of all men in His body—not in the sense that He has committed them but in the sense that He took these sins, committed by us, upon His body, in order to make satisfaction for them with His own blood.”23 Hence: “He [God the Father] sent His Son into the world . . .and said to Him  . . . be the person of all men, the one who committed the sins of all men. And see to it that You pay and make satisfaction for them.”24 In a word, Christ anticipates the simultaneity of the Christian’s status as sinner and righteous in reverse order: righteous in himself, sinner by imputation.  

The Eternal Righteousness of Christ is Our Eternal Righteousness

Because of the unity of his person, what Christ does as a man according to his active and passive righteousness is an eternal and infinite righteousness. The Old Testament prophets saw this when anticipating the Messiah. Jeremiah tells us that the righteous branch of David (i.e., the human nature of the Messiah) would be called “The LORD is our righteousness” (Jer. 23:6). In speaking of the coming of the Messiah, Daniel describes it as: “[a time for putting] an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness” (Dan. 9:24).  Therefore, Luther writes:

In addition, it follows that our sins are so great, so infinite and invincible, that the whole world could not make satisfaction for even one of them. Certainly the greatness of the ransom—namely, the blood of the Son of God—makes it sufficiently clear that we can neither make satisfaction for our sin nor prevail over it . . . But we should note here the infinite greatness of the price paid for it. Then it will be evident that its power is so great that it could not be removed by any means except that the Son of God be given for it. Anyone who considers this carefully will understand the one word “sin” includes the eternal wrath of God and the entire kingdom of Satan, and that sin is no trifle.25

The infinite nature of Christ’s active and passive righteousness counters the infinite and eternal retribution due sin (Dan. 12:2, Matt. 25:41-46, 2 Thess. 1:9, Rev. 20:10). The eternal righteousness of Jesus, our great High Priest, ushers in a new testament and resurrected existence that is likewise eternal (Rev. 14:6).  

  1. Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, The Purification Offering in the Priestly Literature: Its Meaning and Function (Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1987); Kleinig, Leviticus, 117; Jay Sklar, Leviticus: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 50-52. ↩︎
  2. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 711-712. ↩︎
  3. C.H. Dodd, The Bible and The Greeks (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1935), 82–95. ↩︎
  4. C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), 21. ↩︎
  5. Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1955), 144-148, 155-157; idem, The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 1984); idem, “The Meaning of Hilasterion in Romans III.25, ” New Testament Studies 2 (1956): 33-43.  Also see good discussion of the debate in: Stott, The Cross of Christ, 168-175. ↩︎
  6. Mira Balberg, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 90-91. ↩︎
  7. George Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 472. ↩︎
  8. Anni Maria Laato, “‘The Lord Reigns from the Tree’: Psalm 96:10 in Early Christian Writings,” in David, Messianism, and Eschatology: Ambiguity in the Reception History of the Books of Psalms in Judaism and Christianity, Erkki Koskenniemi and David Willgren Davage, eds. (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University, 2020), 269-281.  ↩︎
  9. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 139. ↩︎
  10. See: The Racovian Catechism, trans. Thomas Rees (London: Paternoster Row, 1818); Faustus Socinus, De Jesu Christo Servatore, Hoc est, cur et qua ratione Iesus Christus noster serauator sit (Cracow: Alexander Rodecius, 1594). ↩︎
  11. Johannes Quenstedt, “Of the Priestly Office of Christ,” in Atonement in Lutheran Orthodoxy: Johannes Quenstedt, trans. Matthew Carver (Sidney, MT: Synoptic Text Information Services, Inc., 2023), 24. ↩︎
  12. See similar argument in: Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 119-120. ↩︎
  13. See English translation: Albrecht Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, trans. John Black (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark. 1872). ↩︎
  14. Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 22-35. ↩︎
  15. Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 41-72, 195-288. ↩︎
  16. Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 298-308. ↩︎
  17. First Antinomian Disputation (1537); LW 73:112; FC, SD III; CT, 935.  FC, SD III; CT, 935. ↩︎
  18. Lectures on Galatians (1531); LW 26:95. ↩︎
  19. See: Lectures on Galatians (1531); LW 26:281. ↩︎
  20. Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, 342-70.  See brief comment in: Vainio, Justification and Participation, 25. ↩︎
  21. Philipp Nicolai, The Joy of Eternal Life, Matthew Carver, trans. (St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 2021), 142. Emphasis in the original. ↩︎
  22. Lectures on Galatians (1531), LW 26:281. ↩︎
  23. Lectures on Galatians (1531), LW 26:277. ↩︎
  24. Lectures on Galatians (1531) LW 26: 280.  Emphasis added. ↩︎
  25. Lectures on Galatians (1531); LW 26:33. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from Bryan Wolfmueller, “The Day of Atonement at the Time of Jesus,” Worldwide Wolfmueller, April 8, 2019, accessed July 1, 2024, www.wolfmueller.com; other images from Craig Truglia, “Solved! Unequivocal Biblical Proof For Limited Atonement,” Orthodox Christian Theology, April 14, 2017, accessed July 5, 2024, https://orthodoxchristiantheology.com/2017/04/14/solved-unequivocal-biblical-proof-for-limited-atonement/; Frederick Bartels, “At an Unexpected Hour, Christ will Come,” Joy Truth, November 26, 2022, accessed July 6, 2024, https://joyintruth.com/at-an-hour-unexpected-hour-christ-will-come/; Garrick Sinclair Beckett, “Beckett: Matt Walsh – ‘We are saved by loving Jesus, not simply by believing,'” The Lutheran Column, April 6, 2018, accessed July 5, 2024, https://thelutherancolumn.com/2018/04/06/matt-walsh-we-are-saved-by-loving-jesus-not-simply-by-believing/; and John Kleinig quotation meme from St. John Lutheran Church, Wheaton, Illinois, https://www.facebook.com/stjohnwheaton.