Brian Harmon

Homemade Peeps

Posted by Brian April 11, 2007 4 comments so far

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Posted by Brian April 08, 2007 No comments yet

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

More from Frederica:

Rising Victorious

Atonement, again

Posted by Brian April 03, 2007 3 comments so far

I’ve written before about how I sometimes worry what crazy thing will come out of the mouth of whoever is preaching at my local Episcopal church whenever my parents are visiting.

Actually, I wasn’t worrying about it this Sunday; my Dad has been with me at church for the past several weeks. So I was caught off guard when Ed said, “Jesus did not die for your sins.” Yikes! (Though Dad didn’t say anything about it; maybe he didn’t hear. )

I think what Ed was really trying to do was to deny the Penal Substitution theory of the Atonement. I’ve mentioned before my own discomfort with this theory, which says that an angry God could not forgive our sins without punishing somebody, and so he killed Jesus as our substitute.

Apparently there’s been a flap in England over this very topic recently, so I guess it’s a good time to revisit it, especially since it’s Holy Week, with the Great Three Days of our redemption coming up.

The bottom line is, even though it’s very popular today, the idea of Penal Substitution as the meaning of the cross has not always been the dominant idea in Christian thought. In fact, it’s fairly new.

Father Jake has a good synopsis of some of the various atonement theories which have been proposed through the years. Here’s another summary. And here’s an article I like by Frederica Mathewes-Greeen discussing Orthodox ideas of the Atonement.

Father Jake quotes C.S. Lewis:

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself…

(I might humbly suggest that saying “Jesus did not die for your sins” is not the best way to phrase a denial of penal substitution.)