4.0
Healing the Gospel
ByPublisher Description
Why did Jesus have to die? Was it to appease a wrathful God's demand for punishment? Does that mean Jesus died to save us from God? How could someone ever truly love or trust a God like that? How can that ever be called "Good News"? It's questions like these that make so many people want to have nothing to do with Christianity.
Healing the Gospel challenges the assumption that the Christian understanding of justice is rooted in a demand for violent punishment, and instead offers a radically different understanding of the gospel based on God's restorative justice. Connecting our own experiences of faith with the New Testament narrative, author Derek Flood shows us an understanding of the cross that not only reveals God's heart of grace, but also models our own way of Christ-like love. It's a vision of the gospel that exposes violence, rather than supporting it--a gospel rooted in love of enemies, rather than retribution. The result is a nonviolent understanding of the atonement that is not only thoroughly biblical, but will help people struggling with their faith to encounter grace.
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4.0
“The penal substitutionary theory of atonement has always pricked at me and made me uneasy, especially when I hear it presented to my child—but I had the hardest time expressing why it bothered me. This book eloquently explains the sticky parts of the PSA theory, and gave me clarity and the words to express my own discomfort with the way the PSA characterizes God, and the way it flattens redemption. The book expresses a rich multifaceted understanding of Christus Victor, and a thorough reading of Isaiah 52-53, which is challenging—and I mean that in the best sense of the word.”
“Derek opens that there are enormous problems with penal substitutionary atonement theory:
1) It sees a conflict between the mercy and justice of God. Jesus is punished to end this "conflict". So God's anger must be appeased, so we cower in fear wondering who God really is. Can't God's mercy and justice be seen in a fashion that work with each other rather than in some sort of yin vs. yang? And isn't this sort of appeasement more inline with a pagan's view of god than the enemy love revealed in Jesus Christ?
2) The doctrine of imputation (either God's wrath on Jesus, or Jesus' righteousness on our account) makes no rational or biblical sense and has also been debunked by the New Pauline Perspective, largely followed in some form by Pauline scholars today.
3) It results in low self-worth of many who believe. Spurgeon wrote for instance: "I feel myself to be a lump of unworthiness, a mass of corruption, and a heap of sin, apart from His almighty love." This attitude infects much of conservative evangelicalism today, and Derek believes this causes mental problems.
4) It results in punitive violence such as capital and corporal punishment, the latter being proven in numerous and exhaustive studies to only inflict mental harm on a child. This punitive attitude also negatively impacts our justice system in general and our attitudes toward war.
5) Apart from an abstract doctrine that Jesus fulfilled the law perfectly to become the perfect sin sacrifice--didn't Paul claim that he did was blameless regarding the law (Phil 3.6) and yet this was regarded rubbish, and the emphasis in the Gospels is certainly not Jesus as a scrupulous follower of the law--the life and works of Jesus as restorer and healer have little play in what he accomplished on the cross.
6) It minimizes the importance of the resurrection. Penal substitution theory has little to say how the resurrection figures in our healing from sin.
7) Ironically, it has a low view of sin, as it touches it almost exclusively in a legal fashion rather than relational and doesn't understand how victimhood also separates us from God.
But oddly enough, the solution is not to chart new territory, at least entirely. It is to claim the dominant atonement theory held by Christians for the first millennium of the faith, before Calvin, and even before Anselm, that of Christus Victor. It is a grand sweeping narrative of God's rescue on our behalf, through Jesus, from both our sin as assailants as well as the crippling effects of sin on our lives as victims. We are broken sinners, sick and in need of a doctor, and only by incarnating into our lives as the son of man can a mystical union take place where our hurts, sins and pains are joined to him. And in the resurrection, God vindicates Jesus, the ultimate victim of our sin, wrath and hurts, thus giving us a way for the Spirit to heal ourselves, for if the darkest of nights is conquered in love than so can our condition as well. In this fashion, God's restorative justice is accomplished--true justice!--restoring and cleansing our broken lives causing us to live in the Spirit toward true righteousness (not imputed) and in the process propitiating the natural wrath that is upon us.
The implications are startling! God, through Jesus, as restorer, prompts me to offer this same enemy love to others. I don't need my primitive need for retribution to be accomplished before I forgive someone. Rather, in imitation of Jesus I let go of the anger and pursue reconciliation and relationship with the one who have wounded me. That's ultimately what it's all about, relationship. God's actions on our behalf are not about some abstract atonement theory of vindication, they're like a loving Father pursuing the prodigal son to the depths of hell because He tenderly wants the best for him and wants to relationally restore him. And the power of the cross and resurrection is ultimate. No matter where the prodigal son has wandered and where his suffering and hurts have distanced him from his Father, there is always a pathway back home.”
“Slow and almost aggregating to start the book presents a senecio of how a punitive system of justice has no merit. However it takes him 3/4 of the way through to present any actual evidence of this other than his own biased hope and experience. Even if social patterns indicate some flaw in punitive justice I don't think such comparisons actually hold weight in the case of God's kingdom. I also felt like the book was concentrated on the fact of Jesus' death as the focal point rather than on the resurrection. In this I felt he was misrepresenting those who actually would hold to the traditional punitive model of atonement. In that God's wrath must be appeased. The last 1/4 of the book swings around. I feel as though the book should have been much shorter and that it was stretched out to appease a publisher not because there was that much meaningful content. That last 1/4 though was incredible. Especially his exegesis of Isaiah 53 and his filling out the picture of restorative justice being a case study for how we live out lives in others centred grace filled living. It also makes sense. I would pick up the book if you are really curios about why Jesus died and how that has any impact on your life.”
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