Jesus’s death is certainly important in the participatory account. His execution terminates our sinful, fleshly condition, which he assumed in his incarnation. In this assumption and termination, as the Spirit joins us to these events, our sinful flesh is thereby rendered extinct; it is dead and buried. The ravages of sin are thereby contained. Few things are as important as this termination then.
But Christ’s resurrection and ascension are equally critical as the basis of our reconstitution and new life. Without the resurrection we just stay dead. But the good news is that we rise from the dead, leaving our flesh behind, bearing Jesus’s new resurrected image—a process that has begun miraculously to impinge on our own lives already. Hence without participating in the resurrection we are not saved, even from our sins, as Paul points out quite directly to the Corinthians on one occasion. (1 Cor 15:17) For him it is two steps or none.
It is clear then at the atonement is handled very differently by the two models. For the participatory gospel Christ’s death is a single part of a bigger story of divine lowering, bearing, terminating, and then re-creating through resurrection; all of these acts together comprise Paul’s understanding of the atonement. And, in particular, both cross and resurrection work together to save us by transforming us as we participate in them. However, J[ustification]T[heory] struggles to ascribe any kind of atoning value to most of these events in Jesus’s life. Everything is effected by the cross. For JT Jesus does need to maintain his innocence through his life to that he can die in a pure, uncontaminated form, and in Piper’s Reformed version, offer the clothes to us of perfect righteousness, but it is difficult to supply a soteriological rationale for his life beyond this. As a result of its focus then, JT struggles to provide for his life beyond this. As a result of its focus then, JT struggles to provide a strong justification for either the incarnation or the resurrection. Moreover, nothing is transformed by this theory, except, in a sense, God’s attitude toward us. We are left very much as God found us, although relieved of fear and hopefully motivated by gratitude. Still, we are essentially the same.
In sum: for the transformational gospel, Jesus must certainly die, although for different reasons from those suggested by JT: Jesus’s death is all about termination, not punishment. But “to atone” fully for our problems he must also be resurrected, and it is this act that is so important for the changes it delivers for us. For JT, however, Jesus must simply die; and then explanations for the resurrection, which will not involve salvation (at least, this sense), must be found somewhere else.
When one theory of salvation focuses almost entirely on Jesus’s death, and the other model combines that death with the resurrection in order to save humanity in a dramatically reconstituted way, we are really talking about two fundamentally different models of salvation. (Douglas A. Campbell and John DePue, Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel [Eugene, -Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2024], 77-78, italics in original)
