Category Archives: Atonement

The root of John Piper's wrong theology

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I may have got myself into trouble with some comments I made on Adrian Warnock’s blog, on his post 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 5 – Two Critical Passages on Justification. This post is part of Adrian’s series on John Piper’s new book The Future of Justification. I was commenting mainly on these words which Adrian quoted from Piper:

Justification . . . happens to all who are connected to Christ the same way condemnation happened to those who were connected to Adam. How is that? Adam acted sinfully, and because we were connected to him, we were condemned in him. Christ acted righteously, and because we are connected to Christ we are justified in Christ. Adam’s sin is counted as ours. Christ’s “act of righteousness” is counted as ours.

In my first comment I argued that Piper is here basing his theology of justification on an analogy with Augustine’s understanding of original sin, an understanding which is faulty because, as widely recognised and as I explained in a previous post here, Augustine misunderstood Paul’s meaning in Romans 5:12 based on a poor Latin translation.

I went on to begin to sketch out some alternative views of my own. Continue reading →

Mark Driscoll head to head with Joel Osteen

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Adrian Warnock has posted an interesting video (ten minutes long) of two well-known American preachers head to head. The video is basically part of a sermon by Mark Driscoll, but it includes a long clip from a sermon by Joel Osteen. Driscoll is one of Adrian’s favourites, and has had some generally not so favourable mention on this blog; nevertheless I respect him for his no-nonsense approach. Osteen is, I understand, well known in the USA for his prosperity teaching on TV and radio, but is not so well known here in the UK.

Adrian’s main point in posting this video is to present it as “a model of gracious rebuke”, of Osteen by Driscoll. And indeed it is this. If only Adrian and his other favourite speakers had treated Steve Chalke with this same grace, rather than accusing him of heresy! Then the whole atonement debate would have been a lot less bitter. I too need to take Driscoll as an example of how to show gentle wisdom over such issues.

But I want to look more at the different approaches represented here by Osteen and Driscoll. Continue reading →

Augustine's mistake about original sin

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Scot McKnight writes:

Behind the Reformation is Augustine; behind much of modern evangelicalism, especially in the Reformed circles today, is the Reformation. Therefore, at the bottom of the evangelical movement in the Reformed circles is Augustine and his anthropology.

And behind Augustine’s anthropology (understanding of humanity), which is outlined in Scot’s post, is a simple misunderstanding of one word in the Bible, a preposition consisting of just two letters. Scot is writing about the New Perspective on Paul, an interesting issue. But my point here is not about that, but about how a misleading Bible translation has led Christian theology seriously astray for 1600 years.

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Paul Trathen on the Atonement

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Paul Trathen is the Anglican vicar at whose church, about ten miles from my home, I went to a gig by Tim Chesterton, which I blogged about before. Paul, a rather occasional blogger, has now entered the atonement debate by contributing quite a long essay. In this he reviews three different books about the atonement. Pierced for Our Transgressions, of which we have heard so much here, and even more on Adrian’s blog, is not one of them. One reason for this is that Paul’s essay is probably not as new as this book. But it may also be that from Paul’s perspective outside the rather narrow confines of evangelicalism Pierced for Our Transgressions looks a much less significant book than Adrian and some others want to consider it.

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Wife beating

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For some reason which neither Joe Carter nor I can understand I cannot access the blog Evangelical Outpost; I always receive the following error message, from the home page and from any individual post:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.evangelicaloutpost.com Port 80 

Anyone know why? Anyone else get the same response?

But thanks to Eddie of Kouya Chronicle I was able to read the main part of this post about being critical of others’ theology etc. Actually at least the part Eddie quotes seems to be taken from this 2005 post, for which I found a Google cache.

Maybe I can at times be a bit of what Anthony Bradley is said to call a “wife beater”. Perhaps Lingamish feels a bit that I have been beating him. He is not my wife, of course! (Nor is he my gay “civil partner” – I don’t have one, or a wife.) In my defence I can say that the view I beat him about was “heretical or likely to lead someone away from salvation”, and so I can claim to be justified in fighting tooth and nail about that. But on lesser matters, just like Joe Carter,

I find that I just don’t have the stomach for those old arguments anymore. I’m still willing to discuss doctrinal differences. But now I’m less sure that I’m standing on the right side of scripture.

Cyber-psalm satisfies

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Lingamish has posted a new version of the cyber-psalm which I had an issue with yesterday. This is a definite improvement, with the problematic word “rejected” dropped. I have no theological objections to the new version of these few lines:

And you left him there
Out of love for us,
The people living in darkness.

But there is an ambiguity which I don’t think was intended. The collocation of “left” with “there” gives a different meaning to “left”, suggesting that Jesus was allowed to remain on the cross indefinitely, but not foregrounding the fact that God left Jesus. The meaning would be better without “there”, or as “And there you left him”. I cannot comment on which makes the best poetry; I leave such things to English major Lingamish.

Cyber-psalm is suspect

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My cyber-friend Lingamish has published the first of a series of “cyber-psalms”. (In this sentence “cyber-” seems to mean no more than “communicating only on the Internet”.) On his lingalinga blog he notes:

Aren’t those susserating* sibilants simply succulent?

Indeed, Lingamish, this is a great poem or psalm. Except for one little problem. You have fallen straight into the trap of describing the atonement as the Father working separately from the Son, the very trap I have been trying to warn you and others about on this blog for more than a year. Well, I can hardly blame you for not reading all my 45 posts on the atonement, but surely you have read at least one of them?

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How to understand the Bible on atonement

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Andrew has written an important post on the methodology of exegeting atonement doctrine, i.e. how to understand what the Bible has to say about the atonement. He explains what is wrong with the way many others study the biblical teaching on the atonement. The principles he gives here apply to the biblical teaching on any other doctrinal issue.

Andrew also outlines how, through years of study, he came to his own view of the atonement. But he doesn’t actually describe that view; he simply says:

The reasons why I think my view is best are horrendously complicated

I hope he will try to make sense of these complications in clear writing in the near future.

In the light of his own lengthy studies he writes:

I think this makes me truly appreciate works where the author[s] … have long grappled with all the different atonement ideas and really understand the situation. I think this is what made me so contemptuous of Pierced For Our Transgressions as the authors demonstrated ignorance on all the important issues and had set out to prove what they had been taught in response to some else denying the truth of what they had been taught.

Ouch! Read Andrew’s post for some justification for this statement.

UPDATE 26th July: Andrew has followed this up with a post The same cup, which shows clearly how flawed is the argument, used in Pierced for Our Transgressions and elsewhere, that Jesus’ use of the word “cup” for his sufferings implies that God was wrathful towards him.