The Real Reason Many Reject Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Ever since Bible College almost 20 years ago (gasp!), I have wondered why there is so much argument and furor over “theories of the atonement.” I remember seeing an essay in the student paper that questioned penal substitutionary atonement (hereafter PSA) and put forward an argument for Christus Victor. It revealed a clear aversion to PSA and this mystified me. Why, I wondered, would someone be so motivated to deny something which seems to be the plain teaching of the Bible?

Over the years I came to better understand the issues at stake, but I admit I still had trouble making it make sense. I could understand why some progressive Christians refused to believe in a God who poured out wrath and judgment (due to liberal theology’s allergy to descriptions of God that went against the grain of respectable modern moral sensibilities), but then what about those who had no problem with those parts of the Bible but who still seemed to have so much animus against PSA? I recently heard Derek Rishmawy make a comment on an episode of the Mere Fidelity podcast that struck me as an excellent answer to that question.

Here is the point he made: penal substitutionary atonement gets pulled out of shape and distorted when the categories of classical theism are not there. The prevalence of modernist metaphysics throughout the 20th century gave us a strange mix: conservatives held onto supernaturalism (like the virgin birth and the resurrection) but unwittingly lost the doctrinal substructure that served to keep PSA in its proper shape. Rishmawy observed that many conservatives in the 20th century (and into the 21st) were defending what they rightly thought of as a doctrinal core (PSA), but doing it in ways that would be contrary to earlier advocates in the tradition who had certain doctrines in place that protected them against the severe distortions. The most obvious stabilizing doctrine would be a classical view of the Trinity. He added that “substitution is an extraordinarily powerful doctrine that, without the right machinery around it, creates severe shearing forces in preaching that that can go wrong.”

This seems quite right to me, like a key piece of the puzzle going right into its place. This insight explains some of the dynamics at play in these discussions and debates. For instance, without a clear understanding of the inseparable operations of the one triune God, then there is no guardrail to keep a preacher from describing the cross as the Father over here pouring his wrath out on the innocent and reticent Son over there, introducing a firm separation between Father and Son, as if they were not together fulfilling the plan of redemption they drew up before the foundation of the world. And without divine impassibility—the idea the God is without passions—then any talk of the wrath or punishment of God conjures images of uncontrolled anger or passionate revenge. But this is not the way to understand the wrath of God.

Here is a possible sequence of steps to summarize this process:

Modern metaphysical assumptions seep into theology —> classical trinitarian theism is revised —> loss of doctrines like divine impassibility and inseparable operations —> PSA language gets pulled out of shape by many of its proponents —> people react against the distortions of PSA by energetically rejecting PSA and pursuing alternative understandings of the atonement.

This would explain the strong overlap between those who reject classical theism and those who reject PSA, of which John Mark Comer would be one obvious example. Without the former, the latter is too easily distorted into absurdity (”cosmic child abuse”). So a twofold dynamic happens: proponents of PSA who haven’t got a firm grasp on classical theism tend to present it in distorted ways since they lack that doctrinal framework, and those who have rejected classical theism have a hard time conceiving of PSA without it quickly devolving into something grotesque, making it easier for them to reject PSA.

The parallel track that runs alongside this, mentioned above, is the rejection of wrath and judgment as fitting for God, a hallmark of liberal theology. Even the great evangelical stalwart John Stott seemed to be affected by the sense that it was not respectable, and perhaps unthinkable, to claim that God would pour out his wrath in judgment for all eternity. Stott’s case was mild — preferring annihilationism to the idea of eternal judgment. But the same impulse has pulled many a Christian to rethink PSA on the grounds that the idea that God’s wrath against sin must be satisfied is beyond the pale.

Even without a thoroughgoing classical trinitarianism, the best exegetes throughout the 20th century always managed to avoid serious problems in their description of the atonement by sticking close to the text of the Bible and letting their preaching and teaching reflect the overall balanced emphasis of the Scriptures. This is a point that D.A. Carson has made repeatedly, and it is worth bearing in mind: it is not enough to find something true that the Bible affirms and then proclaim it from the rooftops. There is a matrix of truths that are all interconnected, and the careful student of the Scriptures pays attention to the relative emphasis and the context of those truths as found in the whole Bible.

Talk of the various theories of the atonement seems to me to start the whole conversation off on the wrong foot. Let us rather seek to understand and rightly represent the multifaceted glory of the atonement. Wonder of wonders—our God has reconciled us to himself through the cross! And how? Let me count the ways, for the Scriptures unfold and tease out multiple threads of wondrous truth about this singular moment in history. One of these, among others, is the idea that in our place condemned he stood, becoming sin for us, bearing the punishment our sins deserved, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Our triune God planned and accomplished this for the fame of his name among the nations, and because he loves us. He redeemed us from the curse of sin, becoming a curse for us; he ransomed us, buying us with a price; he defeated the powers of darkness, triumphing over them and disarming them. Yes and amen.

The insight from Rishmawy is helpful because it reminds us that our theology is a complex matrix of interrelated truths. And there are some, it must be said, that are foundational, load-bearing truths. They keep the whole superstructure balanced and strong in ways that are not immediately obvious. And once they are removed or compromised, the whole building may not immediately fall down, but it may sway and wobble and buckle in unhealthy ways. I think this is what we’ve seen with popular-level representations of PSA, with lamentable results in driving people away from any kind of penal substitutionary element in their understanding of the atonement. The answer to overcorrections and pendulum swings, however, is careful and loving attention to the holy Scriptures.

Letter to a Brother Stuck in Pornography

The following is a letter I wrote to a brother some years ago. It has been anonymized and lightly edited.

Dear Brother,

You have been on my mind for a few days and so I have been praying for you. What prompted it was that I listened to an interview podcast episode with a pastor who struggled with porn for years while in ministry. It was really amazing, but it made me think of you. You were honest and open enough last year to let me into this area of your life. I don’t take that lightly, and I thank you for taking that important step. But unless there have been developments I don’t know about, it doesn’t seem like there has been much traction or forward progress in this area of your life.

Assuming things are more or less the same as they were when you shared this struggle with us, I have a few things I want to share with you.

1. I Am Not Better

I write to you as a fellow sin-struggler. I write to you as one who knows what it is like to be stuck in that cycle of sinning, repenting, self-loathing, promising God to do better, and falling again. I write to you as someone who spent years turning to broken cisterns filled with filthy stagnant water over and over. This is the language in Jeremiah 2:13-14 “Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

This was my reality and (if you are still continually turning to pornography and sexual sin) it is yours as well. And with this intake of poison over a long period of time come serious effects and consequences. The most dangerous of them all is blindness. You are deceived, and cannot see, your real and true spiritual state. That is probably why your initial reaction to this letter may be negative. Sin and Satan have got a deep, deep hold on your heart by now. So I have been praying that you will have a few moments of clarity as I share some good but difficult truths with you.

2. You Can be Free

One of the worst deceptions you are believing is that you are going to be stuck here forever. If I was to boil down the Bible’s teaching on sin to a single truth, it would be: The gospel exists to defeat sin! Really, sin is nothing compared with the power of the gospel when it starts to work in a heart. Jesus came and died and rose again to deal with sin. Not just the guilt of it, but the power and grip of it in your life. Countless thousands have experienced true and lasting and supernatural freedom from the chains and slavery of habitual sin, and you can too. “For if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

I believe that you have experienced the gift of forgiveness, but it seems to me that you have yet to really experience the joy, happiness, and delight, of walking in the light of the fellowship with God that your forgiveness is meant to lead to. I stress those three words: joy, happiness, delight. Listening to that interview with that pastor, I was reminded in fresh ways of just how delightful Jesus is to our souls compared to everything else we try and find satisfaction in. And it reminded me of how miserable it is to be a slave to sin.

Aren’t you just sick of it?

This misery is what those verses from Jeremiah are about – we compulsively dig our own filthy broken cisterns which end up just holding muddy rain water that tastes good only in the moment, while just behind us there is “the spring of living water” that we have forsaken and which truly satisfies the deepest longings of the soul. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

3. Spiritual Power

One of the worst effects of giving in habitually to willful sin (making choices by habit or addiction that you know are sinful), is that it saps you of spiritual power. It is like a cup with a hole in the bottom. You never can stay full even when God’s Spirit moves in you and revives you because “the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.” Yes – “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” and “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:16, 17, 25). How can I be filled with this Spirit when I am continually grieving it? “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30).

It is one thing if I mistakenly trip my friend. I can honestly apologize and be reconciled easily. The tripping was real but it wasn’t a personal rejection or attack. But it is another thing entirely if I slap my friend across the face and call him a pathetic loser. I cannot so easily apologize and be reconciled, since the sin was so personal. It is like that in our relationship with God too – how can I come to Him for the millionth time about the same sin and say I’m sorry? Am I really? I know I’m just going to do it again. My repentance feels shallow and fake, and perhaps it is. Intimacy with God is therefore impossible, and I would rather not face the pain of that distance, so I numb it with distractions.

In this state, I have almost no spiritual power. How can I genuinely share the hope and joy of the gospel when I am not able to enter into it myself? How can I lovingly rebuke my brother for sin when I am secretly indulging it in my own life? How can I look my son in the eye and promise him that virtue, integrity, honesty, and purity are so much better than vice and sin when I am not walking in those virtues myself? So I stay silent, and the voice of my conscience grows quieter and quieter, and in a thousand little ways I therefore fail to minister to those God has placed around me, and my spiritual impact is reduced to almost nothing. What a victory for Satan! Here is a soldier in God’s army that has been rendered almost completely ineffective. Brother, don’t let this be true of you.

4. Looking Ahead

I want you to think ahead with me. You have two paths set before you. You will definitely walk down one of these two paths. The first path is the one you’re currently on, and the second is quite different. You’ll have to forgive me for being very blunt here.

Let’s imagine the first. You get this letter, you give it a reading, but things don’t change. You’re middle-aged now, so in just a few years, you’re officially a dirty old man, still looking at pictures of much much younger naked women. Let’s be honest – it’s a pathetic picture of manhood that you would not wish for your sons. Hopefully the perversions of your lust haven’t taken you down any darker paths, but they very likely have since that is the law of diminishing returns.

I know it’s painful but follow this through with me. In a few short years, you are confronted with the devastating reality that you are lusting after women the same age as your daughter (who is by then a young woman). You are confronted with the devastating hypocrisy of your actions. Namely, you want men not to lust after your daughter, not to degrade her and fantasize sexually about her (the very thought of it enrages you – as it should), but you are doing that exact thing to other men’s daughters, some of whom are probably brothers in Christ who are heartbroken about what their daughters have gotten caught up in. What else? Your marriage will certainly not be any better, and you will not be any more satisfied, despite giving away more of yourself. You will continue reaping the fruit of the seeds you’re currently sowing, only with compound interest – the cost will continue to rise and you will continue to be more miserable.

The second path is, as I said, quite different. Maybe, in a sovereign act of divine mercy, as you read this you experience godly grief over your sin – the heinous filthiness of it in the eyes of God, the shame and betrayal of it in the heart of your marriage where you are called to imitate the self-giving and self-sacrificial love of Christ, the pattern of failure to set an example at home and in the church in resisting sin and repenting of it. Maybe God grants you this conviction and grief and a blessed repentance as you turn away from these broken cisterns and back to the spring of living water that is the Living God who redeemed you, who gladly laid down His life for someone like me, and someone like you.

This repentance would lead to a painful confession to your wife – there is no other way. “In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor 7:4). Your body is not yours alone, so you don’t have the authority before God to keep this from the wife He has given you. Not that you must share every gory detail, but she needs to know the truth. This extremely scary and painful step is the very door through which healing will come into your marriage. Jesus holds out free and full forgiveness, but also a cleansing and purifying that you desperately need. He offers you true joy and satisfaction in place of the fleeting, defiling pleasure of sin.

If you do start walking down this new path, you need to know it will be extremely difficult. There are spiritual, emotional, and physiological realities that will push back hard. But you will not be alone. You have brothers here who are more than willing, more than ready to do battle with you, to be there to lean on when you’re weak, and celebrate every little step forward. In ten years, there is literally no telling where you might be in your walk with God, in your marriage, in your family. You could be reaping the fruit of grace and restoration and undeserved flourishing. By God’s grace that is how I feel today, and no words can describe how meaningful it is.

Make no mistake, you will reap what you sow. You already have been. The brokenness in your marriage is not all your fault, by any means, but it is largely your responsibility (don’t miss the difference). Perhaps you have used the brokenness and pain of your unfulfilling marriage as an excuse for your sin, but your Savior did not wait for you to make the first move – He initiated our incredible salvation while we were still enemies, rejecting and crucifying him. This is the pattern for husbands to follow, as Ephesians 5 makes so clear: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” This is something you can only do by God’s Spirit.

Brother, let’s sow something better from now on, for God’s glory, for your good, and for your joy.

Start by taking a long walk (or drive) and getting it all out with God. Pour out your heart. Allow yourself to get to that lowest place where you’re fully honest with yourself and Him just how messed up you are and how badly you need help. This is humility – God likes it. And devour some Scripture. Read Proverbs 5-7 (you’ll recognize yourself there!). Read Hosea. Read the Gospel of John and encounter again this Jesus who is so amazing. Read Galatians and get clarity on the gospel and walking in the Spirit.

I’m also including a passage from C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce where he describes an incredible conversation with a man enslaved by lust.

I’ve shared this with our mutual friend and we are both praying for you. We love you.

Phil

Appendix: From The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis:

I saw coming towards us a Ghost who carried something on his shoulder. Like all the Ghosts, he was unsubstantial, but they differed from one another as smokes differ. Some had been whitish; this one was dark and oily. What sat on his shoulder was a little red lizard, and it was twitching its tail like a whip and whispering things in his ear. As we caught sight of him he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. “Shut up, I tell you!” he said. It wagged its tail and continued to whisper to him. He ceased snarling, and presently began to smile. Then be turned and started to limp westward, away from the mountains.

“Off so soon?” said a voice.

The speaker was more or less human in shape but larger than a man, and so bright that I could hardly look at him. His presence smote on my eyes and on my body too (for there was heat coming from him as well as light) like the morning sun at the beginning of a tyrannous summer day.

“Yes. I’m off,” said the Ghost. “Thanks for all your hospitality. But it’s no good, you see. I told this little chap,” (here he indicated the lizard), “that he’d have to be quiet if he came—which he insisted on doing. Of course his stuff won’t do here: I realise that. But he won’t stop. I shall just have to go home.”

‘Would you like me to make him quiet?” said the flaming Spirit—an angel, as I now understood.

“Of course I would,” said the Ghost.

“Then I will kill him,” said the Angel, taking a step forward.

“Oh-ah-look out! You’re burning me. Keep away,” said the Ghost, retreating.

“Don’t you want him killed?”

“You didn’t say anything about killing him at first. I hardly meant to bother you with anything so drastic as that.”

“It’s the only way,” said the Angel, whose burning hands were now very close to the lizard. “Shall I kill it?”

“Well, that’s a further question. I’m quite open to consider it, but it’s a new point, isn’t it? I mean, for the moment I was only thinking about silencing it because up here—well, it’s so damned embarrassing.”

“May I kill it?”

“Well, there’s time to discuss that later.”

“There is no time. May I kill it?”

“Please, I never meant to be such a nuisance. Please—really—don’t bother. Look! It’s gone to sleep of its own accord. I’m sure it’ll be all right now. Thanks ever so much.”

“May I kill it?”

“Honestly, I don’t think there’s the slightest necessity for that. I’m sure I shall be able to keep it in order now. I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it.”

“The gradual process is of no use at all.”

“Don’t you think so? Well, I’ll think over what you’ve said very carefully. I honestly will. In fact I’d let you kill it now, but as a matter of fact I’m not feeling frightfully well today. It would be silly to do it now. I’d need to be in good health for the operation. Some other day, perhaps.”

“There is no other day. All days are present now.”

“Get back! You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did.”

“It is not so.”

“Why, you’re hurting me now.”

“I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”

“Oh, I know. You think I’m a coward. But it isn’t that. Really it isn’t. I say! Let me run back by tonight’s bus and get an opinion from my own doctor. I’ll come again the first moment I can.”

“This moment contains all moments.”

“Why are you torturing me? You are jeering at me. How can I let you tear me to pieces? If you wanted to help me, why didn’t you kill the damned thing without asking me—before I knew? It would be all over by now if you had.”

“I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?”

The Angel’s hands were almost closed on the Lizard, but not quite. Then the Lizard began chattering to the Ghost so loud that even I could hear what it was saying.

“Be careful,” it said. “He can do what he says. He can kill me. One fatal word from you and he will! Then you’ll be without me for ever and ever. It’s not natural. How could you live? You’d be only a sort of ghost, not a real man as you are now. He doesn’t understand. He’s only a cold, bloodless abstract thing. It may be natural for him, but it isn’t for us. Yes, yes. I know there are no real pleasures now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing? And I’ll be so good. I admit I’ve sometimes gone too far in the past, but I promise I won’t do it again. I’ll give you nothing but really nice dreams—all sweet and fresh and almost innocent. You might say, quite innocent . . .”

“Have I your permission?” said the Angel to the Ghost.

“I know it will kill me.”

“It won’t. But supposing it did?”

“You’re right. It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature.”

“Then I may?”

“Damn and blast you! Go on can’t you? Get it over. Do what you like,” bellowed the Ghost: but ended, whimpering, “God help me. God help me.”

Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken backed, on the turf.

“Ow! That’s done for me,” gasped the Ghost, reeling backwards.

For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialized while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. Its hinder parts grew rounder. The tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippled with swells of flesh and muscle, whinnying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled.

The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse’s neck. It nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other’s nostrils. The man turned from it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness (one cannot distinguish them in that country) which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse’s back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I well knew what was happening. There was riding if you like! I came out as quickly as I could from among the bushes to follow them with my eyes; but already they were only like a shooting star far off on the green plain, and soon among the foothills of the mountains. Then, still like a star, I saw them winding up, scaling what seemed impossible steeps, and quicker every moment, till near the dim brow of the landscape, so high that I must strain my neck to see them, they vanished, bright themselves, into the rose-brightness of that everlasting morning.

Escaping the Malaise of Modernity

The opening chapter of Samuel Parkison’s ‘To Gaze Upon God’ — a work of theological retrieval for evangelicals on the beatific vision — makes a striking argument.

Parkison states that all Christians throughout history have agreed that the beatific vision — seeing God face to face — is what makes heaven heaven, it is our blessed hope. But evangelicals in the last couple centuries have largely abandoned the term, though thankfully, many have not abandoned the idea. For example, John Piper’s ministry has hammered home the idea that seeing and savouring Christ is the chief delight of the soul; C.S. Lewis’ vision of “further up and further in” forever in Aslan’s country is similar, and so on.

But then Parkison takes aim at what he calls the “fundamentalist-biblicist” approach to the Bible as fatally compromised by the spirit of the Enlightenment. “Tradition, according to the Enlightenment, is a straight jacket, confining the would-be liberated intellect to immaturity.” Sola Scriptura, he argues, was never meant to be a rejection of the “confessional, catechetical, and liturgical life” that is shaped by the wisdom of past generations.

“The contemporary antipathy for tradition that often accompanies fundamentalism and a biblicist approach to theology did not come from sola Scriptura; modernity and the Enlightenment are to blame for this aberration form historic Christianity.”

This is a bold statement. And we are only at page 6. He goes on to argue that we have been largely cut off from our historical inheritance as Christians by this Enlightenment turn, this promise of intellectual maturity that turned out to be more like the journey of the prodigal son. Seeking self-fulfillment and freedom, we’ve ended up as a culture and in much of the evangelical church at a dead end, wondering what went wrong.

In this context of modern confusion, the idea of the beatific vision “touches a nerve within the soul; a nerve for which the post-Enlightenment imagination does not even have a category.”

And here is the conclusion he drives home to conclude the section:

“The way we escape the malaise of modernity is not by embracing individualistic biblicism, for individualistic biblicism is stuck in that very same malaise. The way forward is first the way backward. We must correct our course, and theological retrieval is the way to do this.”

I find myself resonating with this line of argument, though Parkison puts a very sharp point on the matter. One of the challenges here is that not every Christian or lay leader or pastor can be (or *should* be) doing this work of retrieval. There are SO many other good things to give ourselves to.

But I am convinced we do need a broad movement within evangelical Protestantism that consciously works to retrieve the best of the small-c catholic tradition, the ‘Great Tradition’ that forms the central core of Christian belief (including philosophical substructures) in such a way that is accessible and digestible for 21st-century believers of all kinds. Thankfully, there is such a movement already underway.

I’m looking forward to what I’ll find in pages 8-214 of this book, and maybe I’ll have more to share. I expect this book will be intellectually stimulating and, more importantly, spiritually edifying.

Yes, Jesus was Crucified with Nails (and It’s Irresponsible to Suggest Otherwise)

A Response to Christianity Today’s recent article, which featured a subversive argument, a spirit of revisionist speculation, and evinced poor editorial stewardship.

Correction: In a previous version of this post I stated that Gordon College is associated with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, but I was mistaken. Gordon-Conwell was formed in 1969 as a merger between Gordon College’s Divinity School and the Conwell School of Theology, so the two institutions (Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) have been separate entities since 1969. I apologize for this error and any confusion it engendered.

Introduction

I do not make a habit of speaking to the latest furor or controversy. It’s not healthy to be fixated on such things, at least for me. Polemics is not my wheelhouse. But I read an article on Good Friday that I found frankly shocking, called ‘Was Jesus Crucified with Nails?’ with the subtitle being ‘Why one evangelical scholar thinks the answer might be no’. It was featured at Christianity Today, under their Church Life section, as a kind of report on the thought of this scholar, Jeffrey P. Arroyo García, from Gordon College.

So I’m breaking from my usual habit and I want to share a few thoughts about this article and the three problems I see in it. The first problem is the argument, which I think is very weak and contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture. The second problem is the spirit of revisionist speculation that motivates the argument in the first place; and the third problem is the editorial decision by CT to publish this and push it during Easter week.

I have already seen a number of responses to this ill-begotten article. And so probably my voice is not needed to push back on it, but this is one of those pieces that I felt compelled to write, if for no other reason than to get it out of my system.

*It’s never a good sign when a post has 25 times more comments than likes.*

The Argument: Nails or Ropes?

Dr. García’s argument boils down to this: Since the crucifixion narratives themselves don’t explicitly mention nails, and since it is well established that crucifixion during Roman times was often done using ropes instead of nails, then it is quite possible that Jesus was not actually nailed to the cross but only hung with ropes. I think I have represented the argument fairly, but you can read the article for yourself and make of it what you will.

In one sense I am grateful for this article because it sent me, like the Bereans, examining the Scriptures “to see if these things were so.” And lo, I beheld they were not so. The article itself admits this problem about three quarters of the way through, where García deals with John 20:25, which he says is the “one place in the New Testament that mentions nails.” That’s not quite true, as we’ll see, but even if all we had was John 20, it’s a slam dunk that puts this argument to bed.

In John 20:25, Thomas says “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Then, in verse 27, Jesus makes clear that Thomas was not mistaken in assuming nail holes in his hands, when he responds: “Put your finger here, and see my hands.” It’s hard to imagine how the text could be clearer about the fact that Jesus was crucified with nails. The only way around the clear meaning of John 20 is to undermine the truthfulness of John’s gospel itself. Sadly, that’s exactly what García does:

But he isn’t completely convinced. Jesus doesn’t explicitly say “nails,” and the Bible does not say Thomas touches Christ’s hands or his feet. Many scholars think John was written later—perhaps after crucifixion with nails had become more common, García said.

Come again? I had to read that paragraph over a few times to believe what I was seeing. What does the dating of John’s gospel have to do with the argument? How is this not just refusing to believe what the text clearly says? What does it matter whether Jesus says the word “nails” when he does say “put your finger here.” García seems to be more riddled with doubt than poor Thomas was.

There are a lot of other passages in the Bible that point firmly towards the crucifixion being done with nails, including Colossians 2, Psalm 22, and Luke 24. For an excellent overview of these passages and more, see Benjamin Gladd’s article over at The Gospel Coalition.

To summarize, the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross. This was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and served as a powerful symbolic image for Paul to use in Col. 2:14, where he explained that God took “the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands” and set it aside, “nailing it to the cross.”

It grieves me that this clear teaching was undermined in this subversive and speculative article that only serves to get Christians to question whether the text itself is trustworthy. But it raises the question of what exactly is driving this project? For lack of a better term, I’m calling it a spirit of revisionist speculation.

A Spirit of Revisionist Speculation

One of the few things I didn’t enjoy about my time living on a Bible College campus was the way in which some of the young men seemed to enjoy speculating about all kinds of biblical and theological matters. I hadn’t experienced that before and I wasn’t expecting it. My own formation had been towards seeing these things as weighty, consequential, eternal matters, so I was thrown off by the apparent enjoyment some guys took in questioning and speculating.

I was reminded of this experience as I read the article and came across the words “perhaps,” “unclear,” “maybe,” “not convinced,” and then language like this:

‘“We don’t really know,” García said. “We don’t really have a lot of evidence, and the evidence we do have, it involves interpretation.”’

This is the lexicon of speculation. I don’t mean to imply it’s wrong to ask questions and think through various sides of an issue. There is most certainly a place for that. But what I’m trying to put my finger on is this spirit of taking delight in calling into question things that normal Christians consider to be solid received truth. This is destabilizing for simple Christians, and it strikes me as a problem related to scholars who are divorced from the nitty-gritty sin and glory realities of church life among normal people.

Kevin Vanhoozer addresses this problem in his recent book, ‘Mere Christian Hermeneutics’, where he claims that this division between the academy and the church has led to a theological anemia in the church and an ecclesial anemia in the academy. That seems to apply here, for I cannot imagine how this line of speculation and subversive revisionism about the crucifixion could possibly be edifying for God’s people. As an intellectual exercise between historians and scholars, maybe, but not as a featured article for Easter week for a publication that claims to be the flagship magazine for evangelicals. And that brings me to the third problem.

Publishing as Editorial Stewardship

Christianity Today’s unfortunate trajectory of decline has been well documented. I subscribed to it a few years ago, while it was under the editorial leadership of Mark Galli. It was a mixed bag to be sure, but I found value in keeping abreast of the conversation in broad evangelicalism. But what became clear over time is that it was more reflective of an elite cadre of left-leaning evangelicals than actual normal evangelicals. Galli left his post and then converted to Catholicism, which is perhaps not the ideal trajectory we are looking for in the people who fill these very consequential editorial positions. He was replaced by Russell Moore, who has had his own troubling theological trajectory.

The magazine and website still publishes good straight news reporting on issues facing evangelicals around the world, and it also still publishes good, thoughtful writing, but it certainly does seem to suffer from what some have dubbed living under the progressive gaze. This latest article is sadly on brand for what CT has come to represent, though it is the most egregious I have seen because of its direct attack on the truthfulness of the Gospel of John.

Whether John’s gospel was written early or late makes no difference when we are talking about the canon of Holy Scripture. Consider the staggering hubris of the argument once again. Consider what John himself writes in verse 24 of chapter 21, “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.” But here comes a scholar who, having studied extra-biblical sources, decides that they are a better guide to what really happened than the divinely inspired biblical author.

Should we also question wedding at Cana? The conversation with Nicodemus? The encounter with the woman at the well? The raising of Lazarus? After all, these stories only appear in the gospel of John, which “many scholars think was written later.” And if we shouldn’t question the truth of those stories, why not? On what basis are we deciding which parts of the gospel of John are trustworthy?

Whatever this is, it isn’t an evangelical view of the Bible.

Vanhoozer warns about the danger of allowing the world behind the text (historical context and research) to eclipse the text itself. I think that is what has happened here because it’s stated plainly in the article, here in the penultimate paragraph:

“The most important thing for me is that we read the text,” García said. “And then there is a world lying behind the text—but it takes some work for us as moderns to get to the point where we know something about that world, and for me, that deepens, that broadens and focuses how you read the text, how you understand it.” (emphasis mine).

Historical context is helpful, but it should not be used to contradict the plain meaning of the biblical text.

Any publishing outlet that puts content out has to decide what it will feature. These editorial decisions are what give each publication its own flavour and voice, and are therefore a stewardship of the trust and attention that readers grant. I think every publication has at times put out content that wasn’t so good in retrospect, but over time a publication does reveal what its agenda and priorities are—and readers will take note.

It strikes me as a staggeringly poor editorial choice to feature this article prominently on the week of Easter, and a poor stewardship of the trust and attention that regular churchgoers place in the masthead of Christianity Today.

I hope and pray that CT learns from this decision and recommits itself to building up the faith of its readers with robust, wholesome, edifying content. Especially during Easter, when the focus should be on the wonder and cosmic significance of the resurrection of the Son of God, as testified to by the trustworthy Scriptures.

Happy Easter, dear reader.

Update: The article’s author, Daniel Silliman, has since written an apology at the Christianity Today website, which is commendable and for which I am grateful. My critiques of the original article and of CT more generally remain the same, but good on them for course-correcting.

Review of ‘A priceless heritage’ – A History of Heritage College & Seminary

This book is a brief survey of the history of Heritage College & Seminary, with a chapter devoted to Central Baptist Seminary, another to London Baptist Bible College & Seminary, and then finally a chapter on the merged entity of Heritage College & Seminary (from 1993 to 2023 when the school celebrated its 30th anniversary and the book was published).

There is lots of very interesting and salient information to be gleaned in this book about the history of these three schools, even though it left me wishing it was longer. Despite being already somewhat familiar with the material, I learned lots from these essays. For example, I had not appreciated before just how central the topic of eschatology had been to the identity of the two schools (perhaps especially London) — which magnifies the accomplishment of finding a way to merge the schools together in 1993 to form Heritage. We too often hear about Christians splintering apart; it is good and right to celebrate when Christians find ways to come together without compromising on truth.

On a personal note, I was also surprised to hear about how truly dire the financial situation was even while I was living on campus and serving in student leadership from 2006-2009. Yet despite those challenges, the school was a buzzing hive of genuine spiritual transformation, regular deep immersion in the Scriptures, and warm Christian fellowship that has left a mark on me for life. As a student I had picked up on the fact that there were financial concerns, but it’s a credit to the leaders at the time that this did not put a damper on the spiritual and academic experience of students. I don’t deny that the school needed course correction and a way to achieve financial stability, but those were also great years of blessing under the leadership of Marvin Brubacher. If I have one minor criticism to make, it’s that this reality (admittedly based on my personal experience and bias) did not seem to come across in the way the story was told.

As a graduate of the college, a former staff member, and a continuing friend to the school and those who work there, I read the book with great personal interest. (And full disclosure: I also know and like the authors!) Despite whatever challenges it has faced and continues to face, Heritage remains a shining light of doctrinal fidelity and spiritual vitality among Bible Colleges and Seminaries in Canada. I pray that it grows and flourishes in the years to come.

I’m so very grateful for the work that went into researching and preparing this written history. I hope it spurs further writing on the history and leadership of what I consider to be the premier Bible College & Seminary option for broadly-reformed complementarian evangelicals in Canada.

C.S. Lewis’ Miracles – Another Prescient Masterpiece

Somehow I have never read ‘Miracles’ until now. I listened to it, narrated by a very good narrator, and really enjoyed it. Lewis’ prose is so striking and memorable – but why? It is a strange mixture of dense rational arguments, conversational tone, and colourful illustrations. There is a strong undercurrent of wit and humour spread throughout the whole thing. This kind of writing is a pleasure to take in, even when you don’t agree with it. Chesterton is the same way, though perhaps more effortlessly funny.

Lewis here is writing in the mid-20th century in an intellectual climate that is modernist and naturalistic. He is concerned about making a robust defense of miracles, but really miracles is just an entryway into a far more expansive discussion that centrally takes aim at the hubris of modernist metaphysics (naturalism) and, having disarmed it, makes a strong case for the reasonableness of the Christian faith which includes the central Christian miracles of the incarnation and resurrection.

It’s worth noting that he presents the incarnation as the central Christian miracle in a way that evangelical apologists have typically presented the resurrection. Lewis is in line with the early church here more than contemporary evangelical apologists, I believe, and my hunch is that this difference is not disconnected from the relative weakness of evangelical anthropology – our understanding of the human person and human nature. Which is not to take anything away from the importance of the bodily resurrection, of course.

This book is also a prime example of what makes Lewis so rewarding to read: his writing has aged so well. In fact, his analysis and prognosis of Western culture was so perceptive and ahead of its time that some of the books that were largely ignored in his lifetime have surged in popularity only in the last couple of decades, such as The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. To a lesser degree, this is true of Miracles as well.

One of the most perceptive writers of recent years has been Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a psychologist and cultural critic who specializes in the way the brain hemispheres affect our modes of thinking. His work is fairly popular now, as one can see by the flowering of discussion about the left vs right brain kinds of thinking. He argues that the left hemisphere, which specializes in a narrow focus of attention for manipulating and controlling elements of our environment, has become dominant in the modern era. But the left hemisphere was always meant to be subservient to the broader-scoped, more intuitive and open right hemisphere. He argues that many of our modern psychological and social ills are related to this left-brain dominated mode of thinking.

Here again Lewis seems to have anticipated this state of affairs, this modern crisis. He was himself a man of unusual gifts in this exact regard, as John Piper helpfully explored in his conference and subsequent collaborative book called ‘The Romantic Rationalist’. In short, Lewis’s mind was a remarkable marriage between the left-brained hardnosed rationalism that he imbibed from his beloved tutor William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’, and the right-brained imaginative intuition and romanticism. How many other authors have managed to write works of fiction (imaginative) and non-fiction (rational) that have endured so well?

These two passages here illustrate how prescient Lewis was in his diagnosis of the modern mental malady. The first passage traces the process of increasingly “truncated thought.”

“There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious fact of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of men have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialised inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the ‘scientific’ habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. But no other source was at hand, for during the same period men of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated.” (Chapter 6).

In this second passage, Lewis argues that Christianity is uniquely equipped to bridge the “unbridgeable chasm” that has grown between the two different ways of thinking.

“There is thus in the history of human thought, as elsewhere, a pattern of death and re-birth. The old, richly imaginative thought which still survives in Plato has to submit to the deathlike, but indispensable, process of logical analysis: nature and spirit, matter and mind, fact and myth, the literal and the metaphorical, have to be more and more sharply separated, till at last a purely mathematical universe and a purely subjective mind confront one another across an unbridgeable chasm. But from this descent also, if thought itself is to survive, there must be re-ascent and the Christian conception provides for it. Those who attain the glorious resurrection will see the dry bones clothed again with flesh, the fact and the myth remarried, the literal and the metaphorical rushing together.” (Chapter 16).

As you can see, the book is brilliant and worthy of close scrutiny.

Another element that stood out to me was the way Lewis based his central argument against naturalism in the mystery of human consciousness and the mystery of human thought. I don’t know if consciousness studies were in vogue in the mid-20th century, but I know they have exploded in popularity in recent years. And somehow everything Lewis said about cognition and consciousness aligned with what I understand (as a layman) to be the best ‘theory of mind’ out there.

For a book that is nearly 80 years old, that is remarkable.

The Everlasting People: A Second Reading

Back in 2022, I read an interesting little book called The Everlasting People. I wrote up a brief review on Goodreads and then went on with my life. And then I got a reply from the author, gently pushing back on some of my comments. It was a strange experience, which I wrote about here.

I thought about what the author – Dr. Matthew Milliner – wrote back to me and I decided I needed to re-read the book. Fast forward to 2024, and it became time for me to keep my promise. So a few weeks ago I cracked it open again and gave it a second reading.

I tried to have a more open and positive posture towards the book this time around. It really is a remarkable project, trying to adopt the general approach and insights of the inimitable G.K. Chesterton, and applying them to the Native peoples of the Americas (or Turtle Island), especially their art and mythology. Having just re-read Chesterton’s great book, The Everlasting Man, I was all set.

The book, derived from a set of lectures that were delivered, is made up of three chapters, followed by three ‘responses’. The first thing to say is that I learned so much from the book (in both readings). I learned a ton about First Nations history, a lot about Chesterton himself, and much about the surprising degree to which those early indigenous people accepted Christianity. The fact that I – along with most North Americans – do not know this history well is a sad testament to our particular blindness when it comes to these matters.

So the first reaction is a genuine lament for the way in which human persons, indeed entire communities and peoples, were mistreated, cheated, and wiped out by bloodthirsty men who too often claimed the name of Christ. Milliner is to be commended for the evenhanded way he did not ignore the sins and atrocities of First Nations people (a common enough manipulation of the story in our day of cultural self-hatred). The third respondent came closest to this particular malady of the mind, but we can just leave that to the side since it was written in 2020; one can still catch the aroma of the peak wokeness and racial angst convulsing our educated classes at the time.

One concern I had in my initial review, the usage of terms like whiteness, is still worthy of comment. Having read the book more carefully, I don’t really see any compromise here. And yet the cultural turmoil of recent years is necessarily the context into which this book must be understood, and everyone knows that a term like ‘whiteness’ is strongly coded as leftwing-progressive. Here at the end of 2024, it feels like the winds have shifted and the reactionary populism of the normies has rejected the progressive left’s project of anti-Western critical theories. So while I am happy to gloss over the term in my reading of the book, it’s inescapable that it will signal certain political and cultural alignments whether the author intends it to or not.

The meat of the book, however, is far more interesting that culture wars. The Mishipeshu (underwater panther) and Thunderbird (Animiki), two mythical creatures found within indigenous mythology, are explored for their evocative imagery and the way in which these figures were adapted by Native Christians. It is powerful to consider the Native Christian, sorrowful after so much suffering, persevering in Christ and expressing that faith in ways that are genuine to the best aspects of their culture. That is good missiology, and a good example of the kind of thing Chesterton loved.

The last chapter, which reflects on Chesterton’s poem about the Virgin Mary (The Queen of Seven Swords) as well as the medieval Virgin of the Passion (a suffering Virgin Mary, later renamed Our Lady of Perpetual Help), and how devotion to her permeated through the region where the Lenape people had once lived, was the hardest for me to wrap my head around.

But that’s okay. Gotta leave something for the third reading, I guess.

The Long Way Home – A Review of Ashley Lande’s ‘The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever’

Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande’s story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.

For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it’s that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I’ve ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.

There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.

The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one’s embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.

We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book ‘The Everlasting Man’.

For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.

A Very Boring-Sounding Title: The Foundation of True Discourse

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I can’t understand how anyone could believe that.”

“Anyone who thinks that is a complete idiot and understands nothing.”

We’ve all heard people say things like this, and most of us have said some of them ourselves. But the more I observe people interacting in person and online, the more I see how destructive such attitudes are towards the goals of honest conversation and true discourse.

It is the most natural inclination of any group with shared beliefs to reinforce those beliefs by developing arguments against the beliefs of others. This in and of itself is fine and good. This is why Christians study and discuss the wrong beliefs of Muslims, Mormons, and atheists, and why Camaro enthusiasts talk trash about Mustangs. The last thing we want is to say that one belief is as valid as another, or else we end up with plain old relativism and that is about as helpful as a set of black and white traffic lights or pharmacists who only administer placebo pills.

And yet something critical is lost when the Camaro Club members come to believe that the Mustang is a useless piece of junk and quite literally the worst car ever made, or when a Christian says that Muslims or Mormons or atheists are completely deceived and know nothing about God or the world. What is lost is simply the truth. In the effort of preserving and reinforcing one’s own beliefs, it is all too easy to leave the realm of truth and reality. Constructing crude caricatures of opposing views is so rampant in religious and political discourse that its easy to lose sight of how harmful and destructive it is. And it isn’t just harmful for the one being caricatured. No – it is even more harmful for the one doing the caricaturing, because even if that person holds the view that is really true, he has left the realm of truth in his attack on the other, and is now frankly unable to convince anyone else of the truth.

Why is this? It’s because of a very simple and understandable reaction that always occurs when someone hears their own beliefs misrepresented. It’s essentially impossible to be convinced by an argument that is not addressing your position. And if I can narrow the focus a little bit to an especially guilty party of which I am a guilty member, we Christians are constantly doing this. The other partners in this fumbling waltz of misfired arguments are the atheists, who I daresay are just as bad.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Christians quote Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”” and then proceed to argue that atheists are all fools and if they had any working brain cells they would see that God exists. Now, the scripture is true, and in the last analysis, when all things are revealed and our profound blindnesses are cured, it will be obvious that it is a foolish thing to say there is no God, sort of like it is a foolish thing to say there is no such thing as speech. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t perfectly understandable why someone would be a committed atheist. In fact, I am quite sure I would be a committed atheist if I had been born to atheist parents and if God had not so clearly intervened in my life; there but for the grace of God go I and you too.

The truth is, if the deepest pre-supposition you held was that there is no such thing as the supernatural, God, or anything beyond the physical world, then it makes sense to look at all the data available and conclude, like so many do, that the universe somehow came into existence through a big kablamo and that by endless chance life came into being and through countless eons evolved into what we see today. A lot of very intelligent, sensible people believe this. Likewise, atheists should be able to imagine how an intelligent and thoughtful person could come to believe that God created all things and that Jesus is the son of God.

We need a kind of intellectual empathy that says “I can see how you could believe that.”

This is the foundation for any conversation which might actually bear the fruit of mutual understanding, growth, and maybe even epiphany.

Defending the truth is a vital and worthy objective. But often in the interest of defending the truth we build walls instead of bridges, creating insular intellectual communities instead of winsome truth-telling communities, based in fear instead of love.

Someone I know came back from a conference a few years ago and told me “Post-modernism is so stupid!” I don’t disagree with the fact but the sentiment is not likely to convince many post-modernists. Forgive the analogy but if you want the dog to come inside you’re going to have to do something other than throw sticks at it.

Republicans routinely demonize and draw caricatures of the Democrats, who then turn around and return the favour with interest. Christians get together and make fun of those stupid know-nothing atheists, who also get together and chuckle at the poor misguided fools who believe in an imaginary omnipotent being. And then there was the guy in my class who had decided that any and all Japanese cars were ugly and stupid and that only Fords and Chevys were worthy of appreciation, a position so untenable that it was hard not to laugh.

Building walls of mutual incomprehension will do a good job of preserving the status quo but it will also prevent any actual conversation and – most shockingly of all – any realization of our own errors and wrong beliefs. Ultimately it is the path to ignorance, blindness, and even hate and violence, for there is a sense in which the kinds of mental attitudes I’ve described contain the seeds of the dehumanization necessary for violence.