Show Notes
In this deeply theological episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland continues the Lenten journey through Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixionby working through two chapters that bring Rutledge’s long introduction to a close. These chapters cover her reconsideration of Anselm and satisfaction theory and her exploration of the gravity of Sin. They both lay crucial groundwork for everything that follows in the book.
Derek engages Rutledge appreciatively but critically, clarifying where he agrees, where he wrestles, and where he remains unconvinced. Theology at its best does not simply settle questions but deepens them in faithful and prayerful ways.
This episode explores Anselm’s satisfaction theory, how it differs from penal substitution, and why Rutledge’s retrieval, guided in part by Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, deserves careful attention. Derek also raises important questions about obedience, the life of Jesus, and whether “satisfaction” is best understood as a life faithfully lived rather than a transactional mechanism centered on death alone.
The episode concludes with Rutledge’s sobering chapter on the gravity of Sin, where sin is not treated as a collection of bad choices but as a dark, enslaving power paired with Death itself. Only when we take sin seriously, Rutledge insists, can we begin to understand why the cross had to be as ugly and costly as it was.
Key Takeaways
Anselm’s satisfaction theory is distinct from penal substitution
Satisfaction focuses on restoring God’s honor; penal substitution focuses on punishment.
Rutledge does not defend a transactional or appeasement-based view of atonement.
Jesus’ obedient and faithful life raises important questions about what truly satisfies God.
Sin is not merely individual wrongdoing but a power that enslaves and destroys.
In Scripture, Sin and Death function as ruling forces over humanity.
The ugliness of the cross corresponds to the gravity and power of sin.
The cross makes no sense unless we take sin far more seriously than modern culture does.
Books Mentioned
The Crucifixion — Fleming Rutledge
On the Incarnation — Athanasius
Scriptures Mentioned
Romans 5:19
1 Corinthians 15:3
Romans 6:12
Romans 6:17
Romans 7:11
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Transcript
Welcome back.
To another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I’m your host, Derek Vreeland.
I’m glad you’ve joined me for this episode.
We are in the season of Lent.
Is a time for us to draw near to Jesus.
In his sorrow and suffering, we are journeying with Jesus to the cross.
And here at Peaceable in Kind, we are also on a journey, a journey of a different kind.
We are journeying through Fleming Rutledge’s book, The Crucifixion.
And on this episode, I want to spend some time with just two chapters that will round out the five-chapter, 200-word introduction to this book
One of the reasons I’m going through this book during the season of Lent is it is a massive 600-page
Theological treatise on the death of Jesus.
It took Rutledge like twenty years to write.
It was her magnum opus.
She spent
a good portion of her life dedicated to researching and studying
the meaning of the death of Jesus.
And she’s given us a great gift.
And I understand that most people are not going to read a 600-page theological book.
It’s a challenging book.
It is not easy to read.
And so I thought it would be good to take you through the book because the content I think is so important.
And so today we are going to look at what Rutledge calls a bridge chapter
And we are going to be rethinking Enselm and the satisfaction theory.
And then after that, we’ll look at her chapter on the weight and gravity of sin.
And these five chapters with this bridge chapter, which doesn’t have a number, which is really strange to me.
But these two chapters will round out this introduction, and then on future episodes, we’ll work through the rest of the book.
Where she goes through eight major motifs, images, patterns of how the death of Jesus is described throughout the scriptures.
We’ll look at that in future episodes, but for today, it is Anselm and the power of sin.
And so before we jump into Rutledge’s book, if you have not already, let me encourage you to subscribe to Peaceable and Kind.
We are producing weekly episodes that help you engage in the Christian faith
in such a way that you can sow seeds of peace and kindness in the world.
So subscribe if you haven’t subscribed and if you are enjoying this work I’m doing with Rutledge’s book.
And you know someone that would be interested in this if you wouldn’t mind sharing this episode or a previous episode and leave us a rating and review that helps a lot.
One more thing to say before we jump into Rutledge on this episode.
And I want to be clear that I don’t agree with Rutledge on everything.
But I am grateful for how she makes me think and wrestle with this important topic of atonement.
of the death of Jesus.
Now, for me to say that I don’t agree with her on everything, uh, is really not even necessary because I don’t know if I agree
With every author in everything they say, in every book that they write.
Even my beloved Eugene Peterson or Tom Wright, my theological mentor.
You know, I’ll read their works and there’s places.
There’s there’s there’s things that will come up, and I’m like, eh, I don’t really see it that way.
And to me, the quality of a Christian book is not in its ability to confirm everything I already believe
But I really like to be challenged to think in some new areas, and sometimes I’m convinced, and they win me over to their position.
And other times I wrestle with what they’re presenting, and at some point I’ll have disagreements, and that’s okay
It’s okay to not always agree.
You may not agree with me in everything I say and do on this episode.
I mean, I don’t always agree with myself.
So it’s okay
It is the sign of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it
And for me, the value of of books like The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge
the value of podcast episodes like this, which is going to get deep into the theological weeds.
is that it allows us to love the Lord with all of our minds.
Yes, we want to love God from our heart, and we want our heart, our soul to expand and grow.
But there’s also value, and perhaps I overvalue it, but there is value in growing in our capacity to think God’s thoughts after him
There is value in education.
And there’s there’s there’s limits to what we do with the theological knowledge that we have.
There’s limitations, there’s pitfalls, but I still believe that the renewing of the mind
And growing in our ability to think is important for our own spiritual formation.
So let’s jump into this bridge chapter
and talk a bit about Anselm.
And Rutledge’s goal here is not simply to restate
Anselm’s view, or to make his theory of atonement somehow the de facto understanding
of the death of Jesus, but she simply wants us to rethink, to reconsider Anselm, particularly in the light of contemporary theology.
Now I’m not going to go into a deep dive of Anselm himself, but let me talk a little bit about his view or his theory.
of the death of Jesus.
And it has been called historically the satisfaction theory.
Now, I’m going to talk a lot about atonement theories, atonement theologies, and some of this is technical language that I think needs a little bit of definition.
Because for Anselm, his view of the death of Jesus, I think is best summed up with the title Satisfaction Theory, which is slightly different from penal substitution
And so I think it’s important before I even talk about Anselm and how Rutledge wants us to reconsider and rethink Anselm.
To give some working definitions to some of these technical theological terms.
So
Let me first just give a brief definition of satisfaction theory and then penal substitution theory.
Just so when I use those terms, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Or at least I hope you know what I’m talking about.
So the satisfaction theory of atonement, and maybe I should even define atonement before we move on.
Atonement
Is the meaning of the sacrificial death of Jesus.
So when we are speaking theologically
Atonement is how the death of Jesus covers our sins.
Or we could say, atonement is how the death of Jesus rescues us from our sin.
Okay, there’s a working definition of atonement.
What about satisfaction theory?
What is the satisfaction theory of atonement?
A simple working definition would be.
The satisfaction theory is that the death of Jesus offers God a satisfactory payment in order to restore God’s honor.
Now we’re going to spend a lot more time because this is Ann Selm’s theory, breaking that down and explaining it.
But satisfaction is about Jesus’ death paying God something.
a satisfactory payment in order to restore his honor.
So satisfaction is about dishonor and honor.
The penal substitution model is the view that Jesus is punished by God in our place for our sins, enabling God to forgive us
So, penal substitutionary atonement is a predominant image and theme in modern evangelicalism.
And in some pockets, the penal substitution model is the de facto view of the atonement.
I mean, some Christians would even say the penal substitution model is the gospel itself.
which is not true, but some people hold that opinion.
So when you hear satisfaction theory, think of a payment that’s given to restore God’s honor.
When you hear penal substitution,
think about Jesus being punished in our place.
Satisfaction is about the restoration of God’s honor.
Penal substitution is about punishment.
Okay.
So there’s some working definitions as we move forward.
So, in Rutledge’s bridge chapter, she wants us to reconsider
Encelm and his theory of satisfaction.
But let me give a a deeper definition
of Anselm’s view so that you can begin to have some understanding of what he’s talking about.
So, if I were to break down Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, it goes something like this
First, our sin robs God of the honor God deserves.
So in our sin, we are dishonoring God.
God deserves the honor of us living a holy and a pure life.
I mean, God created us, God has blessed us.
What we owe God is obedience.
to live according to God’s way.
So when we sin, we’re dishonoring God.
So because of this
We are indebted to God.
We owe God something.
We have a debt of honor that must be repaid.
Now, modern Americans in in Western civilization, we live more in a guilt-shame culture
um than an honor and dishonor culture.
So I think it’s hard for us to kind of understand this, where in the medieval times when Enselm was
was writing and thinking about the death of Jesus, he was living um in more of a of an honor and dishonor culture
So, in the satisfaction theory, our sin robs God of the honor God deserves.
So, we owe God something
And because we owe God something, we have to offer to God something that is satisfactory.
And that’s where the satisfaction language comes from.
Now, because of our sin, we are unable to offer God a
Satisfactory offering.
So we need a mediator.
We need someone else who can do that.
So Jesus offered to God his perfect life
through his death as a satisfactory offering, restoring the honor that we failed to give God.
So, in this sense, from the view of satisfaction, Jesus’ death satisfies God’s sense of justice
Because God would be unjust to simply forgive when his honor has been stolen from him.
Now, this is probably not the best view of Anselm.
You can probably find a better view, but if you’re new to Anselm, I think that this brief sketch does it some kind of justice.
Now, what you will hear more often is a slightly different view of satisfaction that uses the language of the wrath of God.
So sometimes you hear a version of satisfaction theory that goes something like this.
We have sinned and incurred the wrath of God.
The wrath of God is God’s moral objection to sin, because God is holy and just
Of course, God has to have within God’s nature an objection, a rejection of sin.
And this is described as the wrath of God.
And that wrath, which you’ll hear popularly, is associated with punishment, and it has to go somewhere.
God has to do something with this wrath.
And so at the cross, God poured out God’s wrath on Jesus instead of pouring it out on us.
So Jesus took the wrath of God so that we could be forgiven and don’t receive the wrath of God.
Now
This version of satisfaction theory is blended a bit with penal substitution, right?
Because it has punishment language in it.
And for me, this popular understanding of the wrath of God being poured out on Jesus is really distinct from Anselm’s satisfaction theory, but some people would blend them together.
But what I would say about that popular view, and then we’re gonna get back to Enselm, but what would what I would say about this popular view of at the cross the Father pours out his wrath on the Son.
Is that that is something that the Bible never says, which it almost makes me laugh.
To me, it’s almost absurd
That people believe that this is the gospel.
That the gospel is this.
The good news is this.
God has wrath and God’s poured it out on Jesus.
He ain’t gonna pour it out on you.
I have to pause this episode for just a moment to tell you that the next two Bible studies in the God and the Neighborhood Bible study series are available for pre-order.
Crucifixion: 8 lessons on how God.
God saves us and resurrection.
Eight lessons on how God restores us, both release on February 17th, just in time for Lent and Easter.
Pre-order now.
Links are in the show.
notes.
But the whole it it’s it’s it’s and I don’t I don’t mean to I don’t mean to make light of it because there are very serious theologians that believe this.
But I believe that our theology, our understanding of atonement
should grow out of the scriptures, should grow out of biblical language, and
Now we’re in this bridge chapter.
Rutledge is going to get us there.
400 pages of her book is dedicated to exploring the scriptures.
She’s just getting us ready for that exploration.
So I think that our theology should grow out of biblical language
instead of searching the Bible to find individual Bible verses that fit our theology
Does that make sense?
So I don’t think that we need to untangle all of the theological knots of all of these different theories.
I just think we need to start with the Bible and what the Bible says.
And nowhere does the Bible say that at some moment on Good Friday, God the Father poured out wrath on the Son.
And so I understand how that theory has developed, but it doesn’t start with the scriptures.
It simply doesn’t.
The Bible does not say that.
Okay.
That was a bit of a rabbit trail.
Let’s get back to Anselm.
And I want to work through this chapter because it may be unimportant to you.
Honestly, for me, it wasn’t the most important chapter of the book.
But I want to walk you through some of the things that Rutledge has to say.
So in this chapter on Anselm Reconsidered, she does something that surprises me.
And she
begins to enlist the help of David Bentley Hart in order to help us rethink Anselm
Now, I find that surprising Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian
Now, this view of satisfaction, of penal substitution, the idea of punishment and s and satisfying God’s honor and the wrath of God being poured out, all of these concepts
are very foreign to Eastern Orthodoxy.
In fact, David Bentley Hart has been extremely critical
Of what he would call a more Western view.
This idea of satisfaction and punishment, this is a part of Roman Catholic and Protestant theology.
and it really hasn’t been predominant themes at all in Eastern Orthodoxy.
So the fact that she would begin to quote from heart, it did cause me.
To slow down just a little bit and uh listen to what David Bentley Hart has to say.
So she quotes Hart as saying that Anselm’s theory of atonement
is rooted deeply in prayer and within the story the Bible is telling.
Now, I don’t know if I’m convinced of that.
But again, I’m not here to convince you to accept Anselm, and that’s not what Rutledge is doing.
It’s simply let’s just reconsider him a bit
So, David Bentley Hart, as quoted by Rutledge, goes on to say that Anselm is right to say that the death of Jesus frees us from the guilt of our sin.
But the issue of guilt is tied to the death of Jesus rescuing us from death itself.
Now, the rescuing of death is a predominant theme in Eastern Orthodoxy, and I am persuaded that it is a predominant
image.
It’s in a predominant pattern.
It’s a very, very helpful way to understand what the death of Jesus accomplishes
And that is, through Jesus’ death, we are rescued from death.
We see that in 1 Corinthians 15 and throughout Hebrews, particularly Hebrews chapter 2.
So, according to Hart, Eastern Orthodoxy agrees with Anselm that humanity is guilty of sin and that guilt must be dealt with
But it is dealt with not only with Jesus’ death, but his life, death, and resurrection.
And this is where I find Eastern Orthodoxy helpful, particularly the works of Athanasius.
Uh Athanasius book on the incarnation is not just a book talking about
God becoming flesh in Jesus, but the ramifications of that, including how
God becoming human helps us to understand why Jesus died.
So Athanasius, who becomes a predominant thinker in Eastern Orthodox theology
understands that the entirety of Jesus’ incarnation, his life, his death, his resurrection, all of this is a part of God’s saving work.
Interesting, though, that Rutledge is going to draw upon resources from Eastern Orthodoxy.
I I find that interesting.
So she goes on now let’s set aside Eastern Orthodoxy, David Bentley, Hart, and Athanasius for just a second.
But Rutledge then, after quoting David Bentley Hart, talks about satisfaction, at least the way Anselm uses it
To say that it’s not so much a mechanism that changes God as if God were angry and needed to be persuaded to love us.
Instead, she frames satisfaction as something closer to the idea that the living God, the creator and sustainer of all things.
is do worship, honor, and obedience, and Jesus offers God obedience through his life, even being obedient to the point of death.
And I appreciate Rutledge getting us to rethink Anselm, but I just still have questions about this whole satisfaction theory.
I mean, if satisfaction is not blood payment, if it’s not divine appeasement, if it’s not a mechanism that that
switches and changes God in some way, then what exactly is being satisfied?
Anselm writes
That God is due a restoration in some way satisfactory to the person whom He has dishonored.
But what does God really do?
God’s not due blood.
God is due obedience.
I mean
Isn’t the true debt of humanity a failure to live in faithful obedience as creatures made in the image of God?
I mean, if that’s the case, then perhaps satisfaction isn’t primarily about death at all, but about life.
I see that what Jesus is offering for satisfaction is not his blood, but his life, which includes his willingness to die.
I mean, Paul gives us language for this in Romans 5.
For just 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.
It’s almost as if Adam’s disobedience locks humanity into what Rutledge will later call sin’s prison house.
And Jesus, through his obedience, his whole life lived in faithfulness to the Father, becomes the means by which humanity is restored.
In that sense, satisfaction, if you want to call it that, sounds less like penal substitution and more like
recapitulation, which is a biblical image that Rutledge will talk about later on, and we’ll talk about recapitulation in an entirely different episode.
So I’m not really convinced
Of Rutledge’s desire for us to reconsider Anselm, but there’s some value at least in exploring it.
Let’s move on to the next chapter
which is the gravity of sin.
Along with her chapter on the justice of God, this chapter received more underlines in in my copy than almost any other chapter in the book.
At the heart of our Christian faith is a simple statement.
Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
That’s 1 Corinthians 15, 3.
All Christians, regardless of their understanding of atonement or their theology or theory of atonement.
All Christians believe this.
Jesus died for our sins.
But what Rutledge argues is that that very simple
Basic foundational statement only makes sense if we take sin seriously, far more seriously than our culture.
So when she talks about sin throughout the book, she has it capitalized with a capital S as a proper name.
Rutledge, and by the way, she’s still active on social media.
She’s retired, and um she she has no problem talking about uh the issues of modern culture.
I mean she can almost come across as a curmudgeon at times, but I I sort of like that.
I feel like I need that sometimes in my life.
So she believes that modern American culture has devalued sin, and because of that, there’s a lot of sentimentality around the death of Jesus.
And this chapter, The Gravity of Sin, wants to blow that up.
Because for her, sin is a power.
It is a dark power to enslave.
She insists that sin is not just a collection of all of our bad choices.
It’s not simply a sum total of everything we’ve done wrong.
Sin is something much darker.
She writes this, for example.
Sin is not so much a collection of individual misdeeds as it is an active, malevolent agency
Bent upon despoiling, imprisoning, and death.
The utter undoing of God’s purposes
Misdeeds are signs of that agency at work.
They are not the thing itself.
It is the thing itself that is our cosmic enemy.
So, what she’s doing is posing sin not just in our behavior.
But sin is an entity.
Sin is a power.
Sin is our enemy.
Sin is something we are under the power of
So in this regard, she’s following the Apostle Paul, who in his letters, particularly in Romans, personifies sin.
So it’s almost like sin is a is a person, right?
Sin as a as an entity.
I think it might be helpful to think of sin as a as a monster.
And I mean Paul does this throughout his letters.
You see it at a couple of places in Romans.
For example, Romans 6, 12, therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies.
Here, sin is personified as an evil king ruling and reigning in your heart.
Then he goes on, verse 17, Romans 6, 17, you were slaves of sin
In this image, sin is a is a slave master.
Romans seven, verse eleven.
For sin seized an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it
killed me.
So in that verse, Paul is personifying sin as a murderer.
So for Rutledge, sin is not just an idea.
It’s not just a concept.
It’s not just our actions, and it’s certainly not defined by shifting cultural norms.
Rutledge says bluntly,
Sin is a category without meaning except in reference to God.
So if sin is our enemy, if it’s a power, if it’s a monster,
Right?
Sin is what it is only in relation to God’s nature revealed to us in Jesus.
And all we know about God is that God is love.
And as Thomas Merton said, sin is any kind of drawing away from love.
Anytime we depart from the path of love, well, that’s sin.
So sin is a monster that we create whenever we drift away from God.
And sin in its action form is missing the mark, and that is missing the mark, which is love, which is defined by God’s very nature.
So, from a Christian perspective, we have no understanding of sin except in its relation to God.
Sin is this evil monster that is the antithesis of everything that God is.
So if you remove God from the moral equation,
Sin is nothing more than an idea, a concept, a social construct that can be negotiated and revised and changed as culture changes
And so Rutledge would agree with Dostoevsky, who said, without God, all things are permitted
As she goes on in this chapter, Rutledge compares and links up sin with its partner death, and she capitalizes the words sin and death when talking about them
Together, Rutledge says, they rule over the human condition.
And as I was reading her chapter here, I found myself
Imagining sin as the bully who has beat us up, and death is the prison that locks us up
Now, this may sound pessimistic, but Rutledge is convinced, and I think she’s right, that we will never awaken from the sentimentality of our culture
Unless we feel in our hearts and understand in our minds the weight of this truth.
That sin really is a monster.
So she writes The hideousness of crucifixion summons us to put away sentimentality
and face up to the ugliness that lies just under the surface.
The scandal, the outrage of the cross, is commiserate
With the offense and ubiquity of sin.
Man, that statement, that’s the one I put in my crucifixion Bible study.
That statement right there
We do in our culture have a very sentimental, a very paper-thin view.
We we’ve just sanitized the cross.
And we understand that the cross is ugly because sin is ugly.
The cross is hideous because sin is hideous.
And equally the cross is powerful because sin is powerful.
And until we understand the weight and gravity of sin.
We will never see how wonderful and beautiful and redemptive the cross really is.
Sin, Rutledge goes on to write, cannot be overcome by willpower, by human determination.
Not by our resolve to try harder, not by education, not by therapeutic self-improvement.
To continue thinking of sin primarily as individual acts that we try to avoid
Is simply misleading.
It’s untrue about human nature.
We sin
Because we are enslaved by sin.
Sin has become our ruler and master.
And once we understand that that’s the real condition humanity is in
Then we’ll begin to see that the cross becomes a great victory.
Not only forgiving us, cleansing us, and setting us free, but defeating
the monster of sin and death.
And with that, she brings her chapter on the gravity of sin to a close.
And then this also wraps up this 200-page introduction.
And if you have made it to the end of this podcast episode,
Congratulations.
Because this has been deeply, deeply theological, but I think it’s I think it’s necessary.
There is some good to be done here.
Because with some of this theological framework, we are now ready to look at the scriptures and what the scripture says.
And so we’ll begin to look at these eight different patterns, these eight different views, images, motifs of the death of Jesus on the next episode.
But that is all that I have for you on.
This episode, thank you for joining me.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.