Is the Cross a Classic Case of Misplaced Aggression?

My religion professor in college summed up his main critique of my belief in biblical Christianity as bad ethics.  His summation was that, "God is angry at sinners so he decides to beat up his son in our place".  It's classic misplaced aggression and it's bad ethics.  Recently on the Stand to Reason radio program, J. Warner Wallace, answered this objection.  I would encourage you to think well about this.

Some atheists are challenging Christianity by claiming that God is immoral. It’s an internal critique of Christianity. In other words, it’s an attempt to take what Christians claim and show that there’s a serious flaw. It doesn’t succeed because it doesn’t take into account a critical claim of Christianity, but here’s how it goes.

The atheist claim is that Christians support the unjust torture and killing of an innocent human being for their crimes. Christians believe it’s immoral to punish innocent people, yet we believe that God punished an innocent man, Jesus, for the crimes the rest of us committed. So they are attempting to say that Christianity’s core belief is immoral, therefore Christianity is an immoral belief system.

The idea that the suffering of this man, Jesus, is not fair because he’s innocent--and notice my words I’m using, an innocent man—is misrepresenting a core claim of Christianity. The claim treats Jesus as just another man. It separates God the Father and Jesus. It treats Jesus as another creature just like the rest of us, though innocent. This claim fails to take into account that Jesus is God.

When Jesus goes to the cross, it’s not another human being like you and me who goes to the cross to die for someone else’s penalty. It’s God Himself that is going to that cross. You see, it’s a category difference.

I think they would be right if, in fact, Jesus was just a man--a good man, a man who didn’t deserve to die--who died for you and I. That would be one kind of claim. But if, in fact, Jesus is who He said He was, and demonstrated He was through the resurrection, God is not punishing an innocent bystander for others. Jesus is clearly something more than one of us. Jesus is part of the triune God. So this is a decision that God has the right to make because He’s offering Himself as the substitute. He’s not punishing a third party; He offers Himself.

That’s the core claim of Christianity that is missing from the objection, and it makes all the difference in the nature of the punishment.

When folks try to categorize or try to describe Jesus as just a man, then this argument, I think, has some emotional power because it sounds like you’re just punishing one of your kids for the other one. But in fact that’s not what’s happening in the crucifixion.

It’s all about what God did for us, not to one of us for the other. It was what God Himself did for us, and that’s a much different claim. That is what Christianity teaches, rather than the way the atheist objection frames it.

And I think, really, it takes that act and it makes it incredibly virtuous, where it may seem at face to be horrific. God has self-sacrificially come to us and given Himself, instead of requiring anything of us. We deserve punishment, but He took it on Himself for us. That’s quite the opposite of being immoral. It’s the most virtuous act of love.