My Article in Evangelical Quarterly: Penal Substitution and the Church Fathers

I just heard that my article on the Church Father's view of the atonement will be published in the upcoming (May) issue of Evangelical Quarterly! EQ is an international peer reviewed academic journal of Bible and Theology edited by I. Howard Marshall and published in the UK by Paternoster. So I've doing a happy little dance right now :^)

The article is a response to the book Pierced for our Transgressions claim that penal substitution was taught by the early church. The authors back this up with a host of citations from Justin Martyr, Athanasius, Augustine, and other big guns from the early church, all who seem to be espousing penal substitution. After this book came out there was quite a bit of buzz across the internet of folks exclaiming that the PfoT authors had pretty much conclusively "disproved" the misconception (taught by folks like me) that penal substitution was not taught for the first 1000 years of church history. So I was understandably a little bit irked by this claim which went against the larger tide of patristic scholarship. The problem was that it had been considered so self-evident for so long that the early church did not teach penal substitution that most historians and scholars would simply state it as fact without feeling the need to back it up. So against that the detailed array of quotations marshaled by the PfoT authors was pretty impressive. In fact, it was the one positive thing that NT Wright had to say about the book(!)

The problem is that the quotes they cite are all taken out of context and thus misrepresent what the the early church was saying. So in my EQ article I take a look at the citations they give, paying attention to the larger context, and showing that the early church not only did not teach penal substitution, but in fact explicitly denies it. Here's the tricky part though: What they do teach is substitutionary atonement, and so to folks who think that the only way to understand substitutionary atonement is in the way Calvinists do, this of course looks like the Calvinist doctrine. Only if you really listen to what the church fathers are saying, actually reading them in context, they are understanding substitutionary atonement in a very different context - one which has to do with healing our sin and liberating us from bondage.

In correcting the record, I thought it would be important to say this via an academic peer reviewed journal in order to take the conversation beyond the blogosphere and get it in front of theologians and scholars as well. My hope that it will open up the possibility of some dialog here, because while I think that the authors of Pierced for Our Transgressions are definitely wrong in their representation of the fathers, at the same time I also know that they are good guys who love Jesus and are all pretty sharp to boot. What I really appreciate about the atmosphere of debate in England (both EQ and the PfoT authors are in the UK) as opposed to here in the States is that while we tend to have polarized sides on issues that shut down communication, they are more accustomed to lively debates. That's true specifically of Evangelicalism here, and across the pond as well. So I hope that this will spur a healthy discussion, even though we obviously disagree significantly.

update: I have now posted a PDF of my article. More here.

Victor Hugo on Slavery and Prostitution

The following is a passage from Les Misérables. Hugo here is describing Fantine who has sunk to prostitution in her poverty,

"What is the story of Fantine about? It is about society buying a slave.

From whom? From misery.

From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from desertion, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a piece of bread. Misery makes the offer; society accepts.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not yet permeate it. They say that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. That is incorrect. It still exists, but now it weighs only on women, and it is called prostitution.

It weighs on women, that is to say, on grace, frailty, beauty, motherhood. This is not the least among man’s shames.

At this stage in the mournful drama, Fantine has nothing left of what she had formerly been. She has turned to marble in becoming corrupted. Whoever touches her feels a chill. She goes her way, she endures you, she ignores you; she is the incarnation of dishonor and severity. Life and the social order have spoken their last word to her. All that can happen to her has happened. She has endured all, borne all, experienced all, suffered all, lost all, wept for all."

I can't help here but think of the words of Isaiah:

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Hugo's chapter here is called Christus nos Liberavit - Christ our Liberator.

Atonements Debate: A Response to Recent Criticisms

I'm reading through the book The Atonement Debate which is a collection of essays by evangelical theologians who gathered together at a symposium hosted by the Evangelical Alliance and the London School of Theology to debate the pros and cons of penal substitution in the wake of the recent controversy in Europe sparked by a comment by Steve Chalke in his book The Lost Message of Jesus that was critical of the doctrine.

In this post I want to address the chapter by Garry Williams entitled "Penal Substitution: A Response to Recent Criticisms". Williams begins by addressing a criticism raised by Steve Chalke: that it would be inconsistent for God to command us not to practice retribution, if God made retribution the center point of his redemptive work in Jesus. Chalke sums up his position saying that "I for one believe that God practices what he preaches". Williams in response argues that God does in fact have a right to act differently than humans do. He appeals to Paul's argument in Romans 12 where he urges us not to practice retribution, but to leave that to God.

Williams is, I think, right in saying that God is not subject to the same rules as humans are. God can judge in a way that no human can. God has a right to demand our worship in a way that no human does. So Williams makes a valid point here generally. However, while we cannot take everything God does is a model for human behavior (since we are not God), the cross is presented in the New Testement specifically as a model for ethical behavior. So we can and should take the message of the cross as a model of how we should act. Paul grounds his teaching on ethics in Philipians on our imitaion of the way of the cross. Jesus also calls us to "take up our cross" and follow him. If, as Williams insists, the central message of the cross is a demonstration and affirmation of retribution, this would mean that retribution is being set forth as a model of human interaction. If the "way of the cross" is the "way of retribution" then we are called to follow in that way. Since we clearly are not called to practice retribution in the New Testament, retribution is not the "way of the cross".

Secondly, Williams in championing retribution seems to be missing the larger point of the gospel. Even if we do accept that divine retribution is justified and right, and that we as sinful humans are headed towards that judement, this by itself is by no defintion the "gospel". The gospel is a way to avoid that retribution, a way for God to not send us to Hell. The whole point of the gospel is that the economy of quid pro quo justice, of get what you deserve, of sewing and reaping is superseded by the superior economy of grace where God acts, despite the fact that we have not earned it, to save us, heal us, and set us free. I am sure that Williams agrees with all of this, but his focus on retribution seems to loose sight of the larger perspective of salvation and grace.

This is not simply a matter of semantics. Williams, in focusing his soteriology seemingly exclusivly on the idea of retribution leaves no room for the idea of sanctification. As Williams puts it, the only problem is the need for punishment. Once that punishment is "exhasted" on Christ, Williams says, the "obstacle" to new life is removed. In other words, there is no objective onological problem of sin in people that needs to be healed, the problem is with God. Here I think Williams gets it backwards. If God is angry at sin, it is because sin is a real problem. Remove the problem by healing the sin, and you remove the cause of God's righteous anger. So God acts in Christ to heal, to cleanse, to renew, to sanctifiy, to liberate, to make us new, thus addressing the problem of sin which is our problem.

The papradigm here is a medical one. If a person is sick they need a doctor. That is precisly the reason Jesus gives of why he has come to seek sinners: they are sick and need a doctor. If salvation is framed however only in terms of retribution, then the entire idea that sin is a problem that needs to be healed is simply lost. Sin becomes only an act that needs punishment, and once that punishment is taken care of, the problem just vanishes. This strikes me as a very shallow understanding of the depths of human brokenness. There are real consequences to us hurting and being hurt. Deep and profound consequences. We might even describe them as a kind of "retribution" flowing out of that action, as Williams does. But the task of salvation is for God to break that vicious cycle, to set us free from that bondage, to heal our brokenness, to make us new and clean again. That's a perspective that allows for the reality of so called "divine retribution" (and we do need to be very cautious of such phrasings as they can easily evoke a picture of sinful and petty human anger), but views it in its proper perspective within the larger picture of God's redemptive work. Simply put, it is the dilema, not the solution. The solution is grace, which is a creative, restorative, transformative, action of God, not an inaction.

nonreductive physicalism

I've been reading Nancy Murphy's "Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism" where she uses the philosophical idea of nonreductive physicalism to argue for the possibility of miracles. She continues this exploration in "Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies". So what the heck is "nonreductive physicalism", you might ask? As the name suggests, nonreductive physicalism is the opposite of reductionism which says that all our experience can be reduced down to the smallest parts. For example, if you listen to a Bach symphony and are moved to tears, reductionism would say that this is ultimately just a chemical reaction. The music sends sound waves which vibrate on your eardrums which send a signal to your brain which causes the ducts in your eyes to secrete a saline solution. Physicalism is synonymous with materialism or naturalism. Materialism is the methodological assumption of all natural sciences, and up until recently it was assumed that this materialism was reductive, that is, one could explain things like love or awe by breaking it down into the physical explanations - chemicals, brain signals, etc and thus "explain it away".

The typical choice then is between saying

A) miracles don't happen because everything is physical
B) God breaks the laws of nature

Both are modernist choices. Murphy proposes going beyond this Liberal/Fundamentalist impasse via nonreductive physicalism which offers a third possibility. It agrees that everything that exists is made of matter and energy, but says that there are no practical, law-like relationships between levels of hierarchy. That is, there is no law you could discover that would translate statements like “Nancy is feeling awe” into a description of very specific brain states or molecular events as in the above reductive example of the person moved to tears by Bach. A state of awe of being moved by beauty is certainly caused by specific brain states and molecular transactions, but slightly different brain states and molecular transactions could instantiate awe or wonder or love in a different person, or in the same person at a later date. Really its kind of a no-brainer that the person is not crying because of chemicals, they are crying because it is beautiful and moving, and we need to have a way to make sense of those very real aspects of our human experience rather than "explaining them away" through the tunnel vision of reductive physicalism.

Nonreductive physicalism would agree with the physical description is accurate as far as it goes, but say that there is more that is going in than can be described in these reductive terms. Rather than reducing everything to physics, it says we need to realize that we can also learn things about our world and who we are from the other disciplines. Biology can tell us stuff that physics alone cannot, which is why we have both, and psychology can give us yet another level of insight. At the same time the lower level disciplines can also help the hight level ones. For example we really understood what was happening with some sicknesses after they broke the human genome on a chemical level which explained what was observable on a higher biological level (genetic defects). So we no not reduce everything into physics (the old model) rather we have all the disciplines, including Murphy says ethics and theology, each contributing its own level of insights in a nonreductive way.

So what does all of this have to do with miracles? Well, you may have asked yourself when you prayed and someone got better if it was really God, or whether their healing could be explained naturally. What Murphy says is that it could very well be both. There are always physical causal properties to miracles, but this would not mean that God was not involved, just as there would be physical phenomena when you experienced love, but the chemical would not be ALL that was happening. The love is a real part and is not explained away by the physical factors involved. Both are real. So there is no need to put religion and science in separate realms that can never meet. Personally I find this line of thinking promising for a collaboration between science and faith, and a deepening of the insights of both into who we are and how we tick.

Blogging thru Wikiklesia

The Wikiklesia book seems to be off to a good start. It's gotten some rave reviews like this one from Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired Magazine,

"The hive-mind of Christianity speaks! It brings news of the future. Uttered like a prayer retrieved from the year 2030, spoken in a new tongue, a new form. Listen!"

For those of you who would like to get a sample taste of the stuff in the book to whet your appetite, Paul Walker at Out of the Cocoon is blogging through every chapter of the book, including the one by yours truly on Theology As Art. So go check it out, and then buy the book. It's for a great cause since all the proceeds go to supporting the Not for Sale campaign to end modern slavery in our world. It's available now as a download (PDF) and as audio from Lulu, and within the next few weeks will also be available there in paperback. Here's a list of all the books author's with links to their sites:

Andrew Jones
Andrew Perriman
Bill Kinnon
Bob Hyatt
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Calvin Park
Cynthia La Grou
Cynthia Ware
David Hayward
Derek Flood
Drew Goodmanson
Ed Brenegar
Heidi Campbell
Jo Guldi
Joe Suh
John La Grou
John Sexton
Br. Karekin Yarian, BSG
Katharine Moody
Kester Brewin
Len Hjalmarson
Matt Reece
Michael Lissack
Mike Morrell
Mike Riddell
Peggy Brown
Rex Miller
Rick Meigs
Scot McKnight
Scott Andreas
Scott McClellan
Scott Ragan
Stephen Garner
Stephen Shields
Steve Scott
Steve Knight
Stuart Murray Williams
Thomas Hohstadt
Wild Grace

Wikiklesia: Voices of the Virtual World

The collaborative book I was asked to contribute a chapter to, Wikiklesia Vol 1: Voices of the Virtual World will release this Monday (July 23) as an online book on Lulu. A hard copy version is on the way too, as well as audio files of the chapters recorded by the authors. You can see a list of the chapter titles for the contributing authors (who include several well known names in the Emergent scene), and the press release for the book. All the books proceeds with go to the Not for Sale campaign to end world slavery. Here's a blurb from the press release.

Voices of the Virtual World explores the growing influence of technology on the global Christian church. In this premier volume, we hear from more than forty voices, including technologists and theologians, entrepreneurs and pastors… from a progressive Episcopalian techno-monk to a leading Mennonite professor… from a tech-savvy mobile missionary to a corporate anthropologist whom Worth Magazine calls "one of Wall Street's 25 Smartest Players." Voices is a far reaching exploration of spiritual journey contextualized within a culture of increasingly immersive technology.

Conceived and established in May 2007, the Wikiklesia Project is an experiment in on-line collaborative publishing. The format is virtual, self-organizing, participatory - from purpose to publication in just a few weeks. All proceeds from the Wikiklesia Project will be contributed to the Not For Sale campaign.

Wikiklesia

I was invited by John Lagrou to contribute a chapter to the upcoming online collaborative book that will be available to download from Amazon.com very shortly. Other authors include Andrew Jones, Andrew Perriman, Doug Pagitt, and Scot McKnight. The basic theme of the book will be on the intersection of the interactive technology known as "web 2.0" - blogs, wiki boards, youtube, etc., and how this has effected how we think and live out faith and church.

I'll be talking in my chapter about faith, art, and technology. How faith and art intertwine, and the shape that this takes in a wired world, and the impact this has for independent artists. The proceeds from the book will be going to Not For Sale, a project that is working to end slavery and human trafficking. You can find out more about the book project here: Wikiklesia

Book Research

I have at the moment 11 books on my desk that I got from Interlibrary loan. It is really a pretty amazing program. No matter how obscure the book, they can get it. I think my favorite so far was the original copy of a doctrinal dissertation from Fuller which was an English translation of Faustus Socinus' de Jesu Christo Servatore. I think it is one of the few translations of the work into English in the world.

Right now I have two volumes of Luther's Works from the Weimar Edition which is in German (which I can read), and Latin (which I cannot). The German is in an 15th century gothic font which makes it a real chore to read:


Some of the other books I'm reading are:

The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder

The Upside-Down Kingdom by Donald B. Kraybill

Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solszhenitsyn

A Grace Disguised by Jerry L. Sittser

I try to keep the pile of books circulating as I read and return the books I have out and put new books in my ILL queue to be delivered, so I usually have a pile of new books waiting to be read. It's a pretty cool system that allows me to have access to pretty much anything I can think of anywhere in the world. Pretty amazing how the posibilities of reasearch has opened up in the past few years!

Luther's theology of the Cross - pt 1 Justification

Luther's Stein asks...

"So Shark, How do you understand Justification and the legal motifs apart from a penal-substitution model?"

I was planning on going into this with Luther, so I thought I would answer this comment in a post. I've been reading Alister McGrath's "Luther's Theology of the Cross" which I highly recommend. In it he talks about Luther's struggle with the law. Penal Substitution has its foundation in a judicial understanding of justice based on a punishment and reward system. As Luther says

"I had hated that phrase 'the righteousness of God' which according to the use and custom of the doctors I had been taught to understand philosophically... by which God is righteous and punished unrighteous sinners" (Luthers Werke Wiemar Ed. 54.185.12)

Luther goes on to say that

"I did not love, and in fact I hated that righteous God who punished sinners...I was angry with God...I drove myself mad with a desperate disturbed conscience". (Ibid)

Because his understanding of justice, which he had inherited from the 500 years since Anselm was one based on a criminal law understanding of justice. Luther describes this kind of justice as a "tyrant". In his commentary on Galatians Luther writes

"Did the Law ever love me? Did the Law ever sacrifice itself for me? Did the Law ever die for me? On the contrary, it accuses me, it frightens me, it drives me crazy”

Luther's breakthrough of finding grace was in discovering that the justice that Paul speaks of was not in the legal sense of punishement but in the Hebrew sense of "making things right". Hence Paul speaks of "justification" which means "setting something right". A justice based on our own performance (works) is a death trap. But a justice that originates from God's goodness through faith means that God sets things right in our lives when we open our lives to him. The first is legal and in conflict with mercy. It sees justice as punishing (active) and mercy as leniency (inaction). That later biblical justice is in contrast about "making things right" and comes through acts of mercy as seen in the ministry of Jesus who came to establish justice in us though acts of healing and restoration. In this there is no conflict between justice and mercy becasue restorative justice comes through acts of mercy. Luther again:

"I began to understand that 'righteousness of God' ...to refer to a passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies us by faith...this immediately made me feel feel as if I was born again, a though I had entered through open gates into paradise itself. From that moment the whole face of Scripture appeared to me in a different light...and now where I had once hated that phrase the phrase 'the righteousness of God' so much I began to love and extol it as the sweetest of words" (Luthers Werke, Op Sit)

So rather than reading the idea of justice in the legal sense of punishing, we need to read with Luther the idea of justification and justice in relational terms as God setting things right, as him through mercy breaking us out of the shackles of performance and law. God did not do this by "satisfying the demands of law" as Penal Substitution would say, but by "nailing the law to the cross" (Col 2:14) by overcoming it along with sin, condemnation, wrath, and the devil and putting all of these tyrants under Christ so that they would no longer oppress us and keep us from life, but serve us and point to the God of grace. In a nutshell we could say that biblical justice is about restorative justice not punitive justice. Punitive justice is the consequence of sin, but God's righteousness and justice is revealed in mercy which sets us right God breaks us out of that death trap putting it to death.

Christus Victor and Penal Substitution Blog

Hi and welcome to the new webpage/blog!

You'll still find all the familiar content here in the "Articles and Essays" sidebar on the right, plus I've added a blog to chronicle the researching and writing of a book on the Atonement I am working on based on a four part essay that you can read here called "Penal Substitution vs. Christus Victor". At the time I had no idea it would be such a popular essay. But it apparently touched on a nerve in people and positive responses flooded in. So I expanded the essay with new sections, until finally I decided I needed to make this all into a book to really flesh out the ideas. There have been over the years lots of books criticizing Penal Substitution, but next to none that offered a biblical alternative from an Evangelical perspective with a high view of Scripture.

So I've been working on taking the essays and adapting and expanding them into book form. A big part of that has involved reading everything I could on the Atonement. If I was going to take on a major doctrine of my Evangelical faith I wanted to make sure I was critiquing the most intelligent version of that doctrine I could, rather than a straw-man, so I could know whether the doctrine itself needed to be revisited or it simply needed to be better stated. After I read around 70 books and had developed things quite a lot I decided it would be fun to start a blog and share some of the stuff I'd been reading and thinking.

Theology is ultimately something that should be done in community, and a blog seems like a great way to get that interaction and feedback. So I look forward to any comments.