N.T. Wright | The Cross (10/11/2017)

good evening i'm sarah negly Oh director of Christ with the core an assistant professor of history before professor Nick Peron formally introduces our guests I'd like to begin by welcoming you to a very special event in our second annual Christ at the core fall series the Christ of the core fall series features events outside the classroom that highlight key themes of our new core curriculum and our distinctive first year seminar in particular tonight we have the honor and the privilege to welcome back to Wheaton College the right reverend professor NT right dr. Wright is a leading voice of biblical scholarship Christian thought and theology and most importantly he shares with us the desire to serve Christ and his kingdom we spend each fall semester at Wheaton discussing at length in our first-year seminars the enduring question of what is the good life and in fact many of you have read as first-year seminar students dr. Wright's book simply Christian we read simply Christian because it addresses enduring questions about justice and the brokenness of our world the person and work of Christ and how we as Christians may live a good life of worship service and proclamation of the gospel like dr. Wright we see the enduring value of asking and seeking answers to these questions with guidance from Scripture and in the context of a Christ centered community so as we turn now to tonight's lecture on the cross I pray that each of you will find renewed hope and a strengthened faith because of the transformative power of Jesus Christ in the cross one day some 25 years ago when I was a twenty-something m.div student with a nascent interest in academics I bumped into author an apologist Jim Steyer while attending an inner-city conference Jim was using his afternoon free time to catch some rays while reading a splendid blue covered scholarly work entitled climax of the Covenant when I asked Jim what he was reading he excitedly began to explain that he was going through a series of essays written by brilliant highly promising scholar who would one day go places and that perhaps I myself should keep an eye out for this rising star soon enough I did and have never looked back as Providence would have it between 2000 and 2003 had the privilege of working closely with NT Tom Wright serving him as research and editor in his capacity at that time as canon theologian of the westminster abbey from there between 2003 and 2010 Wright went on to serve as the Bishop of Durham for the past seven years he has been the research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Saint Mary's College at the University of st. Andrews Scotland the author of some 80 books several hundred essays and articles and trust me you don't want even know how many lectures right comes to us as one of our generations most prolific contributors at the roundtable of biblical and Theological studies not to mention cultural analysis but my view the secret to Tom's success over the years has not been so much the sheer volume of his output but his unique ability to offer a penetratingly insightful analysis of biblical texts and backgrounds apply these insights to a big picture and then winsome ly convey that same big picture in a way that is equally accessible to professional theologian and untrained lay reader of course this does not begin to speak to Tom's amazing qualities as a person but for me has been a source of prayer encouragement he has been a magnanimous and wise friend Tom Wright has profoundly shaped my identity not only as a reformed evangelical scholar but also as a man who has sought to live Cornel tonight whatever your current theological persuasion I hope and trust that you will find yourselves wonderfully unsettled by what tom has to say because in order to grow and be enlarged one must first be unsettled if this evening you were looking for a speaker to serve as yet one more echo chamber of some highly familiar theological refrains cast in this familiar theological language I assure you that we you will certainly be disappointed otherwise if you are interested in being stimulated and challenged to think about God and scripture and exciting and new ways to go places that you may never have been before I encourage you now to buckle up and join me in welcoming tonight's speaker and to write Thank You Sarah and Nick it's very good to be back here thank you all for coming out on a Wednesday night when I'm sure you've got plenty of other things you might just as well be doing it's it's a delight to be with you and have a chance to share and to sense myself here among friends and colleagues who share a common task and engaged together in the constant effort to get to know the Bible better in order the better to worship God and serve Him in tomorrow's world that's been my lifelong aim and it's in that spirit that I offer you tonight some reflections which are drawing on but also going a little way beyond what I've laid out in my recent book the day the revolution began which I saw some copies of on the table at the back there as I was coming in this is a huge topic and it's always a sense of penetrating into a mystery that leads us into it so I'd be grateful if you just join me in a moment of prayer as we begin Almighty father we thank you for the privilege of being able to meet discuss share ideas from Scripture but particularly focusing on Jesus himself and on his death we know that our small minds will never comprehend more than a fraction of what that means but we pray that we will be obedient in our thinking tonight to follow where you are leading so that we may wisely serve you in our thinking and in our living in Jesus name we pray amen anyone who is interested in the power of symbols let alone by the power of art let alone by the power of religious symbols and art is bound to be struck by the peculiar power still possessed by the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth this event was after all horrible brutal obscene it was a denial of all that is good and lovely and beautiful in the world in its own terms it represented the victory of raw power political and military power the rumor of a different kind of power the power which Jesus had modeled and represented the power he had spoken of as the power of humble love the crucifixion was deliberately staged to be over-the-top lots of people got crucified in the ancient world sometimes thousands but for Jesus it was not only the killing but also the shaming the dressing up as a king they were dressing him up because he had dared to stand up against the might of the Empire and also against the pretension of the Judean leadership which was in league with that Empire by announcing the kingdom of God on the first Good Friday nobody was standing there saying what a beautiful event it was or how glad they were that Jesus was dying for their sins or how marvelous it was that the Scriptures were being fulfilled no they were horrified disgusted shocked beyond measure and those of Jesus followers who are close enough to glimpse what was happening were in utter despair now unless we remind ourselves of that Good Friday reality regularly we will never appreciate just how revolutionary the early Christian message actually was because of course it was less than 30 years later that a former zealous Judean Saul of Tarsus aka Paul would write the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me there is the revolution in a nutshell this typical act of casual imperial brutality was quickly seen despite everything as the greatest possible act of divine love now some people might say no doubt from a sceptical point of view that Jesus followers were bound to try to say something like that to soften the blow to sugar the pill but that just doesn't fit the facts the man who wrote that line about love Paul was himself a convert who had been shocked into recognition despite himself that Israel's God had raised this G's from the dead and thereby declared that his death was no shameful feat defeat but rather an extraordinary victory and if his followers had been simply rationalizing that defeat then the impact of Jesus death could not have continued there were many other Jewish movements in the hundred years either side of Jesus of Nazareth that ended with the failure and the violent death of the founder and even if some people retain nostalgic memories they didn't last long they were in a realistic world get on with the job either give up the revolution or find yourself a new leader no for Jesus we find right up to our own day that Jesus crucifixion carried and carries a strange power a power which artists try to catch a power which still can stop cynical unbelievers in their tracks in the book I tell a famous story to illustrate this when I wrote the book I didn't know who the story was about I knew that somebody must know and sure enough after the book had been out a few months somebody sent me a note to tell me who had actually told the story in the first place Cardinal jean-marie Lustig er was Archbishop of Paris from 1980 to 2005 and he told the story of how three boys decided to play a trick on a local priest by going into the confessional and confessing all kinds of wild imaginary sins the first two did it and then ran away laughing but when the third one who happened to be Jewish had his fun the priest said he was gonna give him a penance to do and he indicated the large statue of the crucified Jesus of the East End of the church and the priest said I want you to go up to that statue I want you to look that figure in the face and say three times you did all that for me and I don't give a damn and so the boy trotted off this was still part of the fun and he said it once then he said it again and then he found he couldn't say it the third time he broke down and he left the church changed and the reason I know that story concluded the archbishop it's because I was that young man he became a Christian against the wishes of his Jewish family he later became a bishop against the wishes of many in France who saw him as a social outsider and his dying day he lived by the love which had grasped him at that first moment the cross of Jesus despite its horror and perhaps even because of its horror speaks powerfully across the centuries and across cultural barriers it speaks in a pre articulate way deep like the depths of art or music only more so deep with the depths of God now at this point someone might say well if the cross speaks so powerfully why do we have to try and explain it why not just let it do its work why try to get in the way with all our theories and speculations about what it might mean that's a fair point but down the years it's become apparent that unless the church is constantly exploring the meaning of Jesus death constantly wrestling with the early biblical texts which refer to it it's all too easy to get sidetracked to settle down with a half-truth or even to follow paths that ultimately lead down blind alleys every generation I think has to do business afresh with the crucifixion and however well we think we know the story and its meaning we are not absolved from the same responsibility I have myself preached and lectured and written about the cross hundreds possibly thousands of times but I'm still in my old age finding deeper meaning and more powerful energy in it that's why I wrote that book now as I was working on the book I was repeatedly struck by a strange phenomenon the great majority of people who've written about the cross and about theories of atonement in the last hundred years or so and I've read many of those books have concentrated not on the four Gospels but on Paul and Hebrews now Paul and Hebrews are enormous ly important but there is a great irony here Matthew Mark Luke and John tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to lead the eye up to his crucifixion they didn't have to do it like that but they did and they do it apparently with the intention of explaining not only how it happened but what it means and indeed the question of how and what it means go very closely together though this has often been screened out now the early church and indeed the church right on to the late 16th century never tried to tie down the meaning of Jesus death in an official creedal formula when they were arguing about the Trinity and the Incarnation the person of Jesus they made the Creed's Center on that but they didn't actually produce a similar formula for the atonement but this became a problem when the 16th century reformers saw that some of the errors of the medieval church that they were opposing could be traced to or seen in distortions of atonement theology so they did their best to rule them out by fresh dogmatic formulations in sixteenth and seventeenth-century particularly but in that work which continues to this day under the rather loose heading of atonement or under Karl Barth's chosen heading of reconciliation people have not usually gone to the four Gospels for illumination what might happen if we did the four Gospels confront us with a central claim that Jesus of Nazareth was inaugurating God's kingdom on earth as in heaven that's the overall that Matthew Mark Luke and John are telling as opposed by the way to the non-canonical so-called Gospels like Thomas which don't want heaven to come to earth and which don't see the death of Jesus as carrying any salvific meaning but Western theology in the last 200 years has had a hard time putting together the kingdom and the cross they seem to cut against one another people see the kingdom of God as being about God transforming the present world and they see the cross as being about God rescuing people from the world but that is too shallow by half the first and most important thing to say about the cross in the Gospels is that all four Gospels see Jesus crucifixion as the moment when and the means by which the Creator God wins the victory over the forces of evil kingdom of God who is in charge at the moment the Prince of the power of the air the power of darkness says Jesus in Luke's Gospel the Satan the accuser something happens at the cross which changes cosmic power relations one of the first things revealed by the resurrection is that when Jesus was crucified as King of the Jews above his head this was in fact not simply a mocking slogan but was telling the truth this was Jesus enthronement when we follow this line through we can see the beginnings of what we might call atonement theology in the book of Acts in chapter 4 people don't often go there either but in chapter 4 of Acts verses 23 onwards the disciples are faced with the threat of persecution and they pray a remarkable prayer based on Psalm 2 Psalm 2 describes the rulers of this world raging against the Lord and against his anointed and the early church pick up that Psalm and they say that's exactly what was going on right here we had Herod and Pilate representing the kings of the earth symbolizing the coming together of all the evil in the world doing their worst to Jesus and as in Psalm 2 the Creator God the Covenant God responds by exalting his son and declaring that he is now the true ruler of the world and the early church in praying that prayer invoking Psalm to say therefore now Lord look upon their threats and grant to your servants to speak the word with all boldness they've got Psalm 2 in their bloodstream and they know that it's just been fulfilled but the point is that evil has gathered together in the persons of Herod and Pilate and all that they represent to put Jesus on the cross this is the beginning of atonement theology and this early biblically rooted theology is then reflected in passages like Romans one three four and five where Jesus is described as the seed of David according to the flesh now designated son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the Dead the point is that whereas the ordinary revolutionaries of Jesus day were hoping for a messiah who would lead them to victory over the Romans Jesus was constantly hinting at a different victory over a darker enemy all four Gospels and Acts Paul and the rest speak of Jesus winning the victory over death and hence over sin and hence over all the powers of the world that have shaken their puny little fists at God the Creator whose power is the power of love so what is this victory and how is it come about if the first thing the Gospels insist on is that the cross is the climax of Jesus victorious Kingdom work the second thing that the Gospels highlight is that Jesus chose Passover quite deliberately as the moment to do what had to be done to confront the powers of the world with his kingdom message knowing where it would lead Jesus didn't choose Tabernacles or Hanukkah in particular he didn't interestingly choose the Day of Atonement he could have done Passover as Jews then and now know very well speaks powerfully of God rescuing Israel from slavery in Egypt God won the victory over Pharaoh and his hosts and redeemed his people and the symbolism goes on right through the story the blood of the Passover lamb marks out God's people who are then led through the Red Sea and onto Mount Sinai whether given the law to make them the people in whose midst God can then come and dwell in the tabernacle as the sign of his intention to restore creation to renew heaven and earth in a single bond this is the message of the kingdom once more as it says in Exodus 15 and Passover is the means towards it so the two go together God is to become king over all the world uniting heaven and earth in a single bond and rescuing his people from Pharaoh's power is the means to that end but here's the thing in its original context Passover was never about forgiveness of sins for the simple reason that Israel's enslavement in Egypt had never been seen as a punishment for sin in the first place but by Jesus day the Jewish people had for half a millennium been living under foreign rule in a kind of extended exile and the prophets had insisted that this had been brought on as Deuteronomy had warned by the idolatry and wickedness of the pre oxalic Israelites so as Isaiah and the rest had declared what was needed was a second Exodus a new Passover that would not only liberate God's people from this new slavery but would do so by somehow dealing with sins and so accomplishing forgiveness here we have the answer to some of the puzzles that have been it would be atonement theories for the last few generations the victory over the dark powers the great new Exodus if you like is to be accomplished through God dealing with the sins of his people it can't be either victory or dealing with sin it's got to be both the former the victory depends on the latter dealing with sin it isn't surprising that the early Christians looked back to Isaiah 42 55 to help them tell this story because that is exactly the combination of themes that we find there plus a lot of other stuff so when we put this picture together the victory over the dark powers including death itself accomplished by God dealing with the sins of his people we start to see a new kind of sense emerging from the Gospels themselves which Paul and the others pick up and develop but which is there in the very early Christian telling and retelling of the story Paul in fact summarizes exactly this of the start of Galatians which i think is the earliest Christian document we possess when he says that the Messiah quote gave himself for our sins in order to deliver us from the present evil age there you have both halves of it the dealing with sin is to accomplish the act of deliverance how does this work it works through what we can call in shorthand representative substitution let's be quite clear at this point because it's easy to get confused the phrase penal substitution or penal substitution area tone menteur furn abbreviated these days to PSA which sounds like some odd disease can mean various different things to different people in different contexts and it won't do simply to ask does this person or that person believe or not believe in PSA we need to be clear which version we're talking about and in particular which ones are biblical and which ones aren't the first official confession of the church's faith is what we find in 1st Corinthians 15 verses 3 to 5 according to which the Messiah died for our sins in accordance of the Scriptures he was buried he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures what does it mean that he died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures sadly for many Christians it has come to mean that the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the narrative which are comparatively modern tradition is told for which we can find three or four biblical proof texts that's simply not good enough in accordance with the scriptures means something far more organic far more rooted than just a handful of isolated texts that way lies Marcion the attempt to hold Israel's scriptures at arm's length and try to make sense of the gospel by other means people go on doing that to this day but for all the early Christians Jesus death meant what it meant as the Gospels were trying to tell us because in his kingdom launching public career and in his crucifixion itself he was bringing - it's paradoxical climax the long sometimes disjointed often puzzling story of creation and covenant the story of Adam and Abraham of Moses and the tabernacle of David and Solomon and the prophets and the exile the elongated exile and the promises of renewal and restoration and even the promise that one day Yahweh himself would come back in power and glory and make all things new that is the narrative which the early Christians believed had come true in Jesus and within this narrative of Kingdom bringing victory and sin forgiving Passover the four Gospels unfold several narrative strands which show what representative substitution then means they usually do it by telling stories rather than its in theories they show us for instance Barabbas a brigand under sentence of death for murder and Jesus literally taking his place it's made very explicit Luke shows us two brigands on the cross beside Jesus one of whom declares that Jesus is innocent but he is dying the death that would have happened had he been guilty how much clearer can Luke you know I grew up with theologians telling us that Luke has no atonement theology it's impossible to read Luke 22 and 3 without seeing it all over the place you would have thought and they show us Luke shows us in particular the great build up of Jesus denunciation of Jerusalem and its hierarchy and its revolutionaries for their radical distortion of the purposes of God and then Jesus going ahead to take upon himself the full force of the Fate which he had announced for the nation and the temple Jesus speaks of himself as the green tree who is dying the death that all the dry trees around had deserved and he does all this as the Gospels insist because he is Israel's rightful king the king in Waiting the monarch who arrives incognito the one who defines his kingdom and responds to Pilate sneering question as having to do with telling the truth and the truth in question as John makes clear is the creational truth the covenantal truth the ultimate truth of outpoured divine love what generations of philosophers and system editions have struggled to hold together the new testament appears to do effortlessly with central Jewish categories the Messiah represents his people and so like David taking on Goliath on behalf of Israel as a whole he can go by himself to do battle with the ultimate enemy that's why he tells his followers in the garden you aren't to be involved in this you watch and pray that you don't have to enter this time of testing Jesus has to do it alone he is to win the victory for those he represents now once we grasp this we see the normal theories in a very different light people like to speak of models of the atonement or various metaphors which can be used or not according to taste to build up this or that system that is at best an abstraction a way of holding back from Total Immersion in the historic biblical story the theories that people have grandly called Christus Victor Christ the victor or representation or substitution and the different words which cluster round them like Redemption and reconciliation all of these mean what they mean in the New Testament in relation to that single coherent great story which the Gospels claim is reaching its climax the story of Israel's failure in the Messiah's victory of human failure and God's victory it is not however to anticipate an objection many people raised today it is not a grand crescendo a story of a progressive revelation or progressive developments nothing progressive about it at all because without the resurrection no one would ever have dreamed of seeing Jews Jesus crucifixion as the fulfillment of a long slowly developing revelation it will be nothing more than another ghastly gaping hole in the shattered dreams and hopes of a people but when we look back from the post resurrection viewpoint it becomes clear and in particular we can understand the interconnection between the victory of the cross and the substitution for sins the root of all human sin is idolatry worshipping something other than the Creator God what happens when you worship that which is not God is that your humaneness your God reflecting image bearing vocation starts to fracture and the name for that is sin missing the mark of genuine humaneness to put it another way we humans are endowed at creation with the glorious task Psalm 8 reflects it as well as Genesis 1 the task of reflecting God's power and love into the world but when we worship idols we give to those idols a measure of that power which should be ours and we reduce and distort our human vocation in consequence and our sin thus becomes the chain with which the idols we have worshiped hold us in their grip so here's the point for the idols to be defeated and overthrown the chain must be cut sins must be dealt with so the penal substitution that we find in Scripture is not a different model of atonement to be played off against the idea of Jesus victory over the powers or Jesus as our representative it is because he is our representative as Israel's Messiah that he can appropriately be our substitute and it's because he was and is our substitute that his dealing with sin has robbed the powers of their enslaving dominion this is what the Gospels are telling us Paul picks it up Galatians Romans and elsewhere Hebrews reflects the same train of thought Revelation sees it from several different angles but it's that same train of complex but coherent thought now I've said enough I hope so far to show you what I think is the rich many-sided but deeply integrated picture in the New Testament of what Jesus death achieved for the individual Christian for the church as a whole there is no excuse for not soaking ourselves again and again in the larger story of the Gospels praying for fresh insight into the biblical story as opposed to the stories we've routinely told ourselves because as I now want to try to explain I believe that Western Christianity as a whole both Catholic and both liberal and conservative has told itself a distorted and shrunken view of the great biblical story and it's by putting the cross into the middle of that distorted and shrunken view that we've made it difficult to see the cross the way the first Christians all did let me tell you what I think has happened there are three mistakes which go together and have reinforced one another the first one and if you've read my book surprised by hope this won't come as a surprise first first we have allowed ourselves to think that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is quote going to heaven when we die rather than in terms of the new heavens and the new earth and of Resurrection into that new world in other words we have largely swapped the biblical vision of new creation of heaven and earth coming together as one of the restoration of what was begun in Genesis 1 and 2 we've swapped it for a philosophical and platonic vision of disembodied souls escaping this world and heading off for a non spatio-temporal place called heaven generations of biblical scholars have actually pointed out that the New Testament doesn't talk like this but we have behaved as if it did and our hymns and liturgies have gone along for the ride and we have read Jesus language about the kingdom of God in Matthew's Gospel kingdom of heaven as though it was referring to the essentially medieval idea of heaven and the split-level world of eighteenth-century deism and Epicureanism the philosophy on which your country was founded by the way has merely reinforced this producing we don't have a philosophical foundation in Britain we're just muddled pragmatists and it still doesn't work the split-level world of eighteenth-century deism and Epicureanism is reinforced in producing a split of religion and real life which has generated so many damaging features in society and culture but as I tell my students again and again if you go to the first century looking for somebody to teach you the humans possess a soul which is in exile from place called heaven to which it's longing to return one day the teacher whose writings you should pull pull off the library shelf is Plutarch not Paul Plutarch that great middle platonic philosopher a biographer a cultural critic of the first order but of course not a Christian actually he was a pagan priest at the shrine in Delphi so much of the Western tradition has gone with Plutarch that many even many Bible believing evangelicals have assumed that even when the New Testament is talking about bodily resurrection it must really be talking about going to heaven when you die and it really isn't so here is my first point we have platon eyes our eschatology how does that affect what we believe about the crucifixion well if the point of Christianity is that my soul needs to get to heaven and if I know that my soul is sinful then my basic problem is moral failure and it then becomes easy to project that backwards onto the creation story itself and to imagine the whole point of Genesis one two and three was that God created humans in order to set them a moral examination which they then failed would they pass the exam would they be morally perfect no they wouldn't so they couldn't join God in his pure heaven that's how we've read the story of course Genesis says nothing of the kind Genesis envisages humans as God's image bearing creatures designed to stand at the threshold between heaven and earth and to reflect God's loving care into creation even as they reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator sin then matters it matters desperately primarily because it is the failure of vocation the humans refuse to worship the Creator and so twist and distort their vocation and instead of reflecting God's wise care and order into the world humans have reflected into the world the dark power of whichever idols they happen to be worshiping at the time that is the problem and it's a problem because God's purposes always were not just for humans as though the whole glorious world of creation was just a theatrical backdrop for a human drama God's purpose was through humans for his creation now we can get away with this as long as we're thinking of the Platonic heaven but as soon as we realize that the ultimate goal is the renewal and unity of heaven and earth we see that we can't reduce the human plight to questions of a moral examination which we've all failed and which by the way carried the death penalty which then happily someone else has taken on our behalf that's how so many people have told the story precisely because I strongly affirm the biblical view of penal substitution I insist that it belongs within the biblical doctrine of human vocation the moral challenge is an important part of our vocation but it is the by-product of worship just as moral failure is the byproduct of idolatry rather than the central feature so here's the second problem if we have Platon Eyes dour eschatology we have moralized our anthropology we have done Oh irony we have done what Adam and Eve didn't in the garden we have put the knowledge of good and evil ahead of the knowledge of God we have made moral morality and our moral failure and culpability and our deserving of punishment to now need to escape that punishment as the only story worth telling about human beings Martin Luther described sin as homo in covetous in say humans turned in upon themselves ironically our central focus on morality has just that turning our gaze back on ourselves oh dear I have a problem how am I going to get out of it rather than outwards to our vocation we were supposed to be doing stuff in God's world and we didn't but then it's the third point which is the real crunch if we have platon eyes dire eschatology and moralized are anthropology by the way when I first drafted something like this and put it in a draft of the book my editor said you can't possibly use all those long words I said trust me we'll explain it they'll get it we'll get them if we've place a nice tower s khatallah G and moralized our anthropology we have all too often paganized our soteriology what do I mean this point we have to be very very careful there are many preachers and theologians who have seen this danger coming and have taken steps to ward it off indeed very few preachers or teachers would admit to teaching what I'm now going to suggest is a major failure in the Western tradition but I'm concerned here with the message that thousands upon thousands think they are being taught because actually it follows directly from the play tonight eschatology and moralized anthropology many people not least many young people in our churches or who were once in our churches really do believe that the Christian gospel teaches that the Creator God was very angry and wanted to lash out and kill us all because we defended him but that somebody else happened to stand in the way it happened to be his own innocent son so that somehow makes it alright and that the angry creator exhausted his wrath on his son so that everyone else could go free a popular hymn says and on that cross as Jesus died the wrath of God was satisfied and as with the first mistake the Playtone izing 1 if you go to the ancient world looking for people who teach something like that they're all over the place in the Greek tragedies in the Roman histories here and there stories of a malevolent deity who's got it in person and needs to be placated by the death of an innocent victim so that the expedition may go ahead so that the winds will blow the right way whatever it may be this is a thoroughly pagan soteriology and it is not taught in the New Testament now of course many will protest and say that when the Creator pours out his wrath on the son this is an act of love the more tightly you hold and expound a Trinitarian theology the more obvious this should be it is the love of God that is revealed in the death of the son quite so but the structure within which that means what it's come to mean pulls away from that until we are left with an alarming spectacle of a God who says I'm doing this because I love you but in fact is acting out sheer angry vengeance there are all too many people in today's world including many young people who have known human beings who say I love you but who in fact behaved with malice and anger and they think if that's what gods like don't want anything to do with him the problem here includes our traditional miss reading of the biblical language of sacrifice and it's reallocation to Jesus now in pagan worship where animals were killed on an altar there was sometimes a sense of the animal being a kind of substitute for the worshiper but in leviticus the animals are not killed on an altar indeed the killing is not the point animals are killed in leviticus because the living god intends to dwell on earth in the midst of his people and his sanctuary must be regularly cleansed from the stain of death which arises from the sins of the people around because that stain would otherwise pollute the sanctuary and cause the divine presence to withdraw the cleansing agent is the lifeblood the god-given gift of animal life this entire train of thought has remained foreign too much western christianity which is therefore fast and on a penal substitution airy interpretation of sacrifice to sustain its alternative ideology you see once again how it all fits together if the ultimate goal is not getting disembodied souls into a distant heaven but rather the joining of heaven and earth together in a new creation then the sacrifice of Jesus as the letter to the Hebrews explains I didn't get a chance to say this in the book because it was already 400 pages long and I decided leave Hebrews for another day sadly then the sacrifice of Jesus will enable heaven and earth to come together at last as a result of the Covenant renewal brought about in the events of Jesus death and resurrection and ascension and that is the context as I said about the Gospels themselves where the biblical truth of penal substitution shines out over against the unbiblical distortions the distortions of the results of the wrong framework which goes back at least to the Middle Ages in Western theology but in Romans 8 perhaps the clearest statement anywhere poor declares there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah Jesus because on the cross god condemned sin in the flesh of the Messiah that is certainly penal that's what the word condemn means it is certainly substitutionary his death means there is no condemnation for those who are in him that is of course substitution again held within representation but notice Paul does not say that God condemned Jesus the Messiah he says God condemned sin in the flesh of Jesus misako's that didn't make Jesus crucifixion any less painful physically or emotionally or spiritually but he makes all the difference to what we say about it on the cross God allowed sin to do its worst think Herod and Pilate in Psalm 2 again that's actually what Romans 7 is all about the nations came together says acts 4 to put Jesus on the cross and Romans and explains in detail what Paul had said very cryptically in Romans 5:20 the law came in so that the sin the trespass might abound what on earth does that mean what was the point of sin abounding why would God give the law if that was what it was going to do the answer right there at the deepest point of Paul's theology is that God gave the law so that sin with a capital S might do its worst precisely in the people of the law in Israel in order that sin might then accumulate and be handed on to Israel's representative the Messiah and might thus be condemned once and for all that is penal that is substitutionary and that is biblical and it belongs as I've stressed within the larger biblical picture of the victory of God over all the powers the victory which Paul sketches in Romans 5 and then triumphantly reasserts in Romans 8 take that truth out of the biblical framework and put it in what is essentially a Western post medieval framework and the distortions will follow pretty quickly now I appreciate that these are huge issues too huge perhaps to take you in all at once that I hope they will serve as a spur to reading the book or perhaps just signing on for the online course that goes of the book but I want to do two more things before I close first I want to alert you to the way in which the New Testaments picture of Jesus crucifixion stands at the heart of the Gentile mission and of Gentile inclusion in the people of God some very interesting issues going on here in the New Testament I think have tremendous relevance actually for our society for your society today in ways that some people are resistant to just as in the last generation people wrongly played off the idea of the crosses of victory over the idea of the crosses substitutionary so in the last generation there's been a tendency to play off to different views of Paul's central thought justification included on the one hand there is a traditional doctrine of just vacation which is about sinners getting saved on the other hand there is a different perspective with Paul insisting that Jews and Gentiles belong at the same table and people have said well you've got theology over there in sociology over there no that's that's wrong some may have tried to do it like that but that's not what's going on if we understand the cross or right we see that those two are different ways of saying the same thing in Galatians Paul opens by declaring that on the cross the Messiah defeated the powers of the present evil age by dealing with sin but that means that any Gentiles who become Messiah followers by faith and baptism are no longer sinners they are no longer under the power of the idols that they used to worship and since those were the reasons normally given by Jews for not sharing table fellowship with non-jews it must follow the Jewish Messiah people and Gentile Messiah people belong at the same table foundational to Christian theology is the abolition of ethnic distinctives in the one family of God the Messiah's death precisely by saving people from their sins and thereby defeating the idols which had held them captive constitutes his people as the single family which God promised to Abraham you see this dramatically in John 12 when some Greeks come to the feast and want to see Jesus you might expect geezers to arrange a time to meet them and discuss whatever questions they have and instead as often in John Jesus seems to go off on his own tangent talks about something quite other about his own forthcoming death but then he explains now is the judgment of this world now is the ruler of this world cast out and if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself in other words at the moment the Greeks like all the nations and indeed like Israel itself are under the power of the ruler of this world who it seems is both the pagan ruler and the dark power that stands behind him so basically there's no point in trying to discuss things with the Greeks just at that moment their time will come once the power that holds them in its grip has been defeated and as we saw earlier John explains this in terms of the crucifixion narrative Jesus goes to the cross to do for Israel and the world what his role in the world can't do for themselves as Caiaphas explains in John 11 despite himself it is better for the one to die and the nation as a whole not to perish that's substitutionary atonement right there through representation resulting in victory over the powers the victory which then sets the pagan nations and also the Jewish nation itself free to belong to God's relaunched and enlarged people in John as in Paul and Hebrews in Revelation that victory means new creation the inauguration of new heavens and new earth with Jesus at its heart and with the disciples to their surprise and alarm being equipped by the spirit to be agents of that new creation as they're caught up in the mission of God because at the center of it all the cross is about God's powerful love sweeping through his creation and at last doing the new thing that had been promised John says in the introduction to the passion narrative having loved his own who were in the world he loved them to the end to the uttermost there was nothing that love could do for them that love did not do greater love has no one than this said Jesus later on in the farewell discourses to lay down your life for your friends and he says and you are my friends he could hardly be clearer John had said so much earlier on in the gospel God so loved the world that He gave His only Son God forgive us that we've sometimes preached as they watch on really meant was that God so hated the world that he killed his son this theme of divine love revealed glorious beyond the cross is central to Paul and to John and also to Paul God commends his love for us Romans five Wow we were yet sinners the Messiah died for us and 2 Corinthians he says the Messiah's love leaves us no choice comes back to it again and again this is what makes Paul an apostle this is why he'll go to any lengths to bring the gospel to people it is love that drives him on and as he says climactically in Galatians 2:20 I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me and you see this love isn't simply a strong feeling it isn't simply that God loves each of us the way we love our closest family that is true and more than true love here is covenantal it's the covenant commitment the ultimate divine faithfulness it's what the psalms and isaiah are talking about the New Testament doctrine of powerful divine love embodied in Jesus and his death is the direct and decisive outworking of the Covenant promises in the Old Testament and the covenant commitment is itself the sharp edge of the creator's faithfulness to creation itself that ultimately my friends is why atonement theology matters get this right and the entire picture from first creation to the new heavens and new earth is held in place get it wrong and you might just end up with Plato denying the goodness of the present universe and seeking to escape it but I think when we get it right we see the cross itself as a sign I think Athanasius was sitting hinting at this of the joining together of heaven and earth like the Tabernacle in the wilderness the cross is a strange place where instead of the pillar of cloud and fire we now have the bruised and bleeding body of Israel's Messiah and one of the reasons why this symbol is so powerful as we saw at the start is because it says visually in a radical new way what the temple had always been about this is where heaven and earth are held together only now in the self giving love of heaven for the undeserving earth and because the victory of love we see on the cross is so central and vital we shouldn't be surprised that it's been distorted in thought and in practice the power of this divine love is the most powerful force in all creation and all the other powers of the world are eager to distort or misrepresent it alternate aside than our task as faithful and careful students of Scripture is continually to search the Scriptures to see what it really means that the Messiah died and rose again in accordance with those same scriptures and so to articulate that first century vision of God's gospel as to upstage and relativize all the subsequent attempts with les Bible on board that they should have had to construct theological schemes my friends this is an exciting time to be working on Scripture not just because it carries its own beauty and delight though it does but because this message of God's victory over evil through the representative substitution of Jesus the Messiah remains the single power through which the warring nations of the world can be held to account and the hard bitterness of human hearts can be softened he loved me said Paul and gave himself for me hang on to that and victory is ours will you join me again in a moment of Prayer greater love has no one than this than to lay down your life for your friends almighty father we thank you for your love revealed in the death of your son we pray that we may as a community as individuals be grasped afresh by that love both tonight in the days to come we pray that that love will have its full powerful out working in fresh moves of our day fresh moves to call other power to account to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and that the victory of the Cross is your victory over all the forces of evil that still wreak havoc in your world so bless us with that presence and then we pray because we ask it in Jesus name Amen [Applause]

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Published: Thu Oct 12 2017