Archives

Steve Chalke and EA symposium on the atonement

A while ago Steve Chalke published his now infamous book The Lost Message of Jesus which provoked no small amount of furore and doctrinal hand-wringing in the UK (and US) evangelical world. Adrian has written a post highlighting (thanks for the tip Adrian, I'd forgotten about the symposium!) some of the papers that came out of the recent Evangelical Alliance symposium on the atonement, which was convened in the light of the controversy caused by Chalke's book. I have to admit I found the whole thing rather bizarre to say the least. To set the scene, here's what Chalke actually said in his book:

"John's Gospel famously declares. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son" (John 3:16). How then, have we come to believe that at this cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own son?

The fatc is that the cross isn't a form of cosmic child abuse -  a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement "God is love". If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus' own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to pay evil with evil."

So there's the controversy, although to my mind there isn't anything - apart from perhaps the choice of language - that is particularly controversial here. First of all, Chalke's primary concern in this chapter of his book is forgiveness and the problem of suffering. He argues (with good reason in my view) that in the relationship between forgiver and the forgiven, the forgiver has to choose to bear the cost of the wrong done in order for there to be reconciliation, so in Christ God bears the sins of the world and sin in sinful man is put to death on the cross, so that a new man, free from the power of sin, may be brought forth. This is what I believe Paul to be saying in Romans 6.

As far as the understanding of the cross as being a vengeful God expending his anger at humanity on his Son, this understanding of the cross is fraught with problems. Not only do no biblical writers reach this conclusion about the cross, but far from 'taking sin and justice seriously' this model seems to me to describe something that is profoundly unjust. I have no problem in saying that I disagree with the doctrine of penal substitution, but the problem lies in the fact that people define the doctrine in so many different ways. I disagreed with the way Adrian defined it back when this discussion was first doing the rounds, but I would agree by and large with I H Marshall's paper on the matter. I believe that Christ bears the penalty for sin and that he experiences the full wrath of God - but this is not the same thing as saying I believe that the Father inflicts a punishment on his Son either to placate his anger or satisfy his need for justice, or indeed to make the Father prepared to forgive the world. To speak of the Father condemning the Son (which the Bible does not affirm) then causes problems when we ask why God raised Jesus from the dead and so vindicates him. As Chalke (again rightly) points out, Protestant preaching of the Gospel makes almost no mention of the resurrection, or perhaps simply tags the resurrection on at the end as a 'happy ever after' - when in fact the proclamation of Jesus being raised from the dead is the central and decisive proclamation of the early church. Anyhow, I intend to go through some of the papers from the symposium and make a few more comments in future posts.

The problem with making arguments about the atonement from the NT is that the Bible itself contains statements such as 'Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners' or 'We shall be saved from God's wrath through him' or even 'God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood' but these are statements about the atonement, they are not explanations about how the cross works. The closest we seem to come to an actual explanation about how the cross works is in Romans 6, where Jesus' death is seen as putting an end to sinful man and as a death to sin rather than a system whereby God takes vengeance on his own Son rather than on the mass of sinful humanity.

While I accept the barest tenets of penal substitution in that I believe Jesus bore the penalty for sin and that it was a substitutionary act (although this is often emphasised to such an extent that humanity is often omitted from the atonement altogether and the solidarity with humanity is hardly noted) I do not agree with penal substitution as it is commonly taught and preached. Of course saying things like that is enough to get you stoned in most evangelical circles but I am perfectly happy to maintain the reality of the wrath of God, that Christ bore our sins on the cross and the reality of God's future judgment on sin, and it is perfectly possible to hold to these ideas without subscribing to penal substitution as a doctrine. I believe it at best to be weak and deficient doctrine and at worst (in the hands of some preachers) a gross and misleading perversion of what the Bible actually teaches.

I intended to keep this post short, but in this last paragraph I'll try and sum up what I believe the scriptures teach about the atonement. Firstly, the whole of creation is fallen and subject to the power of evil and death. Men worship created things and not God and so become more and more sinful and corrupted. The wrath of God over such matters is manifested in an increased sinfulness, injustice and violence. Yet God remains faithful to his creatures and so empties himself and takes fallen creation on himself by becoming man. In Christ, God the Son assumes everything that is wrong and fallen about humanity and takes it upon himself, culminating in the cross, where he is crucified as a direct result of the evil, corruption and injustice in humanity. On the cross, Christ bears the weight of the sinfulness and wickedness of the whole of creation and having fully entered into what it means to be human, he then carries this to its logical consequence and dies, and in his death he bears not only sin and wrath (wrath being God's giving man over to the full extent his sin) but the very essence of what it means to be sinful man. At the cross, sin and evil do their very worst and Jesus dies under their weight. The wisdom of God is this however: because Christ bears the full burden of sin and evil, once Christ is dead, sin and evil can do no more. God's masterstroke is then raising Christ from the dead, with the power of sin and death having being completely defeated and exhausted. Christ's resurrection prefigures not only what will happen to those in Him, but also to the whole creation, which will be liberated from its bondage to decay. God will one day judge the world and put things to rights and vindicate himself and his people by raising them from the dead to take part in his new creation which will be completely untainted by sin and evil, but for those who remain hostile to God, they will be engulfed by sin, death and destruction.

That was rather longer than I'd planned, but I'll be writing some more on the symposium over the next few weeks.

25 books that every Christian would do well to read

Chris over at Infinite Wisdom or Absolute Idiocy? is currently reading his way through What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge to Fundamentalism which I reviewed a few months ago here. Chris also wonders if any of his readers have any other good book recommendations on the theological front so partly because I love reading (and partly becuase I love making lists) here's 25 books that have been hugely important for me as a Christian. Some are more well-known than others, but in one way or another these books have been very influential and decisive for me in guiding and shaping my theological journey. In no particular order, here are my 25 books that any Christian would do well to read:

1. The Orthodox Way - Bishop Ware
2. The Crucified God - Jürgen Moltmann
3. Jesus and the Victory of God - N T Wright
4. My Dear Child - Colin Urquhart
5. The Theology of Paul the Apostle - James Dunn
6. The Gospel of Mark - R T France
7. What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge to Fundamentalism - Keith Ward
8. Cur Deus Homo? - Anselm of Canterbury
9. The Actuality of Atonement - Colin Gunton
10. The Coming of God - Jürgen Moltmann
11. The Mediation of Christ - T F Torrance
12. God's Empowering Presence - Gordon Fee
13. The Gospel Driven Church - Ian Stackhouse
14. The Nature of the Atonement - J Macleod-Campbell
15. Once And For All - Tom Smail
16. What St Paul Really Said - N T Wright
17. Reformation - Diarmuid MacCulloch
18. The Climax of the Covenant - N T Wright
19. Rediscovering the Parables - Joachim Jeremias
20. Jesus Christ For Today's World - Jürgen Moltmann
21. The Enigma of Evil - John Wenham
22. Conflict and Community in Corinth - Ben Witherington III
23. The Revelation of St John - G B Caird
24. The Epistle to the Romans - C K Barrett
25. A New Kind of Christian - Brian Maclaren

Christian Carnival

This week's Christian Carnival is not being hosted here as advertised. Due to problems I am having in accessing the internet at the moment I thought it best to cancel my offer to host this week as I could not guarantee I would have internet access.

Instead, this week's Carnival can be found over at Daddypundit. I'll be hosting here on October 19th.