Reviews, Interviews, News, Commentaries, Excerpts, My Top 5 Books, Wilson's Bookmarks, Book AwardsYour Atonement Is Too Small
Scot McKnight wants you to have your golf bag fully equipped—theologically speaking. That's the controlling metaphor of McKnight's 2007 study of soteriology, A Community Called Atonement (4 stars).
Here's how the metaphor works. Each "theory" of the Atonement is, like a particular golf club, better suited to some situations than others. Ministering the gospel is like playing a round of golf. Just as a golfer knows when to use a driver, a wedge, or a putter, the way we proclaim, teach, or share the Good News should be adapted to the situation. You can hit the ball out of a sand trap with your driver, but why would you if you had a wedge available?
The strength of the golf-bag metaphor is that it asks us to stop being partisan toward one particular theory of the Atonement and to minister with the best tools at hand. McKnight is a peacemaker and a bridge builder, which makes his book welcome.
Plenty of discussion recently (some of it acrimonious) sounds like people are saying that all the other clubs are better than your putter—and that your putter is inherently defective. Meanwhile, others defend the putter as the only club needed, since each round ends on the green. Indeed, penal substitution is like a putter, and it should be used often in connection with other Atonement metaphors. But there are still those divinely ordained "hole-in-one" situations, where some theological driver or iron does it all.
The Undivided God
Penal substitution, a biblically grounded, 16th-century Reformation development of Anselm's 11th-century "satisfaction theory" of the Atonement, has been the main target of criticism. In penal substitution, God the Son bears the penalty for our sins on the Cross. The Son having paid our debt, God ...
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no doubt
those who doubt that the Father would give his only Son to satisfy his wrath are in denial that their and everyone elses sin is serious and that God's wrath is fully correct, fully just. That means that rightly God should take out his wrath on you! Severely! and out on me! Severely. We all have trespassed; we all have stolen from God and walked on his holy property without permission. How have you done this, you ask? You trample holy things because you feel self-righteous and justified by your own strength that God owes you his loyalty. How wrong you are! So instead of taking out his anger at you he has severely chastised his son so that the pain of one person is suffcient. That is very very kind of God to do this and very kind of Jesus to willingly submit himself for the sake of love to cover you and my horrible sin. Of these things there is no doubt!
Dayo Adeola
Good work. My respose is to libereco's posted comments - If you overemphasise just one aspect of God's nature, which is love you will misunderstand God. God is as much a God of Love as he is a God of wrath, he is also a God of justice who is the highest authority but is so principled as to bind Himself with His words that is why He probably won't forgive without sacrifice. We do not have a God that has three different faces like a Greek god, He is one and the same person: He can love, He can get angry, He can demand justice and He is absolute. None of His attributes outweigh the other. I cannot convincingly tell you from the scriptures that God is more of love that He is of wrath and justice. Scot McKnight is right that the sacrifice of Jesus does not bifurcate the God of love from the God of wrath.
Jeff K
Okay.. where do I find this book?! I have wept over the distortions of God present in the way that "Penal Substitution" has usually been presented, but I have also known that the sense of real rescue in Jesus' choice for the Cross is indispensable to Christian wholeness. What I have longed for it seems McKnight has systematized. Thank You God!