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atonement
Submitted by Andrew on 21 March, 2008 - 18:50. 
The suffering servant poem of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is set in the middle of
prophecies about the restoration of oppressed and disgraced Israel. Immediately
preceding it is the announcement to Zion that ‘your God reigns’, that the
wretched exiles will be brought back, that God has acted to redeem Jerusalem
‘before the eyes of all the nations’, that there will be singing and rejoicing
because God has comforted his people (52:7-10). Immediately after is the
exultant address to the barren, desolate wife: the time of suffering, shame,
reproach, when God in his anger hid his face from her, is over, and her many
children ‘will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities’ (54:3).
In both instances the promise is that desolate, humiliated Israel will be
restored and will prosper.
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Submitted by Andrew on 27 February, 2008 - 17:37.
The discussion between Graham and Peter about the centrality or otherwise of
the cross starting here was running out of
space, so I will make this contribution a separate post. Peter’s view is that
the cross must be central to our theology; Graham’s response is that in practice
this leads to a downplaying of discipleship and ethics. It seems to me that this
rather highlights the problem that we typically define ourselves with reference
to some part of the New Testament material and with too little regard for
the narrative whole and its connection with history. |
Submitted by Andrew on 29 October, 2007 - 16:01.
The first and most important question we face in
asking about the meaning of Jesus’ death in Paul is: What sort of thing are we
looking for? This is necessarily a highly abbreviated analysis, but I
think that what we need to find is not the right explanatory theory to
superimpose on top of Paul’s various arguments and
metaphors (substitutionary atonement, Christus Victor,
moral influence, etc.) but the eschatological narrative that lies underneath
them. The mistake that is typically made is to isolate the cross from
the narrative context and transmute it into a singular metaphysical
event that can in principle be formulated in terms of a theory of the
atonement. This is not necessarily an illegitimate procedure, but
problems arise when these theological constructs are turned round and
used as interpretive grids for the reading of scripture.
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Submitted by Andrew on 22 October, 2007 - 18:46.
I am holding a couple of Bible studies on the meaning of
Jesus’ death tonight and next Monday here in the Hague. The following
brief notes outline what I think are the main interpretive perspectives
on his death in the Gospels. Next week I will look at Paul. To my mind,
the main points to be grasped from these perspectives are i) that we
need to make sense of Jesus’ death primarily within a (multilayered)
narrative rather than systematic theological framework; and
ii) that at least in the Gospels his death is understood as being not
for humanity but for Israel. In essence,
his death is interpreted by means of various extended stories drawn
from the Old Testament that articulate a hope of forgiveness and
restoration for Israel following judgment and alienation from YHWH. It
seems to me that any attempt to understand his death in universal terms
must first respect the historical contingency of the Gospel accounts.
This is not to say that the cross has no universal significance, rather
that whatever universal significance it has comes by way of its
significance for first century Israel. |
Submitted by Andrew on 26 April, 2007 - 14:34.
Text: 14 For the love of Christ constrains us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died;
This post and its comments have been reproduced on the commentary subsite . Discussion should be continued there.
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Submitted by Andrew on 26 September, 2006 - 23:20.
The doctrine of ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ remains a major bone of contention between the yapping, excitable Jack Russell of the emerging church and the snarling pit bull of reformed theology. There may be some dispute over the choice of dogs, but the seriousness and persistence of the disagreements is apparent from, for example, the 9Marks Forum and this paragraph from an essay by Albert Mohler in which he quotes from D.A. Carson’s Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Given the fact that both McLaren and Chalke deny the substitutionary nature of the atonement – indeed, rejecting virtually any notion of penal substitution – Carson sees the ghost of a discredited theological liberalism. ‘I have to say, as kindly but as forcefully as I can, that to my mind, if words mean anything, both McLaren and Chalke have largely abandoned the Gospel,’ Carson laments. ‘Perhaps their rhetoric and enthusiasm have led them astray and they will prove willing to reconsider the published judgments on these matters and embrace biblical truth more holistically than they have been doing in their most recent works. But if not, I cannot see how their own words constitute anything less than a drift toward abandoning the Gospel itself.’ |
Submitted by Pilgrim on 9 July, 2006 - 18:09.
With the EA having recently declared that penal substitution is central to a correct understanding of the atonement, does this mean that anyone who challenges the concept is, by definition, no longer an Evangelical?
Or does it mean that the EA has simply swerved to the right and is no longer a representative group for Evangelicals? |
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This post and its comments have been reproduced on the commentary subsite . Further discussion should be carried on there.
In a vigorous Fulcrum article entitled ‘The Cross and the Caricatures: a response to Robert Jenson, Jeffrey John, and a new volume entitled Pierced for Our Transgressions’, Tom Wright argues that in order to make sense of the idea of ‘penal substitution’ we must locate it
This is broadly correct, though I think he tends to overstate the extent to which Israel was chosen ‘as the means of putting everything right’. Wright then makes an emphatic statement about Jesus’ substitutionary role:
This is supported by reference to 2 Corinthians 5:14: the Christ who was ‘made sin’ (or a ‘sin offering’) died for all, therefore all died. Wright does not explain how Paul’s logic works here - the argument is only summarily stated. But I would question the conclusion that Paul sees Christ in his death as a substitute for the ‘whole human race’. I think that here, though less clearly than in Romans 3:22-26, the logic of Christ’s death for all relates primarily, and perhaps even exclusively, to Israel as the people of God.
The reasons for this, very briefly, are as follows. i) Sacrifice in Old Testament thought is always for the sake of God’s chosen people, so we would naturally expect the logic of sacrifice to bring those parameters with it. ii) If Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is behind Paul’s thought here, it speaks of the servant’s suffering because of the sins of Israel (see the comments on Romans 3:22-26). iii) The all for whom Christ died are the all who have died, which makes it difficult to think that Paul at this moment presents this as a death for the whole world. It is a death for that community that dies and lives in Christ. The argument that Paul is thinking of all who have died ‘in Adam’ (e.g. Barnett, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 289-290) really does not work. iv) The all who have died in Christ also participate in his life (cf. 2 Cor. 5:4, 15); they will be raised with him (4:14); they become ‘new creation’ (5:17). These are images of renewed Israel. The point is that the individual believer has become caught up in the story about Israel as it is encapsulated in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
So I would say that in Paul’s understanding Jesus died for the sake of, or in the place of, Israel under the wrath of God, and that under this narrative it makes sense to speak of Christ’s death as a matter of ‘penal substitutionary atonement’. But we should hesitate to universalize the argument. He died not for every individual but - this is the thought that lies at the heart of Romans - for the sake of the promise to Abraham when the vehicle of that promise faced destruction.
Of course, because the people of the promise has been saved through Christ’s act of faithfulness, Paul can appeal to the ‘world’ to be reconciled to God and become incorporated into that restored community (5:19-20). In a secondary or extended sense, therefore, it can be said that Jesus died for all humanity, but the specific logic of substitution should really be confined to the narrative about the people of God under judgment. Then it becomes a question of how we understand the conditions of YHWH’s covenant with Israel as set out, for example, in Deuteronomy 28.