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Originally posted by Divine Outlaw Dwarf:
I just think we should talk about the atonement.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I don't think I was advising any such thing: just suggesting that the caricature is so closely associated with the nuanced theology (and having read +Wright's Fulcrum piece, almost indistinguishable from), that for those of us who get the heebie-jeebies from badly-taught PSA, it may as well stay in the seminaries.

Possibly until someone can explain it properly.

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Possibly, it's popular because it's easily "caricatured"? By which I mean, you can explain PSA in clear sentences and perhaps diagrams that go on a flyer that you can hand out at evangelistic events. It's a good story: a clear, simple solution to a clear problem. It's enough for many people, who just aren't that interested in all this intellectual philosophy stuff.

It's only when you start thinking about it that the problems start. A bit like the "solar system" model of an atom is good enough for GCSE, but has real problems when you start thinking about stuff like "why haven't all those electrons fallen into the nucleus?" (thanks, Doc Tor). The problem with QM descriptions of the atom is that, whilst being nuanced and having far more explanatory power, they just aren't as visual. The "story" isn't as clear.

I've read all this thread (well, skimmed parts ), and I still couldn't give a coherent explanation of Christus Victor to match what Stuart Townsend managed with PSA in a couple of lines in In Christ Alone.

- Chris.

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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot

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Originally posted by sanityman:
Possibly, it's popular because it's easily "caricatured"? By which I mean, you can explain PSA in clear sentences and perhaps diagrams that go on a flyer that you can hand out at evangelistic events. It's a good story: a clear, simple solution to a clear problem. It's enough for many people, who just aren't that interested in all this intellectual philosophy stuff.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The caricature of PSA is easily explained. And because it presents the concept that a holy, just and righteous God kills his entirely innocent son who bears the sins of the world - it leads folk like me to say "Hang on a minute! This is neither justice nor mercy. Why would I follow a God like that?"

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Originally posted by Callan:
It seems the Oak Hill lot were not best pleased by +Wright's comments. They respond here.

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Given that NT Wright called their approach "hopelessly sub-biblical," I'm not surprised! If you want a good way to upset evangelicals of their stripe, I can't think of a better way of doing it

- Chris.

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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot

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Originally posted by Callan:
That was quite entertaining wasn't it.

Oddly enough I think the conservative evangelicals come out of the spat looking better than Wright does. At least they did not endorse Steve Chalke's book, which says pretty much the same as Jeffrey John did, and then try to weasel out of it whilst having a pop at Fr. John.

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Originally posted by Freddy:
He spent most of the article railing against JJ's "caricature" of PSA - calling the problems with the caricature "obvious" to those who framed the atonement theories, and talking about a more nuanced approach.

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NT Wright does tend to come across as his homnym... I suppose it depends whether you view Chalke's position and John's as essentially the same. Wright seems to be contending that, aside for the merits or otherwise of his position on PSA, Jeffery John is taking liberties with scripture, whereas Steve Chalke (presumably) isn't. I do detect a bit of "Liberals == enemy" about this: Chalke is allowed to get away with statements as hyperbole whicj JJ is taken to task for similar rhetoric.

I don't think +Tom is trying to "weasel out" of his support for Chalke: he does say "I stand by every word I wrote" in support of him. However, reading what Chalke had to say here, I wonder if NTW's impression that he does support PSA is correct..?

- Chris.

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Now, to be frank, I cannot tell, from this paragraph alone, which of two things Steve means. You could take the paragraph to mean (a) on the cross, as an expression of God's love, Jesus took into and upon himself the full force of all the evil around him, in the knowledge that if he bore it we would not have to; but this, which amounts to a form of penal substitution, is quite different from other forms of penal substitution, such as the mediaeval model of a vengeful father being placated by an act of gratuitous violence against his innocent son. In other words, there are many models of penal substitution, and the vengeful-father-and-innocent-son story is at best a caricature of the true one. Or you could take the paragraph to mean (b) because the cross is an expression of God's love, there can be no idea of penal substitution at all, because if there were it would necessarily mean the vengeful-father-and-innocent-son story, and that cannot be right.

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On the cross God absorbs into himself our falleness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship.

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on the cross, as an expression of God's love, Jesus took into and upon himself the full force of all the evil around him, in the knowledge that if he bore it we would not have to;

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
This con evo can only deal with the Biblical thesis which still no one here or any where else has antithetically even balanced let alone transcended.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I UTTERLY agree it's problematic. That God - Love - the hanging judge, the counselor, the genocidal killer, the Saviour, the assassin of Ananias and Sapphira, the Father, the Son and sacrificer of His Son is ... problematic.

I can't explain how He is SO. And no liberal POV can explain how He ISN'T.

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Originally posted by Freddy:

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
This con evo can only deal with the Biblical thesis which still no one here or any where else has antithetically even balanced let alone transcended.

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What biblical thesis? If you mean Isaiah 53 I am ready to give a better explanation.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I UTTERLY agree it's problematic. That God - Love - the hanging judge, the counselor, the genocidal killer, the Saviour, the assassin of Ananias and Sapphira, the Father, the Son and sacrificer of His Son is ... problematic.

I can't explain how He is SO. And no liberal POV can explain how He ISN'T.

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Sure we can. God is none of those negatives. God is only love. He is perfectly self-consistent.

The reason that God, in the Bible, is said to get angry, curse, kill, and destroy, is so that even the most ignorant people can grasp the central idea that God is completely in charge, He is omnipotent.

So this idea, which completely contradicts God's real nature, is repeatedly rehearsed in Scripture....

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Mr Cunningham said, however, that the decision to end the partnership lay in the 2003 publication of the controversial The Lost Message of Jesus by the Rev Steve Chalke, a member of the Spring Harvest Event Leadership Team and Council of Management (trustees).

In The Lost Message of Jesus, Chalke promoted unorthodox views of the nature of the atonement, and hit national media headlines over his controversial and graphic description of penal substitution.

“The Word Alive committee, of which UCCF is a part, believed such views to be contrary to orthodox biblical teaching and as such, decided that the Rev Steve Chalke could not teach from a Word Alive platform," said Mr Cunningham.

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Originally posted by sanityman:
Are UCCF so incapable of accomodating any views which diverge from theirs that they have to take their ball and go home?

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Originally posted by Callan:
UCCF are fairly hot on having people who speak at CU events sign their DB (although oddly that doesn't explicitly state that people ought to believe in PSA - I'd be interested in Leprechaun's take on the issue)

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First time for everything!

UCCF as an organisation historically formed as a fellowship of people who thought PSA was the heart of the Gospel, so hardly surprising that assent to the doctrine is one of the things they look for in partnerships. It's worth noting:
- Keswick have left the partnership too
- the Spring Harvest line is that there is no falling out over the atonement (after all, why would there be, as Steve Chalke does believe in PSA after all, it's just Jeffery John who doesn't ) and that it was them who ended the partnership because there "wasn't room in the mix" whatever that means.

On the DB, I link to it in fear and trembling as I have been involved in too many "everybody picks their least favourite clause" discussions: here

Clause f says: 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.

So I think it's in there.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
How biblical a God is unacceptable?

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The thing is, that for many people, Christian theology does not just consist of "what scripture says" or "Martin's interpretation of scripture".

Whilst I agree with you that there is a contradictory picture of God's character in scripture, I have perfectly biblical way of resolving that conflict - looking to Jesus who said that if we've seen him we've seen the Father - and reading the rest of the bible through that lens.

You, however, want me to believe that God beats the crap out of anyone that he doesn't like - in the most Omnipotent and omni-horrible ways possible - AND you want me to believe that God loves me.

Frankly, to me, that's unacceptable. There is a certain extent to which Christianity holds ideas in tension. But a god who beats the crap out of people for all eternity and hates our guts is - logically - a God who beats the crap out of people and hates our guts.

The logical consequence of your thinking is that God is the most horrible and evil being who ever existed. You just don't want to face the consequences. (How's that, Mr. 'I've got more guts and outrageous behaviour than anyone on the Ship'?)

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"People waste so much of their lives on hate and fear." My friend JW-N: Chaplain and three-time cancer survivor. (Went to be with her Lord March 21, 2010. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.)

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First time for everything!

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Don't belittle yourself, there are so few foepersons worthy of my steel left.

Clause f is less explicit than I'd imagined but given that its the DB of an organisation which is committed to PSA I suppose interpreting it in any other way would be a bit redundant.

The press releases are all a bit "he-said, she-said", aren't they?

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How easy it would be to live in England, if only one did not love her. - G.K. Chesterton

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Originally posted by sanityman:
Sorry for the double, but just found this and thought that this was a better place for it than a new thread:

The Word Alive event at Spring Harvest is being discontinued. Apparently a major factor was the fact the UCCF didn't think that Steve Chalke should have a platform on it. Our own +Pete comments here

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Mr Cunningham said, however, that the decision to end the partnership lay in the 2003 publication of the controversial The Lost Message of Jesus by the Rev Steve Chalke, a member of the Spring Harvest Event Leadership Team and Council of Management (trustees).

In The Lost Message of Jesus, Chalke promoted unorthodox views of the nature of the atonement, and hit national media headlines over his controversial and graphic description of penal substitution.

“The Word Alive committee, of which UCCF is a part, believed such views to be contrary to orthodox biblical teaching and as such, decided that the Rev Steve Chalke could not teach from a Word Alive platform," said Mr Cunningham.

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Was that really necessary? Are UCCF so incapable of accomodating any views which diverge from theirs that they have to take their ball and go home?

- Chris.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:

Yours isn't authoritative enough. You can't abolish the God of the bible with a wave of your liberal, rationalizing, modern, western wand. Has any one done the intellectual work? I get tired of asking. And I know the answer. No one. Has. Can. No one has the courage, the intellect to start from the premiss of the God of the bible and faithfully, openly, honestly, inclusively move to the liberal's one without being genetically, dispositionally, dyed-in-the-wool 'liberal' in the first place.

So what's the threshold? How liberal, unbiblical, trans-biblical, meta-biblical, rationalized does God have to be to be gracious? To be the best case God?

How biblical a God is unacceptable?

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Originally posted by Jolly Jape:

Ergo, the understanding of God in parts of the Old Testament are, in some way, shadows of what we see in Jesus. People trying to interpret the indescribable in terms of their own experience. That doesn't make the OT redundant; on the contrary, it teaches us how to grapple, Israel like, with a God beyond our comprehension, how to try to make sense of pain, human wickedness, disaster. That, to my mind, makes the OT far more authentic, authoritative and challenging than if we are to read it as if it were some form of primer of systematic theology.

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Wonderful summary

Thank you

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The statement made jointly by the two of us on behalf of Spring Harvest Word Alive criticising Jeffrey John's inflammatory broadcast indicates that there is no way that anyone can represent Spring Harvest as being anywhere other than the orthodox biblical stance on the atonement.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
You can't abolish the God of the bible with a wave of your liberal, rationalizing, modern, western wand. Has any one done the intellectual work? I get tired of asking. And I know the answer. No one. Has. Can.

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Originally posted by pete173:
I think this has been pretty fully discussed above. JJ's views and SC's views on the matter are not identical, as Tom Wright's article seeks to make clear.

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Originally posted by pete173:
I think this has been pretty fully discussed above. JJ's views and SC's views on the matter are not identical, as Tom Wright's article seeks to make clear.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
SHOW ME. Show me the WORK. You are saying NOTHING Freddy and worse - you are patronizing me.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Your 'pattern' is your arbitrary, contingent disposition which has no superior moral, intellectual or emotional breadth or depth than my inadequate mess.

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Probably right.

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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Am I missing something?

Seeker? Freddy?

What do I LACK? With regard to you? Or is it esoterically untransferable? Untransferably esoteric?

Can you put me right?

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Am I missing something?

Seeker? Freddy?

What do I LACK? With regard to you? Or is it esoterically untransferable? Untransferably esoteric?

Can you put me right?

In your superior wisdom and superior love? And superior faith? And superior insight?

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Martin: I don't claim superior anything, although I somehow don't think you'll believe that.

Jesus said that if we've seen him we've seen the Father. Tell me how you explain the fact that Jesus didn't act violently toward people if your 'correct' interpretation is such a no-brainer.

And people wonder why non-Christians get the idea that Christians believe that God hates them.

[ 25. April 2007, 21:42: Message edited by: Seeker963 ]

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"People waste so much of their lives on hate and fear." My friend JW-N: Chaplain and three-time cancer survivor. (Went to be with her Lord March 21, 2010. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.)

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Was Jesus being figurative about Himself here? Matt. 10:28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Sigh. And by the way I like your guts Seeker.

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Show me. It's no esoteric, intellectualist secret.

SHOW ME. Show me the WORK. You are saying NOTHING Freddy and worse - you are patronizing me.

Your 'pattern' is your arbitrary, contingent disposition which has no superior moral, intellectual or emotional breadth or depth than my inadequate mess.

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• Isaiah the prophet was commanded to take the sackcloth off below his waist and the sandals off his feet and go naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a wonder (Isaiah 20:2, 3).
• Ezekiel the prophet was commanded to represent the state of the church by making travel bags, moving to another place before the eyes of the children of Israel, taking out his bags from time to time, going out in the evening through a hole in the wall, and covering his face so he could not see the ground. In this way he would be a wonder to the house of Israel. He was told to say, "Behold, I am your wonder. As I have done, so it will be for you" (Ezekiel 12:3-7, 11).
• Hosea the prophet was commanded to represent the church's condition by marrying a promiscuous partner, which he did. She bore him three sons, one of whom he called Jezreel, the second No Mercy, and the third Not My People. At another point he was commanded to go love a woman who already had a lover and who was committing adultery, and buy her for himself (Hosea 1:2-9; 3:1, 2).
• One prophet was commanded to put ashes over his eyes and let himself be beaten and whipped (1 Kings 20:35, 38).
• Ezekiel the prophet was commanded to represent the condition of the church by taking a brick and sculpting Jerusalem on it, laying siege to it, building a rampart and a mound against it, putting an iron frying pan between himself and the "city," and sleeping on his left side and then on his right side. He also had to take wheat, barley, lentils, millet, and spelt and make bread out of them. He also had to make a cake of barley with human excrement; but because he begged not to have to do that, he was allowed to make it with cow dung instead.

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Lie on your left side and put the injustice done by the house of Israel on it. For the number of days during which you sleep on that side you will carry their injustice. For I will give you the years of their injustice according to the number of days, 390 days for you to carry the injustice done by the house of Israel. But when you have finished them, you will lie again on your right side to carry the injustice done by the house of Judah. (Ezekiel 4:1-15)

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"He bore our diseases, he carried our pains. Jehovah put on him the injustices committed by us all. Through his knowledge he justified many as he himself carried their injustices" (Isaiah 53:4, 6, 11).

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But a god who beats the crap out of people for all eternity and hates our guts is - logically - a God who beats the crap out of people and hates our guts.

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Originally posted by Boviwanjoshobi:
But the good news is that God sent his son, the Lord Jesus to die in our place, taking the punishment that we deserve so that we may be forgiven.

To reject the atonement is to reject God's offer of salvation.

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Are you suggesting that unless we see the atonement in the one way that you suggest - basically PSA - then we are all rejecting God's offer of salvation?

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This is one way of looking at things for sure, but it is far from the only way.

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What makes you think that your way of seeing is the only way, when Christians and theologians have been finding different ways of interpreting exactly how the atonement works throughout the ages?

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To me that is part of the beauty of it is that there are so many different ways of trying to interpret it all of which add colour to the whole picture. It strikes me that you are trying to define God and God's actions in a convenient formula which may be helpful for you but I think it is wrong to suggest that all others are therefore rejecting God's offer of salvation.

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But the good news is that God sent his son, the Lord Jesus to die in our place, taking the punishment that we deserve so that we may be forgiven.

To reject the atonement is to reject God's offer of salvation.

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Originally posted by Boviwanjoshobi:
It is not my way -it is God's way and the atonement is crystal clear in Scripture. The gospel that reformed evangelicals believe in is the same Gospel that was preached and taught by the apostles. There are so many passages that I could refer you to.

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It's not me you're disagreeing with, it's God...

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Originally posted by Boviwanjoshobi:
Seeker 963

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But a god who beats the crap out of people for all eternity and hates our guts is - logically - a God who beats the crap out of people and hates our guts.

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I see two problems with your view Seeker.

Firstly;I think you are equating God's wrath and/or hate with that of sinful human beings.God hates sin with a perfect and holy hatred and will punish sinners with his holy wrath. God does not 'lose it' or fly off the handle. His anger and wrath are perfectly consistent with his righteousness, holiness and authority.

Secondly; You imply that humans are morally neutral. By nature all of us hate God in a sinful way and reject his rightful rule over us. God has every right to punish people who reject him.

But the good news is that God sent his son, the Lord Jesus to die in our place, taking the punishment that we deserve so that we may be forgiven.

To reject the atonement is to reject God's offer of salvation.

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