Resolved, To Not Think Wrongly About Jesus (But To Speak Uncharitably About Our Enemies)

I honestly feel I’ve approached the Resolved conference with an open mind. I’m not saying I had no bias – my initial post made that bias quite clear. But honestly, as each speaker has taken the stage I’ve found myself inwardly excited about the possibility of hearing something true, edifying, and spirit-filled. After all, these are some of the most highly acclaimed preachers in this particular evangelical camp.

However, I spent the majority of Saturday rather disappointed.

First up was Al Mohler, who chose to preach on Jesus as the high priest and mediator of a new and better covenant. Mohler stressed the Holy requirements of God and the desperate need for a perfect substitute to satisfy the wrath that resulted from the human failure to meet those requirements. It was clear from the beginning that Mohler wasn’t really there to speak about Jesus, so much as to press a particular – and for most people, obscure – agenda about Jesus’ death: namely, penal substitutionary atonement. Towards the end he hammered his point home:

“The shortest summary of the gospel in the NT is, ‘He saves.’ Jesus is our savior. We all desperately need a savior. He is the high priest who brings salvation. This is the doctrine of penal substitution and without it there is no gospel.”

In other words, to put Mohler’s teaching as precisely as I can, faith in Jesus isn’t the defining marker of salvation – rather, it is the ability to understand, agree with, and articulate a particular kind of technical belief concerning how and why Jesus died. This theme of salvation hanging on the apprehension of a technicality is one I would hear several more times throughout the conference – although, interestingly, not always in relation to theories of the atonement. Apparently, according to some of the Resolved preachers, there are several finely nuanced abstract constructions one must think about properly in order to be “saved.”

Mohler never explicitly defined what he meant by “salvation,” but in listening to his message it becomes quite clear that according to him what we’re saved from is God (meaning God’s wrath).

It’s not that I disagree with the notion that we must strive to have a proper conception of God. Actually, I do agree. I just don’t agree that thinking wrongly about God eternally condemns us. If it does, we’re all buggered. Making doctrinal purity salvific is the fundamentalist equivalent of Pentecostals making mystical encounters salvific. Both camps say that in order to be saved we must “know” God. Fundy’s make such “knowing” about doctrinal assent, while Pentecostals make it all about having a sensory relationship with God. (I’ve pointed out before that Jesus didn’t say we have to know him in order to be saved, but rather that he must know us).

My problem with both camps is, either way, they’ve made “God” and faith and salvation into boundaries of division rather than bridges of reconciliation.

A good example of this tendency to divide in Al Mohler’s preaching was his constant use of insults and fallacious rhetoric, which he aimed at his ideological opponents. For example, he unfairly caricatured liberal Christianity by referring to some feminist theologians who declared Christ’s crucifixion was an example of “divine child abuse.”

Again, it’s not that I completely disagree. Such extreme theologies are silly and absurd. My problem is that pointing to the most extreme versions of liberalism doesn’t accurately portray the vast, legitimate spectrum of differing theological opinions. He’s not engaging other’s views, he’s hen-picking the worst examples of his opponents and painting all “liberals” with that brush. In doing so he effectively creates an “us vs them” posture for this community. He did the same thing with the Catholic practice of mass. Rather than honestly engage with Catholic theology on this point (which would have been off topic) he merely took a cheap opportunity to vilify all Catholics in a snide tone that communicated not only disagreement, but disdain.

(He also engaged in a rather bizarre rant about P.E.T.A. and the necessity of the animal sacrifices in the OT to cause real and extended suffering for the animals involved. He seems to believe that mere sacrifice wasn’t enough for propitiation; suffering was also required (how much suffering Mr. Mohler?). With this strange and completely unfounded argument he seemed to be going for a hat trick: defending penal substitutionary atonement, legitimizing eternal conscious torment in hell, and associating the opponents of those two beliefs with radical animal extremists.)

Let’s face it: It’s easier to rally people around the differences they have with others than it is to rally them around the commonality we all share. He’s protecting the boundaries of fundamentalism because it’s easier than ministering reconciliation. This kind of technique is simply a manifestation of violence, and hence, a total affront to the gospel. His tactics were fear, shame, and coercion; the gospel, on the other hand, is about Christ, the God-man who totally abdicated such tactics.

What really bothered me was that all I’ve ever heard about Al Mohler is how brilliant the guy is. After all, he has a Ph.D. in Systematic and Historical Theology from Southern Baptist Seminary. I would expect an awful lot more intellectual even-handedness and charity from a Christian scholar. At the very least, I’m quite sure he’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so I honestly expected someone who was reasonable, intellectually honest, and frankly, utterly convincing.

Instead, I was saddened and disappointed by what I heard.

Technorati Tags: Al Mohler, Atonement, Gospel, Penal Substitution, Resolved Conference

After SVS 2010: Steve Burnhope, Penal Substitutionary Atonement and 21st Century Mission

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Steve Burnhope: “Culture, Worldview and the Cross: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and 21st Century Mission”

Abstract
Evangelicals have customarily relied on the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement in gospel presentations.  However, questions have recently been raised from within Evangelicalism as to whether this explanation is saleable in today’s world. In the Reformers’ day, judicial punishment through the infliction of brutal physical violence – such as torture, bodily mutilation, burning alive and drowning – was the normal sentence in criminal justice.  In today’s culture, though, where the judicial system no longer endorses these sentencing practices, is the message of a Saviour who took the brutal physical violent punishment we deserve (for even the smallest of sins), so saving us from God inflicting eternal conscious torment in Hell, still ‘good news’? “If the only gospel we’ve got solves a problem that nobody feels, then it’s no wonder our churches are shrinking” (Stephen Holmes).  Meanwhile, the Christian gospel is widely parodied. But do we have a biblical mandate to explain the ‘problem’ (of ‘sin’) and the ‘solution’ (how Christ dying ‘for us’ is efficacious) in other than ‘crime-and-punishment’ terms. Actually, throughout history, the Church has never insisted on a particular view of Atonement for Christian orthodoxy. In fact, Scripture provides sundry theories of the Atonement in metaphors, models, images or stories of salvation, congregating around spheres of public life (such as the law courts, commerce, personal relationships, worship and the battleground), all drawing on the life worlds of the audiences.  The ‘penal’, juridical view is but one. The Bible reflects a far broader understanding of ‘sin’ than the legal model to which Evangelicalism’s individualized telling has reduced it in Modernity.  The justice of God has been ‘too closely tied to individual sin and forgiveness and too loosely tied to the cosmic and social dimensions’ (Colin Gunton).  Sin affects humanity – as both perpetrators and victims (we are both) – and also, human society and the entire created order. Although penal substitution can be found in scripture, it lacks the exegetical support that any claim to hegemony requires.  This being so, we are not only justified in revisiting its central role in gospel presentations, we are compelled to do so.  To be effective evangelistically, our stories need to answer the questions people actually have, not the ones they ought to have or used to have.  A broader understanding of Atonement more authentically reflects the full biblical picture and enables the gospel to speak more powerfully in the cultural environment facing 21^st century mission.

Interview With Steven

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Before I began theological study, the question of how Christ saved us always bothered me.  In fact, I began theological studies to answer a host of such questions that, for me, were never adequately answered by the standard explanations kicking around in popular Christianity.  I had faith that there were answers out there, but the Church didn’t seem to have them (and nor did it seem much to be aware that it didn’t!).

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: I wouldn’t claim it’s any more relevant to the Vineyard than to the Church-at-large, save insofar as Vineyard is at heart deeply missional.  And, at the heart of mission, is how we tell the gospel-story.  Jesus is the answer, but very often the presumed question, that evangelists are working to in the ‘telling’, is anachronistic. Penal substitution has claimed hegemony in Evangelical telling, but it’s not sufficiently supported scripturally for that, and nor is it culturally compelling any longer either.  For example, it requires a latent sense of guilt.  In the Western postmodern world, people don’t feel guilty that way any more, as we might wish them to, and as the penal explanation requires them to. It also requires an ancient world view of crime and punishment.

That said, atonement is not about inventing therapeutic soteriological ideas to order, to suit popular predilections.  That would be an assimilation of culture, not the critique of culture – all cultures, not just postmodern culture – that Newbigin says is inherent in the gospel. However, the Bible explains the mystery of Christ’s work in a whole ‘kaleidoscope’ of models, metaphors, theories or stories of salvation, each reflecting a different aspect of this very deep and far reaching problem of ‘sin’ in us and in this world.  The ‘legal’ view of problem and solution is but one aspect.  The Bible authorizes an expansive range of images for comprehending and articulating the Atonement.  Since each image also presumes a portrait of the human situation, some will be more attractive than others, some will feel more relevant than others, some will resonate better with people in one time, and others to different people in another time.  We need to tap into this biblical material for our gospel to touch people where they are at.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: Getting me lynched, in some circles, is one of them! Stephen Sykes has made the point that in postmodernity, not all people live in, or are persuaded by, one overarching metanarrative.  This can seem like a major problem in telling the metanarrative of the gospel, if we think of it in those terms.  However, Sykes sees in Atonement one concession that can easily be made to Postmodernity’s ways of thinking, because of this biblical ‘kaleidoscope.’  I think this is right.  However, it’s not about choosing (and sticking to) your preferred model, granting that hegemony instead, because all of them have something to say to us, but let’s at least start scratching where our audience is itching. It does not – to anticipate one obvious criticism – mean going soft on sin as human wrongdoing, or on judgement as an ultimate accountability for our lives and our choices.  We can certainly find different language and concepts in this area, which may be more helpful to the unchurched than some of the ‘lazy’ ways we’re used to parroting, so I do think one implication is that we need to work harder in our gospel-telling, but these essential truths need not be left out.

I think the other implication is that we have to concede (and this is hard for Moderns) that at the heart of the cross is a mystery. We really don’t have a single, conclusive explanation for ‘how’ exactly Christ’s incarnation, life, death and resurrection (not just his death, in my view) is efficacious for us.  To the Modern way of thinking, saying ‘we really don’t know, in any complete sense’, sounds like an apologetic weakness.  In postmodernity, though, we can live with mystery; our epistemology (way of knowing) doesn’t need a foundational understanding based on one most basic truth.  We can say, ‘it’s like this’, and ‘it’s like that’, and we frankly grasp it only partially, like looking at a dim reflection.  Of course, that we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we don’t know anything, but for some, this more humble and less assertive approach will be hard to accept.

There’s another implication here, too, in “What does it mean to be ‘saved’?”, but that’s for another time.

Stephen will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Stephen Burnhope lives in Buckinghamshire in the U.K. and is part of North Thames Vineyard, High Wycombe. He was awarded the Master of Arts with Distinction by the London School of Theology and will begin PhD research in 2010. His MA dissertation was on the atonement and contemporary culture. Stephen is married to Lyn, a religious education teacher and fellow MA graduate of LST, with four children and one grandson.

Technorati Tags: Atonement, Justification, Penal Substitution, Society of Vineyard Scholars, Steve Burnhope, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

Sociopaths Need Jesus Too

Technorati Tags: Atonement, Forgiveness, Gospel, guilt, Micahel Spencer, Penal Substitution, Sartre, Scot McNight, sin