🤷🏻 The Danger of a “Jesus-My-Boyfriend” Theology
In much of today’s Church, the gospel has been reshaped into a sentimental romance—“Jesus my boyfriend,” gentle, validating, affirming, and comforting, but stripped of any weight of divine holiness. Influential voices like Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, and W. Paul Young have championed Christus Victor or the New Perspective on Paul, yet many of them downplay—or even deny—the doctrine of propitiation, the truth that Christ absorbed the Father’s wrath on our behalf. Some even mock it as “divine child abuse,” or argue, “How can we as sinners split the Trinity on the Cross?” Yet without this truth, we have no answer for why the Son of God truly had to die.
🖼️ The Rich Tapestry of Atonement
It is right—and biblical—to celebrate the multiple metaphors Scripture uses for our salvation. Christ’s work is described as (below is a non-exhaustive list):
- ❤️🩹 Reconciliation: “For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son… we shall be saved by His life” (Romans 5:10).
- 💰 Ransom: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
- 🧼 Cleansing: “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
- 🧑🧑🧒 Adoption: “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name” (John 1:12).
We rightly rejoice in ✨ Irenaeus’ recapitulation, 🦸♂️ the moral-influence model, the imagery of 🛡️ victory over sin and death—but these, wonderful as they are, do not by themselves explain why Jesus had to lay down His life.
❤️ The Heart of the Matter: Why He Had to Die
At the centre stands substitution: Jesus endured the curse, wrath, and judgment that we deserved. Scripture is unflinching:
“God presented Him as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness… that He might be just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus.”
Romans 3:25–26
“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows… He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities.”
Isaiah 53:4–5
These are not peripheral footnotes. They lie at the very heart of the gospel: God’s justice required satisfaction; God’s love supplied it.
🎯 Rediscovering Propitiation in a Godless Age
Critics point out that explicit references to propitiation are few in the New Testament. To them I offer two responses:
- What Scripture does teach, we must not deny/ignore. Though the term may be rare, its truth is undeniable: Christ appeased divine wrath on our behalf.
- Its rarity underscores our need to emphasise it today. First-century readers lived under the looming shadow of an angry deity; they instinctively understood wrath and sacrifice. By contrast, our 21st-century world—and even many churches—are utterly devoid of fear of God. We chant “God is love” yet shrink from His justice and judgment. The fruit is all around us: moral chaos, redefined marriage, the slaughter of the unborn, broken families, churches navel-gazing about “inclusivity” while abandoning holiness.
In a culture that cannot grasp divine anger, we must champion the gospel truth that Jesus bore the wrath of God. Only then can sinners see both the depth of their rebellion and the height of God’s mercy.
❣️ Propitiation: The Apex of Divine Love
Far from detracting from God’s love, the doctrine of propitiation reveals its grandeur. At the Cross, justice and mercy collide:
“Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief.”
Isaiah 53:10a
That this was the explicit will of the Father—to bruise His own Son and put Him to grief—underscores the depth of our sin and the height of divine mercy. Christ did not stumble into suffering by accident; He stepped into it by design, bearing all the wrath, punishment, curse, and judgment that we rightly deserved.
This was the very cup Jesus asked the Father to remove in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39)—and yet, in perfect submission, He drank it to the dregs. It was the death of the cross He willingly embraced, completing the kenosis (self-emptying) journey the He began at the Incarnation:
“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant… He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”
Philippians 2:5–8
Only by this voluntary obedience—this willing bearing of divine wrath—could the fountain of God’s love break forth for sinners:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…”
John 3:16
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8
“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
1 John 4:10
📣 Conclusion
We must preach Christ crucified—the Saviour who bore the Father’s wrath, whose blood cleanses, reconciles, and justifies. Only the full gospel, with all its glorious tension of justice and mercy, has the power to transform lives, renew families, and heal a world lost in self-worship. May we, like Paul, be “not ashamed of the gospel of Christ” (Romans 1:16), but boldly proclaim its unsearchable depths until every knee has bowed and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
