Crucifixion

“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”

— Isaiah 53:5 (ESV)

Crucifixion is the Roman method of capital punishment by which the four Gospels record that Jesus Christ was put to death outside Jerusalem under the governor Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27:32-50; Mark 15:21-37; Luke 23:26-46; John 19:16-30). Ancient Rome reserved crucifixion, a slow death by exposure and asphyxiation, for slaves, rebels, and the most despised criminals, making it a deliberately shameful as well as physically agonizing death.¹ For Christian theology, the crucifixion is the act by which Christ, “made sin” and “a curse” in the place of his people, bore the punishment their sin deserved.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states Christ’s crucifixion as the culmination of his obedience to the law on his people’s behalf: having been “made under the law” and having “perfectly fulfil[led] it,” he “underwent the punishment due to us, which we should have borne and suffered, being made sin and a curse for us; enduring most grievous sorrows in his soul, and most painful sufferings in his body; was crucified, and died.”² The Savoy Declaration of 1658, from which the Baptist confession draws this chapter almost verbatim, states the same substance in slightly different language: Christ endured “most grievous torments immediately from God in his soul, and most painful sufferings in his body.”³ Both confessions locate the crucifixion inside the doctrine of Christ’s mediatorial office: his death is the judicial “punishment due to us” that his obedience to the law had already qualified him to bear on his people’s behalf.

Biblical Basis

The Gospels present the crucifixion as the deliberate outcome of Jesus’s own repeated predictions: “the Son of Man must … be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31; cf. Matt. 16:21; Luke 9:22). All four accounts converge on the same core narrative: Jesus was scourged, mocked, and led to Golgotha bearing his cross, crucified between two criminals, and died after several hours, at which point the Roman centurion overseeing the execution declared, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).

The New Testament writers read the event as the fulfillment of specific Old Testament prophecy rather than an unforeseen defeat. Isaiah’s Suffering Servant is “pierced for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities,” his affliction called “an offering for guilt” (Isa. 53:5, 10). Psalm 22, which Jesus himself quotes from the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matt. 27:46; cf. Ps. 22:1), describes in advance the piercing of hands and feet and soldiers casting lots for the victim’s garments (Ps. 22:16, 18; cf. John 19:23-24). Daniel’s seventy weeks prophesy that “an anointed one” would be “cut off” so as to “finish transgression” and “make reconciliation for iniquity” (Dan. 9:24, 26). James Petigru Boyce reads this pattern together with the New Testament’s own sacrificial vocabulary for Christ’s death, John’s “Lamb of God” (John 1:29) and Paul’s “our Passover lamb” (1 Cor. 5:7), and argues from it that the crucifixion is a real, effective sacrifice for sin, not merely an exemplary death.⁴

Doctrinal Significance

Because the person who was crucified is, in the confession’s language, “very God and very man, yet one Christ,”⁵ Reformed theology holds that “whatever can be predicated of either nature may be predicated of the person”: the sufferings inflicted on Christ’s human body and soul were sufferings of the divine Son himself, which is why Scripture can say without qualification that “the Lord of glory was crucified” and that God “purchased the church with his own blood” (Acts 20:28; cf. 1 Cor. 2:8).⁶ Charles Hodge draws out the stakes of this union directly: “If this principle be not correct there was no greater crime in the crucifixion of Christ than in unjustly inflicting death on an ordinary man.”⁶ The infinite worth of Christ’s person, not the intensity of his physical pain alone, is what gives his death the value to satisfy for sin.

John Gill treats the crucifixion under the doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction: Christ was “set forth to be the propitiation,” making atonement for sin and thereby declaring “the righteousness of God” so that God might “be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.”⁷ The cross, on Gill’s account, accomplishes two things at once: it removes the legal guilt of those for whom Christ died, and it vindicates God’s own justice, which mercy alone could not satisfy.⁷

The Gospels also record spiritual anguish alongside Christ’s physical suffering. In Gethsemane he asked that “this cup” pass from him before submitting to his Father’s will (Matt. 26:39), and on the cross he cried out that he had been forsaken by God (Matt. 27:46). Micah McCormick argues that “even more inscrutable” than the physical pain of crucifixion “is the kind of spiritual pain Jesus experienced as he felt in some sense forsaken by God and under the wrath of the one he had loved from all eternity,” quoting Wayne Grudem’s description of Christ facing “the deep and furious wrath of an infinite God,” not “for an instant” but “hour after hour.”⁸

Historical Development

Scripture presents Christ’s death as the terminus of a long line of prior types pointing toward it. The Passover lamb whose blood spared Israel’s firstborn in Egypt (Exod. 12:1-13) and the wider Old Testament sacrificial system are, on this reading, shadows the crucifixion itself fulfills. Boyce argues that Scripture’s own vocabulary for Christ, “the Lamb of God” and “our Passover,” would by itself justify treating his death as a real sacrifice and not a mere figure of speech, even before considering the New Testament’s more explicit statements on the subject.⁴ The confession states the same continuity from the other direction: the “virtue, efficacy, and benefit” of Christ’s redemption, though “not actually paid… till after his incarnation,” reached the elect of every prior age “by those promises, types, and sacrifices wherein he was revealed.”⁹

Opposing Views

The earliest challenge to a real, bodily crucifixion came from within groups that used the Christian name. Some Gnostic teachers, called Docetists from the Greek verb meaning “to seem” or “to appear,” held that Christ’s “whole earthly life was an illusion” and that “he was not born, nor did he suffer or die,” his human form being “a phantasm, a mere appearance without substance or reality.”¹⁰ Others in this same family of teaching, the Cerinthians, distinguished Jesus from “Christ,” holding that the divine Christ descended on Jesus at his baptism but departed before the crucifixion, “leaving the man Jesus to suffer alone.”¹⁰ The wider church rejected these views as heretical, judging a real, bodily death integral to Christ’s ability to save: “nothing is more distinctly revealed in Scripture, and nothing is more essential to Christ’s being the Saviour of men, than that he should be truly a man.”¹⁰

Objections and Responses

If Christ suffered real pain and desolation on the cross, doesn’t that mean God himself changed and suffered, contradicting divine impassibility? Reformed theology answers by keeping the historic distinction between Christ’s two natures: “that does not mean that Christ’s divine nature suffers; we must be careful not to confuse the human nature with the divine nature… But it does mean that the person of the Son suffers on the cross in the fullness of his humanity.”¹¹ On this account it is precisely because the divine nature does not itself suffer that the Son is able to accomplish a rescue at all: “it is precisely because God does not suffer that he is able to send his Son to suffer for us as a man.”¹¹

Related Doctrines

References

Martin Hengel, Crucifixion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 22-32. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 4. ↩ ↩²
The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 4. ↩
James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXVIII. The Atonement of Christ,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 295-340. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, para. 2. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 478-542. ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VI, chap. 5, “Of the Satisfaction of Christ.” ↩ ↩²
Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 247-248, quoting Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 577. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, para. 6. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 376-453. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩ ↩²