I live in Egypt where, oddly enough, Jehovah’s Witnesses seek foreigners to convert. Not long ago I had several return visits from these modern representatives of the ancient Egyptian heresy of Arianism—the opinion that Jesus Christ was not in fact God made man, but something like an angel made man. Witnesses presuppose a more Western set of ideas that highlight sacrifice. They proof-text the New Testament language of paying for sins, paying a ransom, and offering a sacrifice to explain the semi-Incarnation of Jesus who pre-existed as God’s firstborn angel.
I had several questions for them: How did Christ’s sacrifice accomplish anything at all? Why should the life of a perfect man result in forgiveness of sin or life from the dead? Who was offering the sacrifice? Who was the priest—God the Father, or Jesus? Who is the sacrifice to? God or the devil? I argue that if one does not assume Jesus is divine, all answers to these questions are incoherent.
The classic Western articulation of the Atonement is found in St. Anselm’s Why God Became Man. This is sometimes called the “satisfaction theory,” but it should not be confused with the later view that Christ’s death was to satisfy God’s wrath. Anselm rather begins with theological anthropology to talk about mankind’s created purpose, which he defines as giving thanks and praise to God. Sin is a failure to render thanks and praise to God. As we sin, we accrue a debt of unpaid worship that thwarts the purpose of creation. Anselm says that God owes it to himself to save creation and recover his lost investment.
He does this through his Incarnation. To be sure, God can forgive sins without being incarnate. But we don’t just need forgiveness. We need to make up for our sins (“satisfaction”) and pay down our debt. But we cannot make up for our sins because we have nothing to give to God. According to St. Anselm, therefore, God became man. Only God himself can forgive our sins, and only man can make satisfaction. Christ, being fully God and fully man, does both. On satisfaction, he can do this because he lived a perfect life. His death, therefore, is not a punishment for sin like our death is. Rather, Christ voluntarily takes on death to make an additional payment to God on our behalf. But this payment would not have been worth much if he had only been a man.
Because he is God, however, the worth of his payment is infinite. He therefore covers all our sins. As St. Paul said, he became poor so that we could become rich (2 Cor. 8:9). Or as St. Athanasius said, he became man so that we could become gods. Anselm implies that the Resurrection follows from this payment, but he doesn’t dwell much on that side of our salvation.
It may be helpful to place this Western view in dialogue with an earlier Eastern view found in the writings of St. Athanasius. In his On the Incarnation, a text Athanasius wrote before the Arian dispute, he argues that the fall of man and the resulting loss of the image of God was the reason for the Incarnation. On the one hand, God owes it to himself to save his creatures and restore the image that had been corrupted. On the other hand, he had threatened them with death and he therefore needed a way to save them that would not render his word inconsistent. Death is therefore the presenting issue, which had its cause in sin. Thus the Incarnation saves in two ways: first, by making a sacrifice for sin it obtains our forgiveness, and second, it destroys death so that humans can become incorruptible. Incorruptibility thus restores the divine image to man.
Athanasius’ explanation of the Incarnation as an act of forgiveness and a restoration of immortality thus presupposes the divinity of Christ. Only God can forgive sins, and only God can give life. A mere creature could not destroy death. But Jesus could because he is uncreated Life itself. Furthermore, because Jesus incarnates humanity as a whole—is the Head of humanity as a whole—our union with him first puts us to death in accordance with the curse of Genesis 3, but by virtue of his Resurrection, second, it results in his immortality spreading from Head to members. This secures the divine consistency since God both puts us to death in Christ and secures our resurrection in Christ. From all of this it should be clear that the full divinity and humanity of Christ is necessary for our salvation. If Jesus was not God, he obviously could not communicate the divine incorruptibility to us through union with his body.
Let’s return to my questions for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If their Christ is not God, then he is not the one forgiving our sins. That must therefore be reserved to God the Father. So why does their God need a sacrifice to forgive us? Anselm said that we needed a perfect man to pay down our debt of sin, but that the payment of a mere man would not suffice for the debt of all men. Christ is only one man, and we are many. If he is not divine, how can one man’s death pay for the sins of the many?
Witnesses will reply that Jesus was more than a man—he was the firstborn angel. Maybe one might say that this angel’s life is worth more than the life of a man such that his death would pay for the lives of many men. But in what sense is the angel’s life worth more than men? Is it that God loves the angel more than any particular man? If God loves the angel more than a man, why would he sacrifice someone he loved more for someone he loved less? Or maybe God loves the angel as much as he loves all men put together. In that case, the decision to sacrifice the angel for the sake of men isn’t really a decision made from love, but just the exchange of one love for another equal love.
The incoherence goes deeper, though, since without the divinity of the Son we cannot sensibly talk about God’s love. God forgives us because he loves us: “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). On Arian terms it is irrelevant whether Jesus loves us so long as God loves us. It is even irrelevant whether Jesus freely chose to sacrifice himself so long as God is sacrificing him. But the Bible clearly says that Jesus loves us and gave himself for us (Eph. 5:2), so it isn’t just that God is “giving” his Son; the Son is “giving” himself. The only reason why this could possibly matter is if Jesus’ choice to die on the cross is an expression of God’s choice to die on the cross: if Christ’s death is directly an expression of God’s love and not an indirect expression of God’s love.
From the orthodox view, furthermore, the Son is truly a priest offering himself to God on behalf of men. On the Arian (Witnesses) view, the Father is the priest offering a sacrifice to himself of the Son (or, God forbid, offering a sacrifice to the devil). And if the Father is the priest, the priest is not a man, therefore a man is not making satisfaction for the sins of men. Rather, the Father is arbitrarily punishing an innocent victim for someone else’s crimes. Perhaps God needs to punish sins, but for the orthodox the punishment is coming upon God himself—this is what forgiveness means: absorbing the consequences. If Jesus is not God, God isn’t even doing that.
But let us assume that God’s sacrifice of an angel made man has some efficacy for cancelling our sins. We might still ask if the end justifies the means. Our forgiveness by God would still be won at the expense of the extreme suffering of Jesus. Assuming this was the plan of the Witnesses’ God, how can this be just? The answer is not obvious. If Jesus is God, however, and his suffering is a voluntary consequence of the fact that he chose to forgive us, then it makes more sense.
On Arian terms, the gift of immortality is also not logically connected to the sacrifice of Christ. To be sure, Witnesses only believe that 144,000 people will secure real immortality. Neither do they believe that Christ’s body was resurrected. Rather, after death he was liberated to resume life in a pre-existent spiritual body. Be that as it may, my question is about the cause of immortality. On orthodox terms, Christ rose from the dead because he is inherently divine and immortal. By virtue of his humanity’s union with his divinity, and our union with his humanity, Jesus communicates divine incorruptibility to his body and soul and then to our body and soul. But if Jesus is not divine, then how is immortality communicated to us? It would seem that Christ’s immortality does not mediate immortality to us, but rather that it is directly caused by God the Father. Here again, Jesus’ role in bringing to us eternal life is unclear.
One final incoherence in Witnesses’ theology, and Arian theologies in general, is that if Jesus did offer himself as a sacrifice, then we ought to give him more thanks than we give to God, since he suffered more than the Father. But Witnesses do not worship Jesus or pray to him, even though, according to their theology, they owe him more thanks than they owe to God. This is a problem, and it is one of many. Arianism lacked coherence in the fourth century and its warmed-over reiterations remain lacking to this day.
Jeff Boldt has a Th.D. from Wycliffe College and serves as a professor of theology at the Alexandria School of Theology, Egypt.
