After an exciting afternoon with friends at Antalya Zoo—a pair of lions shamelessly and noisily copulating in the long grass, a family of grizzly bears brawling over some obscure breach of protocol—it’s back to part two of my review of Matthew Bates’ Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King.

Bates says that the gospel is “the power-releasing story of Jesus’ life, death for sins, resurrection, and installation as king, but that story only makes sense in the wider framework of the stories of Israel and creation” (30, his italics). In chapter two he gives the reasons for this proposition, drawing on three key passages in Paul (Rom. 1:1-5, 16-17; 1 Cor. 15:1-5).

Matthew Bates’ book Salvation By Allegiance Alone is further evidence that evangelicalism is wrestling honestly and constructively with the biblical, theological and practical deficiencies of the traditional understanding of gospel, faith and salvation.

I haven’t got very far into it, but I’m going to hazard a critique on the strength of the summary provided in the Introduction (9). If it turns out I’m wrong, I’ll post a correction. And an apology.

I visited the excellent Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at London’s National Gallery yesterday as a personal Good Friday ritual. One of the works on display is Sebastiano del Piombo’s Christ Descends into Limbo, which depicts the crucified Jesus reaching out to Adam and Eve in a highly architectural underworld.

The day before Good Friday seems a fitting time to launch a narrative-historical alternative to Tim Challies’ thoroughly Reformed Quiz on the Atonement. Well, not quite an alternative, more a commentary on the standard Reformed account of the significance of Jesus’ death. There are 33 questions in Tim’s quiz, so this is not for the faint-hearted. I only got two wrong, and one of those was attributable to fatigue.

You have to decide whether the statements are true or false. Click on the statement to see Tim’s “correct” answer, the biblical references provided, and my commentary, though you may want to take the proper quiz first and see how you get on.

There is a struggle going on in the church—or at least in parts of the church—over how we should read the New Testament. Basically, as I see it, it comes down to this: do we read through the lens of later theological constructions (Patristic, Orthodox, Thomist, Reformed, Pentecostal, modern evangelical, etc.), or do we interpret according to a first-century Jewish framework of thought and historical perspective?

I am strongly in favour of the latter. I think we should base our “theology”—our self-understanding as the people of the creator God—as best we can on how the New Testament communities understood the texts, not on how the later church, under divergent intellectual and historical conditions, came to understand the texts. But it’s by no means a straightforward task.

At the heart of the critique of the traditional doctrine of (penal) substitutionary atonement is a moral revulsion against the idea that a good God would think it necessary to use violence to bring about the redemption of humanity. Chuck Queen, for example, whose argument against substitutionary atonement I reviewed last week, asks what kind of God would require the “death of an innocent victim” in order to satisfy his “offended sense of honor” or pay off a penalty that he himself had imposed in the first place. “Would a loving parent make forgiveness for the child conditioned upon a violent act?”

The problem with this line of thought is that in the Gospels Jesus appears, on the one hand, to predict future violent events which he regarded as direct, concrete expressions of the will of God, and on the other, to have thought of his own death as being entailed in them. In other words, he is not quite the out-and-out pacifist that we would like him to be.

Having critiqued Owen Strachan’s defence of the atonement doctrine, it seems only fair to examine a thesis from the anti-substitutionary camp. My friend Scott pointed me to Chuck Queen’s combative essay on the Baptist News site: “It’s time to end the hands-off attitude to substitionary atonement”. It will do nicely.

Queen bundles together a number of related motifs under the heading of substitutionary atonement: bearing the penalty for sin, paying the debt of sin, ransoming the sinner, bearing the wrath of God, propitiating God, and the imputation of humanity’s sin to Christ on the cross.