Its amazing how much discussion and interest there is at the moment about the cross and the nature of the atonement. Jeffrey John has received a lot of coverage for his rather rabid caricature of penal substitution on Radio 4.

Now, Tom Wright the Bishop of Durham wades into the debate with an article posted on the fulcrum website. He is clearly frustrated with the apparently ill-informed assault on the doctrine and he systematically takes Dr John’s argument to pieces (it is worth reading in full). He concludes by saying that:  

To throw away the reality because you don't like the caricature is like cutting out the patient's heart to stop a nosebleed. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and all because of the unstoppable love of the one creator God. There is 'no condemnation' for those who are in Christ, because on the cross God condemned sin in the flesh of the Son who, as the expression of his own self-giving love, had been sent for that very purpose. 'He did not spare his very own Son, but gave him up for us all.' That's what Good Friday was, and is, all about.  

What is perhaps most interesting about the article though, is that he doesn’t stop there. Having successfully rebutted and refuted Jeffrey John’s caricature of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, he turns his attention to the new book on substitutionary atonement by Mike Ovey, the new Principal of Oakhill theological college.   

This is a very brave thing to do. The book Pierced for Our Transgressions is the subject of an intense marketing campaign. It boasts its own website, even its own Facebook page, and the commendations at the beginning of the book run to ten pages and include virtually everybody who is anybody in the evangelical world. The authors and the publishers clearly hope it will come to be regarded as the heir to John Stott’s book The Cross of Christ.  

Nevertheless, Tom argues that, though there is much to commend the book, it is, at the end of the day ‘sub-biblical’, even ‘unbiblical’. This is what he says:  

“What then do I mean by saying that Pierced for Our Transgressions is deeply unbiblical? Just this: it abstracts certain elements from what the Bible actually says, elements which are undoubtedly there and which undoubtedly matter, but then places them within a different framework, which admittedly has a lot in common with the biblical one, but which, when treated as though it were the biblical one, becomes systematically misleading. An illustration I have often used may make the point. When a child is faced with a follow-the-dots puzzle, she may grasp the first general idea - that the point is to draw a pencil line joining the dots together and so making a picture - without grasping the second - that the point is to draw the lines according to the sequence of the numbers that go with each dot. If you ignore the actual order of the numbers, you can still join up all the dots, but you may well end up drawing, shall we say, a donkey instead of an elephant. Or you may get part of the elephant, but you may get the trunk muddled up with the front legs. Or whatever. Even so, it is possible to join up all the dots of biblical doctrines, to go down a list of key dogmas and tick all the boxes, but still to join them up with a narrative which may well overlap with the one the Bible tells in some ways but which emphatically does not in other ways. And that is, visibly and demonstrably, what has happened in Pierced for Our Transgressions, at both large and small scale.  

Large scale: when the authors set out their systematic (and would-be biblical!) theology, in chapter 3, they offer a clear, unambiguous example of a problem which has lain deep within some strands of western theology, both Catholic and Protestant, for many generations. They ignore the story of Israel. Yes, they draw on the Old Testament here and there: the Passover lamb and other sacrificial types. They make plenty of use of Old Testament passages and themes. But there is no sense that the basic biblical answer to the problem we encounter in Genesis 3-11 (the problem, in other words, of human sin and its consequences) begins with Genesis 12, with the call of Abraham; that the entire Old Testament narrative demands to be seen within this framework; and that the very passages they appeal to in the New Testament demand to be read in the same way. Their grand narrative goes from creation, fall, sin and judgment to the internal relationships within the Trinity and thence to penal substitution. But the fully biblical meaning of the cross, as presented by the four evangelists, is that the cross means what it means as the climax of the entire story of Jesus - and that the story of Jesus means what it means as the climax of the entire narrative to which the gospels offer themselves as the climactic and decisive moment, namely, the story of Israel from Abraham to Jesus (just read Matthew 1), and thus the story of Israel seen as the divine answer to the problem of Adam. This is a point which the authors have scarcely begun to grasp, foundational though it is to all second-Temple Jewish and New Testament thinking (see, e.g., 94 note 153, where the centrality of Adam in the argument of Romans 3-8, which is precisely the point I am making, is advanced as a reason why it might be difficult to see the passage as a retelling of the Jewish story; for a moment, on p. 95, they suggest that Abraham's family should have been the means of blessing for all, but they never see that this is a major key to the entire biblical worldview). I have explored the biblical narrative from this point of view in several places, not least the central chapter of my recent book Evil and the Justice of God, and I have watched with frustration as those who profess to be 'biblical' in their orientation shy away from listening to what the text actually says.  

He goes on to critique their reading of Romans and Galatians before saying:  

But the biggest, and most worrying, unbiblical feature of Pierced for Our Transgressions is the outright refusal to have anything seriously to do with the gospels. This is a massive problem, which I believe to be cognate with all kinds of other difficulties within today's church, not least within today's evangelicalism. There is no space here to open up this question more than a very little. Let me just tell it as I see it on reading this new book.  

I was startled, to begin with, at the fact that the foundational chapter, entitled 'Searching the Scriptures: The Biblical Foundations of Penal Substitution', has precisely six pages on the Gospel of Mark, a good bit of which consists of lengthy biblical quotations, and four on John. And that's it for the gospels. I don't disagree with most of those ten pages, but it is truly astonishing that a book like this, claiming to offer a fairly full-dress and biblically-rooted doctrine of the meaning of the cross, would not only omit Matthew and Luke, and truncate Mark and John so thoroughly (sifting them for prooftexts, alas), but would ignore entirely the massive and central question of Jesus' own attitude to his own forthcoming death, on the one hand, and the way in which the stories the evangelists tell are themselves large-scale interpretations of the cross, on the other. One would not know, from this account, that there was anything to all this other than Mark 10.45 ('the Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many') and a few other key texts, such as the 'cup' which Jesus prayed might pass, but which he eventually drank...  

...I am forced to conclude that there is a substantial swathe of contemporary evangelicalism which actually doesn't know what the gospels themselves are there for, and would rather elevate 'Paul' (inverted commas, because it is their reading of Paul, rather than the real thing, that they elevate) and treat Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as mere repositories of Jesus' stories from which certain doctrinal and theological nuggets may be collected. And this, sadly, chimes in with other impressions I have received from elsewhere within the same theological stable - with, for instance, the suggestion that since Paul's epistles give us 'the gospel' while 'the Gospels' simply give us stories about Jesus, we shouldn't make the reading of the latter into the key moment in the first half of the Communion Service. (In case anyone should rub their eyes in disbelief, I have actually heard this seriously argued more than once in the last year or two.)  

His main criticism then is their neglect of Israel and the abstraction of their theology from the story of God’s dealings with his people.  


The author’s of the book obviously have a good rapid rebuttal team and they already have a response on their website. This is what they say:  

Wright’s central objection to our work seems not to be directed at any of the specific biblical or theological arguments we have advanced in support of penal substitution. Rather, his quibble is a methodological one: he complains that we have not set our whole discussion within the framework of a narrative-theological exposition of Israel’s history as it reaches its fulfilment in Christ. He even goes so far as to assert that we ‘ignore the history of Israel’ (italics original), which seems at best overstated.  

For example, we set the Passover in the context of the Abrahamic covenant (pp. 35, 41–42), the Levitical sacrifices in the context of the preceding Exodus narrative (pp. 42–43), God’s curse on sin in the context of Israel’s exile (pp. 93–95, 122), the life of Jesus in the context of Israel’s role in God’s purposes (pp. 134–135).  

However, there is a difference between the kind of narrative theology project in which Wright has been engaged for so many years, and the approach of classical systematic theology, which looks to provide an integrated picture of the Bible’s teaching on particular themes. Surely both are helpful and appropriate. A book professing to summarise the message of John’s Gospel must begin with the whole structure of his narrative, the place of the signs, and so on. Conversely, the section on John in a systematic work on the Trinity will necessarily – and rightly – focus on those specific passages which have most to say about the Father-Son relationship, the sending of the Spirit, etc.  

Wright accuses us of ‘sifting’ the Gospels for material relevant to our subject, and indeed that is exactly what we were trying to do! That does not mean that we are free to abstract ‘proof-texts’ from their contexts, but we took pains to avoid that. But Wright censures us for failing to hit a target we were not aiming at. We did not profess to answer the question, ‘What do the gospels teach about Jesus?’ nor even, ‘What picture of the atonement emerges from the gospels as a whole?’ Our aim, as we explain in the introduction to our exegetical section (pp. 33–34) was more modest. We were trying to establish simply that penal substitution has a place in this bigger picture.  

They say that the narrative approach to theology and the systematic shouldn’t be seen in opposition to one another, but as complimentary models. It would be wrong, they argue to say that one is better than the other, or that one should be used to the exclusion of the other.  

However, having recently written an essay on the nature of theology, it seems to me, that they still assume that theology is something drawn out of the text, out of exegesis. I wonder if this is an appropriate way to understand evangelical theology. Please indulge me as I quote from the essay:  

“Theology is an act of transposition, not in the sense of a movement from representation to concept, but in the sense of a mapping and a making sense of what is already there in the text. It is not the replacement of the rudimentary and untheorised language of Scripture with the refined rhetoric of systematics.  Instead, it should remain in touch with the biblical dialect and resist the temptation for over-systematisation. “What is required in an account of dogma and its rhetoric is something more light-weight, low-level and approximate, something therefore less likely to compete with or displace Scripture. (John Webster, Holy Scripture) Thus Webster advocates modesty, transparency, and unoriginality, arguing that “dogmatic theology operates best when it is a kind of gloss on Scripture – a discursive reiteration or indication of the truth of the Christian gospel as it is encountered in the Bible.” (Webster, Holy Scripture).”  

In the essay I draw on the work of the theologian Rusty Reno to argue for a theological exegesis that recognises that “‘exegesis is not about drawing together the scriptural details; rather it is about drawing out theological propositions from the text. Theology is still viewed as a consequence of exegesis rather than a mode or method of exegesis.’ (Reno, ‘Biblical Theology and Theological Exegesis’)”  

Again, quoting Reno, the essay goes on: “‘Here we are much closer to pre-critical tradition and a view of theology as a dense act of exegetical ‘showing’ rather than exegesis that draws theological conclusions at a remove from the text.’ (Reno) For the theologian Karl Barth, the theological task is to draw together the disparate untheorised elements of Scripture; its idioms and dialect, intensifying their interconnections and integrating and co-ordinating the exegetical statements into a coherent meta-narrative grounded in the details of the exegesis. Barth does not describe the text and then formulate a theological conclusion, rather he offers a theological exposition of what the text says and that constitutes his conclusion.”   

It seems to me that methodologically at least, Tom is on the right track, at least if you claim to be an evangelical.