Cross as forgiving: Tim Keller agrees

Looks like I'm not the only one trying to recast the Cross as a forgiving event, Tim Keller seems to be making the same sort of move:
The (True?) Story of the Cross | Musings on Science and Theology:

Forgiveness always requires sacrifice. When we forgive we bear the consequence, the suffering, ourselves rather than demanding retribution. No one “just forgives” any grievous wrong. How much more then for God? God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself. This was not just an example, but an ultimate act of forgiveness.

So maybe I'm not saying something too off the wall -perhaps even an idea whose time has come?

Atonement controversy rumbles on

I'm afraid that I strongly suspect that this has more to do with boundary maintenance by conservative evangelicals who appear to have captured UCCF at the moment and are paranoid enough to feel threatened by those whose commitment to the gospel and scripture has some differences with their own. So, as the Church Times reports it;

At the heart of the controversy over Mr Chalke’s views was his rejection of one understanding of penal substitutionary atonement as “a vengeful father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed”. He wrote: “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith.”
His book was denounced by the principal-elect of Oak Hill College, the Revd Mike Ovey, and two of his students, Steve Jeffery and Andrew Sach, in a response, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution (IVP, 2007).
... Dr Wright says: “What has happened since the initial flurry of the debate about The Lost Message of Jesus has looked, frankly, like a witch-hunt, with people playing the guilt-by-association game: hands up anyone who likes Steve Chalke; right, now we know who the bad guys are.”

Quite so. As far a I can see the real beef is the popularised misrepresentation of the doctrine. Properly understood, the objections are met. For me the real problem is that it is so easy in the current cultural climate to misunderstand it. Only last night a grandmother was telling me how a grandson of hers was not going to church with his parents just now because he felt that a father who would ask his son to be crucified is monstrous. That's a nine-year old's view. We have a problem, folks. How do you explain the idea in terms a 9 year old can readily grasp? Indeed, recognise that for a lot of people, their understanding of religious ideas is not probably much advanced on that child.

My own thinking, at the moment, is that we need to place it all in the context of understanding forgiveness properly and a robust trinitarianism. Forgiveness is a choice by someone who is hurt not to demand recompense of the offender but to 'swallow'/'take' the hurt themselves. It is to choose to be hurt and not to 'export' that hurt to another. Maybe part of the problem is that our culture doesn't really understand forgiveness because we are much more into excuses and explaining away. We have culturally lost an understanding of forgiveness as choosing to hold the hurt and not to redirect it but rather to absorb it and to strive for the inner conditions to rebuild or maintain positive relations with the offender. It hurts to forgive. I suspect if it doesn't hurt, it isn't forgiveness.

How does this fit with the atonement. Well, simply put, I find it helpful at the moment to look at the cross and to see an effective icon of God absorbing the hurt of sin. That is the cross is playing out in spacetime the absorption of the hurt that sin causes. To forgive sin costs God, the cross is a showing forth and an actual experiencing and dealing with that cost. It is a cost to God and God is 'paying'.

The other dimension of forgiveness we do well to recall, is that love is not love that is not outraged by hurt done to the beloved. So if it is true that God deeply loves us, then any hurt, wrong, injustice outrages God just as it does us in our best moments. That outrage is what is traditionally called wrath. I would seriously doubt the love of anyone who does not feel righteous anger at the wilful damage of the beloved.

Now the complicating factor is that God just as passionately loves the abuser as well as the abused. And in a total picture we are all, to some extent and in different ways, abusers as well as abused. In identifying with us by love and incarnation, God is hurt by our abuse not only of our gifts from him but of each other. To forgive, God has to absorb the pain involved and refuse vengeful responses.

That's where I'm up to. I sense I need to push it further, but I think it's important.

One of the issues arising is whether this can translate to answer that 9 year old.

Church Times - Atonement row gets personal as Evangelical partnership splits

Technorati Tags: atonement, substitution, cross, theology, Christian, soteriology

Penal substitution and an object lesson in media manipulation

The other day I blogged about the issue of penal substitutionary theories of atonement. Lo and behold within days there's a minor spat in the UK about it, not in response to my writing (naturally, not enough important people read what I say), but in response to the remarks of one dean which were then leaked to a couple of bishops likely to disagree with the bit that was presumably presented to them. They reacted to what was presented and the media had created a stir of ecclesiastical disagreement. In fact though, when you look at what Jeffrey John said, you realise that he actally agrees with those who were manipulated and probably selectively (mis)quoted into taking an apparently other position. Jeffrey John wrote.

“Why should God forgive us through punishing someone else? It was worse than illogical. It was insane. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we’d say they were a monster." The explanation “just doesn’t work, though sadly it’s one that’s still all too often preached ... The most basic truth about God’s nature is that he is Love, not wrath and punishment.” Some Christians went all through their lives without grasping that, Dr John said. “The cross is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it’s almost the opposite. . . On the cross, Jesus died for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God, but by God. . .”

Which actually is no problem to well-read and thought out evangelicals who would entirely agree. However, I'm not sure whether I've just been a bit overoptimistic, but I do think that the real problem here is that the media have manipulated the situation to make the difference of opinion bigger that it really is. It is interesting, though, that that last sentence of John's is almost exactly the same thing that JI Packer wrote about the matter thirty years ago defending a traditional evangelical view of 'propitiation' in a UCCF monograph under the TSF banner.

What I learn from this is to be wary of the way the media present issues and to understand how they make controversy appear out of nowhere. In this case by selective quoting and asking for comment on those quotes. Presumably also it is not counted 'inaccurate' to miss out any of those annoying riders that people often add such as "If that is a fair representation of what he said...", "Not having seen the whole thing I am not sure how much I can say, but if he said X, then the problem with that might be ...".
Church Times - Dean stands by Radio 4 talk on cross
Technorati Tags: atonement, penal_substitution, theology, Christian, UK, evangelical