Excluding the centre
What do you think of the following summary of the Bible's message?
Ever since the fall, God has been active to reverse the effects of sin. He takes action to limit sin's damage; he calls out a new nation, the Israelites, to mediate his teaching and his grace to others; he promises that one day he will come as the promised Davidic king to overthrow sin and death and all their wretched effects. This is what Jesus does: he conquers death, inaugurates the kingdom of righteousness, and calls his followers to live out that righteousness now in prospect of the consummation still to come.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Except for what it doesn’t say.
As Don Carson points out in a recent article on the Gospel Coalition website, this increasingly popular version of the Bible's message is distorted because of what it omits: “It collapses human rebellion, God's wrath, and assorted disasters into one construct, namely, the degradation of human life, while depersonalising the wrath of God. It thus fails to wrestle with the fact that from the beginning, sin is an offense against God.”
Don goes on to point out that this reductionist version of the Bible's message is just one of the factors lying behind the spate of recent attacks on the doctrine of penal substitution. When themes such as God's wrath, death and judgement are downplayed or excluded, then the central character of the cross as propitiation and substitution is also gradually excluded.
The same happens with the recent trend of talking about different ‘models’ of the atonement—the penal substitution model, the Christus Victor model, the exemplary model, and so on—as if one can choose which model best suits our inclinations or cultural context, and emphasize it to the exclusion of others.
In recent times, it has been the Christus Victor model (that on the cross Christ was victorious over the devil and all evil) that has become flavour of the month. “Of course we accept that there is some element of some sort of substitution somewhere in the atonement”, say the Christ Victor crowd, “but the cross cannot merely be about that. Surely it must also be about the victory of Christ over the powers of evil, with all the ramifications that has for our engagement with society, etc. etc.” And thus the scene is set for a book-length discussion of the cross and its achievement in which penal substitution is relegated to a footnote on page 27.
This is not heresy by denial. It is heresy by omission. By marginalizing and excluding what in the Bible is at the centre, one creates a new centre and a new doctrine.
Don Carson's evaluation is apt: “Christians are not at liberty to pick and choose which of the Bible's teachings are to be treasured”.