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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.

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 now views followers of his Son as righteous, because we belong to him.

Some have distorted this language and set the members of the Trinity against each other—as when the Son is described as the object of the Father's wrath on the Cross. Others stretch the concept to charge that penal substitution language amounts to "divine child abuse"—where an angry, cosmic Father beats up his meek and helpless Son—hardly the biblical imagery of the relationship of the Father and the Son.

Also, the paid penalty is sometimes described almost exclusively in individual terms. When John Wesley had his heart strangely warmed while listening to Luther's preface to a commentary on Romans, he grasped something important. "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation," he wrote, "and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." But my salvation is not the full picture, and speaking only in individualistic terms can lead to a weakened doctrine of the church and an anemic view of the Atonement.

Fortunately, McKnight recognizes that while the Scriptures talk about Jesus bearing the penalty for our sins, they never divide the members of the Trinity or bifurcate the God of love from the God of wrath. Whatever took place at the Cross, it was a unitary act of the whole Trinity—and it was intended to redeem a community of faith.

Thus, John Stott could devote a chapter of his magnum opus, The Cross of Christ, to "The Self-Substitution of God." And the apostle Paul could write about God setting forth his own hilasterion (a Greek word that means "something that makes someone happy," but that is also a technical term for the place on the Ark of the Covenant where Israel's chief priest sprinkled sacrificial blood). Paul clearly stressed that any appeasement is God's self-appeasement. Self-appeasement? Such language is enigmatic, signaling that Paul wanted to get at something bigger and more mysterious than the picture often portrayed by those who preach penal substitution.

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May 2008, Vol. 52, No. 5