Hsu spends the rest of the article answering these questions, but his answers may surprise you: God did not turn his back on his Son, he did not forsake the perfect God-man, he did not pour his wrath out on Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross

Two days before Good Friday, InterVarsity Press editor Al Hsu published a provocative piece in the online version of Christianity Today. Entitled “He’s Calling For Elijah! Why We Still Mishear Jesus,” Hsu opens his essay by asking the following questions: [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Is God the kind of God that turns his back on his Son? Does God abandon those who cry out to him? How could God forsake the perfect God-man, the only one who has ever served him perfectly? Because if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what’s preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?

Hsu spends the rest of the article answering these questions, but his answers may surprise you: God did not turn his back on his Son, he did not forsake the perfect God-man, he did not pour his wrath out on Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross. For Hsu, the view held by Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, Barth, and a host of Protestant theologians for 500 years looks too much like child abuse and breaks the Trinity.

What about Psalm 22:1, which Jesus recited as he hung, writhing in pain, on that most hideous of torture devices—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Surely this clearly speaks of God forsaking Jesus. Not so, Hsu says. He observes that the Gospels don’t unpack the meaning of the anguished cry, that for us to see it as God turning his back on Jesus is to read into the text what cannot be found there.

Hsu camps on the whole of Psalm 22 as what Jesus meant when he quoted the first verse from the cross. I agree that the whole psalm is in view, but Hsu seems to be saying Jesus has in mind the whole psalm except verse 1. “Jesus is not saying that God has forsaken him,” Hsu writes. “He’s declaring the opposite.” In other words, Hsu argues that Psalm 22:1 should be understood to mean that God only seemed to abandon his Son.

If Jesus didn’t die in our place, if he didn’t receive the full force of God’s wrath against sin, then what did he accomplish on the cross? For Hsu, the point of the cross was for us to know that we are not alone in our suffering. And he is bold enough to approvingly cite theologian Thomas McCall and argue, “There is nothing in Scripture that says that the Father rejected the Son.” This might come as quite a shock to Christians throughout 20 centuries who have held otherwise.

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Daniel B. Wallace is Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary