Gospel Prism

In reading Mark Dever’s article in Christianity today on the atonement, so many thoughts come to mind. But to be succinct, I am so glad the Lord has shown me what the Gospel is all about. The objections that people give to a penal-substitutionary view of the atonement is really unbelievable in a sense, and yet very believable in another. Unbelievable in that the Bible so clearly shows that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, bore the wrath and punishment of our sins. But it is believable that so many dance around the texts to fit their schema of interpretation. That is for sure.

Scot McKnight is prototypical of a theologian who says he holds to the primacy of Scripture, but when push comes to shove, so easily fades from making Scripture prime in his hermeneutic. Dever quotes him here and if his assessment of McKnight’s position is accurate, then I am afraid a person like McKnight could never be convinced otherwise from what he believes. Here’s what Dever writes:

Many critics of substitution get around this “problem”—that such language and imagery is found everywhere in the Bible—by downplaying its importance or reinterpreting it in ways that I believe do violence to the plain meaning of the text. Scot McKnight, for example, in his recent Jesus and His Death (Baylor, 2005), does lots of careful work with the Gospel text. Nonetheless, he assumes that the last phrase in Mark 10:45—”For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”—reports not Jesus’ original words but Mark’s theologizing. And while admitting that the idea of substitution is strongly suggested here, he finally rejects it.

Further, McKnight uses Christ’s words to interpret Atonement passages in Paul, Peter, and Hebrews—even though the Epistles provide the most sustained discussions of Christ’s Atonement. He again acknowledges that such passages might carry along with them “the notions of penal substitution and satisfaction,” but in the end says, “[they] need not.” Thus he goes to what seem to be great lengths to avoid the plain meaning of these passages. At one point, he says that Jesus is “both representative and substitute,” but his interpretation so transforms the idea of substitute as to rob it of its traditional theological meaning.

Also, a recurring theme of those opposed to penal-substitution is the argument that it is only found in such and such a text. And this is not usually one verse, but only in Paul’s letters, Peter’s letters, Hebrews, and John (Stephen Finlan also seems to pit one portion of Scripture against another. He writes in Problems with Atonement, “It is a mistake to identify Atonement as the central Christian doctrine, although it is central to the Pauline tradition, to First Peter, Hebrews, First John, and Revelation. But these books in their entirety compose only 39 percent of the New Testament.”). Well, it seems to me that if we were to take that approach with all of our interpretation of the Bible, there would be very few things we could actually believe since it is not in every verse and chapter of the Bible. I would also question that assumption in the first place. A person who does not believe in penal-substitution will probably not want to find it anywhere else in the Bible.

I appreciate Mark Dever’s approach that to think of the atonement is to understand that it is multi-faceted. Is it only about penal substitution? No. Does it have a moral and victorious element to it? Absolutely! But to take away penal-substitution would rip the power out of the morality of what Jesus had done and certainly remove the victory of the atonement. The song says, “There is power, power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb.” I believe this with all my heart. It makes me sing for joy and also humbled by a God so gracious. And without penal-substitution as an important element of the atonement, I don’t think I could sing that song and so many others the same way.