Book review: Brian Zahnd's Water to Wine

Brian Zahnd’s new book Water to Wine tells the story of his own personal journey out of the “grape juice Christianity” he had known, characterized by American values of consumerism and military might, towards a deeper and richer understanding of faith.

Zahnd personal exodus was grounded, he says, in five words: cross, mystery, eclectic, community, revolution. Each of these plays a definitive role in shaping the character of the deeper faith he discovered, the rich “wine” that the book’s title refers to, but at the center of all of it stands the cross.

What does it mean to have our faith centered on the cross? Zahnd writes that meditation on the cross “became a form of shock therapy—a radical reorientation that revealed how disturbingly distorted much of Americanized Christianity had become.”

So what characterizes a Christianity that has been “Americanized”? Zahnd focuses on the two core American values of consumerism and militarism, which had shaped his own faith. A Christianity which is driven by the value of consumerism translates into a self-focused pursuit of wealth and happiness. For Zahnd that meant adopting the word-of-faith of the gospel.

Similarly, a Christianity driven by the value of militarism translates into life “organized around an axis of power enforced by violence”. Again, this is not simply theoretical for Zahnd. He has shared the stage with the likes of Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, and Dick Cheney, but slowly came to realize “I was nothing more than a puppet in a high stakes game of power politics.” In a personal confession, Zahnd tells of a time in prayer and meditation when Jesus took him back to an evening in 1991,

I saw myself watching the bombing of Baghdad live on television, eating pizza, and enjoying it. I wasn’t conflicted. I wasn’t grieved. I was entertained... Then, as I sat with Jesus and was confronted with this long forgotten episode, Jesus spoke to me, “That was your worst sin.” I wept bitterly.

Looking back on how his faith was shaped by consumerism and militarism, Zahnd refers to this as an “aberration” and amusingly as “cotton candy Christianity.” The format of the book, as a personal narrative... perhaps one could even call it a confession... is instructive here. We forget that Paul’s letters take this form as well. Paul similarly refers to his religious past as “dung” (the original word Paul used is perhaps less polite, but it basically means he sees it as garbage compared to Christ). Also, like Zahnd, Paul grew to see his greatest sin as participation in religiously justified acts of violence motivated by religious zeal. Paul describes himself as “the worst of all sinners” and “a violent man” (1 Timothy 1:13, 15), and confesses painfully, “I do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Corinthians 15:9).

Those kinds of personal revelations are hard won. They don’t come from study, but from the painful experience of life. In a very real way, Zahnd’s story is one of a conversion. Not his initial conversion to Christ, but nevertheless a very real conversion—the conversion of a successful mega-church pastor, repenting of a Christianity watered down by American values of success and power, who came to find the rich wine of deeper faith centered in the cross.

Centering one’s faith in the cross is not an easy road to take. It means centering faith in weakness rather than in power. It means learning to “lose your life to find it.” While it is true that this indeed leads to life and love which is indeed truly good news, it does entail, as Zahnd says, “a radical reorientation” of our lives. It is a re-orientation that moves us away from the self-protective reactionary fear that so deeply characterizes our country right now on so many levels, and towards a focus on caring for those we value “the least” in our society, those we regard as undeserving and even as our enemies—the poor, the criminal, the foreigner, the other. That is indeed a costly faith, but as Zahnd can tell us firsthand, it is well worth the cost.

The Theology of the Cross as an Answer to the Problem of Evil

The Old Testament can be read as one long debate about the problem of evil and unjust suffering. It begins by declaring in the law that God will keep his people from suffering if they only follow and obey. If anyone is suffering, it declares, this is because they have sinned and been unfaithful. Then along comes books like the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job where this law is questioned. They complain that they are suffering unjustly. These books call God to task, saying "I am suffering, yet I have been faithful. What's going on?! Why are you letting this happen? This is wrong!"

In short, the question "Why would an all-powerful and good God allow evil?" did not originate with atheism, rather it originated way before that in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a part of our sacred texts. If we understand the Psalms as examples of prayers and worship, then asking that kind of heart-wrenching question filled with desperation and pain and anger is... an act of worship. It is a part of the liturgy of prayer. Selah.

Now that kind of protest-as-worship is quite different from the common religious response to the question of "Why would an all-powerful and good God allow evil?" (which is known as the question of "theodicy"). Here the focus is typically on maintaining the all-powerful side of things at the expense of love and goodness. Explanations will be given as to why what seems to be horrific and devastatingly bad is in fact good and loving. It's all part of a bigger plan, you see. These arguments attempt to tell us how it is somehow "loving" to allow this horrible thing in order to preserve the idea that God is in control.

It's easy to understand why the stress is placed on keeping the all-powerful part. We want desperately to believe that things are under control. We need to believe that. But consider the history of the Israelites: They were enslaved by Egypt. God liberated them, and they had a moment in the sun, but then they were put under the thumb of Assyria, and then Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, and finally under Rome. Basically they were passed as the spoils of war from one conquering nation to the next for generations upon generations. This is a people who know suffering.

The prophets told them that this was because of their unfaithfulness, and if they would just repent then all this suffering would stop. So they did repent, and the temple was rebuilt. But they were still under enemy rule (at the time of the rebuilding of the second temple they were under Persian rule if you're keeping score here).

So consider that history and put yourself in the shoes of a Jewish first century follower of Jesus the Messiah (in Greek: "the Christ"). The idea was that the messiah would be a warrior-king like David. The hope was that the messiah would come and restore Israel to power, and the unjust suffering of Gentile oppression of so many long years would finally stop.

Now, put yourself at the cross. The one that you had hoped would end all the injustice you and your family and your people have suffered for so long is being shamed and tortured and killed before your eyes. Jesus is dying, and all your hopes in God to make things right and good are dying with him on that cross. 

The reaction of the disciples was to run and hide. Jürgen Moltmann has said, “Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.”

Along those same lines, let me say this: Most Christians do not understand the implications of the cross.  Most Christians still hold to what Luther called a "theology of glory." Luther declares, "A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." That's exactly what we experience with typical apologetic responses to the problem of evil. We are told that what seems to be evil is actually good, and we just need to trust God's wisdom here. 

A theology of the cross does not do that. A theology of the cross begins by facing the reality of human suffering head-on. It speaks to those who are in a place of suffering and begins by saying "this suffering you are experiencing is painful and bad. It is not good. It is not deserved. It seeks to offer support and love and compassion, but no matter how much love and goodness may come after this, it does not change the fact that this bad thing really is bad.

Jesus shows us how God enters into our world of suffering and becomes a victim of unjust suffering. That is the crucified God, and that understanding of God completely changes how we understand who God is. It kills the understanding of a God of power and control. Because of this, Moltmann says “Only a Christian can be a good atheist.” What he means is that to call the crucified God "Lord" is to declare that the God of power, the God of Caesar, the God of empire, and indeed the God of Christiandom... is not. 

That God of power is an idol. It is an attractive idol to be sure. Of course we want to believe that God is in control, and that bad things can't happen to us if we are good. But as much as I wish it were not the case, bad things do happen to good people.

What's more, when we go to those who are suffering, seeking to show love and help, this can hurt us. Working with the poor and oppressed may sound romantic, but that's not reality. The fact is, it hurts to share in the grief and pain of another. The word compassion means literally "co-pain" and there's a lot of truth in that. We know a guy who volunteered to help victims following a natural disaster. Years later he is still dealing with the trauma that resulted from what he experienced there. He insists he would do it all over again, but the trauma he now carries from it is still real. He carries those scars, scars born of compassion.

The answer to the problem of evil that we see in the God revealed on the cross is one that calls us to join with those who suffer. That's hard, and carries a cost. It does not come offering explanations, but offering our lives, our selves. It is an image of God who carries scars, and who asks us to love like that, too.

It's been said that the greatest act of courage is found in losing everything worth living for, and deciding nevertheless to live. The reason that I hold to the theology of the cross is because it can face the hard reality of our broken and unjust world and still allow me to hold on to trust and hope and, most of all, hold on to love. We as humans need to hold on to love. 

Jesus, on the night before his death, ate a last meal with his disciples. He told them he was going away, but stressed that they were not being abandoned. He told them they would suffer too, "in this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). That is the tension we need to live in: Suffering happens, especially when we love greatly, but somehow we need to hold on to our trust in goodness and love despite it. That is the courageous balancing act of trusting in love in our broken world, trusting in the crucified God. 

Most of all Jesus asked his friends to promise him that when he was gone they would love each other as he had loved them. The way we can truly answer the problem of evil in our world is by learning how to do that. So when you encounter suffering, don't explain, don't justify. But as Paul says, remain in these three things--trust, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.

A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel

My buddy Brad Jersak has a new book out, A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel that I'm really excited about. As the title suggests, the book’s premise is understanding God in the light of Jesus. That may sound at first glace to be a really basic premise, but in fact it is quite radical. I say this for two reasons,

First, while there is a clear renunciation of humans killing in the name of God in the New Testament (in contrast with the Old Testament where this is presented as a means to bring about God’s purposes and specifically commanded), the New Testament does—at least in some places—still maintain the idea that God can and will use violence in acts of judgment. We see this in places like the story of Ananias and Sapphira, and of course with the entire idea of hell understood as “conscious eternal torment” for the unrepentant.

So to understand God as Christlike means stretching ourselves even beyond where some New Testament authors were able to go. We can argue that in so doing we are moving further in the direction they point us in (I would certainly), but still that requires some courage to more forward towards that new territory—even when we do so believing we are doing it as an act of faithfulness. I personally think it is something we desperately need to do, which is why Brad’s book is so important and needed.

Second, it is radical to understand God as Christlike because this undoes the way we think of God in terms of power and force and strength. If we really get this, we will understand that this applies even to people who don’t believe in God at all (meaning it is not just something that matters to religious folks but to everyone) because it has to do with what we value, how we understand power, how we understand success. Brad understands this deeply and works out in A More Christlike God what it means to re-think who God is in the context of the weakness of the cross. This is, again, a scary and brave thing to do, because it means facing our own helplessness and weakness.

Because of this, A More Christlike God is not a book about detached theology, but a book that cuts to the heart (which is what good theology is supposed to do). Ultimately it is a book that deals with the question of theodicy—if God is loving and all-powerful, why is there so much evil and hurt in our world? Most attempts to deal with this question end up being apologetics that seek to explain the problem away. It’s because of free will... it’s a mystery... it’s for your good... and so on.

That’s not the approach Brad takes because he has spent too much time as a pastor among people who are hurting—parents reeling from the death of a child, people who have survived abuse or rape—in short, among people encountering profound and devastating trauma and loss. There in the face of that kind of pain our best intellectual explanations just ring hollow. What we need instead is a way to face our real pain—to face the reality of suffering in our world—and at the same time be able to open our hearts in hope and trust and love.

This is where Brad takes us. Written with the wisdom of a pastor’s heart, familiar with the reality of people’s real trauma and grief, Brad lovingly helps us to face the pain and darkness of our suffering head-on by showing us a theodicy of the cross that faces the problem of human suffering with brutal honesty, showing us that it is precisely there in that place of brokenness that we encounter God in Christ.

This is a conversation we desperately need to have, and you really could not find a better guide to walk you through this than Brad. So go get yourself a copy of A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel.

Peter Rollins Insurrection - an early review, part 1

I was asked to review the pre-release version of Peter Rollins' new book Insurrection - To Believe is Human, to Doubt Divine. There's a lot of good stuff in it, so I'm planning on covering it over a few posts. In this first post I want to deal with his theology of the cross, which is the core thesis of his book. Before I do though, I want to give a few caveats:

First, I'll be quoting from the pre-release version. Those quotes may change or be refined in the final version. Second, (and more importantly) I will be disagreeing with a lot of what Pete says. That does not mean that I don't like where he is coming from. I do. I consider this a friendly review/critique among common allies. As you will see, I strongly disagree with him on some major areas, but if you are at all familiar with Peter Rollins' thought, you'll know that he wants people to disagree, and not to just passively swallow all he says. As he writes in Insurrection, truth is found "in the ongoing testing and transformation of those claims through the fires of passionate, loving debate." So it is in that spirit that I offer this:

There are several "flavors" to the theology of the cross: Luther, Moltmann, John Douglas Hall, Bonhoeffer, etc. Rollins' theology of the cross is largely built off of Bonhoeffer's idea of becoming "religionless." Rollins refers to this as "a/theism" which he contrasts with the New Atheism of folks like Richard Dawkins which is a mere intellectual rejection of theism. Rollins' a/theism in contrast is about the emotional loss of God, the feeling of forsakenness and utter loss that Jesus felt on the cross when he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Compared to this, Dawkins' atheism is detached and cheap -- in the end New Atheism is just a type of fundamentalism with all the same intolerance and arrogant certainty. The emotional a/theism Rollins advocates in contrast rips away at that arrogant certainty.

Rollins wants to dismantle religious systems of comfort which lead us to mask over and ignore hurt and oppression. His theology of the cross therefore involves the striping way of these securities and comforts, resulting in the "trauma" of personally experiencing the absence of God where one is "crushed by a deep existential loss of certainty" and we "give up everything including God" (his emphasis). That is a very provocative statement, but if one can read on to the end of the book, we discover that what Rollins ultimately means here is the loss of the religious image of God, the loss of our immature picture of God as a sort of heavenly grandpa. This is the theology of the cross that Bonhoeffer wrote of from inside the German concentration camp before his execution. In the face of the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer knew we needed the God on the cross, the God who is there in the middle of our suffering, in the middle of an unjust and broken world.

The question is: In losing the God of religious comfort and certainty, do we also lose the God of hope? It is here that I think Rollins' theology goes astray because he mixes up the meaning of the Resurrection with the meaning of the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Rollins writes that to affirm the resurrection means "embracing the broken world." Resurrection life, he writes, is a way of "truly affirming life" in the midst of "the experience of death we find in the crucifixion." But that is not the meaning of the Resurrection, it is the meaning of the Incarnation. The meaning of the Resurrection is that, despite all the brokenness in our world, we have hope that there will one day be an end to sickness, death, and hurt. That is what the resurrection means. Rollins adamantly rejects the hope that “everything will work out in the end” as an immature illusion that he aims to strip away. In other words, his theology of the cross annuls the hope of the Resurrection. He writes, “In sharp contrast then to the idea that, at the heart of Christianity, we find the loving embrace of some Supreme Being; to participate in Christ’s Crucifixion involves experiencing the destruction of all cosmic security. Here, in this experience, radical doubt, unknowing, loss, desolation, and forsakenness are to be found.”

Rollins sees the Resurrection as “the state of being in which one is able to embrace the cold embrace of the cross.” Now, I fully agree that God embraces us in all of our ugliness and pain (that’s the meaning of the Incarnation), but I also hope Rollins would agree that God does not affirm abuse; God does not want us to be victimized by injustice, or by our own self-hatred; God does not want us to drown in our in despair and grief. God loves us in our hurt, but God does not love hurt, and neither should we. The cross, in embracing us in our ugliness, does not advocate oppression or hurt, rather it is a protest against it. As Moltmann says, the suffering God is the protesting God.

Rollins is all for protest I'm sure. (Heck, that's what "insurrection" means!) But in denying the meaning of the Resurrection, he pulls the rug out from under himself. It is a theology of the cross without a theology of the Resurrection, and therefore without Resurrection hope. So while I affirm all that Rollins affirms, my problem is with what he rejects. In the end, I think he throws the baby out with the bathwater. The gospel is more than that. I want a bigger insurrection. I want an insurrection rooted in the Resurrection.

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 2)

Last time I left off speaking of Paul's exegetical declaration "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2). The cross has a profound affect on how we read the Bible, and is key to its proper interpretation. This time I want to focus on how the cross affects how we think and how we live, that is, how it is the key to a Jesus-shaped ethics.

Paul's stance of seeing everything through the lens of "Christ crucified" completely revolutionized how he read Scripture, and it also revolutionized how he lived his life, and his understanding of what it meant to follow God. That is not just pious talk, Paul radically changed his approach to faith, going from a faith which led him to violently persecute the church, to one that led him to endure persecution in Jesus name. He went from legalism to grace, from religiously justified violence to enemy love and nonviolence. At the heart of that change is the cross. Having listed all the things he used to see a central to his faith, Paul writes, "I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ" (Phil 3:8). Now what does it mean to "gain Christ"? He continues, "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (v 10-11). Notice the pattern here of knowing the power of the resurrection by becoming like him in his death.

This echos the pattern Paul has set up in the previous chapter where he tells of how Christ "being in very nature God... made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant" (Phil 2:6-7) and how that act of self-giving and dying to self resulted in "every tongue acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (v 11). For Paul, saying "Jesus is Lord" means that the crucified one is Lord, and thus that God has proclaimed the way of the cross as both God's way and our way. This is, as Michael Gorman calls it, Paul's "master story" of both the narrative of God's actions in Jesus, and of our model of ethics as we take up our cross and follow. Paul in fact directly connects the example of Christ in the opening hymn of Philippians with how we should act. He introduces it by saying, "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus" (v 5). Our way of life needs to be the way of the cross, the way of doing "nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (v 3-4).

Paul makes an identical point in in Romans when he says we are to live as a "living sacrifice" (Ro 12:1) so that how we think, see, and act is formed by the cross . He continues, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (v 2). Notice here, as in Philippians, Paul draws a direct connection between Christ's sacrificial death and our ethical response. In fact, more than any "theory" of the atonement, what we see in the NT again and again is a connection made from what Jesus did, and what we should do. The cross leads to ethics. From the perspective of the New Testament, this is not a side point, it is the main point.

Paul goes on in this chapter to outline what that looks like. It involves being "we-focused" rather than "me-focused," caring for those in need, demonstrating humility and compassion... but the crux of it all (if you pardon the pun) is summed up in his concluding statement "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (12:21). We see here that Paul's understanding of the Christ crucified, and what it means for us to declare the crucified Jesus "Lord" is deeply tied to what we see Jesus doing throughout the gospels in his teaching and ministry. That is, in order to understand the cross we need to get that all of what Jesus did lead up to the cross. The way of Jesus we see throughout the gospels is the way of the cross. Paul directly makes that connection for us.

Why does the cross matter? Because the atonement is inseparable from ethics, and from exegesis. Understanding the cross properly does not just have an impact on our own personal salvation and relationship with God (as important at that is!), it also changes how we see our world, what we value, and how we treat others.

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 1)

Today is "Christ the King Sunday" and that seemed like an appropriate time to begin a series of posts I wanted to do on why the cross matters. This time I wanted to address how the cross affects how we interpret Scripture. I've said before that we need to read the Old Testament through the eyes of Jesus in order to properly understand it the way the New Testament does. However I want here to make that more specific: we need to take all of what we read and bring it to the cross in order to understand it correctly.

This can be clearly seen in how the cross shapes our understanding of who God's true messiah is. Peter along with the majority of his fellow Jews at the time had expected the messiah to be a warrior king who would lead Israel to conquer the gentiles by the sword, just as Joshua had done for Israel when it entered the promised land. Their hopes of having a just world free from oppression were tied up in this being brought about through violence and bloodshed in the name of God, freedom, and justice. It is an ethos that I'm sure we all recognize as being alive and well today as well, but it was decidedly not the way of Jesus. Jesus did not come to kill the gentiles and sinners, he came to reconcile and save them, and he did not plan on bringing about this "deliverance" by military conquest, but by giving his life on a cross.

This was an idea that was so completely foreign to Peter that when he heard it, he exclaimed to Jesus "never Lord!" Peter says this immediately after he has declared that Jesus is the messiah. The two go hand in hand. Peter's idea of the messiah, based on what he saw in the OT was one of a war lord who redeems through violent force. But Jesus says to him "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men" (Mt 16:23). I'm sure you've heard many sermons on the first part of that sentence, but I want to highlight the last part: you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. Jesus thinks that Peter's understanding of the messiah--an understanding that the majority of biblical scholars would agree is solidly founded on the Old Testament texts--does not represent God's way but man's. So Peter and we need to completely redefine everything the OT says about the messiah in the light of the cross.

We in fact need to do that with everything we read in the Old Testament. We need to take it to the cross and see how it is transformed by it. We need to apply the theologica crucis to all our exegesis. An exegesis of the cross if you will. Take for example the story of David and Goliath. There we have the tale of how the little guy overcomes the giant. But notice that the little guy still overcomes that giant by killing him. What we need to ask is how this story is like the cross, and how it is not. What in this story points us to the cross, and what in this story needs to die. In Jesus we have the story as well of the little "mustard seed" of the kingdom accomplishing big things, and we have the picture of Jesus overcoming and fighting evil, but the enemy is not other people, it is evil and death itself. Jesus does not win the battle by violence and force, but by going to the cross.

It is crucial that we apply the cross to all of what we read in the Bible. This will often necessarily mean deliberately subverting the intended meaning of a passage in the Old Testament--reading it in a way that may appear to be, as Paul says, "a stumbling block" and "foolishness" to some. The theology of the cross carries with it exactly such radical consequences. It means not only our dying, but also the crucifixion of destructive religion itself. This is precisely why the religious leaders of his time wanted Jesus killed. But as Jesus says, if we do not learn how to bring the cross into our exegesis and let it shape how we interpret Scripture, we will likely end up like Peter misreading the Bible and promoting "the way of man not God." This is in fact exactly what Paul did before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He had read his Bible and saw in there that the way to defend God was through violent zeal, and he exercised that zeal, that violence in the name of God, in persecuting the church. But after he met the crucified Lord, he read those same Scriptures and saw a completely different narrative. So he proclaims boldly "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2).

The Emerging Relational Theology #3

I'd like to make a detour in our series here to talk about why narrative theology is important to the Emergent movement, or rather why it should be. I just finished listening to a podcast interview national Emergent Village coordinator Tony Jones did with author Phyllis Tickle about her latest book "The Words of Jesus" which takes the words of Jesus from the canonical Gospels and lays them out with some introductory commentary by Tickle, but with all the narrative removed. Now in itself I have no problem with this, after all many Evangelicals have done the same thing with our red letter editions of the New Testament where you read just the words of Jesus. We call it "reading the red". The problem I have is in a comment Tony Jones makes where he mentions a book he is writing on the Didache, and claims that

"in the Didache the gospel is not 'Jesus died on the cross for your sins', the Gospel is the teachings of Jesus"

First of all this is a highly debatable claim for the Didache. The Greek word translated as "Gospel" Tony is referring to is ευαγγελιω which is the word our "evangel" comes from. It simply means "message" or "teaching". The Didache says things like

"all your deeds so do, as you have it in the ευαγγελιω of our Lord"

and in a section before quoting from the Lord's Prayer they write,

"as the Lord commanded in His ευαγγελιω"

The word ευαγγελιω here which is translated as "Gospel" is simply a Greek word for "teaching" or "message" commonly used in other extra-biblical writings. For example in Homer's Odyssey where it means "good tidings"

"Odysseus shall return, so let me have a reward for bearing good tidings (ευαγγελιου), and as soon as he shall come and reach his home, clothe me in a cloak and tunic" (bk 14:152)

Our English term Gospel as it has come to be understood today as the Christian plan of salvation did not exist as a word at the time. So Tony's claim amounts to "in the Didache teaching refers to teaching" which kind of goes without saying. What the Didache does not say is that salvation comes through obeying teachings as opposed to by grace and the cross, which is what Tony implies here.

Now perhaps Tony did not think much before saying this, I realize it was just an ad lib in a podcast so I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but taken as it stands, his statement is one of classical liberal theology that strips away the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection and reduces the Gospel to the teachings of Jesus. With statements like these it is no wonder that people often see Emergent as Evangelicals turned liberal. On the flipside the classic conservative take on the Gospel has too often been to detach the cross from the teaching and life of Christ. People the Gospel is both the words and deeds of Christ. You can't separate them. His teachings on the kingdom are commentaries on his actions, both in his ministry of healing, forgiving, casting out demons, and of his way to the cross. In fact Christ's central teaching on the Sermon on the Mount (which is the focus of the Didache) is how we are to understand his death. As Paul says "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Ro 5:8). The cross is God loving us His enemies, overcoming our evil through unmerited grace.

A Gospel that does not take into account all of what Jesus did and said, the whole narrative of the story of God coming among us, is at best only half a Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew Mark, Luke, and John deliberately present to us this story in narrative form, and all of it - not just the acts, not just the teaching - is how it is presented. When we try to extract from that a collection of propositional truths ( as conservatives like to do) or compendium of teachings (as liberals have a penchant for) we do violence to the intent of the Apostles. Now let me stress again that as long as it is just an exercise, reading the red as Phyllis Tickle is having us do can be a deeply rewarding expereince, but when we start to think that this "red" is the whole Gospel, and we remove the story, the actions of God in history, then we are most certainly taking a detour off the "strait and narrow" road.

We as Emergents need to be post-conservative and post-liberal. That means that we need a constructive theology that allows us to go beyond these old ruts in the road, and I do see a tendency for Emergents to lean away from the right over into the left as evidenced in Tony's statements here which I do not think are atypical. That constructive theology is greatly helped by a narrative theology that unites the words and deeds of God incarnate into one Gospel that transforms our thinking (orthodoxy) our actions (orthopraxy).

The Rebel God

Some people have complained about the term the "rebel God" saying that it plays into the pop cultural cliches. I can understand this critique since being a rebel has often been appropriated by the corporate propaganda machine to sell conformity - everyone being "original" in the exact same way, "alternative" being the new hip way to say "popular". But I still want to hold onto the idea of the rebel God because I think it tells is something profound about what it means to understand Jesus as Lord, God, and Savior. Jesus was condemned as a blasphemer and crucified as an outlaw. He was a threat to the government and subversive to religious authority. He was nothing else if not a rebel, and following him meant rebelling against the "world" system. Why else do you think the early Christians were killed? Faithfulness to Christ meant subversion of Caesar. Sadly, for so many people today God is associated ith that same authoritative system. Throughout history the church has tragically allied itself with a Constantinian understanding of authority and power. But if Jesus is God then God is the rebel, God is the outlaw, God is the one who is planning to subvert the way of this world with his revolutionary kingdom by starting that revolution in our hearts with the new birth.

I was always taught that rebellion was at the root of sin. But the more I have followed Jesus the more I have found rebellion to be a character trait. It is rebellion that taught me to question not only the assumptions of my culture and its screwed up values, but also to question myself and to never assume that I had a hold on truth, but to instead have a life of seeking. Rebellion has protected me from swallowing the toxic faith that has hurt so many people I know. It is a rebellion against authority that is rooted in the New Testaments witness that authority can be just as fallen as we can be. The "God of this world" is not the one we should follow unquestioningly, but the one we are to oppose in Jesus name. That has meant practically needing to stand up to my pastors when they were wrong and abusing their authority (which has meant taking my lumps at times), but the only regrets I have here are when I did not trust in my conscience and did not stand up. I hope that people I lead would do the same with me.

There needs to be a way for us Christians to embrace absolute truth without being seduced into thinking we have a corner on truth, thinking we can systematize and franchise truth authoritatively. Instead we need to understand that truth is a person who we always need to a to cling to in humility with an open and seeking heart. If Jesus is God then that means the ultimate authority is the one who was an outlaw, the one who identified with the sinner and the least. If Jesus is God then that means the picture of morality and holiness is seen in the one who was accused of being a lawbreaker in the very act of loving and caring for those in need, and who went right ahead and did it anyway despite the reputation it gave him. If Jesus is God then that means that God is the rebel God, it means God is a punk.

Subjective and Objective Atonement - Abelard,Girard

I've noticed that proponents of Penal Substitution seem to divide the world in to two camps: those who see the Atonement as objective (themselves) and those who see it as subjective (everyone else). By "objective" and "subjective" they mean whether the Atonement deals with an objective problem outside of ourselves such as God's wrath against sin, vs. the Atonement dealing with a subjective problem within ourselves such as our being estranged from God because we have a false image of him. The classic example of a subjective understanding of the Atonement is Abelard who saw the purpose of the cross as wooing us to God by a display of sacrificial love displayed on the cross.

Most proponents of Penal Substitution would acknowledge that there is indeed a subjective element to the cross since the love shown there does compel and speak to the heart of the lost just as Jesus does. However they would argue (I think rightly) that if our problem was only a subjective one that it would be rather unjust for the innocent Jesus to die just to appease us.

This idea of Jesus dying to appease our own wrongful need for retribution is, as far as I can tell, essentially what Girardian theory says, and for this reason Girardian theory strikes me as wrong. Again: if our problem was only a subjective one it would be unjust for the innocent Jesus to die just to appease us.

Similarly I would agree that an understanding of the cross based only on Abelard's view is equally lacking. To make an analogy: if a fire fighter runs into a burning building and dies in the flames trying to save people from an objective danger (the fire) this a noble thing. However if that same person would set themselves on fire to show us their love, this would be very disturbing to say the least. Likewise, Jesus dying only to show us God's love and not for a real objective reason would be equally disturbing. So there must be a objective reason for the cross (that can also speak to us and compel subjectively).

Where I think proponents of Penal Substitution get it wrong is in thinking that any view of the Atonement besides their own is automatically subjective. As we have seen Abelard's view is subjective, likewise (and if I any proponents of Girard would like to contradict me on this I would be happy to be corrected) Girard's view is subjective. Indeed the majority of liberal Christianity has presented understandings of the cross that are subjective. That is why I stress that I am not coming at this from a liberal perspective but from neo-evangelical one (some might also say neo-orthodox but since I have not read enough Barth I cant really say). My understanding of the cross is objective, but it sees another objective problem that goes deeper that appeasing wrath.

Penal substitution's objective necessity for the Atonement is that our sin has evoked God's just wrath and that this wrath must be quenched through punishment. That punishment is taken by Jesus who takes our place and thus appeases God's wrath. The problem with this theory is that it does not actually solve the objective problem of sin. God is not angry without reason, he is angry because of our sin. As with any anger, you get angry about something because you care about it. If you care about your kid and see them doing things that are hurting them it makes you angry because you care about them. This is the picture of God's wrath that we see all through the prophets: God is angry with Israel because of her sin and longs to see her turn back. He is angry because he loves. So in order to really deal with the objective reason for the anger what needs to happen is not simply that God can unleash his rage on someone, but that the problem that made him rightly mad in the first place is fixed. The objective problem is not God's wrath, but our sin which has incurred God's wrath. God's wrath is "propitiated" (made favorable) when our sin is healed. The primary work of the cross is not to appease wrath, but to solve the source of wrath by healing our sin.

Penal Substitution would claim that God only expiates our sin after he has been propitiated (that is: he will forgive us only after his wrath has been satisfied through punishment). This makes very little sense to say that someone will only forgive after they have gotten payback. Conversely I would say that God is propitiated ("made favorable") because our sin is expiated (removed). Remove the sin, and there is no reason to be mad. To quote JI Packer:

"The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means"(The Logic of Penal Substitution)

There are in fact many objective theories of the Atonement. Penal Substitution is one. Then there is the view I have been outlining above where the objective problem is our need for moral healing (I like to call it "Incarnational Atonement" which is a combination of Vicarious Sacrifice and Recapitulation), and of course there is Christus Victor where the objective problem is our bondage to the devil.

Anselm vs Penal Substitution

Anselm of Canterbury's work "Cur Deus Homo" (which translates as "Why the God-man?") is usually credited with being the first articulation of what would later become the doctrine of Penal Substitution. However a closer reading of Anselm indicates that he would have in all likelihood have rejected Penal Substitution.

The first important thing to note is that in Anselmian Satisfaction there is a distinction between satisfaction and punishment. In Penal Substitution they are the same: the punishment is what satisfies justice. In Anselmian Satisfaction satisfaction is an alternative to punishment. The satisfaction is what restores honor so that punishment can be averted

"The honor taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow" (bk 1 ch 8)

Satisfaction here takes the form of restoration, mending what has been broken, paying back what was taken, etc. If the guilty party is unable to make this restitution then the only alternative is punishment. The principle is taken from the legal courts of the time where a person would either be required to pay a fine, or if they could not afford it they would be punished instead. In Anselmian Satisfaction, since we cannot ourselves make satisfaction and restore God's honor since even if we led a perfect life we would only be giving what is our due, we are headed for punishment. So Christ not only lives a sinless life, which is again his due, but also is willing to endure death for the sake of love. This goes beyond the call of duty and thus honors God, restoring God's honor which Anselm saw as the central problem of the Atonement.

In contrast to this, Penal Substitution does not see satisfaction and punishment as two separate alternatives, but as the same: it is the punishment that satisfies God. Anselm would have likely agreed that it was appropriate to punish the guilty, and that in the absence of restoration (satisfaction) that punishment was appropriate. However he would not have agreed that it was fitting for the innocent Son to be punished in order to justify the guilty.

"What justice is there in his suffering death for the sinner, who was the most just of all men? What man, if he condemned the innocent to free the guilty, would not himself be judged worthy of condemnation?"

Anselm's answer to this is that

"God the Father did not treat that man as you seem to suppose, nor put to death the innocent for the guilty"

he goes on to say

"It seems to me that you do not rightly understand the difference between what he did at the demand of obedience, and what he suffered, not demanded by obedience, but inflicted on him, because he kept his obedience perfect." (bk 1 end of ch 8 and begin 9)

In other words, God did not require or take pleasure or satisfaction in Christ's suffering, rather Christ suffered because he was obedient to love to the point of suffering and even death. One can think of a firefighter who is wounded going into a burning building trying to save people from the flames. No one is "satisfied" that the firefighter was hurt in the fire. What is heroic is that despite the danger and pain that firefighter went into the inferno for the sake of saving others.

Anselm is right to reject "condemning the innocent to free the guilty" whichPenal Substitution proposes. However there are some problems with Anselm' theory as well. The largest of which is that it is rooted in what is called "natural law" which means that rather than looking at the revelation of God in Scripture, he instead looks to human laws and cultural understandings of what is right and "must be" and then imposes this on God.

I would like to suggest further that there is a difference between Anselm's natural law of "reason" as he calls it which is based on the cultural assumptions of his time and arbitrary and artificial human laws on the one hand, and a truly "natural law" on the other hand based on laws of nature. For instance when Anselm claims that there must either be satisfaction (restitution) or punishment, this is in fact arbitrary. Why must there be? Couldn't I simply decide to forgive instead? This was the argument of Socinus, and it is a compelling one. In cases of human reaction the two options Anselm gives are not the only ones available.

But what happens if we think if this in terms not of artificial human law, but in terms of natural sickness? Then the statement becomes that either the wound is treated (satisfaction), or it will fester (punishment). Either the sickness is cured (satisfaction), or it will result in death (punishment). Here we have a model that makes much more sense than a legal one. There is no third option of simply ignoring the sickness, and the act of mercy instead of being a passive non-action of not punishing becomes here active healing. Furhter the satisfaction does not seem to be applealing to vanity or vengeance, but simply to solving a real problem and the "punishment" again is not arbitrary (so we can ask: why not just forgive?) but is a natural consequence. Sickness, if untreated leads to death.

In Anselm's theory Christ needed to first restore God's honor before God could show us favor. In Penal Substitution Christ had to first be punished before God would show us favor. In a medical view however, the act of the physician is an act of favor. The "problem" is not with God but with us. We are the ones who need to be reconciled, who need to be fixed, not God. Again, to apply Anselm's argument here: Christ does not suffer in order to appease or satisfy God, rather God in Christ loves us so much that he enters into our world of sickness, coming to heal and restore us, and in loves us to the point of making himself subject to our sickness. He takes this sickness upon himself (and here I am leaving Anselm and adding in Christus Victor) and overcomes it thus setting us free from its hold.

Why I am not a Universalist

I've noticed that many proponents of Penal Substitution see it not simply as one theory of the Atonement, but as the Gospel, meaning that to deny it is the same as saying that there is no problem of sin or separation from God. I've noticed the exact same assumption from people who call themselves Universalists: they talk of Christ's work meaning that everyone is automatically saved already.

Now I am all for the thought of God making everything right in the world and "wiping away every tear", but I have seen too much injustice and misery in the world to believe that sin is not real and everything is fine. I don't believe in an imaginary problem where God is angry from some unknown trivial legal transgression that we did. I'm sure you've heard this before: God is holy, and so if you have lied to your mom or cheated on a test ever then you are condemned to eternal Hell, and even if you didn't Adam did so you're literally damned if you do and damned if you don't. In this scenario the Gospel becomes telling a person this "bad news" of how they are condemned to the severest of penalties imaginable (eternal torture) for a petty infraction, but that this same God who made this judgment wants have a loving trusting relationship with them(!)

This is an "imaginary problem" because it is not based on real human need or lostness, but on some transaction in heaven that we would never be aware of if someone did not tell us the news. The problem of sin is real. It is not detached from our experience but dominates it. My wife is a social worker and works with the homeless and the addicted. She sees people at their lowest and most broken. People who are dying alone, people who are enslaved to a life of drugs and degradation. This is the most obvious manifestation of lostness, but if you dig a little deeper you will find suffering and brokenness right next you. That person siting across from you in the pew struggles with thoughts of worthlessness and suicide. The nice woman you see at the supermarket is going through a messy divorce. One you really get to know the people around you, you will find stories of pain, injustice, brokenness, and regret everywhere.

The reason I object to a legal understanding of the Atonement is not because I think sin is not real, but precisely because I do. Because it is real, a mere legal acquittal will not solve the problem, it will not break people out of their bondage and cycles of being hurt and hurting others, it will not restore what has been lost and broken. That is what we need. If being a universalist means trusting that despite our helplessness, sinfulness, and stupidness that God can overcome all of that and find a way to really heal our real problems of sin, suffering, and lostness... yes I place my hope in that and work towards that by fighting injustice, caring for the broken, and showing the same compassion and mercy to others that I so desperately need. What I object to is the kind of universalism that leads to a "don't worry be happy" inaction in the face of human need.

It seems people have a need to think that they are fine, and so God loved them and they have worth. But we know that we are not fine. The "good news" is that God loves us even though we are not fine, and in fact tells us that he has a heart for those who are not "ok". That means that we can be real, and it gives us a basis for compassion.

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.