Atonement discussion

I prefer to read what is probably the most stimulating and theologically sensible website I have come across, rather than comment on things posted.

However, this ‘thread’ is a little more personal than most, so I thought I would write a small note to clarify some things.

Cosmic child abuse: “Steve Chalke and Alan Mann coined the phrase in isolation down t’ pub one evening” - joeblow.

No we didn’t. We were fully aware of the theological concerns over Penal Substitution and the use of the term ‘cosmic child abuse’ by certain critics. In fact, Steve has indicated on several occasions since the fallout from the book that he didn’t come up with phrase.

In addition, can I just add that the comment made Steve and I sound like a couple of lads trying to put the theological world to rights over a pint of beer. Though not a professional theologian, Steve has an incredible knowledge and grasp of current theological issues whilst I am a theological graduate (with a first class honours degree and an MA in Biblical Interpretation to my name). Though the book is aimed at the popular market it is, ‘rooted in good scholarship’, as Tom Wright kindly pointed out on the cover, and not a product of a few pints of beer.

From my perspective, I believe that it is this popularising of already published views that has got us into trouble, rather than the shocking nature of two paragraphs in a 200 page book. While safely locked away in academia, such thinking can’t ‘harm’ the constituents of evangelical churches. Put them in a book and stick Steve Chalke’s name on the cover - then you have a problem because your ‘ordinary’ Christian likes to read Steve’s books. Of course, the irony is that most letters Steve and I get suggest that many Christians already felt uncomfortable with certain views about Jesus (his life, death and resurrection) but couldn’t articulate them in a way that allowed them to be taken seriously among their peers, and more importantly, in the presence of their church leaders. The Lost Message of Jesus has in many cases simply given people the confidence to express what they knew to be true, intuitively and biblically.

Both Steve and I have been saddened by the backlash, as we believed (and this website proves us right) that we were simply raising some issues we thought people needed and wanted to discuss regarding Jesus and the way his message is perceived by those inside and outside the Christian community.

Those of you who are familiar with the book will probably understand me when I say that, we would have had to have shoe-horned in a penal view of Jesus’ death given the context of the argument we had put forward. What Paul and the latter New Testament writers do with Jesus’ death reflecting back from specific missional contexts is a debate we didn’t wish to enter.

Of course, Tom Wright would wish to argue that Jesus did have a penal substituionary view of his own death, though perhaps not in quite the same way as penal substitution is usually understood (see Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Chapter 12).

With hindsight, perhaps we should have simply laid out our view about Jesus’ death in the context of what we believed to be his message and left out the comments regarding penal substitution, as this seems to have clouded people’s understanding of what we were trying to do in writing the book.

One final note. In March 2005, Paternoster is publishing my book, Atonement For A Sinless Society: A new perspective for an emerging culture.

This fits very much into the stream about why we need theories of atonement and groundshero’s comment that ‘we are obliged to make sense of Jesus in terms of our own culture.’ - a view echoed by theologians such as Joel Green, Mark Baker, Douglas John Hall, among othes.

Unfortunately, for contractual reasons I am not able to write at length about the content of the book here, pre-publication. Sorry! I should point out, however, that it is written with the undergraduate theological student in mind, and is not a popular Christian paperback.