"The Father killed the Son": the offence of the Gospel?

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While preaching at the recent New Attitude conference, as reported on the associated blog, CJ Mahaney said:

Who killed Jesus?The Father. The Father killed the Son. Feel God’s love for you revealed in this verse. He crushed his son. For you. He crushed Him. He bruised him. He punished him. He disfigured him. He crushed him. With all of the righteous wrath that we deserved. That’s what the Father did.

So great was his love for sinners like you and me.

It is perhaps not surprising that on that blog every comment so far, except for my own (I wonder if it will be allowed to stay there?), is gushingly positive about these words. But that is not everyone’s response. A certain Duck has written:

If any single quote could encapsulate why I am not a Christian, this one, by C J Mahaney, has to be it.

How should Christians respond to this? Adrian Warnock’s response was simple:

The gospel is veiled to the perishing . . . .

But is this the Gospel? Is the barbarity of a father killing his own son really the essence of the good news of Christ? Now I do not go along with Duck in rejecting the theology of substitutionary atonement, for that is clearly taught in Scripture. But, as I wrote in that comment on the New Attitude blog:

Where in Scripture does it say that “The Father killed the Son”? It is important to get things like this right. … If the offence we are causing to [Duck] is the offence of the Gospel, of course it must stand. But we must make certain that it is the offence of the Gospel, and not the offence of our theological constructions which go beyond the Scriptures.

Prayer and the Powers

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Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be (Doubleday 1998) gives some very interesting insights into Christians’ spiritual battle against evil powers. I don’t endorse everything in the book, as the underlying theology is somewhat “liberal”; for example, Wink writes (p.197):

I do not believe that evil angels seize human institutions and pervert them. Rather, I see the demonic as arising within the institution itself, as it abandons its vocation for a selfish, lesser goal.

But I was struck in a positive sense by this paragraph, the start of chapter 10 “Prayer and the Powers” (p.180):

Every dynamic new force for change is undergirded by rigorous disciplines. The slack decadence of culture-Christianity cannot produce athletes of the spirit. Those who are the bearers of tomorrow’s transformation undergo what others might call disciplines, but not to punish themselves or to ingratiate themselves to God. They simply do what is necessary to stay spiritually alive, just as they eat food and drink water to stay physically alive. One of these disciplines, perhaps the most important discipline of all, is prayer.

And in the last paragraph of the chapter (pp.197-198) he writes:

In a field of such titanic forces, it makes no sense to cling to small hopes. We are emboldened to ask God for something bigger. The same faith that looks clear-eyed at the immensity of the forces arrayed against God is the faith that affirms God’s miracle-working power. Trust in miracles is, in fact, the only rational stance in a world that can respond to God’s incessant lures in any number of ways. We are commissioned to pray for miracles because nothing less is sufficient. We pray to God, not because we understand these mysteries, but because we have learned from our tradition and from experience that God, indeed, is sufficient for us, whatever the Powers may do.

Ready Salted Crisps

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READY SALTED CRISPS

and why (as good Christians) we should be like them!

  • We are like CRISPS, not Pringles all pressed from the same mould: we are all different shapes and sizes, but we have the same taste
  • We should be SALTED with the salt of the gospel message, in our hearts and in our lives
  • We must all be READY to tell others about our faith whenever we have the opportunity

(What we in Britain call “crisps” many of you call “chips”; what we call “chips” are your “fries”)

Getting this blog started at last

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I set up this blog last summer with good intentions, but for various reasons never actually got started with speaking the truth. Now that summer has come round again (at last!), I have decided to get the blog started properly. But to start with I will be a little less presumptious than I might have seemed before, by offering some insights which I hope are helpful, but for which I make no claim that they are objective truth. Some of them may be based on comments I have recently made on other blogs.

Introducing myself as a Speaker of Truth

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My name is Peter Kirk, and I live in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. I have been a member of Meadgate Church, Great Baddow for 20 years. I started in life by studying Physics at the University of Cambridge, and worked for several years in the electronics and software industry here in Chelmsford. I left this work and studied theology to MA level at London Bible College, now London School of Theology. Then I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators, and after training in linguistics I served for seven years in the Caucasus region, coordinating a Bible translation project. In 2002 I left WBT, but I continue to work part time as an exegetical adviser to the same translation project, based at home in the UK with occasional visits to the Caucasus.

I chose to call this blog “Speaker of Truth” because I believe that this is my calling from God. A few weeks ago during a time of prayer at my church two people independently drew my attention to the following lines from the song “History Maker” by Martin Smith:

I’m gonna be a history maker in this land.
I’m gonna be a speaker of truth to all mankind.

(Sorry about the word “mankind”, I would have chosen a more gender neutral word, but I didn’t write the song.)

This confirmed my intention to give a large part of my time to “speaking” truth on the Internet. This is something which I was already doing on various e-mail lists, e.g. Bible Translation, Biblical Hebrew and New Chronology, some of which I had joined in connection with my work as a Bible translator. And I have already extended my speaking of the truth by contributing to the Better Bibles Blog. But in all of these I am limited by the specific subject matters of these lists and blogs. By starting this blog, I am setting myself free from such restrictions – now I can write what I want to! But the intention is that it will be the truth.

Well, first I need to give some attention to Pilate’s question “What is truth?” (John 18:38). This is not the place to answer the metaphysical side of this question. But my intention on this blog is to write what I believe to be the truth. My main focus will be the truth about God and Jesus Christ, and how they relate to humanity and to the universe. But I will not shy away from telling the truth about other issues such as political ones. Nor will I be shy about being controversial.

Now I accept that some of what I call the truth may be debatable, and sometimes I may just be plain wrong (and I will correct any errors which anyone can convince me of). Maybe some people would be more comfortable if I presented it just as my own opinions, rather than as truth. After all, they might say, is there really such a thing as absolute truth? Well, let me say briefly that I reject this aspect of post-modern thought. I believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth, and my intention on this blog is to speak that truth. However, I welcome any comments in reply to my postings.

I hope that all of you my readers will be stimulated by what you read here.