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 ano...

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...

Note: This is the second of a two-part series.  You can read part one  here  and part three here .   Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 1 Corinthians 5:7 In part 1 of this series , I raised the issue of how the wrath of God relates to the cross of Jesus Christ.  I suggested that, contrary to popular evangelical tradition, perhaps the cross of Jesus Christ is actually not purposed to satisfy the wrath of God. What I intend to do in this post is to be less suggestive and more assertive .  I want to  assert that the cross of Jesus Christ was never intended to satisfy the wrath of God. Rather, from the very beginning, it would be more accurate to say that the cross of Jesus Christ was intended to absorb the wrath of Satan (Revelation 12:12), God's adversary, and in so doing, to destroy (Hebrews 2:14, 1 John 3:8) that ancient serpent. In building any...