In lieu of a proper post for today, as I probably won’t have time, I present here a selection of comments which I have made on other blogs over the last few days, in response to the ongoing debate on the penal substitutionary atonement, and relating to my own post about Packer’s view of the Atonement.
Adrian Warnock has drawn my attention to Dr Jim Packer’s important 1973 lecture What did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution. Reading this has helped me to clarify some of my own thinking on this matter, and how and why I disagree with many modern “Reformed” presentations of the Atonement.
Some people have strange bedfellows.
Today I read (thanks to Suzanne for reminding me of what I first saw yesterday) first that Justin Taylor and Al Mohler, conservative Christians, are taking up common cause with President Ahmadinejad of Iran against a woman with a young child who has chosen to serve in the armed forces. Now I would not encourage a woman to leave her child in this way, but I would uphold her right to do so if she chooses to. The strange thing about it, however, is the way that Taylor and Mohler are agreeing with someone one might expect to be their sworn enemy, who is certainly the sworn enemy of their country. But perhaps Ahmadinejad’s vision of a patriarchal theocracy, and expectation of the imminent return of the Hidden Mahdi, are not really so different from Taylor’s and Mohler’s patriarchal and possibly theocratic vision, and perhaps their expectation of the imminent return of Christ. It is no accident that their religion and Ahmadinejad’s are both described, mainly by their enemies, as “fundamentalist”.
Meanwhile Henry Neufeld has posted (all at once) a new series reviewing Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (due out in paperback in May, but already well discounted in hardback). I have not read the book so will not comment on it myself. But Henry reveals an even stranger set of bedfellows than Mohler and Ahmadinejad. Henry notes that
Dawkins sees two possibilities–religion of all related varieties on the one side, and atheism on the other. He downplays moderation of all types.
Later he quotes Dawkins:
The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.
and continues:
One of the most common arguments I face from fundamentalists and also some conservatives is the “slippery slope” argument. If you give anything away, it’s only the first step to giving everything away. But this is a fallacious argument because it has built in the assumption that the correct position will result from choosing one of the extremes. Perhaps the position in the middle is the most correct, and in that case we would have a “slippery slope” on either side.
See also my own recent criticism of the “slippery slope” argument. The new point which Henry makes is that Dawkins is using exactly the same type of fallacious argument as do the fundamentalist Christians against the possibility of the kind of moderate position which (in general terms) Henry and I share. The same Al Mohler who wrote favourably of Ahmadinejad had just a few days earlier railed against a Christian speaker (the same one whose view of the atonement I discussed recently) who dared to question the fundamentalists’ preferred model of the atonement. Mohler tellingly ended his post:
We are left with an unavoidable choice. We must stand with the Apostle Paul … Or, we must stand with Dr. John and Mr. Fraser … On this question there is no middle ground.
“No middle ground” seems to be Mohler’s refrain, and it also seems to be Dawkins’. No doubt it is also Ahmadinejad’s. For all of them, either you agree with them completely, or you are completely in error and your opinions do not even deserve proper respect. Dawkins, it seems to me, should be also be called a fundamentalist.
Meanwhile I want to stand with Henry and others to defend the middle ground of Christian faith, based on the Bible but moderate, intelligent, not dogmatic and open to the surrounding culture, from the attacks of fundamentalists of all varieties.
I’m not actually going to try to answer the question of why Jesus died. But Adrian Warnock has reopened the controversy on this issue in the way that he has started his new series on the atonement. In doing so he has ruffled a few feathers, including making Dave Warnock write “It seems I have no gospel”, and has apparently suggested that Steve Chalke, Spring Harvest and the Evangelical Alliance teach that “Christ Did Not Die for Sin!”
I didn’t expect anyone to be fooled by my post about Dr Wayne Grudleman, which was partly a reaction to this post about which I had some advance knowledge. But I did think I might fool some people with my next two posts, about plans for the UK’s largest church and about me standing for election. Continue reading
Over the last few months I have been doing some research on a shadowy figure in the world of Bible translation. Today is a good day to reveal his true identity as Dr Wayne Grudleman.
I can’t help being amused by the following post at Between Two Worlds:
CBMW has now made available the audio from the “Different by Design” conferences, which have featured C. J. Mahaney paired with Wayne Grudem, and Ligon Duncan paired with Russell Moore.
So, if these pairings were features of these conferences, was their point to tell us how Mahaney is “Different by Design” from Grudem, and Duncan from Moore? From these pictures it seems that the design difference between Mahaney 
and Grudem 
is not in their amount of hair!
Nor, unfortunately, is the difference in my appreciation for them. I have serious issues with the teachings of both Mahaney and Grudem.
I think that I failed to understand that, though the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church (Eph. 5:23), a well-functioning head has ears. Perhaps if I had listened more and involved her more in the process, many of the details of the decision would have been different.
Who wrote this? Believe it or not, it was the same Dr Wayne Grudem whose teaching on gender issues I have criticised so often here and elsewhere, especially in comments on Adrian Warnock’s blog. This is an extract an interesting article, from 2001, in which Dr Grudem explains how he and his wife came to the decision to move to Arizona.
If we heard less from Dr Grudem, or from others quoting Dr Grudem, about how wives should submit to their husbands, and more about how husbands should listen to their wives (and vice versa), less about how “headship” means authority and more about how it means mutual care and responsibility, then maybe I wouldn’t have such a negative attitude towards Dr Grudem and the complementarian teaching which he promotes.
Thanks to Wayne Leman for bringing this page to my attention.
Adrian has now come up with a subject which I would like to take up. He reports on John Piper’s message about Ethnic Diversity and “Affirmative Action” for Pastoral Appointments.
Affirmative action is of course a controversial issue, and I agree with Adrian in being unsure about Piper’s strategy here while applauding his goal of ethnic diversity in his church leadership team. Also, in general I agree with Adrian’s comments that it is better to appoint pastoral staff from within one’s own church than from outside. Sadly perhaps, that is not the usual practice in my Church of England; indeed the church will consider for ordination only those who are prepared to serve in congregations other than the one they are leaving.
Holy Trinity Brompton is a very rare exception in that Nicky Gumbel was originally an ordinary church member, then a curate (assistant pastor), and is now the vicar (senior pastor) there, apparently without ever serving at any other church; but then HTB, the home of the Alpha Course, is an exceptional church in many ways.
Having said that, my own congregation appointed from outside, according to the normal Church of England procedures, a vicar from an ethnic minority, a Palestinian Arab. This was not because of any affirmative action but because he was the best qualified candidate, and has proved an excellent pastor. But if we had looked to our own congregation we would never have chosen an ethnic minority person, because we have rather few in our church – although more than the 2.6% non-white population of our parish according to the 2001 census statistics. Also we probably would not have found among ourselves such a good leader, certainly not someone with the same training and experience.
But unfortunately John Piper’s appeal for diversity in leadership appointments looks rather hollow to me because it applies only to race and not to gender, although the arguments he makes for racial diversity apply just as much to gender diversity. I wonder how he would react to the following adapted version of his own reasons for pursuing ethnic diversity as an argument for gender diversity in the pastoral ministry:
- It illustrates more clearly the truth that God created male and female in his own image (Genesis 1:27).
- It displays more visibly the truth that Jesus is not a male deity, but is the Lord of both genders.
- It demonstrates more clearly the blood-bought destiny of the church to be those “redeemed from mankind (anthropoi, gender generic) as firstfruits for God and the Lamb” (Revelation 14:4).
- It exhibits more compellingly the aim and power of the cross of Christ to “reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Ephesians 2:16).
- It expresses more forcefully the work of the Spirit to unite us in Christ. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28).
(Quotations from ESV, so Piper can’t complain. I note that Ephesians 2:16 is primarily about the hostility between Jews and Gentiles, a religious matter, and so to apply it to gender is stretching it no more than to apply it to race.)
Yes, the church in New Testament times discriminated against women, because the first believers, like many conservative Christians today, brought the presuppositions from their partly patriarchal society into their church. For similar reasons slavery was not explicitly condemned in the New Testament (although of course slavery at that time was not linked to race as it was in 18th-19th century America). And there are significant Christian movements in the USA today which support not only the patriarchal system under which women are oppressed but also slavery. Piper, to his credit, does not seem to be advocating slavery, and certainly not racism. But he needs to realise that the same approach to interpreting the Bible which allows most modern evangelicals to condemn slavery (indeed it was evangelicals like William Wilberforce who led the campaign to end the slave trade 200 years ago this year) also implies condemnation of the patriarchal system and an end to discrimination against women in pastoral appointments.
TheoBlogian Mike Swalm has started an interesting series In Our Image: The Language of Father and Divine Gender. This takes up among other things some of the issues which I raised here recently, about Driscoll’s God and Molly’s paradigm shift.
In a comment on Part One of TheoBlogian’s series Odysseus wrote:
I don’t know for certain, as I have not double and triple checked the reference, but I was told that in Aramaic, ‘Our Father’ can be translated in a variety of ways, including ‘Our Father/Mother’.
I’m not sure about the Aramaic either, but I know that the Greek word πατήρ pater translated “father” is not always explicitly male. Look for example at Hebrews 11:23, where the Greek literally refers to Moses’ “fathers” (the plural of πατήρ pater), but almost all English translations, even back to KJV and including the very literal Young and Darby versions, render “parents”.
If Moses’ “fathers” were not necessarily male, then Jesus’ Father was not necessarily male. Indeed, we more or less know that he was not, because he has no distinguishing body parts, and men and women are equally made in his image – as I argued in my post on Driscoll’s God.
So, do we need to translate πατήρ pater, the more or less new name which Jesus gave to God, as “Father”? Well, it is not a bad translation or a mistranslation. But I would suggest that “Parent”, while arguably not very elegant, would be just as accurate as a translation. For there is no justification for insisting on a specifically gendered word here.
