Some of my favorite commenters (like Annie) have accused me of “straw man” arguments this past week. I disagree. That would mean that I had overinflated the arguments of my theological opponents and then popped their balloons.  But, in fact, I have used actual blog posts and quotes — their very serious charges of heresy about me — in my responses. Anyone who has actually dealt, face-to-face, with persons like John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Justin Taylor, and Kevin DeYoung knows that they are not straw men. I am responding to things they have actually said and written — and things, I imagine, that they actually believe.  (In all honesty, I don’t believe that they treat my arguments as fairly.)

For evidence, just peruse my comment section. Never once does one of them or their posse write that I’ve misunderstood their arguments or “created the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a
superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it,
without ever having actually refuted the original position.” No, they usually just quote Bible verses or tell me that I leading people to hell. Or both.

Exhibit A: Kevin DeYoung’s response to my Good Friday post is to quote four Bible verses and then misrepresent my position in his final paragraph.

I imagine that if I had misrepresented the PSA proponents in my attempt to rebut them, they’d let us know.

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No. I simply deny it pride of place.  Here’s what I wrote in October, 2006 about my lunch with John Piper:

One thing that won’t surprise anyone who knows about these things:
John Piper basically equates a penal substitutionary understanding of
the atonement with the gospel. I am unwilling to do that. I don’t
disparage that theory of the atonement (see my recent endorsement on
the back of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Stott’s The Cross of Christ),
but I believe the birth/death/resurrection of Jesus Christ to be the
pivot point of cosmic history. Thus, I do not think that one
theory interpreting that event to be sufficient. Every theory of the
atonement is 1) human, and 2) bound to a context. The penal
substitution — while there are seeds of it in Pauline writings — is
tied to the development of the Western legal mind. Nor am I willing to
condemn the billions of
faithful Christians who have lived and died in the past two millennia
with alternate understandings of the atonement (here see Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor).

In other words, PSA is one theory of the atonement. Beneficial, but not exclusive. Not even first among equals.

I’m on no quest to reject the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement (PSA). (I merely intend to dethrone it.)   In fact, that’s the understanding of Jesus’ death that was taught to me in my youth group as a kid, and similarly in the college ministry that excommunicated me. But, in all honesty, PSA never sat quite right with me. For one, it didn’t seem to jibe with the chesed of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. And it really didn’t jibe with Jesus’ message. Honestly, I just took my leaders’ words on faith that Jesus perfect life and subsequent death somehow assuaged my own moral guilt.

In my last post, Why Jesus Died, I argued for a different — and more historically robust — understanding of the crucifixion.

Another problem with PSA, it seems to me, is that there’s really no reason for the resurrection. It’s little more than Jesus, “Ta-Da! See, I told you that I was divine!” (Which, by the way, Jesus attests only ambiguously, and primarily in the Gospel of John. Take a deep breath, people. I’m not questioning Jesus’ divinty; I’m just saying that Jesus himself wasn’t particularly adamant about it.) There must be more to Jesus’ resurrection than another proof of his divinity.

So, why a resurrection? More importantly to me, as one who is increasingly shunned by evangelicals and in the same room with liberal mainliners (and Catholics), why a real, historical, physical resurrection?

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It’s Good Friday, the day that we Christians “celebrate” — actually, commemorate — Jesus’ crucifixion. For the last several years, in my little corner of Christianity, there’s been lots of talk about the atonement — that is, about what exactly happened, cosmically speaking, when Jesus died. In fact, the nature of the atonement has become the bête noire of emergent Christians and the cause célèbre of the resurgent Reformers.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a real, historic human being who lived from approximately 6-4 BC to approximately AD 26-29.

I firmly believe, in unity with the Council of Chalcedon, that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine. This belief is key to one’s understanding of the crucifixion. If Jesus was a little less than fully either, then his death means something different than what I think it means.

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