The Atonement | Progressives & William Lane Craig with Alisa Childers

[Music] welcome to the alisa childers podcast i'm so excited to bring you this discussion today with dr william lane craig he's just a brilliant philosopher apologist and author of many books he was recently named by the best schools as one of the 50 most influential living philosophers and i think there were only about three christians on that list so that was quite an honor and so dr craig thanks so much for being on the podcast today and for taking the time i'm glad to do it alicia good to be with you oh great well i've been such a fan of your work in so many different areas having to do with apologetics and philosophy but i've been particularly thankful for your work that you've done recently on the atonement so the idea that jesus died on the cross for our sins in a substitutionary sense and even more specifically in a penal substitutionary sense is an idea that's come under a lot of criticism lately not just from non-christians or atheists but from many who would identify themselves as jesus followers and so your latest book called atonement and the death of christ an exegetical historical and philosophical exploration deals with this doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement and it looks at it from the disciplines of exegesis and history and philosophy so uh give us a bit of background of what inspired you to write this book and to come at it from those three different perspectives well i've been aiming to write a systematic theology for some time but i realized that i needed to bone up in this area of doctrine of the atonement for years i have been waiting for someone to give a robust philosophical defense of the classic reformation doctrine of the atonement and nobody was stepping up to the plate and finally i realized that i was just going to have to do it myself and so i undertook this study and i wanted to be sure that it was well grounded biblically because i think one of the central failings of the treatments of the atonement on the part of contemporary christian philosophers is that they're not biblically based secondly i wanted it to be in touch with the great history of doctrine the great thinkers of the past like augustine and anselm and aquinas and groteus and others so that i would be able to stand on the shoulders of these giants and then finally i wanted to address the philosophical objections that as you point out have been raised against the doctrine of penal substitution and attempt to answer those objections well i'm so thankful that you have taken on this great task and i've really gotten so much out of your book and learning a lot and i think for a lot of christians we we hear the phrase jesus died for my sins and i think a lot of christians might not be thinking much more deeply about it because the bible uses a lot of different language to describe what jesus did on the cross there's different metaphors and different motifs all which you talk about in your book so can you just give us a general overview of what what do we mean as christians when we use the word atonement when we're talking about what jesus accomplished on the cross and then maybe move into this this one specific view called penal substitutionary atonement one of the most important insights i gained from this study is that the word atonement has two very different meanings one is the etymological meaning that is to say the meaning it has in virtue of its derivation it comes not from latin or greek but from middle english the phrase at one month indicating a state of unity or harmony and the closest new testament word for this at one moment would be reconciliation and so in one sense atonement is reconciliation with god but that's not the meaning of the hebrew and the greek words that are typically translated to a tone or to make atonement in the old testament the hebrew word kipper is the word that is translated to a tone and most of us have heard of the jewish festival yom kippur the day of atonement and atonement in this sense means to cleanse or to purify of sin or impurity and it is by means of atonement in this sense of cleansing that atonement in the other sense reconciliation is achieved so paradoxically the means of achieving atonement is atonement well and in your book you describe an analogy of a of a gem having different facets talk a little bit about that and what role does penal substitutionary atonement have to play in that gem the doctrine of the atonement i think has been very aptly compared to a jewel a multi-faceted jewel so that it's a mistake to try to reduce the doctrine of the atonement to just one motif or one emphasis it's a multifaceted doctrine that includes many motifs like penal substitution ransom redemption satisfaction of divine justice moral influence and so on and so forth all of these are part of a complete doctrine of the atonement but gemologists who cut jewels call the central facet of a gem the table of that gem it anchors all of the other facets and is refracted in them and i think that the table of the gem which is the doctrine of the atonement is penal substitution it is the central facet that anchors all the others many people will claim that throughout church history like let's say the early church fathers that they did not ascribe to penal substitution but rather ascribed to christus victor and then there are many even today who will affirm maybe kind of a mixture of christus victor and moral influence why do you think that penal substitution is so important why is it the the table of that gem well first of all because i think it's biblically based it is it is the biblical view of how atonement is achieved but then secondly elisa this impression that you just shared that is repeated constantly in secondary sources is based on ignorance of the primary sources in the book i quote from the primary sources like oregon eusebius chrysostom augustine and so forth and show that penal substitution as well as christus victor and other motifs were affirmed by the church fathers in explicit language so this is a a caricature that has been perpetrated unfortunately in our secondary literature i i discovered that was true when i was doing some research just recently over the past few years because i would hear this claim over and over again even comparing the idea of penal substitutionary atonement to some idea of divine child abuse or cosmic child abuse that the father would require the blood sacrifice of his son well doesn't that make him a cosmic abuser and so this claim that this is a new doctrine that just came about around the reformation or just before it was just shocking to me as i read the church fathers and you you read in augustine and like you mentioned eusebius and some of these other early christian sources talking about jesus uh paying the price for our sins us being bought with a price and and so i was kind of scratching my head over that that claim but you're right it gets repeated so often i think people just start to believe it in fact there was a an article that just made the rounds that someone sent to me and the title of the article is jesus did not die on the cross for our sins and then the subtitle says the idea jesus quote paid the price isn't found in the bible so not only is this article claiming that this doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement didn't exist for the first 1600 years of church history they're also claiming uh that it's not biblical so what would you say to to the claim that the idea of a price being paid is just not to be found anywhere in the bible well anybody with an english bible can refute that assertion uh paul says in first corinthians 15 3 that christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and he tells the corinthians for you were bought with a price and that price is the blood of christ and penal substitution i think is rooted in isaiah chapter 53 which describes the vicarious penal suffering of the righteous servant of the lord whereby he brings righteousness and healing to the people for whom he dies and new testament authors including jesus himself pick up the language of isaiah 53 and apply it to christ and his death on the cross so no one who takes isaiah 53 seriously and it's new testament employment i think can plausibly deny that penal substitution is a biblical doctrine and so let's talk a little bit more about isaiah 53 i'll read a few passages from it and we can go from there because this is such an important passage of scripture when we're talking about penal substitutionary atonement not just the idea that jesus somehow in some ambiguous or vague sense died in our place but that there was a penalty there there was a penal element to that substitution and so isaiah 53 famously the prophet isaiah is describing this suffering servant and he says that he was despised and rejected by men a man of sorrows acquainted with grief surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows yet we esteemed him stricken and submitted by god and afflicted but he was pierced for our transgressions he was crushed for our iniquities upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his wounds we are healed uh and then down to verse 10 it says it was the will of the lord to crush him he has put into grief when his soul makes an offering for guilt he shall see his offspring he shall prolong his days and the will of the lord shall prosper in his hand and so this is describing somebody that's taking the iniquity and the sins of the world upon himself by the will of the father and so this you know the importance of that scripture to the idea of penal substitutionary is is important but can you talk a bit because some of the things you mentioned in your book i hadn't made the connection with i i had read about the upper room the night before jesus died where he quotes isaiah 53 and says this prophecy is fulfilled in me so jesus is identifying himself with the suffering servant but you also mention some other new testament authors who outright identify jesus as that suffering service and i uh servant in isaiah 53 so can you talk a little bit about some of those sources sure a second peter 2 for example is a great uh illustration where uh the author says that he bore our sins in his body on the tree by his wounds you have been healed and the idea there of sin bearing is the crucial concept this is a very common hebrew idiom that means to bear punishment or to bear liability and isaiah 53 says that he bore our sins and peter says that he bore our sins in his body on the tree this is an illustration of the suffering of the righteous servant in bearing our punishment for our sin and one of the cool things i learned from your book too is that when you have philip the evangelist being translated to talk to the ethiopian eunuch and he's reading isaiah 53 and he says you know help me understand and and again philip is identifying jesus with that suffering servant it's just exciting to to find these little uh passages that just affirm that that really is about jesus uh so it is it is exciting isn't it i mean you can imagine philip hearing this man reading out loud isaiah 53 and he says do you understand what you're reading right and and the ethiopian says well tell me who's he talking about and philip preaches to him jesus it's it's magnificent if only our evangelism would be that easy can somebody explain to me what i'm reading that's great um so i want to i want to move to the old testament sacrificial system and what role that has to play in our understanding of what jesus accomplished on the cross when when i was attending a church that would end up identifying itself as a progressive christian community i remember the pastor one time talking about the old testament sacrificial system and basically saying the the israelites didn't have to do that they they didn't have to bring an animal to be sacrificed for their sins that's just something they observed from the surrounding cultures and they thought they had to appease their god the way that the surrounding cultures were appeasing their gods with blood sacrifice and so in a way in that sense he was he was removing the old testament sacrificial system from any sort of lens that we would use it to identify what jesus did so talk to us about what that old sac that old testament sacrificial system means for the way we understand the atonement that jesus accomplished as the new testament presents this this is an arrangement established graciously by god to take care of israel's sin and impurity it was a dangerous business having a holy god live side by side with an impure and unrighteous people in the tabernacle and then later in the temple and so there had to be atonement made for sin and god arranged this levitical sacrificial system uh to accomplish that now in one sense the pastor is right in saying the blood of these animals didn't really take away sin this was a conventional arrangement that god had set up with a foreshadowing and a view to christ's eventual sacrifice that would then finally remove sin once and for all and so uh when jesus identifies himself as the suffering servant even when uh i was kind of interested to read about john the baptist declaring behold the lamb of god that takes away the sin of the world jesus being compared with the lamb uh what what role how does that work with the old testament sacrificial system that was set up before well some of these sacrifices in the old testament like the passover sacrifice were not for the purpose of cleansing from sin or impurity it was rather to allay and avert the wrath and judgment of god when god saw the blood of the passover on the doorframes of the jewish homes the angel of death would pass over them and not strike them down as he did the firstborn of egypt and so the passover sacrifice was a way of expressing this um well the technical term is propitiation of god um averting his wrath justly meted out on sin and protecting those uh who offered the passover sacrifice so jesus choosing the passover as the time of his public declaration of messiahship was no accident you have both the levitical animal sacrifices offered for sin and impurity and then you have the passover sacrifice offered to allay the wrath of god and jesus wraps all of these together in this last supper which symbolically represents his impending death for the sins of the world you mentioned the word propitiation and so this is a word that we find in relation to the atonement we also find the word expiation can you talk to us a little bit about what those words mean when we when we come across that in our bible what do those words mean what do they have what do they encompass when when it comes to the atonement and jesus work on the cross yes expiation means to cleanse or to purify and it has as its object sin or impurity so one of the purposes of the animal sacrifices was to cleanse the people and the instruments of the tabernacle from impurity and sin propitiation means to satisfy or to allay and it takes as its object god and his wrath and it is a way of allaying the judgment of god so that it doesn't fall upon the people and the sacrifices also serve that purpose as well uh very often the roasting of the sacrifices by the priests is said to create a pleasant aroma which is pleasing to the lord and this again symbolizes the way in which god is pleased he's satisfied with these sacrifices so one of the questions that often gets raised in this these types of discussions because it's such a deep doctrine right we're talking not just about our personal sins but we're talking about cleansing we're talking about payment being made punishment being taken we're we're talking about the wrath of god being satisfied there are so many different elements that come together to to form our you know a fully orbed view of the atonement and so one of the questions that often is raised is why why can't god just forgive why did his jesus death have to be sacrificial why can't god just say as a holy decree i declare all sins forgiven and no sacrifice needs to be made now there are two different perspectives on this question and the first one may surprise you many of the church fathers as well as thomas aquinas and hugo grodius thought that god could have done that if he wanted to that god could have simply chosen to say all right i forgive you all and no incarnation no passion of the christ would be required but these church fathers would say god had good reasons for doing it that way by doing it through the atoning death and passion of christ it illustrates god's hatred of sin and also the depth of his love the extent to which he would suffer on our behalf to win us so even though he didn't have to do this this was his choice and he had good reasons for it now the other perspective and the one that i prefer is to say that god's holiness and justice demanded punishment for sin rightly deserved if god were simply to blink at sin then he would not be perfectly just and it seems to me that god's justice is just as essential to his nature as his love is and so some way needs to be found whereby the love of god and the justice of god can both be fully expressed without compromising either one and that's what is achieved through the substitutionary atonement at the cross the wrath and the love of god meet as we see god himself out of his love for us paying the penalty for his uh his own justice and uh thereby satisfying the demands of justice on our behalf so they meet at the cross the love and the justice of god in a moment we're going to talk about some quotes from progressive christians about the atonement but one of the questions that gets brought up also is how is god justified in punishing an innocent person like if he is just you just talked about the justice of god and the love of god meeting perfectly together but if he is just then how can he punish someone who's innocent this is one of the key insights that comes in the third part of the book dealing with philosophical objections to the atonement the principal objection to substitutionary atonement is precisely the one you just mentioned that in our experience we know nothing of the punishment of a blameless third party for the wrongdoing of someone else and what i was stunned to discover alisa is that that is demonstrably false in both civil law and criminal law in the anglo-american justice system the punishment of a blameless third party for the wrongs committed by someone else is a widely accepted and common practice it goes under the title vicarious liability and in the law blameless third parties can be found vicariously liable for the wrongs and even the crimes of someone else even though that blameless party did not commit those wrongs or those crimes and so i quote from numerous court cases in the book to show that vicarious liability is a well understood and widely accepted practice in anglo-american jurisprudence it was shocking for me to discover this yeah well i i'm excited to get into some of these quotes from progressive christians because i read a lot of their books and there tends to be this very common understanding of the cross and and i mentioned earlier it has to do with cosmic child abuse but i thought it would be fun to read you some of these quotes just to get your impression and maybe just kind of an answer from you what what would you say and so this one is coming uh from richard rohr and he is a franciscan friar who actually addresses uh the idea of cosmic child abuse quite a bit and it goes so far as to say in certain writings that if you believe that you're a sinner that you need to be reconciled to god that that you know that you're unholy until you're justified by god that that's actually a sign of like a mental health issue that you might even have it's a toxic kind of uh belief according to him and so he wrote this in a blog post he said why would god need a blood sacrifice before god could love what god had created is god that needy unloving rule-bound and unforgiving once you say it you see it creates a nonsensical theological notion that is very hard to defend what would god ask of me if god demands violent blood sacrifice from god's only son a violent theory of redemption legitimated punitive and violent problem solving all the way down from papacy to parenting if god uses and needs violence to attain god's purposes maybe jesus did not really mean what he said on the sermon of the mount in matthew 5 blessed are the gentle the merciful and the peacemakers there's a lot there what do you think from the very first sentence he sets up a straw man which he then easily demolishes he says why would god need a blood sacrifice before god could love what he has created and the doctrine of the atonement is that god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son it is the love of god that motivates the atoning sacrifice of christ so the sacrifice of christ is not needed to motivate the love of god quite the opposite the love of god motivates god to take on human flesh and to give his life in a supreme act of self-sacrifice in order to satisfy the demands of god's justice so it's god's justice that demands punishment for sin rightly deserved the wages of sin is death the bible says it's a capital offense and god would not be perfectly just if he did not exact the demands of justice but because he is loving he does not exact the demands of justice from our hand but rather he exacts it from his own he pays the price himself in the second person of the trinity christ on the cross and it's interesting to me too this isn't a particular comment toward richard rohr per se but often those who are saying they don't want god to get justice that way that they don't want him to institute justice are the very ones crying out for justice in other areas of life and so i think sometimes it can be a redefinition of words like maybe what they mean by justice isn't what god's justice is and it seems to be motivated also out of a misunderstanding of what god's love is it's like defining words like love and justice based on our own sort of inclinations and impressions and consciences rather than defining those words biblically according to god's nature well i think you're right that there really is a deep contradiction here in their demand for justice and they're championing the rights of the oppressed and the abused and yet saying that god doesn't need to be just yeah that he doesn't care about the victims of these sins or these crimes uh the wrath of god is perfectly appropriate he ought to be incensed with the evil that mankind has perpetrated upon others and uh for a perfectly just god to exact the demands of justice is is an expression of his perfect holiness yeah god help us if god is not just right yes and i've i've often said too i'm actually thankful for god's wrath towards sin it's because he has wrath towards sin that he can keep his promise to wipe away every tear from our eye and essentially quarantine those who love him and trust him away from evil and sin forever and so we should be very grateful that he's wrathful toward sin the christian philosopher steve davis has said our only hope is the wrath of god wow and what he meant by that was that it is an expression that god is perfectly just and therefore can be dependent upon to do the right thing and not be a capricious and arbitrary god like the god of islam for example who is not bound by any sort of uh internal justice wow well here's another one this is coming from steve chalk and he says penal substitution is tantamount to child abuse a vengeful father punishing his son for an offense he has not even committed though the sheer bluntness of this imagery not original to me of course might shock some in truth it is only a stark unmasking of the violent pre-christian thinking behind such a theology this is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy that has no intellectual things to it the atonement is an expression of god's self-sacrificial love where rather than demand justice at our hand he becomes incarnate and pays the penalty for sin that his own justice had enacted and so once we understand the doctrine of the trinity and the voluntary self-giving sacrifice of god himself i think we can see that this is not at all like a child abuse well rob bell has a lot to say about the atonement in fact there was a talk he gave in which he summed up atonement theory as god is less grumpy because of jesus so he's not he's not a big fan of penal substitutionary atonement but in his book what is the bible that came out a few years ago he wrote this and i'll get you to respond to this one he said god didn't need the blood of sacrifices people did god didn't need to kill someone to be happy with humanity what kind of god would that be awful horrific what the first christians did was interpret jesus death through the lens of the sacrificial system trusting that the peace humans had been longing for with god for thousands of years was in fact a reality and always had been that could be trusted that's rob bell from what is the bible now this is a really paradoxical statement because there's certainly a lot of truth in it he's right that they interpreted jesus death through the lens of the levitical animal sacrifices and the passover sacrifice indeed that's the way jesus saw his own death just read the narrative of the last supper so that's true and it's true that god doesn't need the blood of sacrifices that's right but people did that is to say people needed to be cleansed of their sins and to satisfy divine justice and so god graciously provided this arrangement of the sacrificial system of israel to provisionally deal with their sins until the ultimate lamb of god should come god himself in human form who would die to pay the death penalty of sin that we deserved and therefore put away all of the animal sacrifices that had been provisionally offered up until that point so there's just a lot of half truths in in this statement i think by by bell and once you understand it properly you can see there's nothing objectionable what's interesting to me too uh specifically coming from the progressive christian movement is often this claim is made that the earliest christians were just copying the the cultures around them they saw them with the gods are angry and so they had to appease their gods with sacrifices and so the christians interpreted that way because they were simply copying what those pagan cultures were doing but what i've often thought about too is that maybe it's the other way around if if the idea of blood sacrifice is something that god instituted if this is something that as as you've so aptly described his love and justice coming together to to make this perfect sacrifice it wouldn't surprise me then to see surrounding cultures even get a hint of that truth and maybe that their version was the counterfeit of the real thing rather than the other way around well i think this claim um needs to be addressed i'm so glad you brought it up because it's based on a terrible misunderstanding it's true that pagan cultures from time immemorial have offered sacrifices to the gods but these sacrifices are essentially bribes you're trying to curry the god's favor so that you'll be successful so he won't harm you so you'll get by safely they are essentially ways to butter up the gods by giving them gifts and that's not the purpose of these levitical sacrifices these were not bribes given to god not even gifts given to god rather they were expiatory sacrifices to cleanse from sin and impurity and that's a totally different motivation than you have in these uh pagan sacrificial systems right well and i was reading jayce lars commentary on leviticus and one point that he brought out too was that in these surrounding cultures very often they legitimately thought it was their job to even feed the gods so you know a lot of these sacrifices were food offerings in the sense that they were actually feeding and keeping their gods fed and and nourished in a in a physical sense even too so that that would be another just major difference between the surrounding cultures and what the christians were doing and even what the old testament israelites were actually doing that's right these mesopotamian gods were needy and and so they would put food in front of these lifeless idols even in the mouths of these idols as a means of feeding the gods and again the purpose was simply to curry their favor so that you would get by and there's nothing like that in ancient israel there's nothing that says these sacrifices are offered as a way of giving food to the lord to yahweh uh this is brian zond who wrote a book called sinners in the hands of a loving god and of course this is a take on the famous sermon sinners in the hands of an angry god and he's bringing the opposite perspective and so in the book he wrote god did not kill jesus human culture and civilization did god did not demand the death of jesus we did and so this encapsulates a lot of the progressive uh arguments against uh penal substitution that i see in that they're saying essentially god submitted to what we wanted uh we in fact i remember asking a progressive pastor this once why did jesus need to die if the if his sacrifice wasn't substitutionary why did he have to die and i remember the pastor saying to me well it's because we wanted our pound of flesh and then god gave it to us but it wasn't something he was requiring and so i'd love to get your response to this quote god did not kill jesus human culture and civilization did well let me say first that the opinion that your pastor expressed is an abominable view of god that god would do unjust actions like allow some innocent person to be killed to allow somebody else to have his pound of flesh what sort of deity does this man worship that's really horrific but as for the quotation itself it's a false dichotomy these are not mutually exclusive it's true that jesus was unjustly accused and condemned by the sanhedrin and then by pontius pilate and the roman authorities and so in isaiah 53 one of the striking features of the righteous servant of the lord is that he is taken away through a miscarriage of justice he is unjustly punished for what we have done and yet on the other hand it is god's will that this happens it was as you quoted it it was the will of the lord to crush him to inflict him with pain when he bore our sins and so this arrangement was both the will of god the voluntary self-giving sacrifice of jesus himself as well as the unjust act of human agents and anybody who cannot see that there can be a kind of double agency between god's providence and sinful humans i think has simply failed to understand properly uh god's sovereignty and providence over the world these are not mutually exclusive i think also i've as i've thought about this it seems there's also for people who so quickly go to these types of conclusions there seems to be a lack of a recognition of their own personal sinfulness and and the only reason i say that is because i know how desperately i need the sacrifice of that jesus made on the cross and because i know that i'm a sinner and i think sometimes as in more cultural christianity type uh environments as personal sin is downplayed you know you're you're beautiful just as you are you're enough just as you are these types of messages it can almost if you really thought that well yeah you would think that the blood sacrifice of christ on the cross would be horrific because you don't realize how how desperately you need that yes you remember i said earlier that for thinkers like thomas aquinas and hugo groteus they thought that god chose the passion of the christ freely to do it that way because it is such a demonstration of how much god hates sin it was our sin that put jesus on the cross i am responsible for that and so i think you're quite right that this is nothing else ought to bring home to us a deep sense of contrition and repentance for our own evil and wrong doing and then a kind of gratitude to god for the tremendous grace that is shown in giving his own life and suffering an incomprehensible punishment in order to redeem me um so you're right that this really i think gets right at the heart of the the christian faith the christian message yeah and that's why that's that that table of that jewel isn't it it's it's so important all right i want to close out with one more quote um just for anyone listening who might think man these claims of cosmic child abuse and this attack on the atonement this surely this is just on the fringe or this is just something that's relegated to the outskirts of christianity but just to sort of make the point that this is something that's in virtually every christian's home and on your computer screens there was a book that came out in 2008 which sold millions and millions of copies called the shack and it was written as a novel at the time and i think a lot of christians might have had a few red flags about it but they discarded those red flags because it was a novel it was a story they didn't want to draw theological conclusions but a few years after the shack came out the author of the shack wrote a theological treatise called lies we believe about god i'll read this quote and just get your uh response to it he wrote who originated the cross if god did then we worship a cosmic abuser who in divine wisdom created a means to torture human beings in the most painful and abhorrent manner the alternative is that the cross originated with us human beings this deviant device is the iconic manifestation of our blind commitment to darkness and how did god respond to this profound brokenness god submitted to it god climbed willingly onto our torture device and met us at the deepest and darkest place of our diabolical imprisonment to our own lies and by submitting once and for all god destroyed its power and how would we religious people interpret this sacrifice we would declare that it was god who killed jesus slaughtering him as a necessary appeasement for his bloodthirsty need for justice what are your thoughts on that well of course crucifixion is a human invention i mean again you have these kind of half truths this was a roman method of execution and it was gruesome and and horrible but that doesn't mean that christ didn't die for our sins that's what paul says in first corinthians 15 and that the incarnation was motivated by god's love not by his his justice it was motivated by his love to redeem sinful people from their state of just condemnation before a holy and all just god and therefore it is an act of tremendous love a supreme self-giving sacrifice given to give us a an eternal life that we did not deserve on his view i don't understand what the cross actually accomplished why god would submit to this sort of cruelty it's like the pastor you mentioned a moment ago what sort of god is this that would would do this to an innocent person just because evil people wanted to crucify him it it makes no sense and it doesn't it doesn't explain how the the cross achieves reconciliation with god or forgiveness of sins i i don't see what the mechanism of the atonement is in his view yeah well it's uh in the in the book he does say in the shack that or you know the the father god figure in the book says to mac who's the main character that jesus death reconciled the whole world to god in some way but but there's not a whole lot of detail about how that works the only the only thought i could come up with is there was a hermeneutic book that came out that's being used a lot in the progressive church written by greg boyd called the uh i think i think he calls it the cruciform hermeneutic and so essentially what he does is take the cross as the moment and it's sort of an expansion i think of the moral influence theory where jesus we're filtering everything that we read in the bible through the idea of father forgive them for they know not what they do so essentially jesus is showing us forgiveness by submitting to our torture device he's showing us the way to forgive and how the father forgives and so i think that's about as sophisticated as it can get on this view if you if you remove any meaningful sense of penal substitutionary atonement from the equation that's that's about as far as you're going to get it does sound like the moral influence view and while i think that the moral influence of christ's passion is definitely a facet of a full-orbed atonement theory it's not a stand-alone theory because in the absence of penal substitution of satisfaction of divine justice of forgiveness of sins moral influence just doesn't make any sense i think it was pt's forsythe who said if someone rushed into a burning building to save one of my loved ones and perished in the effort i would say greater love has no man than this but he says if someone were to just rush into a burning building where there's no one in there to save and he just immolates himself such a sacrifice would be unintelligible it wouldn't show me how much he loves me at all by submitting to such horrible suffering so apart from penal substitution and sacrifice for sin the moral influence of christ's death just doesn't make any sense it becomes unintelligible well it's this good word and dr craig i it has been such a joy to have you on the show today it's just it's a real honor and if anyone wants to learn more dig a little deeper on penal substitutionary atonement get dr craig's book atonement and the death of christ an exegetical historical and philosophical exploration it's fantastic i'm about halfway through it and i'm just loving it so dr craig thank you so much certainly alyssa great to be with you

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

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Keywords: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, God, Jesus, Theology, Philosophy, Bible, Scriptures, History, Science, Universe, Theism, Atheism, Apologetics, Existence of God, Debate, Morality, Cross, Christ, Christianity, Salvation, The Atonement, Death, Punishment, Sin, Penal Substitution

Id: H-zqN8gh9oE

Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020