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In the American evangelical world you never really have to worry that debates about \u00a0atonement theories will stop and come to some form of consensus. For when a peace of some sort begins to settle over the world as to whether Christus Victor, substitution, Girardian scapegoat, or some sort of neo-Abelardian moral exemplar theory is the predominant view of Christ\u2019s atonement (for my money, I believe a combo of Christus Victor and substitutionary atonement is the primary, but not exclusive, atonement motif in the New Testament), rest assured that someone will stir things up again.<\/p>\n
Enter Michael Gungor.<\/p>\n
For those unaware, Michael Gungor is a very talented and Grammy-nominated\u00a0musician who, with his wife Lisa, leads the eponymous musical collective, Gungor<\/a>. Back in the late 2000s, Gungor (both the man and the band) rose quickly in popularity in the American Christian music world. And for good reason. Their work is very, very good.<\/p>\n However, Michael Gungor\u2019s darling status in the evangelical world was soon called into question. You see, it came to light in 2014 that Gungor had called into question one of the sacred cows of certain, super-conservative, modernist camps within American evangelicalism.<\/a> He said that he thought the primordial history section of Genesis (Gen. 1\u201411) was figurative. Publications like World Magazine<\/a> and other super-conservative outlets\u00a0quickly called into question Gungor\u2019s Christianity. His expression of struggles with various doubts about his faith didn\u2019t help to improve his image in the eyes of super-conservatives.<\/p>\n So what is the point of all this backstory? Well, it is important background info to show how Gungor has grown apart\u00a0from the American evangelical world he grew up in. From what I understand about Gungor (and I am happy to be corrected if I am correct), he grew up in a fundamentalist setting where views like a six-day literal reading of Genesis were markers of one\u2019s \u201ctrue Christian\u201d status. To begin to distance oneself from such views is to implicitly bring in gatekeeper voices who call into question your credibility as a person of Christian integrity. I know, I\u2019ve been there. I\u2019ve had more than a few people call into question my faith when I tell them that I am a theistic evolutionist (just like N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Francis Collins, and many others). These same critics ignore the fact that I (and others like me) wholeheartedly affirm every jot and tittle of the Apostle\u2019s, Nicene, and Chalcedonian Creeds. But I digress.<\/p>\n With his distancing from the super-conservative evangelical fold, Gungor has begun to periodically make other controversial statements about what are often viewed as \u201cconservative doctrines\u201d (or talking about how he went on a personal retreat with Ram Dass<\/a>). The most recent has been as series of tweets calling into question the validity of substitutionary atonement in the crucifixion of Christ.<\/p>\n On February 25th<\/sup>, Gungor put out\u00a0a series of tweets<\/a> saying:<\/p>\n I would love to hear more artists who sing to God and fewer who include a Father murdering a son in that endeavor\u2026 if you can\u2019t think of anything to sing to God other than gratitude for taking your shame away through bloodshed, stop singing and look around\u2026 Now I certainly don\u2019t mean to minimize the meaning and symbolism of the cross for billions of Christians through the centuries\u2026 I simply think blood sacrifice is a very limited and less than timely metaphor for what the cross can mean in our culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Two days later on February 27th<\/sup>, after several interchanges with people rightly critiquing his gross mischaracterization of substitutionary atonement, Gungor tweeted<\/a> what is called an ad hominem <\/em>fallacy:<\/p>\n What percentage of the people still tweeting at me about substitutionary atonement do you think voted for trump? And do you see the correlation between the two things? I do! \ud83d\ude42<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I hold to substitutionary atonement. And I most certainly did not vote for Trump.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time that someone who has a chip on their shoulder from being burned by quasi-fundamentalism (haven\u2019t we all in some way?) has terribly misrepresented substitutionary atonement. The caricatures of \u201ccosmic child abuse\u201d have been going on for a while now. Steve Chalke, ever the provocateur, used it as far back as 2003 in a \u00a0book co-written with Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus<\/a><\/em> (Zondervan, 2003):<\/p>\n The fact is that the cross isn\u2019t a form of cosmic child abuse\u2014a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: \u201cGod is love\u201d. If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus\u2019 own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil. (pp. 182-83)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This line of reasoning\u2014shared also by Gungor in his tweets\u2014has some truth to it. It is true that the cross isn\u2019t \u201ccosmic child abuse.\u201d Nor is it \u201ca Father murdering a son.\u201d And this is precisely because the traditional doctrine of substitutionary atonement is understood within a Trinitarian framework. Only when we understand substitutionary atonement from a Trinitarian perspective do we understand it correctly. Paraphrasing John Stott, a Trinitarian substitutionary atonement is one that fundamentally sees\u00a0the substitute as God Himself.<\/em> Christ is God the Son, willfully substituting Himself in the place of the human race. In Jesus\u2019s application of Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant) to Himself, God the Son explicitly and voluntarily identifies Himself as the Suffering Servant Who takes on the sin of others.<\/p>\n The view of substitutionary atonement as \u201ccosmic child abuse\u201d or \u201ca Father murdering a son\u201d is one that views Christ\u2019s atonement not from a Trinitarian Christological paradigm, but from on an implicitly Arian Christological one. Whether figures like Gungor or Chalke realize it or not, their caricatures assume a Jesus who is alienated from the triune Godhead; a sort of super-human who has been unjustly cast in the role of whipping boy. John Stott addressed such Arian caricatures years ago:<\/p>\n In the one [caricatured] case Christ is pictured as intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation. In the other [caricature], the intervention is ascribed to God, who proceeds to punish the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment. In both cases God and Christ are sundered from one another: either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. What is characteristic of both presentations is they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed on by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.<\/p>\n Such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as a whipping-boy who is punished instead of the real culprit, or as the lightning conductor to which the lethal electrical charge is deflected.\u201d<\/p>\n
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