A couple of days ago I wrote about being the Fiction Theology Police. It’s not a popular position nor, according to many of my writer friends, a necessary one.
Last night on Facebook someone posted a link to a very useful list of Clichés Christians Should Avoid. It was a good list and pretty much everything on it I agreed with. Then in the fine print I came across this:
even if you buy into the concept of substitutionary atonement
Now, in case you don’t know what “substitutionary atonement” is, it’s the teaching that Jesus died to pay for the sins of the world. It’s pretty much the whole point of being a Christian. If we Christians didn’t believe THAT, we’d pretty much be free to be any other religion in the world.
I did some looking into it and discovered that the author of the piece is a member of the Emergent Church and that many members of the Emergent Church deny the teaching of substitutionary atonement. In other words…Jesus did NOT die for our sins. Because, in their view, that would make God a bully who is incapable of forgiving without hurting someone and that’s just not who the loving God is!
I’m still incredibly sad over this; I know a lot of followers of other faiths who think that the whole Jesus Dying For Sins is anything ranging from stupid nonsense to outright heresy within their own faith. As Atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Pantheists, Pagans, Jews, they’re wholly in bounds to have those feelings and to disagree with the Christian teaching.
But if you claim Christianity as your faith you are calling yourself a Follower of Christ. A follower of Christ who denies the central loving and miraculously triumphant sacrifice of Christ is following a kindhearted but crazy man out of some compulsion I cannot fathom. Why would you follow Jesus and yet refuse to acknowledge him as the Lamb of God? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
And yet, there it is. Thousands of people who claim the label “Christian” and move through the world as such–and yet deny one of the central points of the Christian religion.
When I say I’m the Theology Police, this is what I’m talking about. If you hand me a book written for Christians as a fictional entertainment and yet have the story deny Jesus’ death and resurrection, I’m not going to say “well, that’s okay. It’s fiction.” I’m going to say that that book cannot be called a book for the market segment of Christians. There are some historical examples of this type of policing. One excellent book–The Last Temptation Of Christ– and one much more ridiculous book–Gwen Shamblin’s follow-up to her Weigh Down series–were denied places in the Christian marketplace because they had teachings that were not theologically sound.
That’s what I’m trying to clarify with this post. Books with all ideas can and should exist. That’s how we find out about the ideas and test them and test our own ideas against them. But if they clash with things we as Christians hold dear they can exist outside the shelter of Christianity.
I don’t know enough about the author of this list of cliches to argue your point or his. I do know that the early church fathers didn’t quite view substitutionary atonement in quite the same manner as we do post Reformation. In modern times, the Eastern Orthodox church holds to the older definition/distinction of atonement. Since I have to run, I’ll just post this link.
I hate to keep going back to this “excuse” but being raised Anabaptist–specifically Mennonite and (in my husband’s case) neo-Mennonite–our understanding and the Anabaptist understanding of Substitutionary Atonement is much closer to that of the pre-reformation theologians.
We understand Scripture to be explaining that the Substituionary Atonement (and this is why I left of the word “penal”) is a loving sacrifice necessary to triumph over death. The best analogy I have at the moment is that the bridge of the bond between man and God had been washed out by Death due to our sins and Christ, in sacrificing His life was able to fight death on God’s terms and conquer it. This rebuilds the bridge. It isn’t because God hungers for payment. It’s an expression of love and holiness and sacrifice and, ultimately, an expression of triumph over Death itself.
That’s the general Anabaptist understanding, as opposed to the Reformation / Calvinist /neo-Calvinist understanding of ‘God expects payment’.
Splitting hairs, nuance, etc. But that’s how I’ve always understood the many scriptures on the topic.
In researching the Emergent position many of them tend to disavow ANY notion of substitutionary atonement at all. Not just the “penal” version.
And while I can accept the quibbling over the nuances within church discussions (even though ultimately it changes nothing of the perfect truth of what happened and even though none of us yet fully understand the absolute magic of what happened) I can’t see how John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 can be flat-out ignored altogether.
I forgot to add that Packer and other teachers of Penal Substitutionary Atonement are Calvinist or Neo-Calvinist/Reformed. It’s one of my many quibbles with that interpretation of theology, that belief in a selective, exclusionary and legalism-driven God.
Agreed. A nuanced understanding is far different than leaving out the sub. atonement altogether. I wasn’t sure where dude who wrote the list was coming from (I’ve been on the run all day).
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yeah normally though if you have a responsible Christian press they vet these kinds of people who are heretical at root levels, while letting legitimate difference due to denomination pass. Writers also write for a general market, targeting Christians often than specific denominations.
I wonder though if the secular presses getting into the Christian market was good because of this. While business is always important, maybe the bottom-line approach is what is leading to things like this being prevalent in non-fiction. I’m thinking Love Wins for an example.
The secular marketing getting into Christian press was one of the worst things to have happen. It’s how we ended up with The Shack, after all. That’s a very good example of how a bad book happens. I know very well the person who worked for Hatchette and who brought the book on board there. That person is a Christian who is devoted but not devout and certainly not scholarly. But at Hatchette this person was what passed for “an expert” because they had previously worked in another capacity at Thomas Nelson.
Had this been Zondervan in 1989 instead of Hatchett in 200X there would have been a review committee to check the theology. Instead there was one churchgoing employee who had once been in marketing in TN’s gift division.