Testing Tradition

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV) This is a lynchpin text for the traditional Protestant understanding of double imputation.  John Piper is just one example of the many who understand this verse as "the great exchange": This is the great exchange. Here it is again in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” God lays our sins on Christ and punishes them in him. And in Christ’s obedient death, God fulfills and vindicates his righteousness and imputes (credits) it to us. Our sin on Christ; his righteousness on us. If I buy an item of clothing from the mall for my daughter and find when I get home that she likes it but it's either too small or too big, I would take it back to the store to exchange it for the same item in a different size that better fits her.  This exchange means that th

Traditional protestant theology holds that the logic of the cross is that Jesus experienced something instead of His people .  In other words, He experienced something on the cross so that we don't have to.  He is substituted for His people on the cross. In what follows, I want to offer several passages to make the case that this actually is incorrect.  The logic of the cross is instead that Jesus experienced something that we might share in that experience with Him , both His experience of death and resurrection.  His people participate with Him on the cross. And these two are necessarily mutually exclusive.  The cross can't be both substitutionary and participatory because, by definition, substitution requires that the one being substituted for isn't participating.  When a class has a substitute teacher, that necessarily means that the regular teacher isn't participating in teaching the classroom that day.  If the regular teacher is there, then another teacher prese

Note: In the development of my thinking unpacked in this post, I am indebted to Andrew Rillera and what he has written in his superb book: Lamb of the Free , specifically the penultimate chapter (Chapter 7: When Jesus' Death Is Not a Sacrifice).  Before reading his book, the Greco-Roman understanding of hilasterion he discusses there had never been brought to my attention. [21] But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—[22] the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: [23] for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, [24] and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, [25] whom God put forward as a propitiation (hilasterion) by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. [26] It was to show h

Note: This is the third of a three-part series. You can read part one here and part two here . Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. Romans 5:9 This verse in Paul's letter to the Romans is one that probably comes closest in the New Testament to explicitly substantiating the claim that the purpose of the death of Jesus Christ on the cross was to rescue believers from the future wrath of God by Jesus taking it upon Himself as a substitute for sinners.  William Lane Craig, a proponent of this view—popularly known as the penal substitutionary view of the atonement—comments on this verse: For Paul Christ’s death is conceived to be both expiatory and propitiatory... The first clause expresses expiation (justified by his blood), the second propitiation (saved by him from the wrath of God). —Craig, William Lane. Atonement and the Death of Christ (p. 34). In this post, my aim is to show how Romans 5:9 does no

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage! Psalm 33:12 Have you ever seen this picture? The first time I saw it was as a painting hanging on a wall in one of the buildings where my kids go to school.  At the center of this image is an American flag, as a boat full of what we can probably safely presume to be American patriots are proudly waving their flag in the name of God.  And so Psalm 33:12 is identifying America as that nation whose God is Yahweh, the nation that God uniquely established.  As millions of students in classrooms throughout the United States have been taught to recite daily over the years (myself included), we are: one nation, under God . But does this application square with the context of Psalm 33 and, more widely, the rest of the Scriptural witness? My assertion is that it does not and simply cannot ultimately be about America, or any earthly nation for that matter. Let's look at the context of Psalm 33 first.