Channel 4 are showing a programme on the issue of theodicy on Christmas Day entitled 'Tsunami: Where was God?' It's on at 19:50 UK time and should be worth watching. Here's the brief:

A year after the Indian Ocean tsunami, former Dominican Friar Mark Dowd faces a question that has troubled religious thinkers for centuries: how can belief in a benevolent God be reconciled with natural disaster?

Should be an interesting watch.

"The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it. The true light that gives light to every man is coming into the world..."

(John 1:5,9)

Anne of Weekend Fisher fame has tagged with a very kind Merry Christmas meme. The idea is to tag two other blogs I read regularly and wish them a Merry Christmas and also make a gift suggestion for them (the last part was Anne's idea, and a good one it is too.) I read a lot of blogs regularly but I've finally managed to whittle it down to two...

The first person I want to wish a Merry Christmas is John Pettigrew from /musing/struggling/dreaming/. John writes some interesting and thought-provoking posts on his blog and in addition provides some top quality links to other articles of Christian interest. John has always been a kind and faithful commenter as well as a generous linker to various articles on this blog which is a great source of encouragement to me. For a Christmas book I think I'd buy John a copy of The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware as I just have an inkling he's really love reading it. Happy Christmas John!

Secondly I'm going to wish a Merry Christmas to Mark Heath at Word and Spirit. Mark has been on my blogroll for over a year and is one of those blogs that I always look forward to reading when something new has been posted. Mark and I have similar church backgrounds (although I have left NFI recently) and Mark writes on some of the theological issues that charismatics face in an articulate way that is also honest as well as well-informed. I'm also a big fan of Mark's regular reviews of the BST commentary series which you can visit here. I'm not sure what I'd buy Mark for Christmas so rather than suggest socks or chocolate I'll suggest a sizeable Amazon book voucher to pick up some new commentaries with. Merry Christmas Mark!

Same goes for everyone else too. If I don't blog before Christmas, have a good one and may God bless you richly.

A few weeks ago I began an occasional series looking at the history of the Christian doctrine of the atonement as outlined in Gustav Aulen's classic work Christus Victor. In part 1 we saw how there have been three main ways of understanding the atonement, from the earliest 'classical' view to the later western forensic 'objective' view and then finally the 'subjective' view.

It may unsettle some that this series on the atonement begins with dogmatic theology and not the New Testament, although it must be pointed out that all atonement theories have sought to base themselves in the biblical witness and it is not a question of a 'biblical' version of the atonement against a 'theological' one as I have been accused of doing on more than one occasion.

Part 2 will look at the idea of atonement expressed in the theology of Irenaeus, who lived in the second century. Irenaeus' work is hugely important in terms of atonement studies because it was the first serious attempt to explain Jesus' work in a complex and coherent manner. Before I start however I'm going to insert a brief disclaimer: I'm told by someone who knows Irenaeus a lot better than me that Aulen seriously misunderstands Irenaeus, and that his interpretation of him is quite inaccurate. I can't vouch for this myself, but here's an outline of one of the most important and earliest theologies of the atonement.

1. The Purpose of the Incarnation

The question of why Christ came down from heaven is the driving force behind most of Irenaeus' theological enterprise, and the way in which we answer this question will determine how well we understand his theology. Put simply, Irenaeus held that Christ became man so that we might become divine:

"we could not otherwise attain to incorruption and immortality except we had been united with incorruption and immortality."

Against Heresies IV 33:4

 
So right from the very beginning, the doctrine of atonement and salvation is bound up with the idea of incarnation. This is contrary to most Latin views of the atonement which often separate incarnation from atonement or simply ignore the incarnation altogether as something merely incidental. Through Adam's disobedience humanity has become enslaved and trapped by sin, evil, and death, and so it becomes clear that

"the work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers that hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil....the victory of Christ creates a new situation, bringing their rule to an end, and setting men free from their dominion." (Aulen, 20).

This is why the incarnation is so important to understanding Christ's work: man is helpless and is enslaved to sin and evil, but only God can save us, and therefore it is only by becoming man in Christ that God is able to free humanity from the tyrannical evil powers that dominate and oppress him:

"The Word of God was made flesh in order that he might destroy death and bring man to life; for we were tied and bound in sin, we were born in sin and live under the power of death."

Epideixis, 37

Notice that although Irenaeus asks the same question Cur Deus Homo? as Anselm would a millennium later, he gives a very different answer. Anselm's model drives a wedge between the Father and the Son so that the Son is simply an intermediary being between God and humanity, whereas Irenaeus crucially recognises that Christ is not a kind of third party between God and humanity but that God himself is in Christ as the Word become flesh and as such is the active subject in bringing about man's liberation from sin and evil.

For Irenaeus, Christ's work is a recapitulation. Man has fallen away from God and become corrupt and enslaved to the powers of death and evil and so in turn God becomes man and defeats the evil powers and so restores man back to his position of freedom and union with God. In the meantime, Christ's Spirit works in us to quicken us towards the perfection and freedom that are part of the victory Christ has won for us. This means of course that Irenaeus' theology is necessarily eschatological in its outlook.

2. Sin, Death, and the Devil

It may already be clear that Irenaeus' understanding of the human predicament and sin differs somewhat from what we are used to in the western tradition. Aulen says that Irenaeus is typical of Eastern theologians in that he places little emphasis on sin (p22), which is a little unfair in my view as it not so much a case that the Eastern tradition places less emphasis on sin but that it understands sin as part of a greater organic whole involving death and evil whereas the West (especially the Reformed tradition) has a tendency to view sin simply in legal or juristic terms, with death following as a kind of judicial consequence and salvation thus as a bestowal of forgiveness and a change of legal status rather than the impartation of life. Aulen illustrates this difference superbly with this quote from Orthodox theologian Stephen Zankow:

"Salvation from what? From sin or from death? Western theologians like to put this in contrast and claim that Orthodoxy put death in the foreground instead of sin. But this is scarcely true. Orthodoxy is quite inclined, it is true, to conceive of original sin as the first sin, and death as the reward of sins; yet, as has been said, empirically one is not separated from the other; where sin is, death is also, and vice versa ... To the Orthodox the question 'why salvation?' is very clear: in order to be free from sin and death, in order to break down the wall of partition between God and men, to enter into inner and complete communion with God, to be at one with him." (Aulen, 23)

So it is with Irenaeus who does not take a legal and moralistic view of sin, but sees sin as something organic, affecting the entire person both physically and spiritually. This does not diminish man's guilt before God however, because man wilfully and deliberately chooses to flee from the light of God. We were created to be his sons but through our disobedience we have disowned God and are now alienated from him. The only way back for man is through a reconciliation or atonement.

Irenaeus chiefly expresses death as a loss of immortality or having become corrupted, but at the same time death is much more than this. Disobedience to God is death in its very essence:

"Fellowship with God is light and life, and the fruition of thr good things that are with him. But on those who voluntarily rebel against God, He brings separation from Him, and separation form God is death."

(Against Heresies V 27:2)

Along with sin and death, Irenaeus also sees the Devil as being one of the powers from which God must deliver mankind. The Devil is essentially the Lord of sin and death, and as such is the Father and ruler of all rebellious human beings and fallen angels. Christ's victory over the devil comes because Christ is man, and so by restoring humanity back to fellowship with God mankind is delivered from under Satan's power.

3. The Atoning Work

As we have seen already, Irenaeus does not view Christ's work on the cross as an exclusive act of Atonement, but traces a continuous line from the incarnation, through Jesus' death and resurrection and on to his exaltation without breaking down Christ's life and work into separate theological parts. Indeed his particular emphasis on salvation as deliverance from death and the bestowal of life requires that the resurrection and ascension feature just as prominently as the cross.

The entire earthly life of Christ is seen as leading up to Christ's final climactic victory in two main ways. Firstly Christ reveals the Father in his preaching and ministry and opens up the way to the knowledge of God which will free us from slavery and corruption, and secondly Christ's obedience to God and his refusal to disobey Him and give in to Satan's tempations means that Satan's hold over disobedient humanity is finally broken as Christ subverts and finally overthrows Satan's rule: "by his obedience unto death the Word annulled the ancient disobedience committed at the tree."

In the climactic act of atonement at Calvary God is both active and passive in the work of reconciliation. He is active because he is the one stepping forth to defeat and overthrow the powers of evil, and at the same time he is passive as the removal of the power of sin and death and the reuniting of humanity with God mean that God himself is also reconciled. Here we see echoes of Pauline thought: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."

The cross marks the end of the old age of sin and death and in turn the Resurrection marks the beginning of the reign of Christ in the new age where the powers of sin, death and evil have been decisively crushed. The ascended Christ then sends forth his Spirit to renew humanity and to draw man and God into closer and closer union.

"The Lord, through his passion ascended up on high, led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men, and gave power to them that believe in Him to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the power of the enemy - that is, the prince of the apostasy. The Lord through his passion destroyed death, brought error to an end, abolished corruption, banished ignorance, manifested life, declared truth, and bestowed incorruption."

Amen to that. The next part in this series will look at the rest of the church Fathers and also the first beginnings of the Latin model of atonement.

One from my theology lecturer, Dr David Rainey:

"The doctrine of the trinity is the first thing you'll see on an evangelical statement of faith, but then that's the last you'll ever hear of it."

Adrian Warnock has an interview with the head of the University and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) over on his blog. I was quite active in the CU at Manchester during my first year there but a change of course and a change of campus means that I no longer have much to do with it, plus at the ripe old age of 24 I feel a bit left behind by all these young 18 year old students with their i-pods or whatever it is the young people are into these days.

UCCF do a grand job in running CUs on University campuses in the UK and the Relay guys who run them are excellent people, although I did find them to be not quite as open to charismatics as Richard Cunningham seems to envisage.

Atonement

More worrying is the insinuation in the interview (not helped by a rather leading question it has to be said) that those who do not hold to the penal substutionary doctrine of the atonement would not be welcome in the Christian Union of a British University. It's no secret that I think the whole Chalkegate atonement scandal was the biggest non-controversy in the history of modern evangelicalism, but to decide whether or not people are 'in' or 'out' on the basis of their attitude to particular aspects of a particular theory of the atonement.

When we examine the UCCF statement of faith however, it becomes clear that their version of penal substitution is still actually rather broad:

"Sinful human beings are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death once and for all time of their representative and substitute, Jesus Christ, the only mediator between them and God."

There's nothing here that I think Steve Chalke and Co would disagree with. On the whole I am in agreement with Chalke (who it must be remembered is simply elaborating the atonement doctrine of H R Mackintosh) but I can't say there's anything I'd disagree with in this statement about the atonement. The disagreement between myself, Richard, Adrian and others has arisen when it has come to going beyond statements (both biblical and non-biblical) about the atonement and trying to come up with explanations about what is actually happening in Christ's work in a way that is coherent.

John Stott and the Atonement

The daddy of almost every conservative evangelical student I've ever met is of course John Stott, and although I largely disagree with his explanation of the atonement in chapter 6 of his classic work The Cross of Christ, he makes this very astute observation that I'm not sure many evangelicals would now agree with in the post-Chalke aftermath of evangelical atonement theology:

"We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of one another or were even in conflict with one another. We must never make Christ the object of God's punishment or God the object of Christ's persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taken the initiative together to save sinners."

Stott still doesn't shake off the idea of God being in some kind of internal conflict with himself but instead relocates the conflict between love (read: God wants to save humanity) and justice (read: God's holiness demands that he destroy them) away from the Father-Son relationship and instead posits the (false) dilemma in the character of God himself, and so the atonement becomes a means by which God readjusts the balance between his love and his wrath within his own person. Stott insists though, that this is not acheived by God punishing Jesus - something that I think Steve Chalke would agree with - but what of other conservative evangelicals?

Unity

Would John Stott be allowed in a modern UCCF-run CU? Of course he would, and I'm being facetious here of course, but I'm trying to make a point. Trying to exclude someone from fellowship on the basis of some doctrinal finery is a profoundly dangerous thing to do, epsecially that there is neither a biblical nor historical precedent for excluding someone from fellowship on the basis of their understanding of the atonement.

The locus of Christian unity is the person of Jesus Christ, it is in him that we are united in love and faith with our brothers and sisters and he is the one we worship and in whom and for whom we live. Here there is no division, and this is why it is Jesus Christ is the central point of unity. Christian unity is like a series of concentric circles with Christ at the centre and the smaller doctrinal issues belong on the outskirts. It is only when the smaller issues replace Christ at the centre of the Christian faith that division occurs in Christ's body. The most divisive groups and individuals are those who seek to make central what is really marginal and who marginalise what really should be central. Excluding people from fellowship on the basis of whether or not they understand and agree with a particular slant of a particular doctrine in such a way is divisive and profoundly unhelpful to the life of the Church.