UCCF interview
Adrian Warnock has an interview with the head of the University and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) over on his blog. I was quite active in the CU at Manchester during my first year there but a change of course and a change of campus means that I no longer have much to do with it, plus at the ripe old age of 24 I feel a bit left behind by all these young 18 year old students with their i-pods or whatever it is the young people are into these days.UCCF do a grand job in running CUs on University campuses in the UK and the Relay guys who run them are excellent people, although I did find them to be not quite as open to charismatics as Richard Cunningham seems to envisage.
Atonement
More worrying is the insinuation in the interview (not helped by a rather leading question it has to be said) that those who do not hold to the penal substutionary doctrine of the atonement would not be welcome in the Christian Union of a British University. It's no secret that I think the whole Chalkegate atonement scandal was the biggest non-controversy in the history of modern evangelicalism, but to decide whether or not people are 'in' or 'out' on the basis of their attitude to particular aspects of a particular theory of the atonement.
When we examine the UCCF statement of faith however, it becomes clear that their version of penal substitution is still actually rather broad:
"Sinful human beings are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death once and for all time of their representative and substitute, Jesus Christ, the only mediator between them and God."
There's nothing here that I think Steve Chalke and Co would disagree with. On the whole I am in agreement with Chalke (who it must be remembered is simply elaborating the atonement doctrine of H R Mackintosh) but I can't say there's anything I'd disagree with in this statement about the atonement. The disagreement between myself, Richard, Adrian and others has arisen when it has come to going beyond statements (both biblical and non-biblical) about the atonement and trying to come up with explanations about what is actually happening in Christ's work in a way that is coherent.
John Stott and the Atonement
The daddy of almost every conservative evangelical student I've ever met is of course John Stott, and although I largely disagree with his explanation of the atonement in chapter 6 of his classic work The Cross of Christ, he makes this very astute observation that I'm not sure many evangelicals would now agree with in the post-Chalke aftermath of evangelical atonement theology:
"We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of one another or were even in conflict with one another. We must never make Christ the object of God's punishment or God the object of Christ's persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taken the initiative together to save sinners."
Stott still doesn't shake off the idea of God being in some kind of internal conflict with himself but instead relocates the conflict between love (read: God wants to save humanity) and justice (read: God's holiness demands that he destroy them) away from the Father-Son relationship and instead posits the (false) dilemma in the character of God himself, and so the atonement becomes a means by which God readjusts the balance between his love and his wrath within his own person. Stott insists though, that this is not acheived by God punishing Jesus - something that I think Steve Chalke would agree with - but what of other conservative evangelicals?
Unity
Would John Stott be allowed in a modern UCCF-run CU? Of course he would, and I'm being facetious here of course, but I'm trying to make a point. Trying to exclude someone from fellowship on the basis of some doctrinal finery is a profoundly dangerous thing to do, epsecially that there is neither a biblical nor historical precedent for excluding someone from fellowship on the basis of their understanding of the atonement.
The locus of Christian unity is the person of Jesus Christ, it is in him that we are united in love and faith with our brothers and sisters and he is the one we worship and in whom and for whom we live. Here there is no division, and this is why it is Jesus Christ is the central point of unity. Christian unity is like a series of concentric circles with Christ at the centre and the smaller doctrinal issues belong on the outskirts. It is only when the smaller issues replace Christ at the centre of the Christian faith that division occurs in Christ's body. The most divisive groups and individuals are those who seek to make central what is really marginal and who marginalise what really should be central. Excluding people from fellowship on the basis of whether or not they understand and agree with a particular slant of a particular doctrine in such a way is divisive and profoundly unhelpful to the life of the Church.