Instead of taking this reasonable approach, nine members of the committee decided to remove a song because they discovered that the single line reading “the love of God was magnified” originally read the very Reformed (and Biblical) notion that “the wrath of God was satisfied.” As the chair of the committee herself tells it, it was only after their three-and-a-half years of quarterly meetings and after all the songs (including this one) had already been accepted, that nine members voted to censure this song. They were on a “mission,” states the chair: A mission to educate Presbyterians to stop believing a major feature of their own confessional heritage.

In the previous installment we examined why the PCUSA hymnal committee rejected the popular worship song “In Christ Alone” and the furor that developed around that rejection.

 Presbyterian hymnal committee rejects a song for promoting aReformed view of salvation

One wonders whether the majority of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song caught the incredible irony of rejecting a song from the new Presbyterian hymnal on the basis that it put forward a theme that is commonly regarded as a distinctive part of the Reformed view of salvation. It would at least be understandable (though not justifiable, given the Biblical basis for the idea) if a non-Reformed hymnal committee rejected the song because it spoke once of Christ’s death satisfying God’s wrath. But for a Presbyterianhymnal community to do so borders on theological lunacy.

It is not just a matter of the majority saying: “We personally don’t like this theme of Christ’s death satisfying God’s wrath. Yet we will not deny the song to others who use this hymnbook because (1) it is such a widely cherished worship song with undeniably beautiful lyrics; and (2) the theme of Christ’s death satisfying God’s judgment has historically been a distinctive feature of Reformed soteriology ever since the inception of Reformed faith. As such the song is meaningful to most in the Reformed faith.”

Instead of taking this reasonable approach, nine members of the committee decided to remove a song because they discovered that the single line reading “the love of God was magnified” originally read the very Reformed (and Biblical) notion that “the wrath of God was satisfied.” As the chair of the committee herself tells it, it was only aftertheir three-and-a-half years of quarterly meetings and after all the songs (including this one) had already been accepted, that nine members voted to censure this song. They were on a “mission,” states the chair: A mission to educate Presbyterians to stop believing a major feature of their own confessional heritage.

How significant a part of the Reformed view of salvation is the theme that Christ’s death satisfies God’s wrath? Without any pretense of being exhaustive, we will look at two lines of evidence: (1) John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559; 1st ed. 1536); and (2) the Reformed confessions found in the PCUSA Book of Confessions.

Calvin on Christ’s death as satisfying God’s judgment and appeasing God’s wrath

I provide just enough examples to underscore the reader the significance that the doctrine of satisfying God’s judgment and appeasing God’s wrath plays in Calvin’s soteriology. I am using the standard translation by Ford Lewis Battles in the Library of Christian Classics (ed. John T. McNeill; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960). Emphases are my own.

Two points about vocabulary are in order before we enter a discussion of Calvin’s views. One point has to do with the slightly different verb-object vocabulary used in “In Christ Alone” and in Calvin’s Institutes. The song “In Christ Alone” states “the wrath of God was satisfied.” Technically, I suppose, one should speak (as Calvin does) of satisfying God’s judgment and appeasing or propitiating God’s wrath (note: the Reformed confessions speak of satisfying God’s justice). Yet one should not be too demanding of a song or poem which needs to worry about syllable count (one-syllable “wrath”) and rhyme (“satisfied” with “died”). At any rate in Pauline usage wrath and judgment have significant overlap since Paul often gives wrath an activity-oriented sense, as in Rom 2:5: those who do not repent “store up … wrath on the Day of Wrath and of the Revelation of the Righteous Judgment of God.” There the Day of Wrath refers to the moment when God executes righteous judgment on wrongdoers, not the moment when God first becomes angry toward sin. To say this, however, does not mean that God is not angry toward sin and impenitent sinners, as though Scripture viewed God as an impassive or robotic being.

The other vocabulary point has to do with the use of the word “appease” in the translation of the Institutes (which translates the Latin verb plācāre, from which we get the verb “to placate”; it is related to the verb placēre “to please”). When Calvin wrote of “appeasing” or “placating” God’s wrath he obviously did not mean making efforts to mollify an unjustly belligerent deity at the expense of justice or other principles. That image of sacrificing justice to accommodate an evil ruler has dominated the modern concept of appeasement, thanks to the actions of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in response to Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia in the Munich Conference of 1938, about four centuries after Calvin’s first edition of the Institutes (1536). Calvin meant by the term “appease”pleasing God by satisfying or fulfilling God’s righteous requirements. The linking of the verb “satisfied” with the noun “wrath” in “In Christ Alone” avoids the Munich connotation even as it achieves the necessary rhyme with “died.”

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