Friends: Western commercial culture insists that everything has a price. What if an ultimate price is really an expression of ultimate love?

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Spirituality column #1030

August 11, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Payment Plan

By Bob Walters

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son …” – Jesus, John 3:16

The following puts me at friendly odds with every evangelical preacher I can think of, but I think modern western Christianity has it wrong, or at least misdirected, by insisting Jesus died as a “payment” for our sin. I.e., a quid-pro-quo transaction, not grace and love.

In Orthodox circles, this transaction of the cross – an idea Anselm of Canterbury conceived in the early 1200s that grew into the stubbornly western mainstream doctrine of “penal substitutionary atonement” – is considered worse than head-shaking bad teaching. To the Orthodox, it is more like a heresy and considered an insult to Christ.

Now, we hear about Jesus “paying the price” every Sunday. It fits our western, commercial culture of cost and reward, penalty and payment, punishment and prize, etc. If we do something good, we get something good. If we do something bad, we get something bad. But we all know that’s not an accurate picture of how the world and humanity work.

Jesus, God’s son, the only perfect human, was given by God into the world, into humanity, to restore our divine relationship with our Creator; a relationship that was broken in the fall. Curses aside (read Genesis 3 for a refresher), God pursued humanity and Jesus was point of reconnection. In Jesus we know God is real, because Jesus was with us, and sacrificed mightily to cover our sins, ransom our souls, and restore us to God.

We think, generally, of sacrifice and ransom as payment options. But what if instead of a transactional installment payment, the Cross was a positive action of love? What if the Cross isn’t a metaphor for “final payment,” but instead is a freeing sacrifice of faith?

I see the Cross not as the wrath-driven payment of an ultimate price, but the gracious expression of an ultimate love. Do we see God’s wrath in the Bible? Sure, but we also see His righteousness and His truth. When Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” that is God saying to humanity that His righteousness, commands,  truth, and sacrifice are unassailable and reveal the heavenly realms of His existence.

We diminish it horribly, I think, by defining Christ’s person and faith with a price tag.

It’s not just a linguistic trick or a moot point of semantics – a gift vs. payment – that sustains this view in my mind.  There is the practical, obvious question of, “If Jesus paid a price, to whom did he pay it?” Certainly not to God, because He is God.  And certainly not to Satan, because God owes Satan nothing. Atonement and ransom are conditions that result in forgiveness and freedom. The cross is an invitation of faith, in faith, through faith.

And if 1 John 4:8 is correct, that “God is love,” think about the maximum and defining loves in our own lives.  Is my love for my wife a payment plan? Or for my children, my grandchildren, the friends in my life I cherish the most? Or for my country?

My longtime Bible mentor George Bebawi always willingly swam upstream on this issue of the Cross as a payment vs. the free grace of God’s love. He was a Coptic priest (Egyptian Orthodox), multi-lingual Bible translator, a divinity lecturer at Cambridge University, England, among other places, and renowned Patristics expert, the study of the early church and the church fathers. I studied with him for nearly 20 years,

George would joke that if modern Western evangelism and substitutionary atonement were correct, then John 3:16 should read, “For God was so mad at the world that he killed his only son.” That’s because we see salvation as a “deal,” not perfect love.

We see God’s wrath and Jesus’s punishment, not righteousness and obedience.

I could go on. I don’t write about this often, but I think about it all the time. Christianity survived its first millennia without “penal substitutionary atonement.” The Bible was taken at its word, and the glory of Christ was not reduced to a payment. I like that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) wrote about this in 2015; see “The Price is (not) Right.”