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The Atonement, penal substitution, and Adrian Warnock

My good friend Richard was shamed-but-not-named by leading UK blogger Adrian Warnock in this post where it was stated that Richard was in some sense dismissing what Adrian saw as the key elements of wrath, justice and vengeance in the atonement. I've debated the atonement with Adrian and others many times, and although there is much I agree with, I think the overall idea Adrian has put across is too juristic, and ultimately (whether intentional or not) leads to a juristic idea of salvation in which being saved is mainly a matter of status, rather than bringing about eschatological and ontological transformation, and is such is rather inadequate and in some places deeply problematic, and (yes) unbibical, but more on that some other time.Richard has asked me to post his response to Adrian on this blog so rather than prattle on I'll let him speak for himself:

"First of all, before I begin I would like to commend Adrian for his concern regarding my spiritual well being in his posts on the atonement. Secondly, I would like to suggest, however, that he has not clearly understood me so his description of my view has not been always the most accurate. Thirdly, In this blog article I am going to assume a fair amount of knowledge of the discussions of the early church, particularly nicean and Chalcedonian orthodoxy.  I will use terms like homoousion Monophysite, Nestorianism. If you have no idea about what these terms mean, and/or the discussions surrounding them, I would respectfully ask you do read up on your early church doctrines. This is not because I think that only people who are trained in theology can discuss theology. Rather it is because repeatedly in my discussions with those who are sympathetic to Adrian their lack of knowledge of these points makes the task infinitely harder and exasperating. I am not suggesting that you must agree with the position on the early church to discuss these points but that you at least know what they are and state if you disagree with them.

The Holy Love of God

God is Holy Love. This statement is fundamental in any understanding of Christianity. God’s holiness is his absolute moral perfection.  Our first and final word in all theology must be the glory of God. Man only has realty in as much as it is caught up with the glory of God.

God in his boundless Holy Love, as the communion of Father, Son and Spirit, Created the world from nothing. The pinnacle of this creation was humanity, who were made to be God’s image bearers to creation. The tragedy of Eden was that man rejected this vocation and sinned. Man rejected the Goodness of God. Humanity had rejected and devalued that which was most valuable.

God in asserting the value of his holiness must reject the rebellion and the rebellious. His Holy Love for his rebellious creatures must issue out in Wrath. That is in the rejection of what human sin. His way of doing this is death, the ending of the creature back to nothingness from whence humanity came.

If God stopped here he would be worthy of our praise, if he let man slip back into the nothingness from which he came he would be both Holy and Loving. But God in his infinite and free goodness, with no compulsion but an act of free Holy Love, sent his Son. That is the Father sent his Son, his Son willingly obeyed and by the Spirit of God.

In the incarnation, the Son of God took upon himself our fallen and alienated humanity. He came to deal with both the legal and the ontological problems of human sin. He took our doom and judgement upon himself willingly by becoming man-by taking our ontologically fallen nature.. He stood under the verdict of the Holy Love of God issuing forth as Wrath.  All his life he lived under the Wrath of God. What is more, being the eternal Son of the Father this verdict was his own. He rejected sin in all its sinfulness. His life was one continuous agreement to the Wrath of God to sin.

When the sinfulness of Man had done its worse in rejecting God, in the person of Jesus. Jesus took this rejection by Man and made it the rejection of God upon sin. He in his own Person willingly took the doom of men to himself as man (as well as God). He willingly took our punishment[1], our penalty, to himself and turned it to praise. He praised the Father’s rightful judgement on sinful man by willingly submitting to and enacting this Judgement by the Spirit.  This he did as our substitute and representative -vicariously. He died for us in our place.

God the Father took this praise of the Son as the perfect satisfaction of his Wrath. Being the perfect agreement, in word and action, to the Holy Love of God. Death had met it end. God the Father, by the Sprit, raised Jesus from the dead. Thereby, affirming the purification and change ontologically and legally within human kind.

Where upon Jesus ascended and so sent his Spirit. This means that we can follow in Jesus footsteps."

[1] Jesus was not punished by the Father, but took our penalty. This is why I object to the term punishment. Because it implies someone, normally the Father, punishing Jesus.

N T Wright lecture - part 3

Wednesday night's lecture was entitled 'New World, New Bodies' and although less technical and detailed than the previous lecture on Tuesday, it was again supremely informative and interesting. Here's an outline of the lecture:

Two erroneus extremes

Wright began by showing how Christian thinking as regards eschatology has often gone to two incorrect extremes. First of all was the myth of inevitable progress, routed in evolutionary optimism. One finds this kind of thinking in thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, but it fails to provide a satisfactory way towards God's new creation because it cannot deal with the problem of evil. Things will not just simply 'get better'.

The second error the church has made is at the other extreme, where it is assumed that things will gradually get worse and worse and then there will be a final escape from the earth as God finally does away with creation for good and believers enjoy eternity in heaven. This is routed in an incorrect dualistic understanding of the universe which sees the physical as corrupt and true reality lying beyond the physical in the 'spiritual' realm. This could not be more wrong, Wright emphatically states, because God's faithfulness to creation means that it was made good and he will not discard it, but make it new. What God did for a small part of creation in the body of Christ, he will one day do for the whole cosmos: "Behold, I make all things new."

Next Wright highlighted six themes in the New Testament to help us think more biblically about eschatology under the overall heading "not abandonment, but redemption and renewal."

i) Seed time and harvest - the resurrected Jesus is the firstfruit of what God has planned for all creation. He is the seed from which the future 'harvest' will come.

ii) The resurrection was the decisive victory in the battle between God and darkness. Jesus' resurrection means that he is now the exalted King of the whole universe and will reign with all his enemies inder his feet.

iii) Citizenship - our citizenship is in heaven. This does not mean that our eternal destiny is to live there, but we are now a colony of heaven on earth. In the power of the Spirit, we experience and proclaim now (in part) what God will do in the future.

iv) 'God will be all in all' - this is not some form of Christian panentheism where God and creation merge into one, for if this were to happen God would become indistinguishable from the fallenness and evil in the world. Instead suggested that we think of the cosmos as "a receptacle for God's love and glory." God will come and make his home with us, and we will freely love one another.

v) The idea of new birth - not only of individual people, but of the whole world. The world is now in labour and we groan together with the Spirit as we anticipate the renewal and restoration of creation (Romans 8). It is almost as if the current creation is writhing in birth pains as it gives birth to the new one.

vi) The marriage of heaven and earth - there is no dualism or separation where believers 'go up' to heaven and that's that. Rather, heaven joins with earth, so that the earth becomes God's home and creation is saved from its decay.

Wright ended the first half of the lecture by briefly mentioning the second coming of Christ. He says the NT describes it better as an 'appearing' of Christ, as though a curtain between us and the risen Jesus will suddenly be drawn back, and we shall all see him as he is. Wright heavily criticised traditional 'rapture' theology we sees the coming of Christ as an escape from history and creation. In fact, he says, Christ will come to restore and rule over creation, not to destroy it.

What about us?

Once again, Wright was scathing what he called the 'diminishing of Christian hope' whereby all that remains after death is a one-stage process of going to either heaven or hell and that's it. This has led to the marginalisation of the hope of bodily resurrection when in fact it is the central hope of Christianity. We are awaiting not the escape of our souls into heaven, but redemption of our bodies (Rom 8:23).

At his coming, Jesus will transform our bodies to be like his, and God will give life to our mortal bodies (Rom 8:9-11), we will not spend eternity in heaven. Wright never tired of emphasing this point, simply because it is so ingrained in our thinking, but he points to the Lord's prayer: "Your Kingdom come, on earth as it is heaven." Heaven is the source and origin of God's Kingdom, but that is not where he intends it to stay.

This runs contrary to many pagan (and indeed Christian ideas) that non-physicality is the way to salvation. Many people who disagreed with Wright on this have pointed to Paul's arguments about the outer nature wasting away and the inner one being renewed, but read on to 1 Cor 5 and then 1 Cor 15, and it soons becomes clear that discarding the concept of physicality does not have the biblical support people may think.

1 Cor 15 is of course the great resurrection passage, and there is often confusion between what Paul meant between a physical body and a spiritual one. This has often led to the emphasis on the spiritual nature over the physical nature, but this is not borne out by exegesis. When Paul talk about a psychikos body (our current Adamic bodies) and the future pneumatikos (spiritual) bodies, he is referring to the force that drives and enlivens the body, not it substance. A spiritual body is not made out spirit "any more than a steam train is made out of steam", and our future bodies will be like that of the risen Christ. God will reaffirm the goodness of what he has created, not remove it, we will have a body that will have overcome and been liberated from death.

In closing the penultimate lecture, Wright briefly gave a run through some of the questions that we might like to ask about the resurrection:

Who will be raised? The NT seems divided on this issue. John speaks of both the righteous and wicked being raised bodily to face judgement, while Paul affirms that the children of God will definitely be resurrected, he says less about the wicked.

Where? The resurrection will take place on the new earth, because God is concerned not only with people, but with renewing the whole entire cosmos. If you think only people will be resurrected and made new, you'll be spending eternity being homeless.

What will the resurrection body be like? Further to what's been discussed above, our new bodies will be more real and more substantial than what we have now, they will incorruptible and immortal. Interestingly, Wright picked up on the early church idea that like Jesus, the marks of suffering for the Gospel would be retained, even in the new body. Our current personalities and gifts will also be resurrected, enhanced and glorified and put to use in the service God without the taints of sin and corruption. There will also be rewards for what we do now in this current body. However, contrary to a lot of thinking, our rewards from God are not earned like a wage but we should think of them as a reward in the same way that one is rewarded with a good marriage by perseverance and love. The reward does not come like a wage, but like reciprocated love.

When will this happen? Not as soon as we die, but at the coming of Christ. The old will be transformed and made new, not merely replaced.

How? There lies a great mystery in this question, but Wright notes that in Pauline theology it is the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead that will raise us from the dead also. The Spirit serves as a present guarantee of our inheritance to come.


This was an excellent lecture once again. We'd had three lectures of theory up to this point and we were all looking forward to the 'practice' of the resurrection life in the present which I'll outline inmy next post: 'Living By Easter In the Present Time'.

N T Wright lecture - Wednesday

I'm now a day behind with reporting back on the N T Wright lectures I've been to this week. I'm up at 5.30am each morning for work and it's proving very tiring to work all day, go to a lecture and then come home and type it all up so I'm going to put my health first and leave off typing up the remaining two lectures until tomorrow night but you're in for a treat because tonight's lecture was an absolute cracker. I'm only half-joking about my health too - I spent the first 6 months of this year off sick with a chronic fatigue illness and I'm none too keen to bring it on again.

I'll have the highlights from Wednesday ('New world, new bodies') and tonight ('living by Easter in the present time') up sometime on Friday hopefully.

Thought for the day

“Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned.”

Augustine

Correction

I said last week that this week's Christian Carnival was being hosted over at Lady 4 Jesus. I stand corrected (as a man in orthopaedic shoes once said) as the Carnival will now be hosted over at White Ribbon Warriors.

N T Wright lecture - Tuesday

The second lecture in the series of lectures I've been to this week saw N T Wright seeking to cover some familiar issues he wrote about in the Resurrection of the Son of God but also seeking to move beyond some of those issues and not only look at what we can know historically about the resurrection, but also how we can know it.



Wright dealt effectively with the ideas of those like Crossan (right) and Borg (left)

He opened by recounting the famous public argument between Wittgenstein and Popper at Cambridge University in the 1940s, pointing out that despite the many eyewitness accounts, no one is able to accurately recall exactly what did happened, but this does not mean that nothing happened. So too with the resurrection - the Gospel accounts conflict and record various different sequences of events, but this does not authorise the sceptics to conclude that nothing happened.

After briefly outlining what the resurrection is not (a divinely given answer to the question 'can God do miracles?' or 'is the Bible true or not?'), Wright outlined some of the many attitudes to death and the afterlife that existed in the first century. For the pagans, the idea of bodily resurrection was simply a non starter. Death was a one way street and at best offered a shadowy bodiless existence in the underworld. Everybody knew that they would all die, and no one came back from the dead - and certainly not with a new and glorious body.

The Jews thought differently on the other hand, although their views were by no mean unanimous. Some (e.g the Sadducees) rejected the idea of a future resurrection or anticipated some kind of platonic bodiless existence (e.g Philo).  Jesus himself actually says remarkably little about resurrection, and talk of his own forthcoming death and subsequent vindication were perfectly in line with Jewish messianic ideas of the time. However, it seemed that the crucifixion was to be the end of the Messiah ('we had hoped he would be the Messiah') but after Easter the disciples proclaim him to truly be the Messiah because (unlike all the other would-be Messiahs) he had actually been raised from the dead. In short, Wright argued, the idea of full bodily resurrection is not a pagan idea, but a thoroughly Jewish messianic idea, which was taken on by the church.

The Church modified many Jewish ideas about resurrection in the light of Jesus' death and resurrection in what Wright termed 'early church mutations'. In Judaism for instance, the idea of resurrection was important but it was not central. Compare this with the early church emphasis on the centrality of the resurrection for instance, and the shift in thought becomes apparent. Furthermore, Judaism saw  resurrection as a single event at the end of time, but Jesus' resurrection in the middle of history now caused the church to rethink that idea. Jesus had been raised, but believers were still waiting for their own resurrection, which was in turn part of a much bigger thing the Creator God was going to do when he would finally make the whole creation anew. Thus belief in the resurrection does not mean abandoning the world to its fate, but being part of what John Dominic Crossan calls 'collaborative eschatology' - in the power of the Spirit the church begins to inaugurate the coming new creation in anticipation of God's final coming to earth to restore it and make it new. (Wright was keen to credit Crossan for this point and stressed that although they are 'sparring partners', they are good friends - perhaps my illustration is a tad inaccurate)

After continuing to explain how the churhc transformed and expanded the doctrine of resurrection, Wright turned to the question of the historicity of the Gospel accounts. He was fiercely critical of revisionist sceptism about the historicity of the resurrection narratives and made some thoughtful points regarding their genuineness:

i) The Gospel writers all draw heavily on the other scriptures - but the resurrection narratives do not, when they easily could have done. This, suggests Wright, leads us to think that we are dealing with genuine eyewitness and oral tradition material, not something constructed artificially.

ii) Unlike many other parts of the Gospel, there is little or no textual relation between the resurrection narratives, which suggests they rely on numerous independent sources rather than a single common origin which has then been duplicated.

iii) Despite the supreme theological significance the early church gives to the resurrection in its scriptures and creeds, the resurrection narratives contain almost no theologising or creed-like formulations (unlike Paul, for example) which again suggests authenticity and not that the narratives are the product of early church imagination.

iv) The reliance upon women for the resurrection appearances - unthinkable in a male dominated oral tradition

v) Some critics have suggested the parts about Jesus eating etc were added in the 2nd century to combat docetism. This can hardly be taken seriously, says Wright, because the parts about Jesus walking through closed doors would have been music to docetic ears.

vi) The sense of urgency the resurrection narratives give is very clear: Jesus is raised and is Lord of the world, we must act immediately. there is none of the later eschatological thought about Christian hope that is found elsewhere in the NT. The lack of theological development suggests the resurrection narratives are very early.

Wright closed this section with another fierce attack on reductionists who have posited all kinds of ridiculous ideas to explain the resurrection narratives (e.g. the disciples reinterpreted his death, but really they just understood that his soul had gone to heaven, or they were so upset they hallucinated it all). In short, the best explanation for the resurrection beliefs of the early church are based on the simple fact that they really happened, no other suggestion fits the evidence as well.

Methodology

Lastly (and hopefully more on this tomorrow), Wright offered a few suggestions about method and asked how can we know about the resurrection. He is quick to point out that we cannot 'prove' the resurrection in a rational sense, as it has no analogy in history. Any methods we use to invesitgate it will have formed based on experiences of history where there have been no resurrections. Yet if we are right, and the resurrection did happen, it happened within history and so it has the power to transform and shape history towards its eschatological goal.

Traditional methods of knowing and seeing are limited when it comes to the resurrection. Wright rather helpfully used the story of Thomas to make his point. The historical rationalists are like Thomas, demanding empirical proof of the raised Jesus. Yet Jesus' response is first to challenge Thomas to believe, and it is only then that Thomas gets the evidence he needs and exclaims 'My Lord and My God'. This serves as a good example to show how faith and historical enquiry meet in the study of the resurrection. We cannot convince people of the resurrection by simple rational argument, because belief in the resurrection cannot leave one remaining in a state of non-commital, it is not a neutral historical event. We are to witness to it however, and pray for those who do not yet believe. Wright closed by saying that although we can amass evidence for the resurrection, it is love that believes it. This does not mean that it is a mere subjectivism that 'feels' the resurrection is real, because as with Peter, Thomas, and the others, their love required an external object in the world outside the lover - the resurrected Christ.

Reflection

I'll keep this short because I need to be in bed, but once again I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture and found it both educational and spiritually edifying. The survey of the historical situation surrounding early church belief in the resurrection was excellent, though I would have liked to have heard a bit more on the methodology by which we understand the resurrection (though in a stiflingly hot room, I was having trouble taking it all in by that stage). Some interesting questions were asked, but the most tricky one of all was by a friend of mine who enquired "if Jesus left the burial linen in the tomb, how was it that he had clothes by the time he appeared to the women? Where did he get them from?" That's a tough one even for N T Wright.

Tomorrow's lecture is entitled 'New world, new bodies.' Should be great.

Poor old Steve Chalke...

There's nothing quite like getting slated for something you haven't actually said or done. Adrian quotes Phil Johnson quoting Spurgeon in a warning about those who dismiss the substitutionary nature of the atonement. Steve Chalke of course infamously said that often the cross has been presented as a form of 'cosmic child abuse' (it has been presented this way, and wrongly so) though really he was attacking some of the more inept presentations of the Gospel that have become popular in many evangelical circles. He does not deny (and neither do any of the other emerging church leaders as far as I know) that Christ died a substitutionary death for us.

Spurgeon himself seems to have gotten stuck halfway between Anselm and the classic Reformed position:

"My conscience tells me that I must render to God's justice a recompense for the dishonor that I have done to His law, and I cannot find anything which bears the semblance of such a recompense till I look to Christ Jesus."

Doesn't this sound rather more like satisfaction theory rather than the popular version of penal substitution? This is of course slightly problematic, because Anselm (satisfaction theory) and the magisterial Reformers view Christ's death in two very different ways, because of course if Christ makes recompense to God's honour, no punishment is required. Here's Anselm:

"God the Father did not treat that man (Jesus) as you apprently understood him to have done; nor did he hand over an innocent man to be killed in the place of the guilty party. For the Father did not coerce Christ to face death against his will, or give permission for him to be killed, but Christ himself of his own volition underwent death to save mankind."

In Anselm, Christ makes satisfaction and atones for sin by his perfect obedience and satisfaction of God's demands for obedience rather than by being killed to balance out God's demands for justice, which is why Spurgeon's polemic is a little hazy. There'll be more on this but alas it's time to go to work.

N T Wright Lecture: Monday

Tonight was the first of four lectures that N T Wright is giving at my college this week on the theme 'Life After life After Death' which will be looking at the Christian ideas about resurrection and life after death in both theology and the New Testament. Those who have read The Resurrection of the Son of God and For All the Saints will be familiar with much of what Wright outlined in his opening lecture. The lectures are being published by Paternoster next year so there won't be any audio available and I'm limited as to what I can quote but here's a few thoughts on tonight's lecture entitled Present Confusion About Future Hope.


As in all my lectures, I made thorough notes 


The lecture began by reflecting on public responses to death in world events of recent years, from the public outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Diana to the drama of 9/11 to the unimaginable carnage of the Tsunami. More than ever before, Wright noted, people are questioning and positing all kinds of various ideas about life after death, and the Christian doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead has become confused and muddled in the melée of ideas to do with death and what happens afterwards.

Most worryingly, the church seems to have substituted the idea of a bodily resurrection and the future making new of all things for ideas about a soul going to heaven when we die. Not only is this idea supremely anti-biblical, but too often the Gospel is shorn of the good news for the future of the whole physical creation and instead the emphasis has been placed on the post-mortem fate of our immmortal souls. The secular world is also greatly confused about what it believes about life after death, and the wide range of beliefs in the different world religions and as well as the prevalent pantheism and emphasis on reincarnation (which Wright described as "psychoanalysis by another means" - because people are simply creating their futures as a means of self-discovery) show just how little untiy and clarity of thought there is on the matter.

Wright then spent some time outlining the rise and fall of ideas about the afterlife over the last 2-300 years, and showing how often Christians have subconsciously ditched New Testament ideas about bodily resurrection and adopted often quite pagan ideas in their place. I hadn't really realised it until now, but Wright went through various popular hymns of the last 200 years to show how often Christians have got ideas about death and life after death completely wrong. Christian belief does not involve becoming a part of the natural world, losing ourselves in the ocean of God's divine essence, continuing our spiritual journey beyond the grave or enduring a spell in purgatory. Wright was particularly critical of the re-emergence of the doctrine of purgatory in recent years.

The second half of the lecture was entitled 'Confusion of Hope among Christians' and he began by sharing one or two thoughts on contemporary Christian attitudes towards death, most of which he felt did not understand death. We have begun to view death something to make peace with, and have begun to redescribe it in all kinds of ways to be able to accomodate it. Wright reminded us however, that death is a "horrid enemy" - but one that Christ has defeated and which will ultimately be swallowed up in victory. In the short term, death can be seen as a 'paradoxical friend' that ushers in our sleep before the resurrection of the dead, but we must remember that death is only temporary and will ultimately be destroyed by the power of God.

Wright moved on to an all too short discussion about heaven and hell, but often reminded us that the Christian replacement of the idea of resurrection and new creation with heaven and hell owes more to Plato and Dante than it does to Jesus and Paul. The NT talks about 'heaven' but not in the sense we understand it today. Likewise much biblical talk about hell often has little to do with the ideas we imagine about an endless post-mortem state of torment, but there'll be more on that in the rest of the week's lectures.

The unfortunate outworking of this has bene that instead joyfully anticipating the coming of heaven to earth and God making his dwelling with men, we now live in an escapist dualism where Christians are waiting for God to remove them from earth and carry us all off to heaven while the earth is done away with (pay attention Tim Lahaye). This is the opposite of the biblical picture, Wright explained. We are to value God's creation and ourselves (including the body) and look forward to not an escape from history, but to anticipate here and now the joyful fact that God will one day completely overthrow death and decay and make the world new. As agents of God's Kingdom on Earth, we are not to be passive escapists but we are to value God's world and to look to its transformation in the power of God's spirit.

Reflections

I have to say I thought Wright's delivery of his lecture was excellent. He has an extraordinary ability to communicate on so many levels simultaneously that he reached both to the professors and the non-specialists at the same time. I think one or two (or twenty) people were a bit surprised to hear that the New Testament teaching about the afterlife and the hope of the Gospel was not all about where your soul goes when you die. I'll also get my boasting done now as well by saying that I had a cup of tea with him afterwards and found him to be a very humble and friendly person - far from the image of him that is portrayed on certain minority websites and blogs as a false teacher bent on corrupting biblical doctrine.

As for the content of the lecture, there wasn't anything massively controversial from a theological or biblical point of view, but it was both spiritually refreshing and intellectually challenging and I'm thoroughly looking foward to tomorrow night's lecture when the subject will be 'The Resurrection of Jesus'