Scripture presents man’s death as inseparable from his alienation from God. Both a central and archetypal element of the human condition and a just reward for individual sins, it has a physical and spiritual dimension, and refers beyond the present existence to a judgement to come, and to the impossibility for man to find his salvation in himself. But the punishment of sin can be diverted from the sinner by the principle of the sacrifice of propitiation, already mentioned in the Old Testament. It is according to this principle that the death of Jesus Christ himself has always been intended as a substitute sacrifice for the punishment of sinful man, and on the basis of which the redemption of every man is made possible.

1 The universality of sin and the problem of eternal condemnation

1.1 Death as the universal consequence of original sin

The Christian tradition has sought in many ways to “link” the story of the fall of man and the consequences of “original sin” to the doctrine of man’s “alienation”, in a theological conception of the human condition. Indeed, the judgement pronounced by God on the disobedience of Adam and Eve in Eden (Genesis 3:16-24) is addressed first and foremost to the first parents of the human race. The rest of the text, however, shows how the consequences of original sin, and in particular the content of the judgement pronounced in Genesis 3, were extended to all human beings. The main, and archetypal, consequence of this judgement is man’s mortality: a mortality that is first and foremost spiritual, fulfilling by excluding him from access to the tree of life (Genesis 3:22-24) the threat made in advance by God in his commandment, which was to keep Adam from eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). Adam and Eve did not in fact expire on the day they ate of it (although the expression, also used in Gen 2:4, can take on a more general meaning, “when”), but this spiritual separation from their initial communion with the Creator transported them into a situation where their natural mortality destined them to return to the earth, deprived of the gift of eternal life. Thus we see that their first descendants die one after the other, despite having lived a very long life (Genesis 5).

1.2 Death as universal retribution for individual guilt

Death, both spiritual and physical, is just one of the consequences of alienation. Sickness, suffering and precariousness have reached and surrounded him, conditioning his existence, while the disintegration of his personality and the turning away from the natural knowledge of God have led to the proliferation of sins that flow from a misguided mentality, and constitute evils that have spread over the earth as from a “poisoned fountain” (Calvin), since original sin. So we participate in evil in two ways: we suffer evil, which comes to us from the physical world or from men, but we also practise evil, which makes us sinful beings. And yet, if original sin is the fountainhead of all evil, the epistle to the Romans relates this state of affairs primarily to the individual guilt of men, who, having known God, did not glorify him as such (see Justice and justification :: the universal natural religion): there can be no guilt ‘inherited’ in a biological way, as Paul Ricoeur rightly criticised the Augustinian doctrine (see P. Ricoeur, Le Conflit des Interprétations). Thus, when the apostle Paul links the common destiny of humanity to the original sin of its only father Adam in Romans 5:12-21, in order to associate it universally with the redemption that is in Jesus Christ, it is not without recalling that if “death spread from Adam to all men” – through a natural mortality, as we emphasised in the previous section – this is also a matter of immanent justice, since all have sinned (Romans 5:12). Indeed, when the apostle goes on to develop his doctrine of free “justification”, he repeats in another way that “the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans, Chapter 6, verse 23).

1.3 The coming judgement

Thus, the whole of humanity, born of Adam and condemned by the judgement pronounced by God in Eden to live in alienation and mortality, is considered by the apostle to be responsible, each individually, for his or her spiritual and therefore eternal destiny. Every human being therefore faces the problem of having to address his personal guilt before God, which is inescapable, even if he has not committed a sin ” similar to Adam’s ” (Romans 5:14), i.e. a transgression of the divine will revealed in the form of an explicit commandment. In principle, then, all human beings do indeed share in mortality, in that they all share in guilt, but it is not just a question of physical death, but of “spiritual” death, alienation and separation from God, already mentioned in relation to Adam and Eve, and manifested principally in the ignorance of God in the epistle to the Romans (see Justification and Justice, op. cit.). But the apostle says it differently and explicitly in his letter to the Ephesians:

You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you once walked, according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of rebellion. All of us also were of their number, and we used to live according to the lusts of our flesh and of our thoughts, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the others.

Epistle to the Ephesians, Chapter 2, verses 1-3

Death here is primarily spiritual, since those who were born anew in Jesus Christ had a part in it, but were “made alive”:

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, who were dead in our trespasses, has made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved); he has raised us up together and seated us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus […].

Epistle to the Ephesians, Chapter 2, verses 4 to 6

Now, this state of death is that in which sin proliferates, the transgression of God’s will, under the influence of the “flesh” and of “thoughts”, that is to say a mentality and a life devoid of the knowledge of God. Men, following the corrupting and destructive influence of this death, are “by nature” destined for wrath (v.3). Now, this wrath will be manifested at God’s judgement, as we have discussed in relation to righteousness and justification (Romans 2:5-8 (5-12)).

The sum total of what we have said, then, is that if the evils of the earth spread as a result of the original sin of Adam alone, men each participate in spiritual death and alienation, and that their guilt places them before the problem of an inescapable judgement to come. What the Gospel proclaims is nothing less than free deliverance from this judgement, through the work of Jesus Christ, principally his atoning work, which must now be explained.

2 Substitutive atonement and the solution of universal redemption

2.1 Atonement or “propitiation” in the Old Testament

After their deliverance from the yoke of slavery in ancient Egypt, the people of Israel, led into the desert by their liberator Moses, were gradually constituted as a “nation”. While the nations of ancient times were often founded on a religious code and a civil code that were closely associated, ancient Israel claimed to receive its “codes” from the mouth of God himself, through the intermediary of Moses, its prophet. On Mount Sinai, Moses received spiritual and moral commandments for the first time, as well as religious and civil instructions, which were taken up again and expanded when the law was given “a second time” (Deuteronomy). These religious instructions include a multitude of precepts mentioning and framing obligatory sacrifices and offerings, which must be performed according to specific rites relating to the worship of the God of Israel. In particular, it sets out the requirements for propitiatory sacrifices. These sacrifices were based on the principle of offering a “propitiatory” victim, i.e. one intended to make God favourable to sinful man. The principle was that sinners incurred a moral debt to God, which they would have to pay with their very lives, but that the sacrifice of a victim innocent of the sin committed, in this case an animal, could be accepted as a substitute for the punishment that remained ineluctable. The very principle of this propitiation, or substitutionary atonement, is already set out in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Judaic Bible, attributed by tradition to Moses):

If any man of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats blood of any kind, I will set my face against him who eats the blood, and I will cut him off from among his people. For the soul of the flesh is in the blood. I gave it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, because the blood makes atonement through the soul.

Leviticus, Chapter 17, verses 10-11

The principle of life (or “soul”) of the victim offered is in its blood, and it is therefore by shedding this blood that the sacrificer (the instituted priest) makes atonement for the sinner. This does not mean that sin should not be the object of a temporal punishment or reparation – of which numerous examples are given – but that beyond the consequences, here above all social, of sin, sinful man contracts a spiritual debt towards God, which only a spiritual punishment is able to settle. This punishment, as we emphasised in the first part, is the consequence of sin as the fruit of a “spiritual death”, and refers to a judgement and condemnation to come. A solution was provided in principle by God himself in the theocratic system of ancient Israel, but this solution was imperfect, in that the repetition of sins made necessary the infinite multiplication of sacrifices, which could never bring the pious Israelite the eternal redemption he needed. Moreover, as this practice was not accessible to all the “pagans” or all the “nations”, it could not fulfil God’s promise to Abraham to “bless in him all the families of the earth” (see, for example, Genesis 12:1-3). Rather, this principle points to a universal solution given by God himself to the universal condemnation of humanity, and which is realised through the death of Jesus Christ.

2.2 The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world

The idea of the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death is omnipresent in the New Testament. Taking up the vocabulary of the Old Testament, and of the Mosaic sacrificial system briefly described in the previous section, John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and a prophet preparing for the coming of Christ, commented, no doubt in the presence of his own disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Gospel according to John, Chapter 1, verse 29). The familiarity of his Jewish listeners with the religious system of ancient Israel made this a clear reference to the lamb offered as a sacrifice for sin, the first example of which appears during the institution of the Passover, on the occasion of the going forth from Egypt (Exodus 12:1-11). But it is the lamb of God that is Jesus Christ, in other words the lamb that God himself chose. It is clear that John’s intention here is to speak of the atonement for sins, in that he says that Jesus “takes away the sin of the world”: he thus presents Christ as a propitiatory Lamb chosen by God, not for a particular sin or sins, but for “sin”, as a generic and universal reality. This interpretation of the Baptist’s words finds many echoes in the same Gospel. For example, Christ, presenting himself as the “good shepherd”, takes his own impending death as his own free intention:

The Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord; I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it up again: this is the command I have received from my Father.

Gospel according to John, Chapter 10, verses 17-18

He does not identify himself here as the propitiatory victim, but on the subject of this imminent death, the evangelist John (the author of this Gospel) reports the words of Caiaphas, the high priest, who prophesies against his will about the death of Christ in the episode reported in chapter 11 :

One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, You do not understand; you do not consider that it is in your interest that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish. Now he did not say this of himself; but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation. And it was not for the nation alone; it was also in order to unite the scattered children of God into one body.

John, Chapter 11, verses 49-52

Thus, in divine providence, the death of Christ is accurately prophesied by the high priest of Israel as a means of salvation for the Jewish nation, and, adds the apostle, for all the “scattered children of God”.

2.3 Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement

The theological interpretation of the death of Jesus Christ as an expiatory sacrifice is adopted throughout the New Testament, and first of all in the words of the apostle Peter, who uses the metaphor of the sacrificial lamb of the old covenant:

[…] Not with perishable things, with silver or gold, were you redeemed from the vain way of life which you inherited from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, predestined before the foundation of the world and manifested at the end of time, for your sakes, who through him believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope may rest in God.

First Epistle of Peter, Chapter 1, verses 18-21

The reference to the lamb “without blemish and without spot” is transparent: only these lambs were approved for sacrifice in the ritual system of the Old Covenant, which the Jewish recipients of the epistle knew (“those who are strangers and scattered…”, Chapter 1, verse 1). Thus, the predestination of this “lamb” is implicitly linked to his death, which was foreseen “before the foundation of the world”, in order to redeem men “from their vain way of life”.

This notion of “redemption” is exploited by the apostle Paul in a more conceptual register, where he fully theorises Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement analogous to the sacrifices prescribed by the Mosaic law:

But now the righteousness of God is manifested without the law, to which the law and the prophets bear witness, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. There is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; and they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. It is he whom God destined by his blood to be a propitiatory victim for those who believe, in order to show his justice, because he had left unpunished the sins committed before, in the time of his patience; in order, I say, to show his justice in the present time, so as to be just while justifying those who have faith in Jesus.

Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 3, verses 21-26

The following theological points are taken from this reference text and developed here:

• The righteousness of God is obtained through faith in Jesus Christ: this righteousness consists in God justifying (i.e. declaring righteous) the person who has this faith, and in God manifesting his righteousness as retribution for sins.
• These two ideas, the justification of the sinner and the retribution for sins, are apparently contradictory: the justification (free, i.e. unconditional) of creaturely man contradicts the justice of God which must be exercised towards sinful man.
• The resolution of this apparent contradiction lies in a form of legal transaction, on the model of the “propitiatory victim” of the ancient Israelite rite: God destined Jesus Christ to be such a substitutionary victim, i.e. to receive the punishment of divine justice in the place of sinful man, in principle the one who has placed his faith in him.

Thus, Christian salvation, the free justification of man by God through faith in Jesus Christ, is founded on the very death of Christ, “predestined before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20) to be a “lamb without blemish and without spot”, i.e. destined to be a universal propitiatory victim. The apostles Peter and Paul are essentially in agreement with this interpretation, as is the apostle John, who evoked this reality through the image of the “Lamb of God” in his Gospel, and who himself takes up the theology of “substitutionary atonement” in his first epistle:

My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if anyone has sinned, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He himself is an atoning victim for our sins, not only our own, but also those of the whole world.

1 John 2:1-2

Perhaps the most famous biblical prophecy of Christ’s work of atonement is found in the book of Isaiah, where we can read in advance the prophet’s understanding of a “suffering servant” who would take upon himself the sins of men, so that the punishment thus received would serve as a reconciliation between man and his God:

Who believed what was foretold?
Who has recognised the arm of the Lord?
He has risen up before him like a weak plant,
Like a shoot coming up out of the dry ground;
He had no beauty or splendour to attract our attention,
And his appearance had nothing to please us.
Despised and abandoned by men,
A man of sorrows and accustomed to suffering,
Like one whose face is turned away,
We despised him, we took no notice of him.
Yet it was our suffering that he bore,
He bore our sorrows;
And we regarded him as punished,
Stricken by God and humbled.
But he was wounded for our sins,
Broken for our iniquities;
The chastisement that gives us peace fell on him,
And by his stripes we are healed.

Isaiah, Chapter 53, verses 1-5

3 Eternity and universality of Christ’s work

3.1 The lamb predestined before the foundation of the world

If Christ is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), according to Peter as such he was “predestined before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:19-20). In other words, Christ’s death was foreseen by God before the world itself existed, and he was even destined for it. This proposition is difficult to conceive in relation to man’s responsibility for this death, and must be understood more generally in the light of the relationship between the finite freedom of rational creatures and the integral foreknowledge of God. Schematically, God knows in advance everything that men will freely decide, and he integrates it in his omnipotence with his own design.

Christ’s responsibility

The first responsibility to consider is that of Jesus Christ himself, whose New Testament testifies that he voluntarily gave himself up to this death, in the understanding of the divine plan that concerned him. On several occasions, the Gospel according to John tells us that Jesus informed his disciples of his imminent death; as this event approached, when he entered Jerusalem, he showed his determination to persevere to the end, aware of the spiritual life that his very death would bear as fruit, like the grain of wheat that, sown in the earth, must die to give birth to the plant:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, let him follow me; and where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honour him. Now my soul is troubled. And what shall I say?.. Father, deliver me from this hour?… But this is why I have come to this hour.

Gospel according to John, Chapter 12, verses 24-27

Other New Testament writers may consider that Christ himself gave himself up to this death to which he was destined, for example the apostle Paul writing to the Galatians (we will also quote the epistle to the Hebrews later on):

[…] Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might snatch us out of this evil age, according to the will of our God and Father […].

Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 1, verses 2-3

The responsibility of the people

The second responsibility to be considered is that of the men who took part in Christ’s condemnation and death, and above all that of the present people and the political and religious leaders who were associated with it. Although Christ assures us in the Gospel according to John that he came into the world precisely to suffer this death, and although he willingly gave himself up to this death because of God’s plan, Scripture does not free men from their share of guilt in this event, which was nonetheless salutary. For example, when the apostle Peter addressed the crowd gathered on the occasion of Pentecost and the “outpouring of the Holy Spirit”, he overwhelmed his audience with these words:

Men of Israel, hear these words! Jesus of Nazareth, the man to whom God bore witness before you by the miracles, wonders and signs which he performed through him among you, as you yourselves know; this man, delivered up according to God’s purpose and foreknowledge, you crucified and killed by the hands of the ungodly.

Book of Acts, Chapter 2, verses 22-23

In these words, all the external determinants of the death of Jesus Christ are present, and the people are guilty, having asked for his death when he was presented to them by Pilate, and if it was “by the hand of the ungodly” that he was put to death, it is the people themselves, the target of Peter’s speech, who are made responsible here for his crucifixion, a point made clear in another speech:

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied before Pilate, who was in favour of releasing him. You denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked for the mercy of a murderer. You killed the Prince of Life, whom God raised from the dead; of this we are witnesses.

Acts, Chapter 3, verses 13-15

God’s responsibility

But beyond this complex reality of the web of human responsibilities, the apostle does not forget that Jesus was handed over “according to the purpose and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23): so the guilty and reprehensible acts of men, known beforehand by God, served the purpose that he himself had determined and brought about through their hands. From this we can deduce two things:

• We must not believe that Christ’s death was a “fortuitous” event, used by God but essentially falling within the “private life of men”: it served a purpose established before all times, essentially the salvation of men through a substitutionary atonement
• We must not believe that because Christ’s death was decreed by God before all time, the men who are responsible for it are not guilty of it; thus Christ’s condemnation and crucifixion retain their eminently unjust and tragic character.

The responsibility of the nations

The responsibility of political and religious leaders, for their part, is also affirmed in relation to God’s all-powerful plan, in the next chapter of the book of Acts, when the disciples pray to God on the occasion of the release of Peter and John, who had been locked up following the healing of a man lame from birth:

[…] Against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, Herod and Pontius Pilate have joined forces in this city with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do all that your hand and your council had foreordained.

Acts, Chapter 4, verses 27-28

God’s hand is his action in the world: what happened with the death of Jesus Christ is the result not only of divine foreknowledge, but also of God’s action in the world, mysteriously and through men, who nevertheless participate freely. Here, the nations as well as the peoples of Israel are involved in this plan, through their political representatives, in principle Herod and Pilate, who have joined forces to put Jesus Christ to death. In the apostolic, primitive and Pauline tradition, this event is interpreted as a nexus of God’s plan for humanity and the world.

3.2 The universal value of the one sacrifice

If Christ is a “propitiatory victim” for “the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2), this means that his sacrifice alone is of sufficient value for the salvation of all men. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews theorised in depth the relationship between this salvation and the eternal and unique character of the sacrifice made for this purpose:

[…] Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with hands, in imitation of the true one, but he entered heaven itself, in order to appear now for us before the face of God. Otherwise he would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world, but now, at the end of the ages, he has appeared just once to abolish sin by his sacrifice. And as it is appointed for men to die once, after which comes judgment, so Christ, who offered himself once to bear the sins of many, will appear without sin a second time to those who wait for him for their salvation.

Epistle to the Hebrews, Chapter 9, verses 24-28

The authors of the New Testament are unanimous in affirming the centrality and sacrificial value of Christ’s death in God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. In this extract, the theologian compares the ritual system of the Old Covenant with the sacrifice of Christ himself: whereas the sacrifices, each intended to make atonement for an individual sin, had to be repeated because of the multiplication of sins, by a high priest himself subject to weakness (see the complementary extract Hebrews 7:26-28), Christ is seen as the high priest of a new covenant, himself without blemish and without spot, and having offered himself only once to cover the sins of all men by a single sacrifice, planned from eternity.

This being said, the “infinite” value of the sacrifice of the new covenant is not a guarantee of salvation for all men, since Scripture abundantly affirms the existence of reprobation, that is, the eternal condemnation of certain men. This reprobation results in a “punishment”, the nature of which is not perfectly transparent, and which appears, for example, in the mouth of Christ himself, when he identifies himself in the Gospel according to Matthew with the Son of Man who will come to judge the world with the angels:

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, and go into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and you did not give me to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not take me in; I was naked, and you did not clothe me; I was sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. And they said, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and not help you? And he said to them: Truly I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do these things to one of the least of these, you did not do them to me. And these shall go into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into everlasting life.

Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 25, verses 41-46

Passing over the question of which eschatological event (relating to the end of history) this passage refers to, the distinction remains in Jesus’ teaching between the righteous, who will go to eternal life, and the “accursed”, who will go to eternal punishment, even though Christ’s sacrifice is valid “for the sins of the whole world”. The resolution of this apparent contradiction is found in the principle of faith, which remains: the death of Jesus Christ has sufficient propitiatory value for the sins of all men, but the justification offered on the basis of this sacrifice is only appropriated by the individual on condition, in principle, that he places his faith in Jesus Christ to obtain eternal life: this is the very principle of the Gospel. This consideration must be corrected by the doctrine of divine election, but the sum of it is that we must not confuse the universal value of the substitutionary atonement with the actual appropriation of it by men. But having said this, it is appropriate to reject in the light of this universality the Calvinian doctrine of the so-called “limited” atonement, according to which Jesus Christ “died only for the elect”; we shall have occasion to return to this when dealing with election.