Lighthouse Trails Research Journal
5
Atonement Rejected!—continued from previous page
deliberately punished for another
man’s crime? . . . [S]ubstitutionary
atonement . . . came a long way down
in history in many a penal system.
But now it is a precivilized barbarity;
no secular court would tolerate the
idea for a moment; only in certain
belated theologies is it retained as an
explanation of our Lord’s death . . .
Christ’s sacrificial life and death are
too sacred to be so misrepresented. 13
authentic spirituality. His work
stimulates and encourages me
deeply. 11
THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST
his idea of rejecting God’s judg-
ment placed on Jesus Christ
instead of us is integrated into the teachings
of many others. William Shannon (biogra-
pher of Catholic monk and mystic Thomas
Merton) said:
T
This is a typical patriarchal notion of
God. He is the God of Noah who sees
people deep in sin, repents that He
made them and resolves to destroy
them. He is the God of the desert
who sends snakes to bite His people
because they murmured against
Him. He is the God of David who
practically decimates a people . . .
He is the God who exacts the last
drop of blood from His Son, so that
His just anger, evoked by sin, may
be appeased. This God whose moods
alternate between graciousness and
fierce anger . . . This God does not
exist. 12 (emphasis added)
So in other words, according to Fosdick,
McLaren, and Shannon, Jesus should be seen
as a model of sacrifice to follow in our own
lives, but to view God the Father as a judge
against sin is not a proper view of God.
Those who reject the atonement realize
the greatest threat to their heretical views is
those who take the Scriptures literally and
seriously. Fosdick explains:
Were you to talk to that
fundamentalist preacher, he
doubtless would insist that you
must believe in the “substitutionary”
theory of atonement—namely, that
Jesus suffered as a substitute for
us the punishment due us for our
sins. But can you imagine a modern
courtroom in a civilized country
where an innocent man would be
Volume 7—No. 5
This is a perfect example of how the
emerging “progressive” church turns doc-
trine it doesn’t understand (or accept) into
a mockery against Scripture and God’s plan
of salvation. God’s ways are not our ways
and to expect them to line up with our own
human reasoning is ludicrous:
For my thoughts are not your
thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, saith the LORD. For as the
heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your
ways, and my thoughts than your
thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
The late Catholic contemplative author
Brennan Manning (still a favorite among
many evangelicals) joined the ranks of
those who rejected the substitutionary
atonement. In his book Above All, Manning
quotes William Shannon almost word for
word, regarding the atonement:
[T]he god whose moods alternate
between graciousness and fierce
anger . . . the god who exacts the last
drop of blood from his Son so that
his just anger, evoked by sin, may be
appeased, is not the God revealed by
and in Jesus Christ. And if he is not
the God of Jesus, he does not exist. 14
(emphasis added)
DYING FOR THE SINS OF THE WORLD
he late Marcus Borg (another favorite
among evangelicals) was a lecturer
and the author of several books, some of
T
which are Jesus and Buddha, The God We
Never Knew, and Reading the Bible Again
for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seri-
ously But not Literally. His thinking greatly
influenced the emerging church move-
ment and its leaders. Brian McLaren has
“high regard” 15 for Borg, and the two of
them participated in a seminar series at an
interspiritual center in Portland, Oregon
one summer. 16 Rob Bell (the now-defected
former pastor and a major influencer among
young evangelicals) references and praises
Borg in his still-popular book Velvet Elvis. 17
Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus
at Columbia Theological Seminary and
one of the contributors to Richard Foster’s
Renovare Spiritual Formation Study Bible,
considers Borg an essential part of the
“new” Christianity. Brueggemann states:
Marcus Borg is a key force in
the emerging “new paradigm” of
Christian faith. 18
Borg explains in his book The God We
Never Knew that his views on God, the
Bible, and Christianity were transformed
while he was in seminary:
I let go of the notion that the Bible is
a divine product. I learned that it is a
human cultural product, the product
of two ancient communities, biblical
Israel and early Christianity. As such,
it contained their understandings
and affirmations, not statements
coming directly or somewhat
directly from God.. . . I realized that
whatever “divine revelation” and the
“inspiration of the Bible” meant (if
they meant anything), they did not
mean that the Bible was a divine
product with divine authority. 19
This attitude would certainly explain how
Borg could say:
Jesus almost certainly was not born
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019