I was reading Romans 6, and it occurred to me that this should be read, perhaps more than it is, as an absolutely key text for understanding the atonement. In particular, that our understanding of the atonement is inseparable from our understanding of baptism.
“Substitutionary atonement” is commonly presented as involving Jesus suffering something on the cross that is unimaginably beyond any torment ever suffered by any other human being: all the agonies of hell that every human being who ever lived has ever deserved.
But then we read Romans 6:23a:
For the wages of sin is death.
What if what happens to Jesus on the cross is simply this: he dies. Being made sin for us, he suffers the wages of sin: death. Not “death + x” for some infinitely huge value of x – because the wages of sin is not “death plus x” (or x divided by however many billions of humans will ever live), but death.
Then the relationship between baptism, atonement and justification is set out in the first part of Romans 6: baptism unites us with the death of Jesus. Hence Jesus’ death is our death, so the wages of our sin have been paid in and by the death of Jesus that is our death in baptism – and our life now is the resurrected life of Jesus that is also ours through our resurrection in baptism.
This also restores an intimacy to our relationship with Christ in his suffering and death. Conventional portrayals of “penal substitutionary atonement” can leave us with a very abstract view of Jesus’ death – one in which what he undergoes is not “death as we know it”, but something qualititatively different, some super-enhanced form of death that only Jesus can experience. That makes the connection between his death and our death hard to grasp. What’s more, if “what is not assumed is not redeemed”, then for Jesus’ death to be qualititavely different from ours could lead us to doubt whether death as we experience it has truly been assumed and redeemed.
However, if “the wages of sin is death”, and my baptism makes Jesus’ death (not “death + x“, but death) my own death also – the payment of my “wages of sin” – then there is a direct and concrete link between me and Jesus in his death. I don’t have a small share in a huge super-death; rather, I am identified with the single, human death of Jesus. (Which also then helps us understand the assertion that “even if I had been the only person in need of redemption, Jesus would still have gone to the cross for me”.)
To put it another way: what is remarkable about Jesus’ death is not the actual dying, but who is undergoing it. Jesus dies as a human being, and in that sense his death is nothing out of the ordinary. However, as a wholly innocent human being (with no “wages of sin” of his own to pay), and as the incarnate God, his death becomes something to which I can be united through baptism, something which can become my death, so that in turn Jesus’ resurrection life can become my life.
I think this is certainly not far off the mark. The wages of sin is death and when the one who has not earned the wage dies on your behalf, His death counts in place of yours. It’s not a supranumerical thing rather than a wonderful, glorious, joyous mystery.